Intelligent Design
stcynic | April 17, 2006In addition to AIG, Reasons to Believe and all the other DI folks falling all over themselves to say nonsensical things about Tiktaalik roseae, Casey Luskin has now jumped into the fray with this silly post at the DI's blog. His argument can be summed up thusly: even though this find fills in a gap in the fossil record documenting the fish to amphibian transition, the fact that there was a gap to fill in in the first place means evolution isn't backed up by evidence. Yes, I presume he made that argument with something resembling a straight face. he starts by making a big deal out of the fact…
stcynic | April 16, 2006Joseph Farah's ignorant ravings about Tiktaalik roseae weren't the only ridiculous anti-evolution arguments in the Worldnutdaily yesterday. Ted Byfield may actually have topped Farah for sheer imbecility in this article called, with great delusion, Rebutting Darwinists. It was a response to readers who commented on an earlier article full of silliness from him. He writes:
Where, one reader demanded, did I get the information that 10 percent of scientists accept intelligent design? I got it from a National Post (newspaper) article published two years ago, which said that 90 percent of the…
stcynic | April 14, 2006I reported the other day that William Dembski is leaving the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville to take a position closer to his home in Waco, Texas. Now comes word that he is being replaced at SBTS by Kurt Wise, a young earth creationist geologist. It's certainly interesting that they would replace an ID advocate with a young earth creationist, given IDers claim that ID has nothing to do with creationism. Still, Wise is probably a step up. He's a good bit more honest than Dembski in that he won't distort the evidence or his own position to get out of embarrassing…
jlynch | April 11, 2006Cornell Biology Department to offer course on intelligent design. Two-month schedule starts with lecture on "Great Breakthroughs in Intelligent Design Research," followed by 59.5 days of lunch. Comments here.
stcynic | April 11, 2006There has been a minor brouhaha going on over a new paper published in Science that details precisely how a protein binding site that fits Michael Behe's definition of irreducible complexity (IC) evolved through mutation and selection. The paper prompted an immediate response from Behe that struck me at the time as yet another highly dishonest example of moving the goalposts. Behe's response was to claim that changes in protein binding sites that require multiple point mutations in order to function are not IC at all.
2) The authors (including Christoph Adami in his commentary) are…
stcynic | April 10, 2006Steve Reuland has a post at his own blog following up on my discussion of Jonathan Witt's terrible argumens on Tiktaalik roseae. He includes a quote from Henry Gee, who was quoted in a misleading manner by Witt in his post, slamming the DI for continually taking his words out of context.
stcynic | April 10, 2006Jonathan Witt, one of the many DI shills, has posted one of the many ID responses to the find of Tiktaalik roseae. The most fascinating thing about the ID response to this find is how scatterbrained it's been. An organization famous for being able to stay "on message" can't seem to settle on a position. Rob Crowther, citing unnamed "Discovery Institute scientists", says that the find isn't a threat to ID at all because ID doesn't deny common descent.
But as Nick Matzke points out, Of Pandas and People, which the DI calls the first intelligent design textbook, clearly relies on the lack of "…
stcynic | April 10, 2006William Dembski is changing jobs. For a year, he's been teaching in Louisville (while commuting from Waco) at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary; now he's going to be closer to home with a position at the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Ft. Worth:
Dembski will become research professor of philosophy at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. Southwestern announced the appointment Wednesday. The Southern Baptist Convention operates both seminaries.
What is a "research professor", especially at an academic institution that does no research? Well, it's…
jlynch | April 9, 2006On June 1st 2005, Bill Dembski started as director of the Center for Science and Theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. On April 9th 2006, it was announced that he was leaving the position to "work closer to his home in Waco, Texas, where he has maintained a residence while commuting to Louisville to teach." But never fear, Dembski will become research professor of philosophy at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, where there are no pesky mathematicians, scientists or (by the looks of it) philosophers to get in the way. Anyone want to bet how long Dembski…
stcynic | April 8, 2006After Wes Elsberry found this article containing "cosmo theorist" Raj Baldev's take on the new fish-amphibian transitional fossil find, I have to confess to being a bit disappointed that the crew over at Dembski's home for wayward sycophants has apparently learned their lesson about citing Baldev. For those who don't recall, a couple months ago Dembski's underlings cited Baldev not once but twice before realizing that he wasn't exactly the most reliable source to cite since he is in actuality an astrologer (used to be Saddam Hussein's personal astrologer, in fact).
And true to Orwellian form…
stcynic | April 8, 2006Nick Matzke has a brilliant post up at the Panda's Thumb about the DI and their fumbling reaction to Tiktaalik roseae and on the general issue of transitional forms. This isn't just a fisking, it's a royal beatdown. It's the DI crowd playing the role of the Washington Generals. And it's well worth reading.
stcynic | April 6, 2006GilDodgen over at Dembski's place has a post with excerpts from an article that appeared in Crisis, a Catholic magazine. The article, written by George Sim Johnston (whoever that is), is about the Darwin exhibit now showing at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In just the short excerpt that Dodgen includes, Johnston manages to get much wrong.
The show tells us that Darwin's theory helps us to "understand" the fossil record. This is odd, because the exhibit's curator, the paleontologist Niles Eldredge, has written extensively about how Darwin's idea of gradual evolution has…
jlynch | April 3, 2006Access Research Network (ARN) maintain a blog related to "ID-related" literature. The site has amassed a total of nine posts since October 2004, thus proving that the ID perspective can prompt a veritable torrent of papers. Their latest posting is, believe it or not, a notice of Well's Rivista paper from a year ago. Yup, those IDers sure keep up with their own literature. The notice, by the way, contains a link to a PDF of the paper if you haven't seen it before. Below the fold I give some reactions to the piece and Wells' research.
In the past, I have made the claim in public talks that ID…
stcynic | April 2, 2006As I've worked on writing the preface to our book on the Dover trial, it has struck me how many of the arguments made by ID advocates today are identical to the arguments made, sometimes by the very same people, in defense of creation science in the McLean and Edwards cases in the 1980s. For example, we often hear them argue that ID is not a religious idea because it does not reference the Bible at all and in fact it doesn't mention any particularly religious idea. As the DI themselves have stated,
Unlike creationism, intelligent design is based on science, not sacred texts.
Creationism is…
stcynic | March 29, 2006A couple days ago I made the testable prediction that the denial of tenure to Frank Beckwith would be turned into "those evil Darwinists did this" fodder by ID advocates. A couple of people challenged me on it, noting that no one had yet said that, but I replied that I was predicting that it would happen and that my prediction was, of course, testable. I know refer you to this post by John West of the Discovery Institute as confirmation of that prediction.
stcynic | March 28, 2006Casey Luskin touts the results of a Michigan poll showing that 76% of "Michiganonians" (huh?) agree with the following statement:
"Biology teachers should teach Darwin's theory of evolution, but also the scientific evidence against it."
My first thought was that this is a typically misleading poll question. If there was scientific evidence against the theory of evolution, how could any intellectually honest person say it should not be taught? No scientist that I know of would take that position in a million years. The question, of course, presumes that which is entirely disputable and hardly…
stcynic | March 27, 2006The Worldnutdaily has yet another badly reasoned defense of ID, this one by a homeschooling mother who appears to be equally ignorant of both science and the rules of logic. But rather than spending the time to fisk this one myself, I thought I'd invite my readers to do it. Pick out your favorite passages, quote them, and post a response to them. The article can be found here.
jlynch | March 24, 2006The DI is crowing that their next update to the "Dissent from Darwinism" list will feature 600 PhD's. They highlight a letter sent by William Hart, a Visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (they omit the visiting piece, I wonder why?). In any case, Hart says:
I am a PhD mathematician who has recently (in the last couple of years) examined carefully the claim that the neo-Darwinian synthesis adequately accounts for the variety of life on earth. I have read countless texts on geology, biology (and cosmology) in a multitude of sub-disciplines and…
jlynch | March 23, 2006Like PZ, I too received a copy of What We Believe but Cannot Prove: Today's Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty [amaz] a few weeks back. Also like PZ, I was taken with Ian McEwan's entry (see PZ's post for that). I also liked this comment from Seth Lloyd:
Unlike mathematical theorems, scientific results can't be proved. They can only be tested again and again until only a fool would refuse to believe them.
Unfortunately there are a lot of fools out there, many of them supporters of ID. As Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired notes,
The Intelligent Design movement has opend…
stcynic | March 15, 2006The Discovery Institute's Media Complaints Division is complaining about a New York Times article on a new study about human evolution. It's a fairly simple article, nothing terribly shocking in it. It says quite openly that the importance of the study is only in combatting an attitude common among social scientists that the human species had become essentially exempt from natural selection because of our ability to adapt externally. Yet the DI wants to criticize the article for not proving what it never set out to prove. How odd.
Along the way they quote a statement from Charles Colson's…