Recently in Intelligent Design Category

Intelligent design news, commentary and discussion from the 17^th of December, 2011 to the 10^th of February, 2012.

Huh? Intelligent design, what’s that? Oh, oh, yes. Yes, you’re quite right. I’m sorry, I’ve been out of the loop a bit and I’d forgotten this little movement I like to keep an eye on from time to time. Well, it’s actually supposed to be a weekly thing, but… things have been crazy around here. Leave me alone, I’m a university student on holidays, I have no time to do anything.

Anyway, what has the intelligent design community been up to online since we last saw them? Not a huge amount, actually, although certainly more stuff than is feasibly possible to fit into one blog post. So, like normal, I’ll skim off the cream floating at the top of this ID think-tank and have a peer into the beaker I used to do it.

This time we’ll be looking at speciation, the glowing past and future of ID, ID as a default assumption in science, appeals to historical authority, and the Discovery Institute distancing themselves from a creationist bill in Indiana.

As mentioned, I have a couple of pro-ID books that need to be read and reviewed these holidays: Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design by Stephen C. Meyer, and Intelligent Design Uncensored by William Dembski and Jonathan Witt. While I’ve done preliminary readings of both books, in order to grasp their overall structure and scope, I recently started reading the latter in a greater level of detail.

What I’ve found has not been pretty.

Yes, Intelligent Design Uncensored is not a very healthy book to read, if you get angry at slick rhetoric in place of rigorous argumentation, blatant strawman arguments, and an easily digestible style of writing that doesn’t at all match with the supposed gravity of the topic at hand. Unfortunately, those are some of the things that push my buttons, so I’m not a happy little “Darwinist”. No sir.

In fact, it has been so infuriating so far that I’m seriously considering not doing a proper review of it: it may not be worth my time nor my effort. Meyer’s Signature is a much more worthy target - it’s held up by the ID community as some shiny tome of pure knowledge, blessed to humanity from the heavens, whilst Dembski and Witt’s book is a barely-mentioned teaching tool for prospective members.

Intelligent design news, commentary and discussion from the 9^th of December to the 16^th of December, 2011.

It’s nearing Christmas, and here in Australia the weather is heating up, causing the ground to bake beneath our thong-covered feet - and a kind of cognitive dissonance sets in as the “White Christmas” imagery fed to us by popular culture and jolly old Christmas tunes conflicts with the harsh reality of Summer in December. Such is the Southern Hemisphere.

Of course I could, at this point, easily compare that tale with the cognitive dissonance present in the intelligent design movement as they wiggle around, both in cyberspace and in the real world, evading effective criticism and being ambiguous about many a topic. But I won’t.

That would be a bit forced, wouldn’t it?

No, I just wanted to let you all know about the wonderful Christmas we Australians will be having. Enjoy your Winter Wonderland, Northern Hemispherians: I’ll be cooking sausages, avoiding swarms of flying insects and trying my best not to get terribly sunburnt.

Anyway, this week we have blog posts about biomimetics, the potential predictive powers of Judaism/Christianity when it comes to the origin of humanity, using my words to pump money into the ID movement, and Richard Dawkins brainwashing poor, poor children.

Intelligent design news, commentary and discussion from the 2^nd of December to the 8^th of December, 2011.

It’s well and truly holidays now, and after getting all the fiddly, tricky things out of the way first - such as doing a domain transfer and dealing with responses from the Discovery Institute - it’s time to get back into TWiID and see what the online presence of the intelligent design movement has been like over the past seven days.

What are the notable posts about this week? Why: multiverses; responding - again - to me; the identity of the Designer; and why design in nature may not be so easy to detect after all.

When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground.

~ Cersei Lannister, HBO’s “Game of Thrones”, Season 1, Episode 7

Bit of a dramatic quote, isn’t it? But for some reason it entered my mind when I read what David Klinghoffer wrote about me and my views on the dismissive rhetoric of the scientific community towards the intelligent design movement (which I maintain is understandable, given the history of ID and creationism), in his Evolution News & Views post “A Darwinist Worries about Darwinian Rhetoric”.

You see, I didn’t write the post for a pro-ID audience - it came about because I felt I had some helpful advice to give scientists and science communicators for when they are asked to comment on ID by the media (or in other public outlets). That’s why I didn’t justify or explain, for example, my opinion that the movement is largely motivated by religious sentiment: I was talking to a group of people who already have that point of view.

Obviously I wasn’t thinking very clearly though, because I was writing about why ID proponents love to twist, distort and spin sentiment about themselves into energy for their day-to-day operations, yet forgot to consider how the post being written would appear to those very people. How legitimately foolish of me.

Everything is a rhetorical game to the Discovery Institute! And like the medieval-fantasy political game of thrones referenced in the above quote, when you play the game of rhetoric, you win or you die a (rhetorical) death. Much like gambling, the best way to win is not to play at all, especially when facing down masters like David Klinghoffer. I mean, look at what he wrote - he twisted a post about not giving the ID movement rhetorical nourishment into rhetorical nourishment.

But while I’m undeniably now locked into a PR pact with David - wherein everything I write is now open to dramatisation and being milked for points - I’d still like to focus on the issues that are at least vaguely objectively defensible.

[Republished from Homologous Legs, from October 2010 - I think this topic is particularly relevant at the present moment]

You hear it a lot, the claim that bad design is evidence against intelligent design. Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins, two of the most well-known educators about evolutionary biology, regularly mention it in their books and other writings, and so do numerous other defenders of evolution, striking back at the apparently growing intelligent design (ID) movement that is threatening science education in the US and across the globe.

The argument from bad design is as follows. If life were designed by an intelligence, particularly a supernatural intelligence, organisms wouldn’t be observed to have redundant organs, clumsily constructed systems and life-threatening faults with the ways their bodies work. Vestigial structures, like the tiny hind leg bones of whales or the flimsy wings of flightless ratites, wouldn’t exist, and the vast portions of genomes that do nothing, such as the broken remains of ancient retroviruses, wouldn’t be there. Life looks nothing like it was designed by an intelligence.

Fortunately for intelligent design, some ID proponents have an answer to this problem, as expressed here by Robert Crowther, the Director of Communications for the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture:

All a response…this [bad design argument] really requires is to post a few photos of clearly designed items that have had amazing, spectacularly bad problems. (The Hindenberg for instance. Or any Toyota apparently.) How stupid, yes I said stupid, do you have to be to equate bad design with no design?

In other words, bad design is not a problem for intelligent design because, while many objects have problems associated with them, these problems don’t take away the fact that the objects were designed. Intelligent design is compatible with a spectrum of the Designer’s possible competence, so pointing out a biological system that has flaws does not constitute evidence that the system was not designed.

On this Thursday at 18:00 UT NASA will hold a press conference on a recent discovery by the Kepler, the exoplanet discovery telescope. I don’t know what to expect, on the basis of past performance they will probably announce a tidally locked super-Earth in the habitable zone of a Red Dwarf as if we have found a second Earth (or maybe they will confirm KOI-701.03 really is in the habitable zone of a reasonably sun like star).

Still, despite coming hard on the heels of the 50 new exoplanets found by HARPS, the existing bonanza of Kepler worlds and discovering the atmospheric composition of some exoplanets, one can hardly suppress a thrill at the prospect of learning something new about the plethora of extrasolar worlds we have found.

One wonders how William Dembski feels after proclaiming in 1992:

“Dawkins, to explain life apart from a designer, not only gives himself all the time Darwin ever wanted, but also helps himself to all the conceivable planets there might be in the observable universe (note that these are planets he must posit, since no planets outside our solar system have been observed, nor is there currently any compelling theory of planetary formation which guarantees that the observable universe is populated with planets)”

Three years later the first exoplanet was confirmed, and the current count stands at 677.

[Republished from Homologous Legs]

The intelligent design (ID) movement has been around for over 20 years, and few (if any) of its stated and implied goals and plans have thus far come to fruition. While contributing factors to this lack of success are certainly the hard work of the scientific community and its friends, as well as the fact that ID has never been adequately formulated as a scientific idea, a significant proportion of the responsibility for the outcome should be laid upon the ID movement itself. It has, in arguably many respects, acted in the exact opposite way that it should have acted if it wanted to be taken seriously - only one example of which is bringing up religion whilst simultaneously claiming that they weren’t and then chastising critics who pointed out what they were doing.

It’s hard to find an ID proponent who will admit this. Like many movements, the one constructed around ID is insular, mistrusting and lacks introspection, and it spends most of its time on attacking “the Darwinist enemy” in academia instead of really thinking about what it’s doing. This is understandable, considering it’s been relentlessly criticised by the scientific community ever since it poked its head up out of the carcass of creation science, rendering it in a somewhat-perpetual state of defensiveness. Those few proponents who can somehow forget the fact that nearly every biologist in the world would laugh about their ideas to their face given the chance still attack evolutionary biology with unparalleled confidence, which bolsters the morale of those in the Internet trenches: and thus the movement continues. Even with its “Darwinist conspiracy” mindset, it still thinks it’s winning. But it’s not. Not by a long shot.

Intelligent design news and discussion for August 10^th to August 18^th, 2011.

This week, the Discovery Institute did something rather strange. Well, actually, it’s been leading up to it for a while, but it was only in the last week that this trend became completely apparent: Evolution News & Views, its main blog, is now devoting serious amounts of space in its written output to posts on religion and atheism. Often these posts have seemingly little or nothing to do with the stated purpose of the blog, which is to “[provide] original reporting and analysis about the debate over intelligent design and evolution, including breaking news about scientific research”:  it’s had a “Faith and Science” category for a while now, but the intensity of posts has reached a somewhat amusing level, most of them coming from the supernaturally-inclined mind of DI Senior Fellow David Klinghoffer.

So, in this edition of TWiID, I’ll be touching on many of the religious posts over the last week on ENV, as well as more on the bacterial flagellum (again!) and the supposed design and inspired beauty of butterfly wings.

Intelligent design news and discussion for July 1^st to August 9^th, 2011.

Did the ID movement miss me whilst I was gone? Maybe, maybe not. I don’t pretend to believe I’m important enough to be noticed, so I’ll leave that there. But then again, I don’t blog to necessarily be noticed and to directly engage with the ID crowd: I blog in order to disseminate correct information and to share a passion for science and demonstrable truth (as tacky as that phrase is - I apologise).

So, yes, this is a TWiID that encompasses a little over a month of pro-ID blog posts. As usual, only the most interesting ones will be touched upon: who has the time/sadomasochistic inclination to fully subject themselves to over 30 posts from the Discovery Institute? Not I, not I.

[Review of Shapiro, James A. Evolution: A View from the 21^st Century. FT Press Science, ISBN: 0-13-278093-3, $34.99 Publisher’s site]

Over the years there have been many books that purport to “radically revise” or “supplant” Darwinian evolutionary biology; they come with predictable regularity. Usually they are of three kinds: something is wrong with natural selection, something is wrong with inheritance, or something is wrong with phylogeny. This book, by geneticist James A. Shapiro, exemplifies all three.

As predictable as the sunrise, creationists are launching another round of the disgusting practice of trying to tie every mass murderer to Darwin and evolution, self-consistency and logic be damned. This time it’s about Brevik, the bomber and shooter in last Friday’s killings. We saw this at Uncommon Descent on Sunday (“Norway shooter a Darwinian terrorist?”) – itself relying on an article from the fundamentalist WorldNetDaily (“Terrorist proclaimed himself ‘Darwinian,’ not ‘Christian’”), and today from alleged scholar John West at the Discovery Institute (“Fundamentalist Christian or Deranged Social Darwinist?”).

West does the usual thing, word-searching Brevik’s 1500-page screed for the few references to Darwin, and brazenly playing down the hundreds of references to Christianity and God and the Templars and Christian holy war against Islam. These are just brushed off by West. West pretends that Brevik calls himself a “Christian atheist” through pretty optimistic (optimistic from West’s perspective) readings of some Brevik passages, which completely ignores the various quite direct references that Brevik makes towards his own belief in God. Here’s West:

Intelligent design news and discussion for the month of June, 2011.

I thought it would be best to wait until a month had passed to start doing TWiID again, mainly because:

1. I think whole anthropochronological divisions are beautiful, in a rather frivolous way, and
2. Not many overtly, over-the-top exciting ID things happened in June that warranted immediate attention by my loosely serious writings.

As such, this will be a slight departure from the usual TWiID style you might be used to. Instead of going into detail on only three or four pieces put out by the intelligent design movement, I’ll briefly to semi-briefly touch on a large number of them: in essence, all the vaguely interesting ones. But don’t worry, the regular weekly schedule will be back from next week.

So, on with the show!

Intelligent design news and discussion from the 19^th of May to the 2^nd of June, 2011.

Exams, exams and more exams are what’re coming up in my life soon, so understandably I’ve been a little sidetracked from blogging. But no fear! TWiID is back after a week off (I’m lucky the acronym still fits after I use the alternate multi-week title, I suppose), and I’m ready to get stuck into some ID news and discussion. The big story over the past week has been the Louisiana Science Education Act (LSEA), the repeal of which recently (and unfortunately) failed, much to the delight of the Discovery Institute and friends, who have been lobbying to preserve the “academic freedom” act ever since it was challenged by the repeal last year. I’ll be spending a bit of time on the LSEA, as there have been two major blog posts by the DI on the topic recently, and I want to touch on some points that I think many anti-ID supporters of the repeal have overlooked.

I’ll also be discussing posts on the mysterious and surprising link between mathematics and biology, and the teleology of life.

Intelligent design news from the 28^th of April to the 18^th of May, 2011.

Finally! It’s back again, your fix of ID news and discussion. To make up for my three-week-long absence, this post will cover five of the top ID blog posts from the past three weeks. Lucky for me then that it hasn’t been an especially busy time for the ID community during my break - otherwise I’d have a much bigger job on my hands.

Anyway, enough grovelling, let’s get into it.

Today’s posts are about Osama bin Laden and junk DNA, Oxford University and evolutionary mathematics, dissent in the evolutionary ranks, enzyme evolution, and, of course, junk DNA.

One of the goals of the intelligent design (ID) movement is to show that evolution cannot be random and/or unguided, and one way to demonstrate this is to show that an evolutionary transition is impossibly unlikely without guidance or intervention. Michael Behe has attempted to do this, without success. And Doug Axe, the director of Biologic Institute, is working on a similar problem. Axe’s work (most recently with a colleague, Ann Gauger) aims (in part, at least) to show that evolutionary transitions at the level of protein structure and function are so fantastically improbable that they could not have occurred "randomly."

Recently, Axe has been writing on this issue. First, he and Gauger just published some experimental results in the ID journal BIO-Complexity. Second, Axe wrote a blog post at the Biologic site in which he defends his approach against critics like Art Hunt and me. Here are some comments on both.

Read the rest at Quintessence of Dust.

Intelligent design news from the 21^st of April to the 27^th of April, 2011.

The Discovery Institute has been extremely relaxed with its posting over the last week - partially explaining why this is slightly late, there was no massive compulsion on my part to hastily set the record straight on certain blog posts before other new items swallowed the spotlight - and whether this is an external representation of the internal busyness of the organisation, I’m not sure. Perhaps Casey Luskin was too busy doing proper science-attorney things too blog much this week.

But it doesn’t really matter, there’s enough meat for me to sink my metaphorical blogging teeth into. Also, I remember the last time there was a slump in blogging output from the Discovery Institute: I predicted wonderful things were about to happen, but I was wrong. So, I’ll try not to read anything into it.

This week’s TWiID covers pseudogenes and “Darwinian assumptions”, enzyme evolution and ID, and the traditional religious bias of the Discovery Institute.

Intelligent design news from the 14^th of April to the 20^th of April, 2011.

Another week, another lot of ID blog posts to wade through. Not a lot I want to mention in this intro, particularly, except for perhaps this recent post of mine responding to an Uncommon Descent post about ID’s supposed scientific predictions. It was going to be included in this post, but it needed a larger amount of specific attention, given how important the topic is. It should be cross-posted on PT in a little while, but I just wanted to give you all a heads-up.

Other than that, this week wasn’t particularly noteworthy. Nothing that changed the ID/evolution game too much, just some ideas to consider. Robert Crowther wrote about the difference between promoting ID and teaching criticisms of evolution, Casey Luskin attacked the NCSE’s Steve Newton for over/misusing the word “creationist”, and Jonathan Wells’ new book on junk DNA got a flattering plug, possibly foreshadowing another book-promoting frenzy…

Intelligent design news from the 6^th of April to the 13^th of April, 2011.

This week was fairly interesting with regards to the online ID movement. However, it wasn’t a great week for author diversity. Yes, all the posts I’ll be talking about were written by Casey Luskin, everyone’s favourite non-scientist attorney. What I want to know is: how does he find the time to write so much? Surely his work as Program Officer in Public Policy & Legal Affairs at the Discovery Institute occupies much of his time, so where does all of this time come from to discuss so many different topics relating to ID? As a full-time student I barely have enough time to scrape this together every week… (And I’ve been sick and quite busy, which is why this post is a day late, I apologise.)

Anyway, this week’s posts are about Lynn Margulis and academic “status”, the Tennesse academic freedom bill and language in biology. Let’s get into it.