Intelligent Design
jlynch | December 31, 2008Quoth Fuller:
But I happen to think that there is something more worth arguing about here, and a better way to think about the stakes is to ask, Suppose the matter of evidence remains unresolved or equally balanced: What difference does it make whether I endorse ID or Darwinism? Does it lead me to do science differently - in terms of the research questions chosen, the range of interpretations given to research results, as well as science's broader cultural significance? The answer to these questions seems to me to be clearly yes - and this is what the battle is about. Only some leftover…
jlynch | December 29, 2008Well it's official, Steve Fuller (see here, here, here and here) has officially joined the ID echo-chamber that is Uncommon Descent. He will, apparently, be arguing that "Darwinism is an undead 19th century social theory" indeed
stripped of its current scientific scaffolding, Darwinism is a 19th century social theory that has been turned into a 'general unified theory of everything', and as such belongs in the same category as Marxism and Freudianism. The big difference is that Marxism and Freudianism - throughout their existence - have been contested (many would say decisively) by several…
goodmath | December 29, 2008I'm away on vacation this week, taking my kids to Disney World. Since I'm not likely to have time to write while I'm away, I'm taking the opportunity to re-run some old classic posts which were first posted in the summer of 2006. These posts are mildly revised.
Back when I first wrote this post, I was taking a break from some puzzling debugging.
Since I was already a bit frazzled, and I felt like I needed some comic relief, I decided to
hit one of my favorite comedy sites, Answers in Genesis. I can pretty much always find
something sufficiently stupid to amuse me on their site. On that…
jlynch | December 28, 2008I have a dislike of hip-hop and rap. But when it is mixed with ID, well, I'm speechless. Witness Atom tha Immortal's silken rhymes:
Apocalyptic G-d presence/ Feeling the fire of G-d's essence/ You need Rosetta Stones to unlock my poem's message/ Born in a body of sand since early dawn/ Adam spawned genetic code of early on/ Written on the rocks of Hebron, The Earth Is Gone/ Reverted from an Information Age to Early Bronze/ Punishment of Civilization/ The only reason why this wicked nation ain't burning is G-d's patient/
Chorus: -----…
goodmath | December 19, 2008 Since my post a couple of weeks ago about NASA and the antenna evolution experiment,
I've been meaning to write a followup. In both comments and private emails, I've gotten
a number of interesting questions about the idea of fitness landscapes, and some of the things
I mentioned in brief throwaway comments. I'm finally finding the time to write about
it now.
Fitness Landscapes
First, let me review what a fitness landscape is.
Suppose you're searching for something. There are N parameters that define the thing you're searching for. Then we can say that you're doing a search for a target…
tqa | December 12, 2008
There's a very interesting article over at Uncommon Descent about beavers, and the things that they do. I'm not entirely sure why they posted the article - Barry seems to be trying to make the point that because Beavers clearly can commit criminal acts but just as clearly can't form criminal intent, their brains are different from humans, and there's therefore something "non-materialist" and special about the human brain. I'd like to take a look at the same story, but with a slightly different focus.
Here's the story:
Green campaigners called in police after discovering an illegal…
tqa | December 9, 2008
I've been dealing with creationists for a long time now, and I thought that I'd gotten over being surprised by dishonest behavior in their ranks. In fact, I thought I'd gotten over it even when I'm on the receiving end of the false witness, and when the person dishing it out is someone who really should know better. As it turns out, I might not have quite as far over it as I thought.
As regular readers know, Dr. Michael Egnor is one of the more impressively credentialed denizens of the Discovery Institute's media complaints blog. He has decades of experience as a neurosurgeon. He's on the…
tqa | November 29, 2008
(another own goal, of course.)
There he goes again. Creationist neurosurgeon Michael Egnor's latest post over at the Discovery Institute's Why's Everybody Always Picking On Me blog may have actually reached a new standard for missing the point. And, as both my loyal regular readers know, that's not an easy mark for Egnor to hit.
The current contender is his latest post in a back-and-forth that he's been having with PZ and Orac. Once again, Egnor is attempting to argue that evolutionary biology has not provided any useful insights to the field of medicine. That much is familiar ground.…
jlynch | November 22, 2008O'Leary: "Behe is a working biochemist"
Me: "Funny definition of working you're using there, Denyse"
goodmath | November 11, 2008 It's always amusing to wander over to the Discovery Institute's blogs, and see what kind of nonsense they're spouting today. So, today, as I'm feeling like steamed crap, I took a wander over. And what did I find? High grade, low-content rubbish from my old buddy, Casey Luskin. Luskin is, supposedly, a lawyer. He's not a scientist or a mathematician by any stretch of the imagination. There's nothing wrong with that in the abstract; the amount of time we have to learn during our lives is finite, and no one can possible know everything. For example, I don't know diddly-crap about law, American…
jlynch | September 29, 2008
Over at Uncommon Descent, "DaveScot" has attempted to make the case that "public interest in global warming evaporates". By his own measure, public interest in ID barely exists.
jlynch | September 16, 2008Catholic News Service reports:
Speakers invited to attend a Vatican-sponsored congress on the evolution debate will not include proponents of creationism and intelligent design, organizers said.
The Pontifical Council for Culture, Rome's Pontifical Gregorian University and the University of Notre Dame in Indiana are organizing an international conference in Rome March 3-7 as one of a series of events marking the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's "The Origin of Species."
Jesuit Father Marc Leclerc, a philosophy professor at the Gregorian, told Catholic News Service Sept…
jlynch | August 23, 2008Steve Matheson over at Quintessence of Dust has posted part IIb of his "Why I'm not a fan of Behe" series, this time covering Behe's abuse of genetics. I've referred to previous posts in this series here and here. Steve ends with:
In summary, I find Behe's handling of genetics in EoE to be unacceptable. He seems ignorant of basic evolutionary genetics, and is clearly content to create a folk science alternative to modern evolutionary biology. No one has proven that random mutation generated the wonders of biology, to be sure, and so I'm not saying that Behe's conclusion is known to be false.…
jlynch | August 23, 2008Your irony meter may just exploded on this one.
Predictably, the idiots (at this stage there really is no other word for them) over at Uncommon Descent have been removing comments that criticize Fuller's vacuous defense against Sarkhar, a philosopher whom philosophical-know-nothing Denyse O'Leary calls "third-rate" (seriously!). In justifying the censorship "Dave Scot" states:
In order to make this thread a little easier to manage any critics of Fuller's must use their real name to post a comment. Check the anonymous bravado at the door. I ought to make that a policy for the whole damn blog…
jlynch | August 22, 2008A few days back I noted Sahotra Sarkar's review of Steve Fuller's latest ejaculation. John Wilkins brings to my attention that Fuller has finally shown his true colors and joined the madhouse that is Uncommon Descent with a post attempting to deflect Sarkar's piece. It's amazing how individuals who claim to be dispassionate observers of ID eventually reveal their true colors and climb into bed with Dembski. He, Fuller and Denyse "I'm a serious journalist" O'Leary make quite a threesome!
As one would expect, Fuller's piece is full of sound & fury, signifying nothing, and Wilkins takes him…
jlynch | August 11, 2008In a follow-up to his post on Behe's conduct as a scientist (which I discuss here), Steve Matheson has now posted the second part of his critique, this time examining Behe's "scientific" arguments regarding malaria. There will be a part IIb in the future.
jlynch | August 6, 2008 Over at Quintessence of Dust, Steve Matheson raises some good points about Behe. Steve's argument boils down to the following:
"Behe's fans say that he's a nice guy, and that the evolutionists are "crucifying" him. Both claims seem to be true, but they can't hide some serious problems with his conduct as a scientist." These problems are ...
A. "Behe exudes an arrogant contempt for the scientific community, exemplified by his neglect of peer review."
B. "I find many of Behe's responses to his critics to be suspiciously misleading, and I believe this provides a clue as to why he does not allow…
jlynch | July 22, 2008Over at Crooked Timber they are discussing a review of Steve Fuller's latest expectoration Dissent Over Descent: Intelligent Design's Challenge to Darwinism. As the review notes:
The book is an epoch-hopping parade of straw men, incompetent reasoning and outright gibberish, as when evolution is argued to share with astrology a commitment to "action at a distance", except that the distance is in time rather than space. It's intellectual quackery like this that gives philosophy of science a bad name.
As part of the exchange over at CT, Jeff Rubard claims that "Steve Fuller knows a hell of a…
jlynch | July 22, 2008I recently co-authored a paper that discussed the utility of history of science for science (Isis 99: 322-330). The abstract reads:
This essay argues that science education can gain from close engagement with the history of science both in the training of prospective vocational scientists and in educating the broader public about the nature of science. First it shows how historicizing science in the classroom can improve the pedagogical experience of science students and might even help them turn into more effective professional practitioners of science. Then it examines how historians of…
jlynch | June 24, 2008
(source; click for larger version)
So 60% of Republicans - versus 40% of Independents and 38% of Democrats - think that God created humans as is, 10,000 years ago. Let's get this clear - this isn't 60% accepting some form of "intelligent design" and allowing the archeological and fossil records to speak for themselves. This isn't some form of theistic evolution that may be compatible with some form of intelligent design (the numbers there are 32, 36 & 39% respectively). No, this is 60% of Republicans (and 44% of Americans) being abjectly ignorant and accepting a young earth creationist…