Intelligent Design
jlynch | August 12, 2007Jim Lippard has highlighted an article in the latest Skeptic which provides a taxonomy (below) of answers to why this universe is the way it is. Jim neglected to mention that the article is freely available online as a PDF.
1. One Universe Models1.1 Meaningless Question1.2 Brute Fact1.3 Necessary/Only Way1.4 Almost Necessary/Limited Ways1.5 Temporal Selection1.6 Self Explaining
2. Multiple Universes2.1 Multiverse by Disconnected Regions (Spatial)2.2 Multiverse by Cycles (Temporal)2.3 Multiverse by Sequential Selection (Temporal)2.4 Multiverse by String Theory (with Minuscule Extra Dimensions…
goodmath | August 12, 2007 Despite having written about it before, I still get a lot of questions about William Dembski's "No Free Lunch"
(NFL) theorems. One message recently contained the question in a particularly interesting form, so I thought I'd take
the opportunity to answer it with a post.
Here's the question I received:
Is the NFL theorem itself bad math?
If the theorem itself is sound, what's wrong with how it's being applied? Is it a breadth issue
or a depth issue?
The theorems themselves are actually good math. They're valid given their premises; they're even deep
and interesting theorems in their way…
jlynch | July 31, 2007Sahotra Sarkar (Philosophy of Biology, University of Texas) has revived his blog in response to the creationist takeover of the Texas Board of Education.
Sarkar is the author of Doubting Darwin? Creationist Designs on Evolution and thus will no doubt have good things to say about the situation in Texas.
jlynch | July 27, 2007Gert Kortoff has written a review of Behe's Edge of Evolution. He points out:
Readers interested in "Intelligent Design Theory" will be disappointed. The reader won't find an exposition of the Intelligent Design Theory. Nine out of ten chapters are about the limitations of neo-Darwinian evolution and the last chapter is about fine-tuning. There is no chapter devoted to design theory. Not even one paragraph describing what design theory actually is. ... Behe has the complete freedom to write about design theory, but no coherent treatment of the theory can be found. Professor Jerry Coyne stated…
jlynch | July 22, 2007
Above is a picture of a lightning strike east of Camelback Mountain last night. The monsoon season has officially started here in Phoenix, so we’re looking at a few weeks of increased humidity and thunderstorm activity. A good enough reason to skip out of town. Tuesday sees me head off to England for the ISHPSSB bi-annual conference - the premier meeting of historians, philosophers and social scientists interested in biology. Four days of talks and socializing with people such as John Wilkins. Good fun, though I hear there is flooding in the SouthWest of England that might disrupt travel…
jlynch | July 21, 2007Dembski pimps an interview with his new bestest buddy, the electrical and computer engineer, Robert Marks "director of the Baylor Evolutionary Informatics Lab" (which is comprised of Dembski, Marks and two students). The Isaac Newton of Information Theory says:
I hope you catch from the interview the ambitiousness of the lab and how it promises to put people like Christoph Adami and Rob Pennock out of business (compare www.evolutionaryinformatics.org with devolab.cse.msu.edu).
Let’s do that shall we? Let’s compare the two labs. Number of journal papers by the Baylor Evolutionary Informatics…
jlynch | July 8, 2007In 1999, Dembski established the Michael Polanyi Center - an ID institute - at Baylor University. As this article notes, Dembski appropriated Michael Polanyi’s name, contrary to the wishes of his literary executor and son, Nobel Laureate John Polanyi, in an attempt to associate Polanyi with a cause he clearly would not have shared. Richard Gelwick, the articles author, should know. He is the author of The Way of Discovery: an Introduction to the Thought of Michael Polanyi (1977) and Michael Polanyi: Credere Aude: His Theory of Knowledge and Its Implications for Christian Theology (1965),…
jlynch | July 6, 2007In the past, ID supporters have not only attacked evolution, but also the link between AIDS and HIV (witness Phil Johnson, Tom Bethell, and Jonathan Wells) and anthropogenic global warming (witness the expectorations of Dave Springer - a.k.a. DaveScott - over at Uncommon Descent). Now, it appears that perpetual motion (and the apparently DOA Steorn Orbo project) "is perhaps the best physical evidence I have ever seen against the absurd assumptions of materialism." Perhaps we now need to teach the controversy within physics?
The money quote:
These clever Irish researchers have demonstrated…
jlynch | July 1, 2007Jerry Coyne has posted a reply to Behe’s reply to his original review of Edge of Evolution. A sample:
Behe excoriates me for claiming that his defeat (and that of intelligent design [ID]) in the Dover case was more damaging than the scientific criticisms levelled at Darwin’s Black Box. His mistake here is assuming that "victory" is more pressing in the scientific than in the social arena. But it is Behe himself who has chosen to take his challenge to the social arena, publishing his ideas in a trade book and thereby bypassing the usual scientific route of having these ideas adjudicated by his…
jlynch | June 27, 2007The negative reviews of Behe’s Edge of Evolution continue. Kenneth Miller has a review in this week’s Nature and Richard Dawkins will have one in next New York Times Sunday Book Review (available here for NYTimes Select customers).
From the former:
Behe, incredibly, thinks he has determined the odds of a mutation "of the same complexity" occurring in the human line. He hasn’t. What he has actually done is to determine the odds of these two exact mutations occurring simultaneously at precisely the same position in exactly the same gene in a single individual. He then leads his unsuspecting…
goodmath | June 27, 2007In light of [my recent demolition of a purported improvement on the second law of thermodynamics][2l], an alert reader sent me [a link to this really boneheaded piece of work at Uncommon Descent by Granville Sewell][sewell].
[sewell]: http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/introducing-sewells-l…
[2l]: http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2007/06/dembskis_buddy_part_2_murphys…
Sewell is, yet again, trying to find some way of formulating IDist anti-evolution garbage in terms of the second law of evolution. Sewell's been doing this for ages, and it's been a
wretched failure. Naturally,…
goodmath | June 22, 2007PZ wrote about the latest nonsense from IDiot George Gilder. In this interview, Gilder tries to make some really horrible arguments about how everything is really hierarchical, and he uses "information theory, computer science, and network theory" as examples.
I believe that the universe is hierarchical, with creation at the top - the idea that there's a creator and that we, at our best, act in his image. This top-down model is what all of my work has in common. I sensed that the basic flaw and failure of feminism was its gradient toward pure animal passion with no procreative purpose. In…
jlynch | June 20, 2007In 2002 William Brookfield (our favorite "pleasurian" and "ID scientist") published his paper "In Search of a Cosmic Super-Law: The Supreme "Second Law" of Devolution" in Dembski’s vanity journal PSCID. Mark over at Good Math, Bad Math takes on Brookfield’s "science" here and here.
When Mark took on Behe’s math a few weeks back, Dembski accused him to being insufficiently credentialed to comment - given Brookfield doesn’t "hold any degrees from any university of any kind," yet sees fit to accuse Hawking of making errors, I doubt Billy D will be defending Brookfield on this one!
goodmath | June 20, 2007 Part two of our crackpot's babblings are actually more interesting in their way, because they touch on a fascinating mathematical issue, which, unfortunately, Mr. Brookfield is compeletely unable to understand: the Poincare recurrence theorem.
Brookfield argues that the second law of thermodynamics in not really a law, since it's statistical, and that there must therefore be some real law underlying the statistical behavior normally explained by the second law. Here's his version - be prepared to giggle:
"The second law of thermodynamics has a rather different status than that of other…
goodmath | June 19, 2007 As several of my fellow science-bloggers pointed out, William Dembski has written a post at Uncommon Descent extolling an "international coalition of non-religious ID scientists", and wondering how us nasty darwinists are going to deal with them.
Alas for poor Bill. I'm forced to wonder: is there any purported ID scholar so stupid that Bill won't endorse them? In his eagerness to embrace anyone who supports ID, he didn't both to actually check who or what he was referencing. This "international coalition" turns out to be a lone uneducated crackpot from Canada who uses his ID beliefs as a…
jlynch | June 18, 2007I haven’t spoken of Michael Egnor is a long time. If you remember, he’s the DI’s pet neurosurgeon who, as many have documented, has a penchant for silly arguments. Attacking Egnor is a little like harvesting low-hanging fruit, but I couldn’t let this (lack of) logic go unnoticed ... think of it as a teaching moment.
In response to a Nature editorial on Brownback’s defense of his views on evolution, Egnor writes:
Yet if intelligent design is scientifically wrong ...then the design inference can be investigated (and, they claim, refuted) using the scientific method. Then intelligent design is…
jlynch | June 16, 2007Over at Uncommon Descent, Dembski wonders how the NCSE will deal with "the growing number of non-religious ID proponents" and links to this blog which is something called ICON-RIDS "an international coalition of non-religious ID scientists & scholars." Let’s take a look at this "international coalition," shall we?
ICON-RIDS is a little underwhelming. It’s a blog with five entries going back to October 2006, the first of which proclaims that "Darwinism is a Hoax!" All entries are authored by William Brookfield who describes himself [pdf] as a "logician" and "conceptualist." A little more…
jlynch | June 15, 2007Once again, Jason Rosenhouse goes to ID events so that you don’t have to. Wednesday, he saw Behe give a "staggeringly dull" talk in Washington. Details here.
jlynch | June 13, 2007Jason Rosenhouse has already noted that Tom Woodward opined that "in the next six to twelve months, Darwinism will go into a steep nose dive as the result of Behe’s new book." How is this "tremendously important" book going to change the landscape of ID? Early indications appear to say ... not at all.
To begin with, let’s look at the postings on the Discovery Institute’s blog Evolution News & Views. Since May 30th (i.e. in the past two weeks) there has been a single posting (4% of total) on Behe’s book, a posting that merely noted that Behe appeared on Michael Medved’s radio show (this…
jlynch | June 13, 2007Others have mentioned Jerry Coyne’s shredding of Behe’s Edge of Evolution in The New Republic. I’d just like to highlight this paragraph as it more or less summarizes everything that Coyne has to say:
In the end, The Edge of Evolution is not an advance or a refinement of the theory of intelligent design, but a retreat from its original claims--an act of desperation designed to maintain credibility in a world of scientific progress. But it is all for nothing, because Behe’s new theory remains the same old mixture of dead science and thinly disguised theology. There is no evidence for his main…