Intelligent Design
goodmath | November 27, 2007 An alert reader pointed out that William Brookfield posted a response to
my two part debunking of his argument for design based on a mangling of the second law of thermodynamics. I debated whether it was worth responding to; Mr. Brookfield's got so little readership that I never noticed his response in my referals, even though it was posted on July 3rd! I check my referals regularly (I'm obsessive about seeing who is linking to my blog), and I've never seen ICON-RIDS show up.
But, today, I'm sitting in the hospital while my mother has knee surgery; I'm bored; and I have a throbbing headache…
tqa | November 26, 2007
One of the joys of procrastination is that sometimes if you wait long enough, someone else really will take care of things. I mention that because Ed Brayton just did a good job dismantling Casey Luskin's latest whine about how big bad Judge Jones was such a nasty judicial activist for daring to issue a ruling in the Dover, PA Intelligent Design case that addressed the question of whether or not ID is good science. I was planning a long and detailed post on the same thing, but now all that I have to do is highlight one point that Ed didn't make in his post.
As Ed points out, there were a…
jlynch | November 22, 2007Peter Irons has made it known that Frank Beckwith (Baylor) resigned as a fellow of the Discovery Institute in July.The event went without notice from either Beckwith or the DI. Beckwith’s has in the past stated that he "has never been much of fan [of] design arguments, ever. My interest in the debate focuses on the jurisprudential questions involving the First Amendment and what could be permissibly taught in public schools under that amendment."
Obviously one can speculate as to Beckwith’s reasons - was it related to his recent conversion to Catholicism, or perhaps to the asinine activities…
gregladen | November 16, 2007Here is a preliminary list of resources for people to find out more about Intelligent Design. Please feel free to put this on your own site. If you want, email me and I'll send you the HTML code to make this one step easier. But you can also, if you are using Firefox, use "ctrl-u" to display the code and cut and paste it from there.
Please feel free to add to this resource for people who want to learn more about Intelligent Design.
Intelligent DesignIntelligent DesignIntelligent DesignIntelligent DesignIntelligent DesignIntelligent DesignIntelligent DesignIntelligent DesignIntelligent…
jlynch | November 13, 2007Just want to note that I enjoyed the PBS NOVA special "Judgment Day" which fairly depicted (imho) the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial and the machinations the intelligent design supporters.
A student of mine emailed me to let me know that his wife was impressed about his ability to predict what was going to happen next (I guess regarding the evidence presented by the plaintiffs) in the documentary. I had lectured on the history of ID last week, so that made me happy. At least one of the 85 students is remembering the material!
Overall, the program only strengthened the image of the ID movement as…
tqa | November 12, 2007
The fine folks at the Discovery Institute aren't happy with tomorrow's PBS documentary on the Dover Intelligent Design case, and they're doing their best to make sure that everyone knows just how unhappy they are. They've been frantically tossing articles up on their Media Complaints Division Blog trying to make sure that their version of reality gets some exposure. I'm not going to bother going through all of their complaints right now. Most of their new material consists of a rehashing of discredited arguments from when the ruling came out. There's one post that caught my eye, though,…
grrlscientist | November 7, 2007tags: evolution, politics, education, Kitzmiller, Dover School District, intelligent design, Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial, NOVA, streaming video
Occasionally, very rarely in fact, I wish I had a television, and this is one of those days. I just received an ad from Kate Becker, regarding a new NOVA program, "Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial" which will air 8 pm on Tuesday, November 13 on your local PBS station (you might have also noticed that they are advertizing this program on this site).
This program documents the war over evolution that came to Dover, Pennsylvania…
laelaps | November 6, 2007Back when I was a blogging greenhorn, right about this time last year, an evangelical YEC thought he had come up with an intellectual coup de grâce to make me see "the light"; "Antony Flew believes in a god, so there." (Ok, so I'm paraphrasing just a bit) Chalk it up to ignorance, but I had never even heard of Antony Flew, and saying that he believed in a deity had about as much effect on me as saying "Charlie Parker thought the sky was purple" (and given his problems with drug addiction, maybe he sometimes did). Still, over and over again Christian apologists have invoked Flew's name and I…
laelaps | October 24, 2007Abe: I got a riddle for you, Sol. What's green, hangs on the wall, and whistles?
Sol: I give up.
Abe: A herring.
Sol: But a herring isn't green.
Abe: So you can paint it green.
Sol: But a herring doesn't hang on the wall.
Abe: Put a nail through it, it hands on the wall.
Sol: But a herring doesn't whistle!
Abe: So? It doesn't whistle.
Borrowed from Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar...: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes
Everyone knew it was coming; Ben Stein goes on Bill O'Reilly's show and says that intelligent design has a religious agenda and is concerned with showing people the "…
tqa | September 27, 2007
Today's New York Times has a story up on the upcoming Ben Stein "documentary" on the alleged persecution that ID proponents face in the academic world. The NYT article quotes a number of scientists who were interviewed for the movie (including Scienceblogs own PZ Myers) as saying that they were told that the interview was going to be for an entirely different movie.
Bill Dembski posted something about the article, with a brief comment of his own:
I can't say I feel sorry for these atheistic scientists in agreeing to interview for EXPELLED: NO INTELLIGENCE ALLOWED. When the BBC…
goodmath | September 26, 2007As of 2/24/2008, Sewell has just responded to this, pretending that he just noticed it. To make discussions easier to follow, I have responded with a new post here, and I would appreciate it if comments could be posted there, to keep it all in one place.
My SciBling Mark Hofnagle over at the Denialist blog wanted me to take a look at the pseudo-mathematical ramblings of Granville Sewell. It actually connects with some of the
comments in the thread about the paper by Dembski and Marks - Sewell uses part of the article to make
the same kind of quantum nonsense claims that showed up here.…
tqa | September 25, 2007
Most of the readers of this blog are intelligent, interested, scientifically literate individuals, but I'm guessing that at least a few of you aren't familiar with one of the nouns in the title. Those of you who do know what a conodont is are probably wondering what it has to do with the others. If you bear with me for a little bit, the connection will be clear shortly. It has to do with fossils, fossilization, and the latest spectacular misunderstanding of those two things at Uncommon Descent.
Conodonts are (or, rather, were) an interesting group of animals. They were around from late in…
goodmath | September 17, 2007 Both in comments, and via email, I've received numerous requests to take a look at
the work of Dembski and Marks, published through Professor Marks's website. The site is
called the "Evolutionary Informatics Laboratory". Before getting to the paper, it's worth
taking just a moment to understand its provenance - there's something deeply fishy about
the "laboratory" that published this work. It's not a lab - it's a website; it was funded
under very peculiar circumstances, and hired Dembski as a "post-doc", despite his being a full-time professor at a different university. Marks claims that his…
jlynch | September 14, 2007PZ raises an excellent point about the hysteria being shown by Dembski and others regarding the "Evolutionary Informatics Lab" that Robert Marks was trying to host at Baylor. The Lab, you will remember, does not actually exist in any material sense - it is merely a webpage (currently here) which features the work of three individuals: Marks (at Baylor), Tomas English (with no affiliation), and William Basener (at Rochester Institute of Technology). There is no physical lab and never was. It’s a webpage that can be hosted anywhere (even the Discovery Institute). Marks and Dembski should have…
jlynch | September 9, 2007Just got back from my public lecture - approximately 90 secular humanists packed into the meeting room to hear me talk about the history of the Intelligent Design Movement and their recent fortunes. The talk lasted a little over an hour and there was plenty of questions and discussion afterwards. All good.
Here [swf] are the slides for the talk (minus some animations).
Update: Because the Flash seems to be causing problems for some people, here are the slides as a PDF. Also I've corrected the head count ... for some reason I had doubled the actual number.
jlynch | September 6, 2007This coming Sunday I will be giving a public talk on the Intelligent Design movement for the Humanist Society of Greater Phoenix. Details:
Designs on Darwin: A History of the Intelligent Design Movement
September 9th @ 9:00am (Brunch to start, followed by talk)
HomeTown Buffet, 1312 N. Scottsdale Road, Scottsdale
Talk is free and open to the public.
tqa | September 5, 2007
From an article in the Baptist Press, linked from the Uncommon Descent homepage:
"You have to understand, in the current academic climate, Intelligent Design is like leprosy or heresy in times past," [Dembski] said. "To be tagged as an ID supporter is to become an academic pariah, and this holds even at so-called Christian institutions that place a premium on respectability at the expense of truth and the offense of the Gospel."
Good job, Bill.
jlynch | September 5, 2007As some of you may know, I received my undergraduate and graduate training at University College Dublin (Ireland). Now it seems that there is at least one gullible and uninformed supporter of ID in that esteemed university. John Feehan is a lecturer who works on agricultural management systems and in the Jesuit journal Studies has the following to say:
Proponents of 'intelligent design’ posit a rather directly interventionist role for God. Michael Behe has presented a compelling case to the effect that Natural Selection, as we understand it - the progressive accumulation of small mutations -…
jlynch | September 5, 2007From here:
I'm confident that in the not-to-distant future the information-revolution will sound the death knell for Darwinism. The hard evidence of technology will shake the pillars of evolutionary theory and toss them into the dustbin of history. When America restores true Bible science and accountability to our Creator God into our political and educational institutions, we'll have taken a giant step toward healthier national character and the prevention of crime, life without purpose and the consequences of our condom culture.
jlynch | August 13, 2007One of the reasons that I canceled my subscription to Skeptic was that it was giving a mouthpiece to Frank Miele and his odious defences of Arthur Jensen and putative links between race, intelligence and IQ. Miele as an undergraduate contributed to the racist journal Mankind Quarterly, has collaborated with eugenicist Richard Lynn, and has received funding from the eugenicist Pioneer Fund. Which makes the following all the more ludicrous.
Over at Uncommon Descent, Dave Springer (a.k.a. "DaveScot") has approvingly linked to an overwrought article by Miele which decrys Newsweek for its coverage…