May 2006 Archives

Robert Camp in Can Intelligent Design be considered scientific in the same way that SETI is? delivers a fatal blow to the specious claims by Intelligent Design supporters that SETI uses the ‘explanatory filter’ proposed by Dembski to detect ‘design’. In fact, in order to detect design, these sciences all use additional information such as means, motives, and opportunities to reach their conclusions. Since ID wants to avoid dealing with motives, pathways, methods at all cost, ID will remain scientifically devoid of content.

In the next few weeks I intend to show various approaches and arguments which all reach the same conclusion.

Let’s start with Dembski’s claim about Intelligent Design

Dembski Wrote:

To say intelligent causes are empirically detectable is to say there exist well-defined methods that, based on observable features of the world, can reliably distinguish intelligent causes from undirected natural causes. Many special sciences have already developed such methods for drawing this distinction — notably forensic science, cryptography, archeology, and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). Essential to all these methods is the ability to eliminate chance and necessity.2

Dembski, William. 2003. “Intelligent Design.

Several others have already pointed out the problems with Dembski’s claim but Camp’s analysis is quite excellent and timely as it helps understand why ID id doomed to remain scientifically vacuous.

Here’s a pretty cool example of how isolated environments lead to the evolution of new species. The more isolated, the more unique:

Prehistoric ecosystem found in Israeli cave

Israeli scientists said on Wednesday they had discovered a prehistoric ecosystem dating back millions of years.

The discovery was made in a cave near the central Israeli city of Ramle during rock drilling at a quarry. Scientists were called in and soon found eight previously unknown species of crustaceans and invertebrates similar to scorpions.

“Until now eight species of animals were found in the cave, all of them unknown to science,” said Dr Hanan Dimantman, a biologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. […]

The cave was completely sealed off from the world, including from water and nutrients seeping through rock crevices above. Scientists who discovered the cave believe it has been intact for millions of years.

“Every species we examined had no eyes which means they lost their sight due to evolution,” said Dimantman.

The cave is an “island” of sorts, and like islands out in the ocean, it has unique species that can be found nowhere else. Isolated populations that have their gene pools cut-off from their parent populations tend to speciate rather quickly.

Various terms have been used to describe the simple observation that ID is scientifically vacuous, and devoid of content.

In the meantime, we work with the premise that the Darwinian model is the best model for apprehending evolutionary biology. We believe the Darwinian model has proved itself the most fertile. It leads to new knowledge, which demonstrates its fertility. The difficulty with the Intelligent Design and Creationist models is that they lack fertility. They fail to produce progressive research programs. In a scientific sense, they cannot produce testable models. We believe that the dialogue with theology must take place with the best of science, not with a substitute that is a philosophical position and not science at all.

Martinez Hewlett and Ted Peters, Who Sets the Evolution Agenda?Theology and Science, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2006, pp. 1-3

In a previous post, I presented an example of one of the questions that evolutionary biologists face. In this example, I described three populations of closely related insects, presented a few details about their distribution, and gave the results for some laboratory-based breeding studies that were conducted with these populations some years back. I then asked people to guess how many species the three populations were divided into by scientists. Their answers, and some questions, can be found in comment threads both at The Panda’s Thumb and at The Questionable Authority.

If you look at the answers that people have given, you will see that all three possible choices (1 species, 2 species, and 3 species) have received some votes. The most popular answer is that there are 2 species, with populations A and B being put together as a single species, and population C being given status as a separate species. The people who have chosen this option focused on the obvious differences in fertility for the crosses involving population C. The person who voted for three species did so based on the high likelihood that all three populations are on separate evolutionary tracks. The people who voted for a single species did so based on the fact that, despite the male sterility, population C is still interfertile with populations A and B. Several people also asked for more information. I’ll try to satisfy some of those requests in this post.

Read More (at The Questionable Authority):

One of the questions asked in the comments of the previous post in this series is quite pointed, and very much on topic for this discussion, so I’m going to take a minute or two to answer it. I’ll give the answer to the example in another post, that will shortly follow this one. Karl asked:

So why are you asking that question? How is “species” defined. Does it really have a definition? Does it matter? Isn’t “species” just a modern reaction to the biblical term “kinds”

Now that I’ve taken a few minutes to think about it, I’m starting to remember why I was dodging that question. I could write a long, rambling discourse on the topic, but in all honesty the best I can do for a definition of “species” is to paraphrase Justice Stewart’s concurring opinion in Jacobellis v. Ohio: I might not ever be able to intelligently define the term, but I know it when I see it.

Read more (at The Questionable Authority):

For those interested in the Paul Nelson/Keith Miller situation, Dr. Nelson has responded to my accusations on my blog and I have answered them. He seems to believe, falsely, that he did not misrepresent MIller’s views, yet he says he’s now going to apologize anyway. Disingenuous apologies are no more interesting than disingenuous arguments. I think he knows he’s caught, but simply can’t admit it. For more information, see the follow up post at Dispatches from the Culture Wars. Comments may be left there.

C9: Misuse of an inductive argument by the assertion of no false positives. also CI111.1 Specified complexity is a reliable criterion for detecting design. from the index of creationist claims by Mark Isaak

Hat tip to Wesley Elsberry

Dembski Wrote:

Biologists worry about attributing something to design (here identified with creation) only to have it overturned later; this widespread and legitimate concern has prevented them from using intelligent design as a valid scientific explanation.

Though perhaps justified in the past, this worry is no longer tenable. There now exists a rigorous criterion—complexity-specification—for distinguishing intelligently caused objects from unintelligently caused ones.

Wiliam Dembski: Science and Design 1998 First Things 86 (October 1998): 21-27.

Compare this with

In 2003, Micah Sparacio collected a set of common criticisms of Dembski’s Specified Complexity. Since the initial collection of criticisms, little seems to have happened to address the various criticisms raised. I have collected ones which I find particularly of interest as they shown the various and many problems with the concept of specified complexity. Especially C11 seems applicable to my argument that CSI is merely a unncessary complex way of stating that we do not understand yet how something with a function in biology may have arisen.

This is a work in progress, as I will be linking the claims to other relevant materials.

Science Teachers Confront Intelligent Design by Gloria Hillard (Download MP3)

In classrooms across the country, science teachers are increasingly finding themselves on the front lines of the decades-long evolution wars, pitting accepted scientific explanations against biblical-based challengers. So when some 15,000 science teachers convened for their annual conference recently, many attended workshops designed to help them deal with the issue.

Evolution Resources at the National Science Teachers Association

There is a long history of creationist misrepresentation of the views of scientists, going back to the time of Darwin himself. As the creationist movement has grown and gone through its various phases over the last century, such misrepresentations have been a powerful weapon in their arsenal. In the 20 years or so I’ve been involved in this dispute, I’ve seen it time and time again. Why is this the case? I have always suspected that it’s because they know that they can get away with it. The chances that their largely uneducated audience is actually familiar with the work of the scientists they refer to is slim, the chances that they will go and look up their work and compare it to the way it’s being characterized by the creationists even slimmer.

But during my involvement in this dispute, I’ve also often said that there are at least some creationists who didn’t do that sort of thing. I’ve defended, for example, Kurt Wise, Art Chadwick, Paul Nelson and a few others as being honest men, even genuine scholars, who do not do the sort of straw man caricaturing that so many of their colleagues do when presenting the work and thinking of scientists. And while I still have no reason to think otherwise of the first two, I can tell you that the third one, Paul Nelson, has now been caught in what I can only describe as one of the more outrageous misrepresentations - oh hell, let’s call it what it is, a baldfaced lie - I’ve ever seen. And the person whose views he distorted, Keith Miller, is one of the truly nice guys in the business. And to make matters even worse for Nelson, he’s also a fellow Christian. As we will see, this takes “bearing false witness” to a whole new level.

Continue Reading at Dispatches from the Culture Wars. Comments may be left there.

The book, Intelligent Thought: Science versus the Intelligent Design Movement edited by John Brockman contains 16 essays by Edge contributors such as Jerry Coyne, Leonard Susskind, Daniel Dennett, Neil Shubin, Richard Dawkins, Stuart Kauffman, and others on the topic of ‘Intelligent Design’. What caught my eye however were not the essays as much as the comments by various scientists on Intelligent Design. I was pleasantly surprised to see how the concept of scientific vacuity of Intelligent Design is surfacing more and more.

I’ve got a little question to keep people busy over the long weekend.

There are three populations of an organism. The populations are physically separated from each other as a result of geographical factors. Geographically, they are arranged in a more or less linear fashion. The geographic details are as follows:

Population A is the northwestern population. Population B lies to the southeast, and is eparated from population A by a minimum of ~14km. Population C is southeast of population B, and separated by about 50km.

Populations A & B are identical to each other in appearance and in a key reproductive characteristic. Population C differs very slightly in appearance, but is substantially different in the reproductive characteristic.

The organisms (flying insects) were captured and bred in the laboratory. Experimental crosses were made for the different combinations of these three populations, with the following results:

Read more (at The Questionable Authority):

- Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg warned medical school graduates Thursday that centuries of progress in scientific research are under attack by those who oppose stem cell research and dispute evolution and global warming.

Bloomberg: Science under attack in stem cell research debate by SARA KUGLER, Associated Press Writer

On the topic of Intelligent Design, the republican mayor wasted no words

He then ridiculed the campaign to teach schoolchildren about “intelligent design” alongside evolution. The belief proposes that living organisms are so complex that they must have been created by some type of higher force, and many conservatives, including Bush, say schools should present both concepts.

The mayor said children who learn it are receiving an inferior education that puts them at a disadvantage later.

He told the medical students that they share the same burden carried by the school’s first graduates more than 100 years ago, when the field was “dominated by quacks and poorly trained physicians.”

Their task, Bloomberg said, is to “defend the integrity and power of science.”

They are finally starting to get it… ID is scientifically vacuous.

The appeals court has issued its opinion in Selman v. Cobb County School District. They decided to send the case back to court to clear up some holes in the factual record of the case. The trial court can either hold an entirely new trial or add to the existing record.

Of course, this gives the trial judge the opportunity to apply the ruling in Kitzmiller to Selman.

NCSE has more information.

Ian Johnston reports in Creationism dismissed as ‘a kind of paganism’ by Vatican’s astronomer how Guy Consolmagno rejects creationism as a form of superstitious paganism.

Brother Consolmagno, who works in a Vatican observatory in Arizona and as curator of the Vatican meteorite collection in Italy, said a “destructive myth” had developed in modern society that religion and science were competing ideologies.

The New England Journal of Medicine has an excellent article on Intelligent Design titled Intelligent Judging — Evolution in the Classroom and the Courtroom

Requiring public-school science teachers to teach specific religion-based alternatives to Darwin’s theory of evolution is just as bad, in the words of political comedian Bill Maher, as requiring obstetricians to teach medical students the alternative theory that storks deliver babies

Teach the controversy I say… Storks rule…

There has been some recent news in SC concerning the attempts at inserting creationist language into the science curriculum. I have hesitated to report them here previously, because taken separately they are mostly minor incidents, but taken together, they tell a story. I have three posts up on my blog, in chronological order, consisting of good news and bad news (mostly good, I think):

A Small Victory, But We’ll Take It

More on the Death of S114

Update on the Budget Proviso and the EOC

Also, check out the South Carolinians for Science Education page, as they’ve got a blog with news updates and other good tidbits.

Check out this post by Karl Mogel at The Inoculated Mind. It reviews an April 28 talk at UC Davis given by Discovery Institute fellow Nancy Pearcey. Although Pearcey is now an official ID advocate, she was originally a young-earth creationist. In fact, she was one of the editors of the young-earth creationist Bible-Science Newsletter from 1977-1991, and for much of that period wrote monthly articles. As I showed in this PT post last year, several of her Bible-Science Newsletter articles became part of the text of the first “intelligent design” book, Of Pandas and People. The draft of the Overview chapter of Pandas, which was the chapter that Pearcey wrote, shows the same changes from creation/creationist to intelligent design/design proponent that the six “excursion” chapters of Pandas show. This was first made public when the draft Overview chapter was introduced into evidence in a July 14, 2005 pretrial hearing in the Kitzmiller case.

NBC’s science correspondent, Robert Bazell, has an opinion piece today on MSNBC: Stop whining about intelligent design.

Scientists should stop whining about threats to the teaching of evolution and spend more time discussing values.

I should note here that most of the piece is strongly supportive of teaching evolution. Bazell presents a very brief overview of the history of anti-evolutionism in America, and notes that “serious efforts in biology and medicine can no more ignore evolution than airplane designers can ignore gravity.” He gives the example of influenza H5N1 as a current problem that can only be understood using evolutionary theory. Overall, I think it’s a really good piece–but I still think he’s off-base.

(Continued at Aetiology).

Dembski, apparantly unable (or unwilling?) to address the claims and observations by Intelligent Design critics that Intelligent Design is scientifically vacuous, seems to have changed his approach to: well if ID is scientifically vacuous then evolutionary science is evidence-free.

This all is particularly ironic because Intelligent Design is both evidence-free and scientifically vacuous for the simple reason that intelligent design cannot make any useful predictions since the design inference is based on a gap argument, also known as an argument from ignorance.

Dembski, via one of his ‘colleagues’, asks the following question

What are the other vexing questions facing biologists that we are led to believe have already been solved? How about the origin of the information in the first cell? How about the origin of molecular machines? What about Haldane’s dilemma?

This is really funny. It seems that claiming expertise in “design detection” theory and methods is no guarantee against falling for the crudest of urban legends. Of course, it helps if the urban legend is based on stuff that pushes the religious right’s buttons (although, we are told, ID has nothing to do with religion-based political movements!), such as a story about praying marines being under attack by the ACLU.

Dembski’s blog got snookered by a silly chain e-mail to post the following entry, which I copy in its glorious entirety after the fold (caution: large) so that everyone can appreciate the imaginative use of fonts, caps and pompous rhetoric, which alone should have set off some alarm bells (note also the boisterous approval by Dembski himself in the comments). Ironically, this urban legend was already completely debunked in 2003 (see here and here), so here’s my suggestion, folks: if your design detection methods clearly need some tuning, you can still avoid looking foolish by simply checking the relevant literature.

Some of you may recall the exchange I had with Casey Luskin in early 2005 about ID advocates comparing evolution advocates of being Nazis, and vice versa. It started when he wrote an essay for the IDEA club website (this was before he went to work for the DI) screaming bloody murder about folks on our side comparing ID advocates to holocaust deniers. I pointed out that Luskin was barking up the wrong tree, throwing a fit about us comparing them to holocaust deniers while the ID advocates he admires and, now, works for have long been comparing us to actual Nazis, not to mention Stalinists, the Taliban or Pol Pot.

Continue reading at Dispatches from the Culture Wars. Comments may be left there.

On Uncommon Descent, Dembski shows once again evidence of the historical roots of Intelligent Design and Creationism. In fact, he seems to be suggesting that ID and religious faith are quite intertwined, as much of the evidence already suggested.

Dembski is commenting on Richard Dawkins’ “Root of all Evil” documentary on Channel 4 in the UK.

Dembski Wrote:

You’ve got to wonder what the staffers at the NCSE are thinking when they go to such lengths to assure the public that there’s no problem reconciling evolution and religious faith, only to have Richard Dawkins come along and utter the following (taken from his BBC program “The Root of All Evil?”):

On Uncommon Descent, Dembski quotes a ‘colleague’ on the recent scientific arguments about the link between the eukaryotes and prokaryotes.

Their title refers to the “Irreducible Nature of Eukaryote Cells,” which reads like an echo of Mike Behe. The logic of their argument confirms this: the structures and the genetics of eukaryotes mean that an evolutionary pathway from prokaryotes must be rejected.

Little explanation is given why this resembles the argument of Behe.

However, they do not again use the word “irreducible” in their paper. What is clear is that the “simple” pathway that the textbooks have proclaimed for years must now be abandoned. Surely there are lessons here about the way darwinism gives false leads in its appetite for a narrative about the origins of complexity.

Even if we assume for the moment that the study’s results will hold and that the ‘false leads’ should be blamed on Darwinism, one has to realize that doing science means getting things wrong occasionally. The problem of Intelligent Design is that it has not even the luxury of being wrong since it fails to present any scientifically relevant explanation or hypothesis, other than ‘Darwinian theory cannot explain ‘X”. And although the latter is often argued to be evidence of design, it is clear that intelligent design is doomed to remain scientifically vacuous.

On Aetiology Tara Smith explores these new research findings, and the hype.

So, archaea are apparently the topic of the week. While I wrote here about the pathogenic potential of some species of these organisms, a new essay in Nature and a new review in Science focus more on their evolution (and the evolution of the other two domains of life) than any health application.

In the essay mentioned, Norman Pace discusses the eukaryote/prokaryote dichotomy. Currently the archaea are classified as prokaryotes since they, like bacteria, lack a true nucleus. However, molecular sequence analysis has shown that the archaea and eukaryotes are actually more closely related to each other than either group is to bacteria (see figure, from Pace’s Nature essay). As such, nomenclature that places the bacteria and archaea together into a group is misleading.

(Continued at Aetiology)

This may be a little “old hat” for many of you. After all, how many ways can I find to say, “Don’t try to get science from your Bible”? But with that risk let me direct you to An Evolutionary View of Kinds on Threads from Henry’s Web. Leave your comments there. This article is the result of reading some of Alvin Plantinga’s work on theistic science, a concept I find pretty dangerous.

There was a panel discussion at Florida State University on May 17^th on “After Dover”, featuring Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education, Rob Pennock of Michigan State University, and Stephen Gey, Michael Ruse, and Joseph Travis of Florida State University. Patricia Deborah Blum moderated the discussion. (Thanks to “Vyoma” for the correction.)

There was a question and answer session at the end, and one of the questioners in particular captured my attention. I have transcribed the exchange. The apparent goal of the questioner was to present such obtuse, obfuscated language as to leave the panelists too baffled to answer. However, he slipped up by using a stock phrase with known meaning, but in an inappropriate context.

(Continue reading … on the Austringer)

Some of you may know Dr. Douglas L. Theobald as the author of the 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution FAQ at the Talk.Origins Archive or of this recent paper in the Journal of Molecular Biology.

Well, earlier this month, he accepted a faculty position in biochemistry at Brandeis Univesity in Boston. He will start summer 2007.

As regular PT readers know, Ohio was a primary battle ground for the Disco Institute’s attempt to inject ID creationist trash “science” into the state science standards and model curriculum under the deceptive rubric “critical analysis of evolution”. That attempt was defeated in February. Patricia Princehouse, leader of Ohio Citizens for Science, was a mainstay in resisting that effort over five years. Now Patricia has received the Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Award from the Playboy Foundation for her efforts.

Patricia’s acceptance speech is posted at The Nation site. From it:

People ask me, Why pour so much energy into protecting science education? Why not fight for literacy generally or any of a thousand other educational issues? I have two answers. One is easy: I know about evolution, so it makes sense that I would work on what I know best. The second is harder to grasp. And that is that freedom of religion is the bedrock foundation of liberty in this country. If we allow certain special-interest religious groups to co-opt the public school science classroom, to use it as a vehicle for converting children to religious views their parents don’t hold, if we allow them to spout outright lies about the nature and content of science, what do we really have left? If you can lie about science and get away with it, you can lie about anything. (bolding added)

That’s why we do this stuff.

RBH

DI flak Jonathan Witt has posted yet another attempt to undermine Judge Jones’ ruling in Kitzmiller. It’s as weak as the DI’s previous 13,582,196 tries. I’ve written a full fisking of his post at Dispatches from the Culture Wars. Comments may be left there.

A new edition of Animalcules, the carnival of all things microbial, is up at Aetiology. Lots of good posts, including one on endogenous retroviruses that may be of particular interest to the group here.