Posted by Ian Musgrave on July 06, 2005 | Comments (33) | TrackBack (0)

It has often been said that it takes two pages of science to correct all the misinformation an anti-evolutionist can pack into one sentence. A recent interview featuring Discovery Institute Fellow Jonathan Wells illustrates this rule of thumb. In a short space he makes numerous errors. For brevity I’d like to focus on two specific areas, but the rest of his pronouncements in this short piece are just as flawed.

Continue reading  “That’s another fine mess you’ve made Jonathan!”

Posted by Nick Matzke on June 18, 2005 | Comments (70) | TrackBack (0)

PT commenter Lenny Flank often asks for IDists to present an actual theory of intelligent design.  Well Lenny, an exclusive commentary was just posted by Kelly Hollowell (see her website, ScienceMinistries.org) on WorldNet Daily entitled, “Mechanism behind intelligent design uncovered?”

Few e-mails have ever stopped me as cold as the one I am about to describe. In it, the author, a former university professor who wishes to remain anonymous, claims to know the actual mechanism behind intelligent design. That is the mechanism by which God created the universe, our world and all biological life within it.

(Kelly Hollowell, "Mechanism behind intelligent design uncovered?")

With an intro like that, you know it has to be good.  Read it here.

Continue reading  “Lenny Flank, this is for you...”

Posted by Pim van Meurs on June 14, 2005 | Comments (27) | TrackBack (0)

On the DI website Rob Crowther spins the following story

OSU graduate student, Bryan Leonard, is suffering a vicious attack from Darwinist who seem bent on keeping him from earning his doctoral degree, precisely because he does not adhere to a strictly Darwinian viewpoint. (see here for more details)

As PT has reported already, this is incorrect

But what really caught my eye was the following ‘quote mine’

Charles Mitchell at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (http://www.thefire.org/index.php/…) has posted his insightful take on the situation:

Continue reading  “Spinning the truth the DI way”

Posted by pz on June 13, 2005 | Comments (45) | TrackBack (0)

The Discovery Institute is doing a fine job of raising the visibility of creationism and focusing the attention of their enemies. They say things like this:

Although much of the public controversy over intelligent design has focused on the application of design to biology, it’s important to remember that design theory itself reaches well beyond biology, and that some of the strongest evidence for design comes from such fields as physics, astronomy, and cosmology.

And suddenly, scientists in disciplines other than biology perk up and realize that these clowns are coming to pester them next. The Privileged Planet debacle is a sign that the anti-evolutionists are eager to pollute national science institutions and all scientific disciplines with their garbage, and more and more scientists are going to be speaking out harshly against them. The utter vacuity of the creationist responses in Kansas is also a sign of their weakness; the DI has overreached itself, and blood is in the water.

The newest recruit is Phil Plait of the Bad Astronomy Blog. Phil has always been ready to dismantle the abuse of his discipline by the media, but now he's alerted to the bad physics, astronomy, and cosmology of the Discovery Institute, and plans to spend more effort fighting the distortions of the creationists.

Young Earth creationists have let slip the dogmas of war. In the ensuing battles they will use a host of weapons, including misrepresenting facts, mining of quotes, belaboring outdated theories, and dancing around to avoid answering direct questions. Mark my words: their history is clear.

They may have fired the first shot, but we have plenty of ammo on our side as well. And we also have many, many scientists willing to accept this call to arms.

I’m one of them. Over the course of time, you’ll be seeing more rebuttals — no, debunking — of creationist claims here. I’ve had enough, and this threat is real. They want to turn our classrooms in a theocratically-controlled anti-science breeding ground, and I’m not going to sit by and watch it happen.

Every anti-science, anti-education bill in a legislature makes a state full of bitter foes, every national embarrassment creates a horde of angry scientists. I think the only thing we've lost in our war with the creationists so far is our complacency.

Posted by Nick Matzke on June 12, 2005 | Comments (128) | TrackBack (0)

William Dembski has just blogged about a short comment I made this morning on The Thumb answering someone’s question about whether or not a detailed evolutionary model for the bacterial flagellum would deserve a Nobel Prize.  In that comment, I pointed to this long web article I wrote on the evolution of the bacterial flagellum (which is already badly in need of an update), but I said that, no, such a model would clearly not deserve a Nobel, because it would be entirely routine and conventional — simply the application of the current paradigm (modern evolutionary theory) to fill in one more little gap in our knowledge of evolutionary history.  Although creationists don’t realize it, discoveries showing how complex system evolved come out all the time in the scientific literature.  (A number of examples are linked from my comment here.)

Dembski’s post in reply is entitled “To Explain the Flagellum — Just Look Up All the Homologies.”  There are numerous dubious assertions in Dembski’s short post that would take all day to write up, but I just want to focus on one limited point for the moment.  Will the ID advocates admit that they made a mistake in asserting that, except for the 10 proteins of the Type III secretion system, they other 30-40 parts of the flagellum were “unique”?

Continue reading  “To explain ID, *don't* look up the homologies”

Posted by Pim van Meurs on June 03, 2005 | Comments (28) | TrackBack (0)

Museum Quits as Film Sponsor

After the news of the showing caused controversy, however, officials of the museum screened “Privileged Planet” for themselves.

“The major problem with the film is the wrap-up,” said Randall Kremer, a museum spokesman.

“It takes a philosophical bent rather than a clear statement of the science, and that’s where we part ways with them.”

Continue reading  “New York Times on the Smithsonian Affair”

Posted by Pim van Meurs on June 02, 2005 | Comments (36) | TrackBack (0)

Denyse O’Leary wrote:

As far as I am concerned, American Darwinists are as dumb as a bag of hammers. Or, as we say here in Toronto, Canada, “smart like streetcars.” By assailing the Smithsonian in droves over the showing of an inspiring film, which the vast majority of them have NEVER SEEN, which suggests that there is meaning and purpose in the universe (well, hello!), they have managed to create a situation where the Smithsonian must now screen the film for free.

- Denyse O’Leary, Toronto

Continue reading  “Fumble in the endzone”

Posted by Pim van Meurs on June 01, 2005 | Comments (21) | TrackBack (0)

Denyse O’Leary reports on the Smithsonian statement

O'Leary on ASA wrote:

O’Leary assails Darwinbots.

Read more at O’Leary’s Web log.

The irony of Denyse’s comments has not escaped the ASA participants

Michael Roberts observes

Congratulations to Denyse for scoring an own goal. If she had not hyped up the whole story these so-called Darwinbots never would have known.

Continue reading  “Darwinbots and the Smithsonian 'controversy'”

Posted by Pim van Meurs on May 31, 2005 | Comments (26) | TrackBack (0)

While researching the nematode work by Azevedo, I ran across the following website called ‘Design vs. Descent: A war of predictions”. The original article can be found at the Idea Center

While the article has many problems, one in particular caught my eye

Finally, a study which compared many proteins in humans, nematodes, arthropods, and yeast found that 2 starkly different trees were produced, depending on which genes were used.25 This pattern of different genes yielding very different phylogenetic trees is very common in the scientific literature, and shows that molecular data fail to give a consistent picture of the alleged common descent ancestry of organisms.

25. Mushegian A, Garey J, Martin J, Liu L. Large-Scale Taxonomic Profiling of Eukaryotic Model Organisms: A Comparison of Orthologous Proteins Encoded by the Human, Fly, Nematode, and Yeast Genomes. Genome Research 1998;8:590-8.

Continue reading  “ID, scientifically vacuous and collapsing gaps”

Posted by Pim van Meurs on May 30, 2005 | Comments (74) | TrackBack (0)

As reported by Reed Cartwright, the strict comment policy of IC blog sites and other websites, is ‘explained’ by Jay Richard by claiming that

the ID contributors ruled out comments because the debate about intelligent design often becomes malicious. “We would have one post and 30 comments that are vitriolic,” he said.

Continue reading  “Teach the uhh... our controversy”

Posted by Pim van Meurs on May 30, 2005 | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

Randy Isaac wrote:

In part 1 I spoke of prejudicial bias, in which there is a tendency for a prejudice, or an a priori desire or preference for a particular result, to influence the analysis and the outcome of a scientific investigation, and a scientific bias, in which there is a tendency for anomalous results, namely those not expected on the basis of established scientific knowledge, to be rejected, particularly if the results directly contradict previously well-documented results.

In this post, I’d like to take a closer look at Baumgardner’s paper http://www.icr.org/research/AGUC-14_Poster_Baumgardner.pdf… which elicited the concern a few weeks ago that it might be rejected by peer-reviewers due to an inappropriate bias. Specifically, Vernon Jenkins wrote on April 4, 2005: “There can be little doubt that Baumgardner et al would be more than happy to publish these findings in peer-reviewed form if a relevant journal could be found to accept their work. However, the sad truth is that a paper challenging the accepted uniformitarian paradigm - irrespective of its intrinsic quality - invariably meets with editorial and reviewer hostility.”

Read more at Bias in Science, Part 2, on the Calvin Reflector

Posted by pz on May 27, 2005 | Comments (84) | TrackBack (0)

What is wrong with Behe? This interview in the Christian Post contains one of the most illogical, stupid, idiotic excuses for the Intelligent Design hypothesis I've read yet. The writer asks a simple question, one I'd like to see answered by the IDists, but Behe's answer is simply pathetic.

Do you see ID having enough evidence?

Yes, I certainly do. Well, I am a biochemist and biochemistry studies molecular basis of life. And in the past 50 years, science has discovered that at the very foundation of life there are sophisticated molecular machines, which do the work in the cell. I mean, literally, there are real machines inside everybody’s cells and this is what they are called by all biologists who work in the field, molecular machines. They’re little trucks and busses that run around the cell that takes supplies from one end of the cell to the other. They’re little traffic signals to regulate the flow. They’re sign posts to tell them when they get to the right destination. They’re little outboard motors that allow some cells to swim. If you look at the parts of these, they’re remarkably like the machineries that we use in our everyday world.

The argument is that we know from experience that machinery in our everyday world that we use in our everyday world required design, required an intelligent agent that put it together, who understood how it was going to be used and who assembled the parts. By an inductive argument, when we find such sophisticated machinery in other places too, we can conclude that it also requires design. So now that we found it in life and in the very foundation of life, I and other ID advocates argue that there is no reason to not reach the same conclusion and that in fact, these things were indeed designed.

Seriously. This is the best the man can do? He's asked for the evidence, and what does he give us? Irrelevant word games ("scientists call 'em 'machines'!"), and asinine metaphors. Calling cytoskeletal transport proteins "trucks and busses" does not make them so. If I call Michael Behe bird-brained, it does not mean I think he has feathers and can fly; it especially does not mean he should jump off a tall building, confident in his avian abilities.

And no, if you look closely at them, they are nothing like the machineries with which we are familiar. When scientists call them machines and pumps and signals and motors, they are making broad but severely limited analogies in order to communicate their function to other human beings who are familiar with machines and pumps and signals and motors. They are not trying to imply that Ford has the contract to manufacture annexins for the phylum Chordata, or that there are little winking green, yellow, and red lights in the cell. Most importantly, there is no intent to imply designers.

One other interesting omission in the article: nowhere does Behe even mention "irreducible complexity". I guess that's one concept the IDiots have learned belongs on the junkheap, yet it's the one thing that made Behe famous.

Posted by Nick Matzke on May 16, 2005 | Comments (367) | TrackBack (1)

In a recent post, I noted in passing that modern evolutionary theory is no more atheistic than other sciences that seek natural explanations for the natural world.  Yet for some reason, Phillip Johnson and the rest of the ID camp think that it is evolution in particular that is inconsistent with Christianity.  As Johnson stated in yesterday’s Washington Post article,

‘I realized…that if the pure Darwinist account was accurate and life is all about an undirected material process, then Christian metaphysics and religious belief are fantasy. Here was a chance to make a great contribution.’

Now, imagine how silly it would seem if Phillip Johnson had said this:

‘I realized…that if the pure scientific meteorologist account was accurate and weather is all about an undirected material process, then Christian metaphysics and religious belief are fantasy. Here was a chance to make a great contribution.’

According to a literal reading of the Bible, the evidence that God controls the weather is, if anything, much stronger than the Biblical evidence that God specially created organisms.  PT poster Wesley Elsberry ran a search on an online Bible and found a slurry of quotes explicitly describing God’s influence on the weather.  The Bible is shot through with such statements, from Old Testament to New.  They are re-posted below for posterity.

Continue reading  “Note to meteorologists: You're next”

Posted by Nick Matzke on May 15, 2005 | Comments (245) | TrackBack (0)

It looks like the Washington Post has just seen fit to publish a long, fairly uncritical profile piece on Phillip Johnson.  The ID people are already crowing and the ID skeptics are already booing.  It is true that the article contains inaccuracies (“[Johnson] agrees the world is billions of years old” — no, he doesn’t); some strangely-quoted, or clueless, comments from some of Phil Johnson’s critics; and little resembling scientifically-informed reporting.  The reporter, Michael Powell, has done capable reporting on ID in the past, but perhaps the Discovery Institute’s systematic harassment of reporters and news organizations has finally had an impact.

On the other hand, the article is good in giving us a lot of detail about Phillip Johnson’s crisis of faith and conversion experience in the 1980’s, and showing rather clearly that Johnson is first and foremost a religious apologist on a crusade against evolution, and accurate science is way down his list of priorities.  Unlike most IDists, he often doesn’t even try and hide his motives and goals.

Continue reading  “A plea to science journalists”

Posted by RBH on May 15, 2005 | Comments (26) | TrackBack (1)

Every once in a while you encounter something that is so blindly oblivious, so … well … so pig-ignorant (there’s no more delicate way to put it), that you can only wonder what the purveyor of that ignorance is using to think with.  An extraordinary example is provided by a benighted piece on the Social Affairs Unit, a British site primarily devoted to conservative political, economic, and cultural affairs.  Like their American counterparts, the SAU folks seem to feel that they must weigh in on scientific issues about which they are supremely uninformed.  From David Hadley via Pharyngula, we are pointed to a ludicrously bad piece by an historian titled The Theory of Evolution: Just a Theory?.  (You can see it coming, can’t you?)

Continue reading  “Clueless in Wales”

Posted by Nick Matzke on May 15, 2005 | Comments (148) | TrackBack (0)

It’s always nice when someone who has some clue about the relevant science decides to write an article on the ID issue.  I would like to highlight this article by Sanjai Tripathi, a microbiology grad student at Oregon State University.  His opinion piece appeared in the OSU Daily Barometer, and no, even though I grew up in Corvallis, Oregon, I didn’t have anything to do with it.

One minor quibble: Tripathi uses the “reducing irreducible complexity” rhetoric.  But the core issue is not really whether or not a system is irreducible, it is whether or not a system is unbuildable.  This is a very different thing.  A system that is currently irreducible for its current function might well be buildable anyway, most obviously via change-of-function.  Tripathi talks about change-of-function anyway, so he basically knows what is up.  But as a general rule, it is important for ID skeptics to keep in mind that “irreducible complexity” has never received a consistent definition, and that various ID proponents and ID opponents use the term to mean some very different things.  See the entry on “definitional complexity” at Evowiki.

Posted by Dave Thomas on May 09, 2005 | Comments (37) | TrackBack (0)

Here’s the latest from Red State Rabble, where correspondent Pat Hayes is doing a splendid job of tracking the Kansas kangaroo hearings.

This entry, The Kansas Science Hearings Metastory, is worth repeating here at the Panda’s Thumb.

Monday, May 09, 2005

The message that intelligent design proponents hoped would come out of last week’s testimony in Topeka is that there is a controversy between scientists over the validity evolutionary theory.

‘There is a genuine scientific controversy,’ insisted John Calvert, the intelligent design attorney, somewhat plaintively as the hearings came to a close Saturday.

The false notion that scientists are divided is key to the intelligent design movement’s strategy to convince school districts around the country to ‘teach the controversy’ over evolution.

That, of course, is only the first step on the road to their ultimate goal of replacing religiously neutral science with a science consonant with their own narrow Christian and theistic convictions.

Continue reading  “The Kansas Science Hearings Metastory”

Posted by Pim van Meurs on May 08, 2005 | Comments (47) | TrackBack (1)

Dembski in a blog posting called Evolution: Vast Ignorance and Trifling Understanding shows once again why ID is scientifically vacuous and nothing more than a gap theory.

Dembski wrote:

‘[ID theorists] are very good at raising questions in areas of ignorance: ‘You can’t explain this, therefore it’s intelligent design.’ You can’t just put God into our gaps in knowledge.’ What I find remarkable about this standing refrain by evolutionists is the presumption that their theory deserves the benefit of the doubt.

It doesn’t of course. What these ID critics correctly point out is that ID is an argument from ignorance also known as a gap theory, based on an eliminative filter which following Dembski’s ‘logic’ is useless.

Continue reading  “Vacuity of ID: Dembski: Vast Ignorance and Trifling Understanding”

Posted by Nick Matzke on May 08, 2005 | Comments (7) | TrackBack (1)

Short note: I accidentally came across some extras from a recent World magazine interview with Phil Johnson.  They are posted on the World magazine blog as “Creationists and intelligent design” and “Christian college professors vs. Intelligent Design”.  This is one of those pages you want to save as a web archive format (MHT) for future reference (see how to do this in IE or Firefox).

Continue reading  “Phil Johnson vs. Christian College professors”

Posted by Steve on May 06, 2005 | Comments (25) | TrackBack (4)

Pitch.com, an alternative weekly in Kansas, has an excellent article about the ensuing Kangaroo Court in Kansas:

This week’s debate over evolution is Kansas’ trial of the century!

Unlike traditional media outlets that usually shirk any attempt at understanding the issue, and instead just present “both sides” as if they were coequal, Pitch writer Tony Ortega actually tackles the important question:  Who are these people and what are they doing here?

It turns out that one of the people being brought to Kansas to testify (on the taxpayers’ dime) is Mustafa Akyol, an Islamic creationist from Turkey who belongs to a rather shady group known as the BAV.  The group has made its mark by publishing and distributing literature from Harun Yahya.  Sadly, their tactics have worked well in Turkey…

Continue reading  “The Objectivity Objective.”

Posted by Gary S. Hurd on May 03, 2005 | Comments (39) | TrackBack (0)

I was quite relieved that Jason Rosenhouse wrote his piece on William Dembski’s recent bloviations about quote-mining.  Specifically, Dembski was challenging a portion of something written by Dave Mullenix and myself about a year ago published on Panda’s Thumb.*  I had felt that I had an obligation to respond, but several commitments had prior claim to my time (and I simply took Monday off to go fishing).

Continue reading  “Quote miner, quote miner, pants on fire ...”

Posted by Matt Young on May 02, 2005 | Comments (25) | TrackBack (0)

David W. Rudge (2005), assistant professor of biological sciences at Western Michigan University, has published a very welcome addition to the literature regarding Bernard Kettlewell’s classic experiments on natural selection in peppered moths.  Here are some of his comments regarding his concerns about creationists’ misuse of industrial melanism and of Judith Hooper’s charges of fraud against Kettlewell:

Continue reading  “Welcome Article on Natural Selection in Peppered Moths”

Posted by Dave Thomas on April 27, 2005 | Comments (266) | TrackBack (0)

Who actually accepts or supports the theory of biological evolution?  Traditionally, one gets different answers to this question from scientists and from creationists / “Intelligent Design” advocates.

Most scientists agree that it is scientists - those practicing science - who accept and support evolution.  However, according to New Mexico’s chapter of IDnet, “evolutionists” are instead those who adhere to Philosophical Naturalism:

…evolutionists, because of their philosophical commitment to Naturalism, insist as a matter of dogma that the process of evolution is undirected and without purpose.

Now, two new pundits weigh in with answers to this age-old question.  And the answers are in substantial agreement, despite their different sources - one is Christian pastor and parent Ray Mummert, from Dover, PA, and the other is Geoff Brumfiel, Nature’s Washington physical sciences correspondent.

Continue reading  “New Data on the Question: "Who is For Evolution?"”

Posted by Nick Matzke on April 20, 2005 | Comments (187) | TrackBack (1)

The following is a guest post from Steven Thomas Smith.  Steve is on the Senior Technical Staff in the Lincoln Laboratory at MIT, and more importantly is a Project Steve Steve.  He attended the Jay Wexler/Francis Beckwith debate on the constitutionality of teaching ID in public schools at Harvard Law School, and gave us this report.  We welcome this submission and encourage others to send us well-reasoned and insightful guest blog essays, particularly if your name is Steve.

Harvard Law School, said by some to be the world’s second best, demands of its students a “record of marked distinction.” Last year, Harvard Law Review editor Lawrence VanDyke, 2L, achieved this lofty status by publishing a besotted review of Francis Beckwith’s book about the constitutionality of Intelligent Design creationism in public schools. VanDyke’s insipid and error-filled piece (“not even wrong” in Pauli’s words) would have been eminently ignorable had it not appeared in the often respected Law Review, and this fact alone attracted a dogpile of criticism involving political columnists, science policy writers, lawyers, biologists, and the Panda’s Thumb. VanDyke, revealing that his motives were those of a clueless dupe, and not a Machiavellian operator, actually responded to this withering barrage with an even more cluelessly clueless post at HLS’s Federalist Society (in which he cites “Project Steve” as proof that 1% of scientists doubt evolution!), ensuring that much fun was had by all.

Continue reading  “Who's Your Daddy? Intelligent Design Creationism at Harvard Law School”

Posted by Pim van Meurs on April 15, 2005 | Comments (35) | TrackBack (0)

Dembski presented a series of lectures at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in 2003.

Arguing that declaring support for ID in science ends one’s career (one very sharp fellow working in ID is waiting until he gets tenure), Dembski makes the following remark:

Dembski wrote:

In my case my cards have been on the table, my career is ruined so (laughter) it doesn’t matter at this point but eh I say just what I want in this regard but it’s a real problem.

Continue reading  “Dembski comments on his career”

Posted by Matt Young on April 06, 2005 | Comments (117) | TrackBack (1)

As Reed Cartwright noted in a short, brilliantly titled essay yesterday, Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Jay Richards thinks he has found a flaw in the theory of relativity.  The theory of relativity is one of the most successful scientific theories ever, and it has been verified time and again with remarkable precision.  This month’s issue of Discover Magazine, for example, notes that a clock runs measurably faster at a high altitude than at sea level.  A nonscientist criticizing relativity is about like a lawyer criticizing evolution; both are in over their heads.

My own knowledge of relativity, while evidently more profound than Mr. Richards’s, is still not up to par, so I contacted my colleague Victor Stenger, author of Has Science Found God? and asked him to comment on Mr. Richards’s essay. Here is the bulk of his reply, beginning with a quotation from Mr. Richards’s essay.

Continue reading  “Did Richards Really Do Away with Einstein?”

Posted by Timothy Sandefur on April 02, 2005 | Comments (8) | TrackBack (10)

I blogged some time ago about the proposed amendment to NAGPRA—the Native American Graves Preservation and Repatriation Act. This is a federal law that requires archaeologists to turn over human skeletons found on federal land if the skeleton to American Indian tribes, if the skeleton is that of a member of that tribe. The tribes then destroy the skeletons, so that they cannot be researched. Unfortunately, the law was a little bit vague, so there was a long court battle over Kennewick Man—a 10,000 year old skeleton that was not reasonably related to any present-day tribe, but which American Indian creationists nevertheless wanted to seize and destroy. That case went to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled in the scientists' favor some time ago. The court said that the law only applies if the skeleton is related to a current-day American Indian tribe.

In response, some Senators, including Ben Campbell of Colorado and John McCain of Arizona are trying to amend NAGPRA to ensure that any skeleton, no matter how old, must be handed over to whatever tribe claims it. The Bill, S536, includes a section (section 108) which will amend the current law so that it defines Native American Indian as

of, or relating to, a tribe, people, or culture that is or was indigenous to any geographic area that is now located within the boundaries of the United States.

What this means is that any skeleton found anywhere on Federal land, even if it is hundreds of thousands of years old and in no way related to an American Indian tribe, must be given to a tribe that claims it, rather than to scientists for research, and destroyed rather than studied—all to appease Native American creationists. This is an extremely serious threat to archaeology and anthropology in the United States.

This bill could go before the Senate for a vote this coming week. It is important to contact your Senator to urge them to delete section 108 from this bill. Otherwise religious extremists will be given a veto power over the scientific study of ancient skeletons. More information at the Friends of America's Past.

Posted by Nick Matzke on March 27, 2005 | Comments (21) | TrackBack (0)

Get your tickets now!  The 2005 Megacreation Conference is scheduled to start July 17, in Lynchburg, Virginia.

The conference website is co-sponsored by Answers in Genesis and Liberty University, and is aimed at: “Equipping Christians to defend and proclaim the Gospel in today’s culture! Featuring a stunning lineup of the world’s greatest minds in creation apologetics presenting their premier presentations.” 

I would suggest that we try and get someone from the east coast to go and give reports to PT, but the conference is running for five days straight and I’m not sure anyone would want to spend their whole summer vacation at a YEC conference.

Posted by Pim van Meurs on March 24, 2005 | Comments (62) | TrackBack (0)

Dembski has ‘responded’ to Wesley Elsberry’s and Mark Perakh’s criticicsm at ARN

Panda’s Thumb.

Does the discussion at the Panda’s Thumb advance the discussion we had on this board about that paper? As I mentioned in another post, that paper will be the basis for my technical lecture at the Trotter Prize Lecture Series at Texas A&M coming up the beginning of April. I’d enjoy meeting any critics on this board there (as well as supporters, of course).

Other than the usual self inflation, Dembski has little to say about the critiques themselves.

When pressed for details as to how Dembski ‘abuses’ critics, Dembski responded:

Continue reading  “Dembski's continuing contradictions”

Posted by Reed on March 19, 2005 | Comments (37) | TrackBack (3)

The New York Times has an article (reg required) about Imax theatres refusing to carry films that mention evolution for fear of pissing off the religions right.

People who follow trends at commercial and institutional Imax theaters say that in recent years, religious controversy has adversely affected the distribution of a number of films, including “Cosmic Voyage,” which depicts the universe in dimensions running from the scale of subatomic particles to clusters of galaxies; “Galápagos,” about the islands where Darwin theorized about evolution; and “Volcanoes of the Deep Sea,” an underwater epic about the bizarre creatures that flourish in the hot, sulfurous emanations from vents in the ocean floor.

People who follow the issue say it is more likely to arise at science centers and other public institutions than at commercial theaters. The filmmaker James Cameron, who was a producer on “Volcanoes,” said the commercial film he made on the same topic, “Aliens of the Deep,” had not encountered opposition, except during post-production, when “it was requested from some theaters that we change a line of dialogue” relating to sun worship by ancient Egyptians. The line remained, he said.

Mr. Cameron said he was “surprised and somewhat offended” that people were sensitive to the references to evolution in “Volcanoes.”

“It seems to be a new phenomenon,” he said, “obviously symptomatic of our shift away from empiricism in science to faith-based science.”

Posted by Matt Young on March 18, 2005 | Comments (58) | TrackBack (0)

The journalist Judith Hooper has recently leveled unfounded charges of fraud against Bernard Kettlewell, the distinguished naturalist who demonstrated natural selection in the peppered moth in Britain.  My colleague Ian Musgrave and I recently analyzed Kettlwell’s data and Hooper’s charges, and concluded that the charges are wholly without merit.  What follows are lightly edited excerpts from our paper in Skeptical Inquirer.

Continue reading  “Why the Peppered Moth Remains an Icon of Evolution”

Posted by perakh on March 16, 2005 | Comments (59) | TrackBack (1)

Introduction. In the beginning of March 2005 William Dembski sent an email message to several critics of his output, including me. Dembski wrote:

“Dear Critics,

Attached is a paper that fills in the details of chapter 4 of No Free Lunch, which David Wolpert referred to as “written in jello.” The key result is a displacement theorem. Along the way I prove and (sic) measure-theoretic variant of the No Free Lunch theorems.”

Dembski concluded his message as follows:

“… I expect that Ken Miller’s public remarks about intelligent design being a ‘total, dismal failure scientifically’ will become increasingly difficult to sustain. 
This paper, and subsequent revisions, can be found on my website www.designinference.com. I welcome any constructive comments about it.”

Continue reading  “Dembski "Displaces Darwinism" mathematically - or does he?”

Posted by Gary S. Hurd on March 15, 2005 | Comments (32) | TrackBack (0)

Fred Reed, right-wing creationist hero of the moment asked what he imagined to be hard questions that challenge the validity of evolutionary biology.  They are actually rather tired and often answered “problems.”  When confronted with any creationist making bold pronouncements,  one should first look in The Index of Creationist Claims, or Creationist Lies and Blunders.  That will take care of a majority of their so-called “evidenecs.”  Several of Reed’s arguments have been debunked here already; The Neck of the Giraffe, and How I Spent My Morning.
 
The key appeal of the Fred Reeds of the world is that they are ignorant, and lazy.  It is neither a shame nor a crime to be ignorant, we are all born totally ingnorant.  It is not a crime to be lazy, but it is a waste of ability.  And true enough, it is not a crime to be ignorant and lazy, nor should it be even abstractly.  But what chafes my butt is that I am actually forced to pay thousands of dollars a year on “professional liability insurance” because I am legally acknowledged as an expert in certain areas, and people, and courts of law, and corporations pay me cash money to provide them with my professional expert opinion.  The salt in the wound is that ignoramuses like Fred Reed can promote their inanities without liability.  Something to do with the First Amendment freedom of speech ‘guarantee.’  Nothing is ever truly secure and ironically the seperation of Church and State also ‘guaranteed’ in the First Amendment is under attack by the far-right.  Because he isn’t an expert at anything, and even stressed that he doesn’t know what he is writing about, Fred’s not accountable for his false statements.  This is a classic example of ‘buyer beware.”

Continue reading  “Swallow Hard Fred, its a caterpillar!”

Posted by Mike Dunford on March 15, 2005 | Comments (37) | TrackBack (0)

By now, most regular readers of this blog have probably seen PZ’s recent analysis of  Berlinski’s latest screed on “Darwin’s theory”.  As most of you undoubtedly saw, PZ was somewhat irked by what Berlinski wrote. 

After reading the full text of Berlinski’s polemic, my first thought was that PZ’s response was actually quite understated. I’ve cooled off a bit since then, but I still need to vent a little, so I thought I’d share one of the things that is extremely irritating about Berlinski-like anti-evolution claims.

Continue reading  “How to piss off a scientist”

Posted by Nick Matzke on March 13, 2005 | Comments (71) | TrackBack (0)

The Discovery Institute has put up a long screed by Fred Reed that was originally published in something called Men’s Daily News.  The article is entitled, “The Metaphysics of Evolution.” Fred Reed claims those nasty evolutionists don’t really know anything, they rely on plausibility rather than evidence, that evolution is an religion of anti-creationism,  and that Fred Reed has stumped all them evolutionists on the internet.

A representative quote is below.  Hey Fred, if you want some answers to your questions, come on over to the Panda’s Thumb and ask them.  Or, you could consider just going to a library, rather than wildly assuming that your personal ignorance bears some relationship to reality.

Continue reading  “The Neck of the Giraffe”

Posted by Gary S. Hurd on March 09, 2005 | Comments (145) | TrackBack (1)

A google search this morning turned up a right-wing, err “conservative voice” in the person of Fred Reed.  Mr. Reed apparently failed as a chemistry student (hey Fred- I hit the P Chem wall too), and instead had a career in journalism.  He is quite upset with science, and particularly evolution.  Fredwin On Evolution.  He attracted some dupes at a free “blogspace” (scan down to “Fred on evolution” posted on Tuesday).

Well, I asked myself, “Self, do you want to play with these guys?”  And, myself replied, “The last fishing boat left an hour ago, no editors are particularly ticked off at you (at the moment), and it is better than poking out your eyes with sharp pointy sticks.” 

But, I still wondered, “Are you sure that it is better than poking out our eyes with sharp pointy sticks.” 

And myself settled the matter with an irrefutable argument, “Trust me!  If you can’t trust your self, who can you trust?”

Continue reading  “How I spent my morning.”

Posted by Wesley R. Elsberry on March 06, 2005 | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)

The Discovery Institute Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture’s Media Complaints Division has a short whine by Robert Crowther about a column in Scientific American by Steve Mirsky. Mirsky made fun of disclaimers for textbooks, specifically mentioning the Selman v. Cobb County case decision.

There’s a general cluelessness about Crowther’s discussion of publications like Scientific American and their printing schedules. But an even more egregious bit from Crowther is a complaint about a lack of originality in Mirsky’s piece.

Continue reading  “10 Times the Daily Recommended Dose of Irony”

Posted by Dave Thomas on February 25, 2005 | Comments (311) | TrackBack (0)

We’ve all heard the Creationist refrain (also a Dennis Miller joke), “If humans evolved from Monkeys, Why are there still Monkeys?”

See http://our.homewithgod.com/whereeaglesdare/darwin.htm for a badly spelled example:

Darwin claims that because we are similar to monkeys in some ways, then we must have evolved from them. So whay are there still monkeys around then?

This aphorism is also discussed here, here, here, here, here,  and most bizarrely here.

As a Friday Treat, I’m posting a Torte and a Re-Torte about this curious argument.

Have a great weekend!
-Dave

Posted by Nick Matzke on February 24, 2005 | Comments (163) | TrackBack (3)

Apparently, the regular procedures for science standards revisions in Kansas have not been going well for ID advocates.  They lost on the science standards committee — the group of Kansas scientists and educators that were appointed to revise Kansas’s science standards. 

And they lost in the four public hearings on the science standards that occurred in Kansas during February.  At these hearings, it became clear that the only people who favored the 20+ pages of revisions promoted by the Kansas “Intelligent Design Network” were straight-up creationists who want God inserted into biology classes.

Now, at the last minute, they have hatched a plan to put evolution on trial for 10 days, with no standards of evidence, none of the rules found in a normal trial, no rules for what counts as a “scientist” or an “expert”, and no limitation that the “witnesses” be from Kansas.  Undoubtedly what is planned is that the Discovery Institute circus of philosophers, lawyers, and a few scientists who’ve never managed to publish original research confirming “intelligent design” will invade Kansas and attempt to give their pseudoscience some thin illusion of respectability.

Unfortunately, I’m not making this up…Read the news story:

Continue reading  “ID advocates set up Kangaroo Court in Kansas”

Posted by Gary S. Hurd on February 17, 2005 | Comments (133) | TrackBack (1)

An editorial in the “The News Record,” a student newspaper associated with the University of Cincinnati by Scout Foust was brought to my attention late in the afternoon on 15 Feb. I was both insulted, and saddened at the gross incompetence and ignorance it represents.  Mr. Foust, a fourth year student in German Literature, titled his editorial, Evolution perpetuates racist ideologies: Blacks shouldn’t back evolution.

Scout Foust was allowed to publish a baseless slander of not evolution, which as a science will take no notice, but of the hundreds of thousands of scientists who work and teach in disciplines related to evolutionary theory.  Evolution is such a powerful truth that this encompasses nearly every science discipline.  The Editors of  “The News Record” have failed their responsibility to their readers.  Further, such an incompetent article reflects very badly on their newspaper, the University of Cincinnati, and the Department that had the dubious task of educating Mr. Foust.  Nor have the Editors done Mr. Foust personally any favor, as he now is exposed as an incompetent on a national level.  A few hours of internet research reveals that Mr. Foust’s editorial is little more than a string of creationist sites’ propaganda weakly edited together and presented without attribution.  In other words, Mr. Foust is not only incompetent on matters relating to history and science, he is also exposed as a plagiarist.

Continue reading  “Creationist Hate Mongering”

Posted by RBH on February 13, 2005 | Comments (25) | TrackBack (0)

Intelligent design creationists have made rhetorical hay out of Stephen Jay Gould’s use of Kipling’s title, when Gould said that adaptationist accounts of biological phenomena sometimes seem to be “just so stories.”  John Wendt on ARN has made the perfect riposte.  An ID creationist claimed

Not really. You can for instance learn a lot about bacteria flagellum from ID proponents because they are reasoning from its detailed exposition. It is much more substantive than the just so stories that have been so popular among Darwinis