Intelligent Design
stcynic | January 11, 2005Feddie from Southern Appeal sent me a link to NRO for a post by John Derbyshire weighing in against ID, much to my surprise. Derbyshire writes:
(1) If scientist X passes a remark about the universe sure being a mysterious place, he has not thereby placed himself in the ID camp. ID is a specific set of arguments about specific scientific topics. Of those arguments I have seen, none struck me as very convincing.
(2) None of the ID people I have encountered (in person or books) is an open-minded inquirer trying to uncover facts about the world. Every one I know of is a Christian looking to…
stcynic | January 11, 2005Came across this post by Verdon, who has also attempted to answer Dean Esmay on why ID should not be in public schools. His answer sounds much like mine, though I think his is more succinct:
Now, when we look at ID what evidence is there? Well? Having a hard time aren't you. You can't look at the bacterial flagellum. Dembski's filter is itself not evidence just as statistical procedures are themselves not evidence of anything in the physical world. How about the clotting cascades of blood coagulation. Nope, those are no longer good examples of complex specified information. Are there any…
stcynic | January 7, 2005Greg Piper, who says he was associated with the Discovery Institute in the past, is joining forces with Casey Luskin and Seth Cooper (and Dean Esmay, for that matter) in their utterly dishonest campaign about Nazi comparisons from ID opponents. With his full approval, Mr. Piper quotes this statement from Seth Cooper, who works for the DI:
The Holocaust was a human horror of the first magnitude. One must hope that, particularly after the moving interview Luskin provides [with a supporter of the analogy], that the Darwin's fiercest bulldogs will themselves have an attack of conscience and…
stcynic | January 5, 2005I have to confess that I'm beginning to wonder why I had previously thought Dean Esmay was really interested in a reasoned discussion about ID in public schools. Following his post of a few weeks ago asking for someone who is opposed to ID to explain the negative consequences of teaching about ID in public school science classrooms, I replied with a detailed and, I thought, compelling essay. No reply from Dean, who was informed that I had attempted to answer his question. Then in returning to his blog to see if he had ever bothered to respond, I found this post, which contains the absolutely…
stcynic | December 30, 2004In the wake of a deadly earthquake-triggered tsunami that has killed at least 77,000 people in southern Asia, brave scientific dissenters are standing up to the Wegenerian Orthoxody that has for so long censored and belittled anyone who dares to question the validity of Naturalistic Seismology. For decades, scientists have told us that they understood the processes that cause earthquakes. In high school science textbooks, they dazzle unsuspecting students with tales of tectonic plates shifting and so-called "continental drift". But new evidence shows that these processes are infinitely more…
stcynic | December 29, 2004The Panda's Thumb currently features two essays thoroughly fisking attempts by pro-ID pundits to defend ID. The first post, by Timothy Sandefur, deals with an article from Hugh Hewitt, the religious right talk show host (and ironically, Sandefur's con law professor in law school). The second, by Steve Reuland, absolutely blisters a ridiculous column by Phyllis Schlafly on the same subject. Schlafly has written numerous similar columns in the past, all showing a very poor grasp of both the science involved and the basic use of logic.
stcynic | December 24, 2004Some of you may remember Robert Meyer, a former Robert O'Brien Trophy winner we had some fun with a few months ago (see also here and here). He wrote an abysmal article packed full of blatant falsehoods about Stephen Jay Gould. He repeated a number of hoary old creationist chestnuts. For instance, he claimed that Gould and Eldredge developed Punctuated Equilibrium (PE) because of the absence of transitional forms in the fossil record (completely false, and debunked by Gould himself numerous times), and that PE was just like Goldschmidt's Hopeful Monster notion (also false, also debunked by…
stcynic | December 24, 2004Accuracy in Media is Reed Irvine's little cash cow, an organization that forever beats the media bias drum, all the while showing considerable bias itself. Well it seems that they have discovered the ID movement and their take on how the media handles it is quite amusing:
But those who believe in intelligent design or find gaping holes in the theory of evolution frequently encounter a hostile press. The Discovery Institute recently provided to Accuracy in Media a thick file of complaints about the way their representatives have been treated by the media, especially National Public Radio. The…
stcynic | December 21, 2004Dean Esmay, a blogger I respect, has a post about ID that might surprise some folks. Dean is an atheist, you see, but he doesn't think it's a bad idea to teach ID in schools, or at least to bring it up in biology classes and mention that there are some smart people who advocate it. The question he wants answered is essentially this: what would the negative consequences be of taking time in science classrooms to discuss intelligent design? So far all he has heard are vague slippery slope arguments (which he appears to erroneously believe is always a logical fallacy; it is not) and arguments to…
stcynic | December 14, 2004At 1 pm today, there is a press conference at the state capital in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania to announce the filing of a federal lawsuit against the Dover School District over its new policy to mandate the teaching of Intelligent Design Creationism in public school science classrooms in that district. The suit is being filed by the ACLU and Americans United for Separation of Church and State, represented in this case by the Pepper Hamilton Law Firm. This could very well end up being the big test case that everyone has been anticipating for several years now. Let me give some background.
In…
stcynic | December 8, 2004Science teacher Mark Terry has a fairly thorough and detailed debunking of the Intelligent Design Creationism movement and the claims that they make in the new issue of Phi Delta Kappan. Well worth reading.
stcynic | December 5, 2004In the aftermath of the decision by the Dover School Board in Pennsylvania to mandate the teaching of Intelligent Design in their science classrooms, there is quite a little fight brewing between the school board and the teachers. The York Daily Record has been following this story very closely and their latest update shows the internal battles. The science teachers are properly wondering what the heck they're supposed to be teaching, since there really is no model or theory of intelligent design to be referred to. Quoting the head of the science department, Bertha Spahr:
Spahr said a…
stcynic | November 23, 2004The long-awaited decision of the Dover Area School District in Pennsylvania regarding evolution and intelligent design has finally been released to the public (press release found here). It's a policy that virtually guarantees legal action that the school district will lose. Let's take a look at the statement. After noting that their biology classes will be using the Prentice-Hall textbook Biology as their primary textbook, they said:
The district also received as a donation 60 copies of Of Pandas and People and the book is now listed as a reference book in the curriculum. It is not a…
stcynic | November 16, 2004Brent Rasmussen and DarkSyde (who never tells anyone his real name, I suspect because his first name is Orville or something like that) have begun a series of posts on the Unscrewing the Inscrutable weblog that introduces readers to the various voices within the Intelligent Design Creationism (IDC) movement. Part one of this series features perhaps the two leading thinkers of the movement, Michael Behe and William Dembski, famous for the concept of irreducible complexity and the explanatory filter, respectively. The introductions are pretty good as far as they go, and they accurately nail…
stcynic | November 16, 2004Astute readers who have followed the Discovery Institute and the Intelligent Design Creationism movement may have noticed a relatively new name cropping up in the recent press releases concerning the Cobb County case, that of Seth Cooper. Cooper is a recent law school graduate who is now a legal counsel for the Discovery Institute, and he was recently lauded in one of their own press releases as an "expert on the legal aspects of teaching evolution". It turns out that Mr. Cooper also has a blog, SharksWithLasers, and that blog sheds a bit of light on Mr. Cooper's expertise.
On March 15th, Mr…
stcynic | October 7, 2004Robert Wright has written an article about what he characterizes as a rather dramatic admission by Daniel Dennett, one of our foremost minds and also a prominent atheist, that life on earth shows signs of having been the product of intelligent design. This would come as quite a shock to those who have read Dennett's work, especially Darwin's Dangerous Idea. But the manner in which Wright announces this alleged reversal of position just sounds like there is at least some oversimplification going on, if not some outright distortion. Having watched the creationists announce breathlessly time and…
stcynic | September 19, 2004Al Mohler, head of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (and Bill Dembski's new boss), has weighed in with a profoundly silly and dishonest article about Stephen Meyer's now-infamous peer-reviewed article. It begins with the standard boilerplate "evolution is a theory in crisis" nonsense:
The theory of evolution is a tottering house of ideological cards that is more about cherished mythology than honest intellectual endeavor. Evolutionists treat their cherished theory like a fragile object of veneration and worship--and so it is. Panic is a sure sign of intellectual insecurity, and…
stcynic | September 15, 2004As a follow-up to the previous post concerning Joe Carter's response to PZ Myers on the subject of Stephen Meyer's misleading citation of the scientific literature, Wes Elsberry has written a brief response to Carter's criticisms on his message board. He points out the quite obvious concerning Meyer's citation of Brocks' 1999 article. Meyer cites Brocks to support this claim:
For over three billion years, the biological realm included little more than bacteria and algae.
PZ had already pointed out one problem with this citation, which is that it only dealt with trace evidence of bacterial…
stcynic | September 13, 2004Joe Carter and PZ Myers have been having a little exchange over some claims in the new paper by Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute, a paper that has prompted quite a bit of discussion. I jumped into that discussion briefly in a comment on Joe's page and I'm posting this as a follow up to that discussion and Joe's response to me. A little background is needed. PZ had pointed out that Meyer had cited a couple of papers in his article that reached quite a different conclusion concerning the Cambrian explosion than the DI has been pushing. Joe had responded:
"It's saying something entirely…
stcynic | September 8, 2004The DI has, predictably, issued a press release spinning yesterday's announcement from the board of the Biological Society of Washington. Also predictably, it contains several misrepresentations. That's what you have to do when the facts are against you, so it's hardly a surprise. The distortions being with the very first sentence:
For the past few years the Darwinian lobbyists at the National Center for Science Education (NSCE) have falsely complained that scientists who support the theory of intelligent design don't publish peer-reviewed articles and don't make their case at scientific…