Intelligent Design
stcynic | June 28, 2005I find this quite fascinating as a sideline in the story of the ID experts in Dover. William Dembski, who was an expert witness for the defense in the Dover ID trial before he was withdrawn, was a few days ago threatening to sue the Thomas More Law Center to get paid for 115 hours of work on the case at $200 per hour. ID shill Denyse O'Leary reported both the lawsuit threat and the resolution of it, as Dembski emailed her to tell her that he had been informed that he would be paid in full. From the reports filed by all of the experts for the defense, in fact, we know that all of the experts…
stcynic | June 24, 2005John West, associate director of the Discovery Institute's Center for (the Renewal of) Science and Culture, the most prominent ID think tank in the world, is mad as hell and he's not gonna take it anymore. It seems that a state legislator in Utah has submitted a bill in that state to give equal time in state science classrooms to teaching "divine design" along with evolution - and that just will not do. West is quite verklempt about the whole thing:
While it's frustrating when critics of intelligent design mischaracterize what ID is about, it's even worse when people billing themselves as…
stcynic | June 11, 2005I'll be gone the rest of the day with some old friends in town to talk business, eat BBQ (5 racks of ribs are in the smoker right now) and play poker. But in the meantime, here's an article for you to read. Richard Colling, chairman of the biology department at Olivet Nazarene University in Illinois, emailed me this column he wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times. In it, he makes the case that evolution and Christianity do not necessarily conflict and that ID has done nothing to further our understanding of life. Enjoy.
stcynic | May 14, 2005One of the things I've been saying for a long time about "intelligent design" is how frustrating it is trying to get IDers to spell out what they think actually happened. They've got lots of criticisms of evolutionary theory, but no model of their own for the natural history of the earth. Some of them claim that ID doesn't really deny evolution but works well with it. For instance, Bruce Gordon posits that ID is compatible with practically any position on the natural history of life on earth, and with evolution specifically:
First of all, what has come to be called 'design theory' is at best…
stcynic | April 21, 2005The Thomas More Law Center, the same legal group defending the school board in Dover, PA, is threatening to file a lawsuit against the Gull Lake Public Schools for telling two junior high science teachers that they could no longer teach creationism in their classrooms. Michigan Citizens for Science, an organization whose board I sit on, has been involved with this case for several months behind the scenes, since being notified of what was being taught there by a parent whose child was in the class. That parent is a biologist and was shocked when his daughter brought home not only pro-ID…
stcynic | March 14, 2005The Washington Post has a pretty good article on ID this morning, one that will no doubt bring howls of outrage from the Discovery Institute's Media Complaints Division (aka their blog). A couple interesting bits from it:
Some evolution opponents are trying to use Bush's No Child Left Behind law, saying it creates an opening for states to set new teaching standards. Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), a Christian who draws on Discovery Institute material, drafted language accompanying the law that said students should be exposed to "the full range of scientific views that exist."
"Anyone who…
stcynic | February 17, 2005Bobby Maddex, senior editor of Crux magazine, has posted a response to my article (posted here and at Panda's Thumb) pointing out several false claims in a couple of blog entries associated with Crux, one by him and one by John Coleman. John Coleman responded both rationally and graciously in a comment on the post in question, saying:
Of course, you are correct that my intial statement that Sternberg lost his job is false. I assure you this was unintentional--a misreading on my part. I corrected this in a discussion with a reader on my blog, but have not yet done so at Crux. Thanks for…
stcynic | February 15, 2005Barbara Forrest has written a review of the book Darwinism, Design and Public Education, written by John Angus Campbell and Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute. Predictably, the DI Media Complaints Division (otherwise known as the DI Blog) is howling in outrage. Just as predictably, their basis for that outrage is a highly dishonest portrayal of what Forrest writes. It begins:
Barbara Forrest is at it again. In her latest review of Meyer & Campbell's Darwinism, Design & Public Education Forrest substitutes strident affirmation for science and scorn for reasoned argumentation.…
stcynic | February 8, 2005DI fellow and ID advocate Michael Behe wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times yesterday. For more thorough responses, see Nick Matzke and PZ Myers. But I want to focus on one aspect of the article, the way it clashes with statements from other ID advocates. Behe states:
As one of the scientists who have proposed design as an explanation for biological systems, I have found widespread confusion about what intelligent design is and what it is not.
First, what it isn't: the theory of intelligent design is not a religiously based idea, even though devout people opposed to the teaching of…
stcynic | February 8, 2005Crux magazine is a new publication with a virtual who's who of ID advocates as contributors and editors. It also has three blogs associated with it, with contributions from those same people. While declaring itself the "last bastion of Truth" (yes, they even capitalized it), their contributors seem to have a little difficulty grasping the non-capitalized variety of truth in two articles about the Sternberg/Smithsonian situation. The first, written by Crux senior editor Bobby Maddex, repeats the accusations in the David Klinghoffer WSJ piece as gospel truth, but adds one bit of falsehood to it…
stcynic | February 7, 2005I just did a search at both the blog search engine and Technorati, and as far as I can tell, the DI blog is still the only one that even mentions that there has been a denial of the accusations made by Richard von Sternberg against Jonathan Coddington and the Smithsonian. Bloggers like Joe Carter, Roger Schlafly, Derek Gilbert and many others jumped all over the Klinghoffer op-ed piece, presumed it must be true, and declared it to be proof of a "Darwinian inquisition". Yet not one of them has even mentioned that Coddington has responded to those accusations, denied them completely, and…
stcynic | February 3, 2005A few weeks ago, I blasted Casey Luskin for his article attacking ID opponents for comparing IDers to holocaust deniers, and I offered a list of quotes from IDers comparing us to Nazis and Stalinists. The use by ID advocates of the rhetorical device of comparing those who opposed their beliefs to Nazis and Stalinists has been so common over the last 15 years that it was inconceivable to me that Luskin could be unaware of them and so I accused him of deliberately hiding the far more insidious comparisons made by the folks on his side in order to score rhetorical points. It now looks as though…
stcynic | January 31, 2005Newsweek has a story in its next edition about the various battles over evolution and ID going on around the country. The DI is sure to go ballistic over it soon, since it actually tells the truth about ID. But there's one passage in it that just leaps off the page. It's this one:
But I.D. has nothing to say on the identity of the designer or how he gets inside the cell to do his work. Does he create new species directly, or meddle with the DNA of living creatures? Behe envisions as one possibility something akin to a computer virus inserted in the genome of the first organism, emerging full…
stcynic | January 28, 2005The Discovery Institute's mid-winter festival of deceit continues with this absurd post about the recent Time magazine article on ID. This passage is particularly dishonest:
Time lists three authors for the story: Michael Lemonick, Noah Isakson, and Jeffrey Ressner. But in the interest of full disclosure, the magazine should have listed a fourth: Eugenie Scott, head of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) and Darwin spin-doctor extraordinaire. Scott is quoted in the article, but she should have been credited as one of the writers, for Time's reporters simply recycled her spin in…
stcynic | January 25, 2005Pat Hayes has an update on the proposed changes in the Kansas science curriculum. It's back to the future for Kansans. I have no doubt that Jack Krebs, Liz Craig and the rest of the great folks at Kansas Citizens for Science will work tirelessly to prevent this absurd rewriting of those standards as they did in 1999.
stcynic | January 23, 2005Psychologists tell us that one of the primary manifestations of guilt is to accuse others of doing what one is guilty of themselves. This is why, for instance, a cheating husband will often exhibit jealous paranoia about his wife cheating on him, and vice versa. They know the lies that they've been telling, so they continually presume that they are being lied to as well. For a perfect illustration of this phenomenon, look no further than the recent obsession of ID apologists like Casey Luskin with Nazi comparisons in the ID/evolution dispute. While howling in feigned outrage at the terrible…
stcynic | January 23, 2005From Bruce Gordon, former Discovery Institute Fellow:
Design theory has had considerable difficulty gaining a hearing in academic contexts, as evidenced most recently by the the Polanyi Center affair at Baylor University. One of the principle reasons for this resistance and controversy is not far to seek: design-theoretic research has been hijacked as part of a larger cultural and political movement. In particular, the theory has been prematurely drawn into discussions of public science education where it has no business making an appearance without broad recognition from the scientific…
stcynic | January 20, 2005Jason Rosenhouse, a fellow Panda's Thumb contributor, has written a thoroughly blistering post about Bill O'Reilly's ridiculous take on Intelligent Design. In a segment about ID, O'Reilly interviewed a University of Colorado biologist, and in his typical smugness-meets-stupidity style, he made quite a fool of himself in the process. This exchange is especially amusing:
O'REILLY: OK. But science is incomplete in this area of creationism, is it not?
GRANT: Science is always incomplete in all areas.
O'REILLY: Well, I don't agree with that. Science is not always incomplete and I'll give you an…
stcynic | January 18, 2005The Washington Post's interview with President Bush was....well, just surreal at times. Bush's answers virtually drip with disdain. At one point he actually says that he's having to make an effort to concentrate to answer their questions. And this exchange can only strike me as bizarre:
The Post: Will you talk to Senate Democrats about your privatization plan?
THE PRESIDENT: You mean, the personal savings accounts?
The Post: Yes, exactly. Scott has been --
THE PRESIDENT: We don't want to be editorializing, at least in the questions.
The Post: You used partial privatization yourself last…
stcynic | January 18, 2005My friend Wesley Elsberry has written an absolutely devestating critique of the ways that the Discovery Institute has engaged in deceit to spin the media coverage of intelligent design in their favor. He absolutely nails the big lie at the middle of the ID strategy, the false pretense that they are not engaged in religious apologetics. We know how this strategy works because they've told us how it works. When speaking to predominately Christian audiences, they tell the truth both about their motivations and about the fact that they intentionally try to hide them as part of their PR strategy.…