Intelligent Design
stcynic | November 15, 2005Yesterday's Wall Street Journal had an article about various college professors around the country teaching about ID in freshmen seminars. In the process, they attributed much of the growth in the ID movement to the Templeton Foundation and did so wrongly. Long quote begins below the fold:
Still, professors with evangelical beliefs, including some eminent scientists, have initiated most of the courses and lectures, often with start-up funding from the John Templeton Foundation. Established by famous stockpicker Sir John Templeton, the foundation promotes exploring the boundary of theology and…
stcynic | October 25, 2005For those of you who don't know of her, Denyse O'Leary is sort of the ID movement's demented, spastic little cheerleader. She's a Canadian journalist who spends most of her time making profoundly silly claims in support of ID. Her latest bit of loopiness is to claim that Stephen Jay Gould would not have signed the NCSE's Project Steve statement, named after him, in support of evolution. That statement reads:
Evolution is a vital, well-supported, unifying principle of the biological sciences, and the scientific evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of the idea that all living things share a…
stcynic | October 6, 2005As the NCSE reports, we have a new battle that has just begun over evolution here in Michigan. House Bill 5251 has just been introduced. It would revise the current scence standards to ensure that students will be able to:
"(a) use the scientific method to critically evaluate scientific theories including, but not limited to, the theories of global warming and evolution [and] (b) Use relevant scientific data to assess the validity of those theories and to formulate arguments for or against those theories."
Sounds perfectly reasonable, doesn't it? Who could be against critical thinking and…
stcynic | October 3, 2005ID advocates love to use the term "Darwinism" rather than "evolution" or "evolutionary theory", a tendency that has always grated on my nerves. We don't do this with any other theory. We don't talk about "Einsteinism" instead of the theory of relativity or "Wegenerism" rather than plate tectonics. Why the focus on "Darwinism"? I submit it is because "Darwinism" is simply a codeword that they can use to mean whatever they want. They know that the average person has so little understanding of the scientific ideas that they don't distinguish between evolution and the big bang, for example. In…
stcynic | September 17, 2005Fresh off his electrifying performance on the Daily Show, the intrepid Dr. Dembski is still, it seems, attempting to do comedy. Witness the extraordinary chutzpah it took to write this post about the speaking schedule of NCSE staffers. He writes:
Have a look at http://www.ncseweb.org/meeting.asp. One of my colleagues describes reading this page as "watching a car wreck." I'm just sorry we can't get a percentage cut from all the speaking engagements they are getting as a result of attacking us. Life is so unfair.
Well Bill, we'd love to have a cut of your speaking fees, and of the fees you…
stcynic | September 10, 2005I haven't written much on the little brouhaha between Genie Scott of the NCSE and Larry Caldwell, a creationist parent in California who, it seems, threatens to sue everyone. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if he threatens to sue me for saying he threatens to sue people a lot. Genie had written an article for California Wild, a publication of the California Academy of Sciences, about a creationist flareup in Roseville, California that contained a few minor mistakes about Caldwell, who was suing the school board in Roseville. Caldwell then filed suit against Genie and the NCSE and threatened…
stcynic | August 29, 2005Wilfred Elders, a geologist from UC-Riverside, passed along this interesting letter to the editor of his local newspaper, the Press-Enterprise. A school teacher wonders, if ID is to be taught in schools, what exactly are they supposed to teach?
Design: What to teach?
I am curious about what I am supposed to teach if intelligent design becomes part of the school curriculum.
After I tell a class that some believe that the universe and life were created by a superior, all-powerful intelligence, where do I go from there?
Do I teach about the creator in Genesis or about Phan Ku, Ulgen, Wulbari, Ta…
stcynic | August 28, 2005Daniel Dennett, a man I consider one of the half dozen or so most brilliant thinkers on the planet, has an op-ed piece in today's New York Times about "intelligent design" called Show Me The Science. He makes essentially the same argument I have been making on this blog for nearly 2 years now:
The focus on intelligent design has, paradoxically, obscured something else: genuine scientific controversies about evolution that abound. In just about every field there are challenges to one established theory or another. The legitimate way to stir up such a storm is to come up with an alternative…
stcynic | August 27, 2005Chris Buttars, the eternally clueless Utah state Senator, certainly didn't get the answers he wanted from the Utah state school board. Buttars has been threatening to submit a bill to mandate the teaching of "divine design" - a slightly more honest version of intelligent design - if the school board doesn't issue a position statement officially denouncing human evolution. Instead, the board has gone the other direction:
The state school board's proposed position statement on teaching evolution doesn't give an inch for a state senator's "intelligent design" concepts.
That bothers Sen. Chris…
stcynic | August 25, 2005Richard Hoppe has already put this story on the Panda's Thumb, but I had to write it up for here as well. The Discovery Institute loves to talk about the "growing number of scientists" who doubt "Darwinism", and especially about their list of 400 scientists who signed on to a statement they put together. Now one of the 400, Robert Davidson, is removing himself from the list, fed up with the DI's "elaborate, clever marketing program" and "misuse of science":
He's also a devout Christian who believes we're here because of God. It was these twin devotions to science and religion that first…
stcynic | August 23, 2005Barbara Forrest was on Larry King Live tonight in one of the most absurd discussions of evolution and intelligent design imaginable. For some reason, they had a huge list of guests - a young earth creationist, Jay Richards of the Discovery Institute, Barbara, two senators (one on each side) and - bizarrely - Deepok Chopra. What the hell Chopra was doing there is beyond me. And just to give you a perfect example of why the media is the last place to look for accurate information on this subject, Larry King introduced Barbara with the question, "How can you reject creationism completely because…
stcynic | August 10, 2005There is an anti-evolution article on Tech Central Station that is just begging for a response, and I'd certainly hate to disappoint. The article is written by Roy Spencer from the University of Alabama. Up front, it is important to note that one should not be fooled by his credentials. He calls himself only a "PhD scientist", and indeed that is precisely what he is. But his area of specialty, climatology, is entirely unrelated to evolution. Thus, the fact that he has a PhD means virtually nothing. He has no more training in fields relevant to evolution - biology, paleontology, anthropology,…
stcynic | August 10, 2005Last evening, Genie Scott was on Hardball on MSNBC along with Bruce Chapman, president of the Discovery Institute. Chapman offered the standard argument that the DI doesn't want ID taught, but only wants the "evidence against evolution" taught in schools. But when challenged to name that evidence against evolution, he immediately mentioned Jonathan Wells' book Icons of Evolution. Wells' book, which claims that science textbooks distort the evidence for evolution, is instead a perfect example of how to distort that evidence. It's a highly dishonest book. Here are three links to excellent…
stcynic | August 8, 2005A state senator in South Carolina has submitted a bill to require that ID be taught along with evolution in state public school science classrooms. They had a conference in Greenville this weekend to promote the idea, attended by some movers and shakers in South Carolina politics. Among those who participated in the conference: Jim DeMint, the bigoted halfwit that state sent to the Senate last year. He's the one who famously said that neither gays nor unmarried women should be allowed to teach in public school. No, I'm not making that up.
stcynic | August 5, 2005Just when you thought we'd heard the last of Utah's reigning ignoramus, State Senator Chris Buttars, President Bush's recent statements on ID seem to have brought him back to life. He's moving forward once again to root out the evils of evolution from Utah schools, and in the process he pretty much gave away that little secret that the IDers try so hard to hide:
"I love it," Buttars, R-West Jordan, said of the president's statement. "I believe the president believes exactly as I do. I believe he believes in God, and the story found in the scriptures: We are children of God and created in his…
stcynic | July 25, 2005The Detroit News featured a fairly in-depth article on the ID movement in Michigan and around the country yesterday. I spent at least an hour on the phone with the reporter who did the story and was quoted in the article. I was also pleased to see that they took my advice and did not use a chart comparing the definitions of creationism, ID and evolution, which was terribly inaccurate. The reporter sent it to me and asked if it was accurate and I gave a long and detailed, almost word for word, critique and they apparently just scrapped it. Good move.
stcynic | July 17, 2005And continues to get more ridiculous as well. This Chris Buttars is some piece of work. It's frightening that someone this badly education could have any influence at all on how children are educated, but that's electoral politics for you. You'll recall from the other day that the Utah Superintendant of Public Instruction, Patti Harrington, was quoted as saying that human evolution could not be taught in Utah public schools because there's no evidence for it. Now another Utah education official says that teachers can teach human evolution, it's just not required. And Buttars says that…
stcynic | July 15, 2005Some of you may remember the story of Chris Buttars, the Utah state legislator who submitted a bill to require the teaching of "divine design" in public school science classrooms in that state. That led to a couple of long exchanges between myself and John West, associate director of the Discovery Institute. One of my readers from Utah sent me an update on the story. It seems that Buttars has now dropped his plan because he found out that Utah public schools don't teach human evolution anyway:
The Utah lawmaker who was kicking around the idea that Utah's schools should teach the theory of "…
stcynic | July 7, 2005Jeff Shallit has issued a response on Panda's Thumb to accusations made (in lieu of a response) by William Dembski to his criticisms of Dembski's work. Dembski's response to the criticism of Shallit and Wes Elsberry is pretty standard stuff for him. Those of us who have followed his work and the responses of scholars have grown accustomed to his modus operandi when responding to criticism. In particular, he has three tendencies:
A. Claim that the critique only deals with some minor component and doesn't really have anything to do with the validity of his claims (in this case, he makes that…
stcynic | June 30, 2005John West, associate director of the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute, has replied to my "fulminating" essay, posted to Dispatches, In the Agora and the Panda's Thumb, on ID and "divine design". You'll recall that Mr. West had claimed that he and his fellow ID advocates get "very upset" when people "confuse" intelligent design with divine design, as a Utah legislator has in a bill designed to give equal time, and I replied by offering numerous quotes from ID advocates themselves ostensibly "confusing" the two. Mr. West's reply to me, unfortunately,…