Posted by Reed on July 09, 2005 | Comments (16) | TrackBack (1)

The New York Times has a full story today on Cardinal Schönborn’s op-ed: Leading Cardinal Redefines Church’s View on Evolution.  According to the story the op-ed was written with the urging of the Discovery Institute’s Mark Ryland but was not approved by the Vatican.

In a telephone interview from a monastery in Austria, where he was on retreat, the cardinal said that his essay had not been approved by the Vatican, but that two or three weeks before Pope Benedict XVI’s election in April, he spoke with the pope, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, about the church’s position on evolution.  “I said I would like to have a more explicit statement about that, and he encouraged me to go on,” said Cardinal Schönborn.

He said that he had been “angry” for years about writers and theologians, many Catholics, who he said had “misrepresented” the church’s position as endorsing the idea of evolution as a random process.

The involvement of Mark Ryland explains why many of the Discovery Institution’s talking points appeared in the Cardinal op-ed.

I still doubt that the Cardinal’s op-ed offers a change to the Catholic Church’s teaching of evolution or our understanding of their official position on it.  It is clear that the Catholic Church doesn’t see evolution as a godless process divorced from Providence.  But I don’t think that this was ever in doubt, despite what Cardinal Schönborn says.

Continue reading  “Victim of the Wedge?”

Posted by Reed on July 07, 2005 | Comments (83) | TrackBack (1)

Today the Archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times about evolution and the Catholic faith: “Finding Design in Nature”.  On a quick read the op-ed appears to place the Catholic Church in league with “intelligent design” creationism.  (I’m sure you will hear such victory cheers from the neo-Paleyists.)  However, this quick read is deceiving, since the author made some mistakes when choosing his words for a US audience.

Before getting upset at what the Archbishop wrote, consider this:

The Archbishop is not writing to align Catholic theology with the anti-evolution movement.  Instead he is writing to reaffirm the Catholic faith’s commitment to theistic evolution and to eliminate any confusion that it is committed to atheistic evolution.  (I have no idea why he thought that this needed to be done.)

Compare and contrast the Archbishop’s words to “Creationism talk suggests need to revisit Catholic education” in this week’s Catholic Telegraph from Archdiocese of Cincinnati.

Posted by Jeff on July 07, 2005 | Comments (64) | TrackBack (0)

In a recent blog entry, William Dembski alleges I am guilty of various and sundry offenses, but avoids once again answering my critiques of his work.  I doubt his smokescreen will convince anyone except the usual sycophants, but in case anyone takes his bluster seriously, I’ll make a response.

Continue reading  “Response to Dembski's Accusations”

Posted by Nick Matzke on July 07, 2005 | Comments (24) | TrackBack (0)

We’re having another one of those media frenzies again.  The 80^th anniversiary of the Scopes Trial, plus continuing legal and political battles over evolution around the country, have provoked a number of high-quality, in-depth stories this week.  NPR’s All Things Considered reviewed the history of the Scopes Trial on Tuesday (see the previous PT post ).  I think the various NPR links to various pro-evolution websites related to PT are partially responsible for the slowdowns we had yesterday.  The Scientist reported on the Leonard affair at Ohio State University.  Ben Feller of the Associated Press wrote a widely redistributed story, “Teachers debate how to handle evolution,” reporting on the dilemmas teachers face and on commentary at the recent National Educators Association meeting.  This story is hosted at MSNBC among other places, and MSNBC has set up a whole special website, “The Future of Evolution,” which links to many previous stories, on both science and politics.  (For reasons that remain obscure, MSNBC decided to put a Conehead alien, or something, in their banner for that page.)

And, best of all, New Scientist devoted the cover of their July 9, 2005 issue to “The End of Reason: Creationism’s new front in the battle of ideas.”  The “Creationism Special” (or was that special creationism?) includes:

Continue reading  “News, news, news!”

Posted by Matt Young on July 06, 2005 | Comments (20) | TrackBack (0)

Jon Pastor, with whom I’ve been corresponding recently, reports that his public radio affiliate recently aired a 3-part series on intelligent-design creationism. Mr. Pastor is a computer scientist and artificial intelligence researcher by profession, with strong avocational interests in typography, page layout, and Web design. Unaware that the name was about to be co-opted by creationists, he registered the domain “intelligent-design.net” back in 1998, when it seemed like a felicitous description of both his professional and amateur interests.  Here is his essay:

Continue reading  “Intelligent-Design Creationism on Public Radio”

Posted by Ed on June 30, 2005 | Comments (38) | TrackBack (2)

John West, associate director of the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute, has replied to my "fulminating" essay, posted to Dispatches, In the Agora and the Panda's Thumb, on ID and "divine design". You'll recall that Mr. West had claimed that he and his fellow ID advocates get "very upset" when people "confuse" intelligent design with divine design, as a Utah legislator has in a bill designed to give equal time, and I replied by offering numerous quotes from ID advocates themselves ostensibly "confusing" the two. Mr. West's reply to me, unfortunately, almost entirely misses the point of my response - by design, I suspect. He has essentially two arguments: A) that ID only has "metaphysical implications" rather than being inherently metaphysical, and B) so does evolution:

First of all, if he had read the article I referenced in my blog post about why ID is not creationism, he would have known that I never deny that ID can have metaphysical implications...I went on to explain that ID in this respect is no different than Darwinism.

But he fails to address here the real substance of my argument. I did not argue that ID merely has metaphysical implications; I argued that ID is inherently metaphysical and that many ID advocates had admitted as much. The only quotes in my initial post that dealt only with the implications of ID were the ones from Nancy Pearcey; the rest of them dealt with the nature of ID either as an explanation or as a political/legal movement. The rest of them all begin with statements like "Intelligent design is...", "Our strategy has been...", and "Our objective is...". These are statements about the nature of ID, not about the implications of ID.

Continue reading  “Reply to John West on ID and Metaphysics”

Posted by Reed on June 29, 2005 | Comments (74) | TrackBack (2)

This has been said before but needs to be said again.

Alien designers are not compatible with “intelligent design” creationism.

According to the intelligent design “theoreticians” and propagandists at Discovery Institute’s Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture,

The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.

(Top Questions)

Anything requiring the prior existence of the universe, like aliens, can not logically be the DI’s “intelligent cause” of the universe.  Clearly only supernatural entities satisfy the Discovery Institute’s authoritative description of intelligent design.

Posted by Wesley R. Elsberry on June 29, 2005 | Comments (58) | TrackBack (1)

John G. West and Seth Cooper of the Discovery Institute wrote a letter to Pennsylvania Representative Jess M. Stairs urging Stairs and the Pennsylvania legislature not to pass HB1007 which would mandate the teaching of “intelligent design” in Pennsylvania K-12 science classes.

While West and Cooper go on at length in their letter, the import is clear: don’t call their tired old antievolution rhetoric “intelligent design”; just put the same content in the classrooms and call it “teaching the controversy”, “scientific criticisms”, or “evidence against evolution” instead. There’s nothing like a marketing effort that goes to the lengths of lobbying the DI does in order to put on a name change for their product while affixing what amounts to a brightly colored sticker saying, “Old! Unimproved!” in the upper left corner of the box.

(Hat tip to Thomas D. Gillespie. Please do keep sending me news items that you see relating to evolutionary biology and antievolution efforts.)

Posted by Ed on June 24, 2005 | Comments (79) | TrackBack (3)

John West, associate director of the Discovery Institute's Center for (the Renewal of) Science and Culture, the most prominent ID think tank in the world, is mad as hell and he's not gonna take it anymore. It seems that a state legislator in Utah has submitted a bill in that state to give equal time in state science classrooms to teaching "divine design" along with evolution - and that just will not do. West is quite verklempt about the whole thing:

While it's frustrating when critics of intelligent design mischaracterize what ID is about, it's even worse when people billing themselves as friends of ID do the same thing. As the term "intelligent design" has increasingly entered the public discourse, the number of people misusing the term to advance their own agendas by calling it "design" has increased. Take the recent proposal by a Utah legislator for something he calls "divine design," by which he clearly seems to mean creationism...

I'd like to give a clear message to those who are trying to hijaack the term design in order to promote something else: Stop!

And he quotes himself being quoted in a Salt Lake Tribune article on this bill:

"We get very upset when supposed friends are claiming far more than what the scholars are saying," says John West, associate director of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture in Seattle...

"We wish [Buttars] would get the name right and not propose something he doesn't understand," West says.

Let me join West in expressing my outrage at Buttars' presumptuous "hijacking" of the term "intelligent design". I mean, where on earth could Buttars have ever gotten the idea that ID had something to do with "divine design" or anything to do with notions of God and divinity at all? He clearly hasn't been listening to the Discovery Institute's scholars, but only to us evilutionists who are bent on distorting their true intent. Shame on him!

On the other hand, perhaps Buttars is not "hijacking" the phrase "intelligent design", and is instead simply relaying the plain meaning that the fellows of the Discovery Institute Center for (the Renewal of) Science and Culture have given to it over the past several years.

Continue reading  “The Discovery Institute's Misplaced Outrage”

Posted by Jim Foley on June 23, 2005 | Comments (69) | TrackBack (1)

Posted by Ed on June 14, 2005 | Comments (36) | TrackBack (0)

Last evening I attended the Gull Lake school board meeting on a sweltering night when they were to decide whether or not to allow two 7th grade science teachers to teach ID as they had been doing for the last couple of years. I am happy to report that after about a year of effort and controversy, the school board voted unanimously that ID could not be taught in science classes in that district, nor could the book Of Pandas and People be used in the 7th grade class where it had been used as a supplemental text for the past couple years by two teachers there. They did so in the face of a lawsuit threatened by the Thomas More Law Center on behalf of the two teachers, who claim that they have a right to teach ID in their classes even if those with authority over the curriculum do not agree.

I gave a brief talk to the board that focused on two things. First, the fact that many prominent ID advocates had themselves said that it was premature to talk about teaching ID in public school science classrooms because it is not yet a full fledged scientific theory and has not been established within the scientific community to warrant such inclusion. Specifically, I quoted Bruce Gordon's statement that ID had been "prematurely drawn into discussions of public science education where it has no business making an appearance without broad recognition from the scientific community that it is making a worthwhile contribution to our understanding of the natural world." Second, I sought to reassure the board that the lawsuit threatened by the TMLC has little hope of succeeding and that they almost certainly know that. As I wrote on the Michigan Citizens for Science webpage a few weeks ago, there are three precedents for such a suit. In all three, the complaint was dismissed and the dismissal upheld on appeal.

Continue reading  “Victory in Gull Lake”

Posted by Wesley R. Elsberry on June 11, 2005 | Comments (43) | TrackBack (0)

“Jumping the Shark” refers to a moment when something distinctly and irrevocably goes downhill. The origin of “jumping the shark” as a phrase goes back to an episode of the “Happy Days” TV show when the character of “Fonzie” actually performed that stunt. But “jumping the shark” works for more than TV shows. So here I want to open the floor for discussion of when “intelligent design” jumped the shark.

Continue reading  “When did ID "Jump the Shark"?”

Posted by jml on June 05, 2005 | Comments (34) | TrackBack (0)

Recently I wrote on Wells' paper in Rivista. Some readers may know that he presented a talk on the very same material at the 2004 Biola "Intelligent Design and the Future of Science" conference, and the talk is available from ARN. During the Q&A session, he was asked to "elaborate on the specific way in which ID plays a role in this situation". Below I provide his answer and leave it up to you, gentle reader, to discuss his viewpoint.

“First of all, ID encourages a closer look at centrosomes and centrioles. They are not very interesting from a Darwinian evolutionary standpoint, in fact they are totally uninteresting. I have submitted this paper … to several journals. The first one, the editor was a strong evolutionary biologist, and his reaction was ‘well, we are not interested in theories of centrosomal function, we just want more molecules, you should just go out and give us those.’ This is the molecular reductionist emphasis that I attribute to Darwinian evolution. ID liberates us from that first of all. It encourages us to take cell structures or living structures at face value. I mean, this thing looks for all the world like a turbine, it’s been called a turbine for decades by cell biologists, but nobody – and I’ve searched the literature – nobody has proposed that it’s a turbine before. I think it might be, you know. It’s worth a shot. ID in a broader sense encourages this sort of cellular perspective, organismal perspective, as opposed to the bottom-up molecular perspective, but the most specific instance in this case is the turbine idea. Well, I would say the Archimedes Screw too – it looks like a screw, maybe it is a screw. … maybe it is a vortexer, and it turns out the effect would be similar to what we have observed in cells for decades. So, ID encourages one to trust your intuition, to make the leap. You know, if it looks like this, maybe it is, let’s look in to it. Maybe it fits, maybe it doesn’t, but it’s worth a shot. And so it’s not that ID says ‘Yes, this is where it is, you have to find it here’ – ID is more of an umbrella, a framework, that encourages this sort of risky hypothesis making that I think could ultimately be very fruitful”

Posted by jml on June 02, 2005 | Comments (34) | TrackBack (1)

Today, the DI proudly announced that "[f]or the second time in nine months, an article explicitly applying intelligent design theory to scientific research has been published in an internationally respected biology journal -- despite Darwinists' claims that this never happens." This leads one to wonder about the status of Rivista within the biological community? While it may be "one of the oldest biological journals in the world" (1919), I would argue that it is neither "internationally respected" nor influential.

Read more over at Stranger Fruit.

Posted by Burt Humburg on May 31, 2005 | Comments (21) | TrackBack (0)

A creationist named Cowan who teaches science at the University Place School District in Washington state has written an essay that was published in the Christian Science Monitor. In part, it talks about how teaching the “controversy” regarding evolution is a stimulating pedagogy.

I wrote a letter to a few of the administrators of the high school at which Cowan works. I’ll show what I wrote on the flipside.

Continue reading  “Open Letter to Administrators of University Place School District”

Posted by Reed on May 28, 2005 | Comments (77) | TrackBack (0)

I’m quoted in Science & Theology News criticizing ID’s new blog:

Unlike most blogs, however, Intelligent Design The Future does not let readers respond online to the posts.  Reed Cartwright, a contributor to the evolution blog called The Panda’s Thumb, said preventing readers from adding their comments to the online discussion about intelligent design, also known as ID, shows that those who created it are not interested in running an actual blog.

“If ID is the future, as the title of the blog advertises, can’t it withstand criticism?” said Cartwright, a doctoral candidate in genetics at the University of Georgia. “I think that it is ironic that a movement, which claims to want ‘more discussion’ about biology in schools, does not allow discussion [on their blog].”

Continue reading  “Science & Theology News”

Posted by Pim van Meurs on May 27, 2005 | Comments (140) | TrackBack (1)

It’s rather like a puddle waking up one morning— I know they don’t normally do this, but allow me, I’m a science fiction writer— A puddle wakes up one morning and thinks: “This is a very interesting world I find myself in. It fits me very neatly. In fact it fits me so neatly… I mean really precise isn’t it?… It must have been made to have me in it.” And the sun rises, and it’s continuing to narrate this story about how this hole must have been made to have him in it. And as the sun rises, and gradually the puddle is shrinking and shrinking and shrinking— and by the time the puddle ceases to exist, it’s still thinking— it’s still trapped in this idea that— that the hole was there for it. And if we think that the world is here for us we will continue to destroy it in the way that we have been destroying it, because we think that we can do no harm.

Douglas Adams

Continue reading  “Privileged Planet: The puddle and the hole”

Posted by jml on May 26, 2005 | Comments (31) | TrackBack (0)

In the past, I have made the claim in public talks that ID could theoretically turn itself into a valid scientific endevour. At The ID Report, Denyse O'Leary (journalist, post-Darwinist, and fan of the fun boys at Telic Thoughts) feels that ID is already there. Writing of Well's recent Rivista di Biologia paper (see here for some comments), she notes:

Wells makes clear in the paper that his assumptions are based on the thesis that the centriole is a designed object, like a machine, and should be studied as one.

(As an aside, it is probably more true that his thesis is based on the assumption that the centriole is a "designed object".)

Over at Stranger Fruit, I examine Wells' theory in light of design.

Posted by Pim van Meurs on May 23, 2005 | Comments (94) | TrackBack (0)

DEVOLUTION by H. ALLEN ORR Why intelligent design isn’t.

Overall a good overview of the arguments made by Intelligent Design and why they fail.

Orr documents a beautiful case of argument from ignorance, in addition to an admission that IC really does not mean anything much

Design theorists have made some concessions to these criticisms. Behe has confessed to “sloppy prose” and said he hadn’t meant to imply that irreducibly complex systems “by definition” cannot evolve gradually. “I quite agree that my argument against Darwinism does not add up to a logical proof,” he says—though he continues to believe that Darwinian paths to irreducible complexity are exceedingly unlikely. Behe and his followers now emphasize that, while irreducibly complex systems can in principle evolve, biologists can’t reconstruct in convincing detail just how any such system did evolve.

Continue reading  “The New Yorker: Devolution by H. Allan Orr”

Posted by pz on May 23, 2005 | Comments (14) | TrackBack (0)

There's been a small, sudden flurry of news about Intelligent Design creationism in the Netherlands recently. Their education minister in the Christian Democratic Party is a proponent, triggering strong protests from other parties. A reader has sent in some translations of Dutch articles on the subject that I have posted on Pharyngula.

Posted by Pim van Meurs on May 22, 2005 | Comments (27) | TrackBack (2)

On A Scientific Dissent on Darwinism we find a Discovery Institute press release which includes Philip S. Skell who is described as an  Emeritus Prof. Of Chemistry. Strangely enough, in a more recent press release from the Discovery Institute we read

Dr. Phil Skell, a member of the National Academy of Sciences** and a professor emeritus of biochemistry at Pennsylvania State University, has just sent an open letter to the Kansas State Board of Education encouraging them to revise the state’s science standards to allow students to learn the scientific evidence both for and against biological and chemical evolution.

What happened? Chemistry or biochemistry… Intelligent design or evolution…

Continue reading  “The unexpected promotion of Phil Skell”

Posted by Burt Humburg on May 20, 2005 | Comments (204) | TrackBack (0)

Andrew Gumbel, a correspondent for the London-based Independent, attended the recent intelligent design show trial in Topeka. His write-up at LA City Beat is recommended reading. Although he develops several good themes in his essay, there is one point in particular I would like to highlight.

Another manifestation of the misdirection of the ID movement is the ludicrous notion that high schools are the appropriate venue for intricate debate about the finer points of evolutionary science. Any public school science teacher will tell you it’s already a minor miracle if a 16-year-old can accurately summarize The Origin of Species, or pinpoint the Galapagos Islands on an atlas. Raising questions about the cellular structure of the flagellum is unlikely to exercise most students until grad school.

The only reason for raising such questions before state education authorities is not to deepen the scientific understanding of teenagers but rather to sow deliberate confusion. It is about denigrating mainstream science as biased against religion — which it is not; it merely regards questions of the supernatural to be outside the realm of scientific inquiry — and by extension bringing God and open avowals of faith into the public school system. (Emphasis mine.)

Many authors have correctly explained that the testimony of ID proponents in Topeka only criticized evolution. Indeed, in an effort to allay concerns that the rejected proposals were written to mandate the teaching of creationism, John Calvert articulated this point numerous times directly. Until Gumbel’s article, though, media coverage has failed to identify the desire by ID creationists to confuse the public. In other words, Gumbel is one of the first journalists to point out that, to an intelligent design creationist, the whole point of criticizing evolutionary theory is to criticize evolutionary theory.

It is important for advocates of science to recognize this strategy because there is a clear link between the beliefs creationists hold, the threats to those beliefs that they perceive from verified science, the fear they have from those threats, and the reactions to those threats that they make. Several points and implications about this understanding of creationist strategy merit mention and they will be developed below the fold.

Continue reading  “Creationist Fears, Creationist Behaviors”

Posted by Pim van Meurs on May 08, 2005 | Comments (21) | TrackBack (0)

Jewish voices of reason have joined in criticizing Intelligent Design. In Jews eye ‘intelligent design’ hearings

“It doesn’t seem to me that intelligent design theory really lives up to scientific standards. Having said that, I don’t think science is the ultimate explanation of our world. Science is an elaborate conceptual game, but it’s not the only game.”
“I believe in intelligent design,” said Rabbi Mark Levin of the Reform Congregation Beth Torah. “But it isn’t science; it’s theology.” The rabbi said he believes in a divine intelligence behind the creation of the world and its natural laws.
And yet he sees the attempt to introduce the notion of “intelligent design” into schools as one that breaches the constitutional principle of separation of church and state.
“It is clearly objectionable to teach theology as though it is science,” said Rabbi Levin, “because … it misinforms children and introduces religious faith into the public school system under the guise of science.”

Continue reading  “The Jewish voice of reason”

Posted by Pim van Meurs on May 07, 2005 | Comments (18) | TrackBack (1)

An unexpected voice in the debate about Intelligent Design has joined the voices of reason. Keith Lockitch, who holds a Ph.D. in physics and who is a junior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, CA, has  written a very compelling evaluation of Intelligent Design leading him to the conclusion that “Intelligent Design” is religion masquerading as science.”

Continue reading  “Ayn Rand Institute: The Bait and Switch of "Intelligent Design"”

Posted by Pim van Meurs on May 06, 2005 | Comments (24) | TrackBack (0)

On Telic Thoughts Krauze objects to critics pointing out the existence of false positives as being problematic to ID by showing that false positives exist in science. Telic Thoughts features several well known ARN players, including Krauze and Mike Gene.

Krauze wrote:

ID critics often point to cases where design was mistakenly inferred, claiming that present design inferences are also likely to be wrong. Those raising this objection forget that all human conclusions are fallible, and that an explanation shouldn’t be ignored, just because it has been wrongly applied before. As another example of this, let’s look at a case where unintelligent processes were wrongly infered.

As I pointed out in the comments, Krauze misses the point. And while he tries to argue that he is not interested in the explanatory filter, he does not realize that this is the form of ID to which critics are objecting.

Krauze wrote:

Let me just remind everybody that the original post made no mention of Dembski’s design filter. IOW, stop leading the discussion off topic. If you want to discuss Dembski, start a thread somewhere else (I hear the ARN Board is beautiful this time of year) and post a link to it here. I’d hate to start deleting posts.

In short, a good and relevant discussion was started but quickly cut short by the moderator who started deleting responses. Krauze’s claim that he did not mention Dembski specifically, ignores that mainstream ID is based on the explanatory filter approach.

Lacking the opportunity to respond to Guts ill-informed comments, I will first present my response to Guts followed by an overview of why the explanatory filter, which is based on an eliminative argument, is useless if it cannot avoid false positives and thus cannot even eliminate “we don’t know”. Ironically, Guts had the guts to argue that ‘we don’t know’ is not an explanation. But then again neither is intelligent design.

Continue reading  “Telic Thoughts”

Posted by Wesley R. Elsberry on May 05, 2005 | Comments (20) | TrackBack (0)

Nick Matzke and I will be giving a short presentation and a longer question and answer session on the topic of “intelligent design”. The event is a ‘Presentation and Discussion on Intelligent Design’, Friday, May 6th, 2005, 4-5:30pm, in building 370 (Science, Technology and Society program), Room 370, on the Stanford University campus. The event is sponsored by Rational Thought. The public is welcome. This is a follow-up to the Veritas Forum series of presentations held at Stanford through this week.

If you are in the Bay Area and can make it, we’ll look forward to seeing you there.

Posted by Nick Matzke on May 04, 2005 | Comments (106) | TrackBack (0)

Last month, Robert Richards, a noted historian of science, particularly evolution, at the University of Chicago, gave a talk, ‘The Narrative Structure of Moral Judgments in History: Evolution and Nazi Biology.’  See the event listing.  The talk has been attracting some attention on the blogosphere, i.e. Light Seeking Light and Red State Rabble.

The Richards talk is described in a reasonably detailed news account from the University of Chicago student newspaper, the Chicago Maroon. According to the news story, Richards addressed the arguments of historians (unnamed in the news article) that “made [Charles] Darwin and [Ernst] Haeckel complicit in the crimes of the Nazis, though both had been dead for decades before the rise of the Nazis.”

Continue reading  “From Darwin to Hitler, or not?”

Posted by jml on April 30, 2005 | Comments (93) | TrackBack (1)

For some years now, we have been hearing about Paul Nelson's forthcoming monograph On Common Descent, which one assumes will stem from his now nearly seven year old PhD in philosophy Common Descent, Generative Entrenchment, and the Epistemology in Evolutionary Inference. As the DI/CSC website notes, "[h]is forthcoming monograph, On Common Descent, critically evaulates the theory of common descent, and is being edited for the series Evolutionary Monographs." The Wedge document notes:

William Dembski and Paul Nelson, two CRSC Fellows, will very soon have books published by major secular university publishers, Cambridge University Press and The University of Chicago Press, respectively. ... Nelson's book, On Common Descent, is the seventeenth book in the prestigious University of Chicago "Evolutionary Monographs" series and the first to critique neo-Darwinism.

Ignoring that the book has been in press for nearly seven years now (surely a record!), these references had been puzzling me for some while. Though trained as an evolutionary biologist, I had never read "the prestigious University of Chicago 'Evolutionary Monographs' series" and had never seen it referred to in research papers. Indeed, I had - wrongly - assumed that the Evolutionary Monographs series had something to do with the University of Chicago Press. Checking the UCP website revealed no such series. So, off to the library I went.

Read more at Stranger Fruit.

Posted by jml on April 30, 2005 | Comments (25) | TrackBack (0)

Over at his website, Bill Dembski had published the front matter [pdf] for A Man For This Season: The Phillip Johnson Celebration Volume to be published by InterVarsity Press in 2006, and edited by Dembski and Jed Macosko. The volume is a festscrift for PEJ that stems from the celebration that was held at the opening of the Intelligent Design and the Future of Science conference that was held in Biola in April 2004. This is the conference, you will remember, that PEJ received the first Phillip E. Johnson Award for Liberty and Truth "honoring lifetime achievements of an individual who has expanded the scope of academic freedom and truth-seeking."

Dembski is known to all, Jed Macosko perhaps not so. Macosko holds the PhD in chemistry from UC Berkeley, and in his portion of the introduction he recounts living in Johnson's basement for a period while in grad school. He is an ISCID fellow, and was a DI/CSC fellow between 2001 and 2003. He is currently an assistant professor (of biophysics) at Wake Forest University. Unlike most ID supporters, he seems to actually publish peer-reviewed scientific research, though none of it appears to offer a theory of intelligent design or any explicit discussion of design.

Over at Stranger Fruit, I offer some thoughts on the volume and its constituent papers. This is - obviously - not a review as I have not read the book and I will no doubt comment more when I do so next year.

Posted by Steve on April 29, 2005 | Comments (29) | TrackBack (0)

The Center for Renewal of Science and Culture’s Program Director Stephen Meyer on human/ape ancestry:

As reported in Newsweek, 2/7/05:

But I.D. has nothing to say on the identity of the designer or how he gets inside the cell to do his work. Does he create new species directly, or meddle with the DNA of living creatures?  …Meyer’s view is simply that “we don’t know.” He declines even to offer an opinion on whether people are descended from apes, on the ground that it’s not his specialty. The diversity of life, in his view, is a “mystery” we may never solve.

As reported on the CRSC blog (quoted from William Provine), 4/26/05:

I asked Steve Meyer if he thought that humans and chimpanzees shared a common ancestor. He said no, for two reasons. He argued first that extreme similarity of DNA said nothing about a common ancestor. This means that systematics (making evolutionary trees) is a sham science since modern methods stress using DNA evidence to support tree structures. Secondly, he said, in answer to my question, that humans had God-given immortal souls, and thus could not possibly share a common ancestor with chimpanzees, also a main argument of the young-earth creationists.

With such consistent, sincere, and unambiguous views on the origin of humanity, how could anyone not understand where ID theory stands when it comes to common descent vs. special creation?  (Paging Jay Mathews, come in Mr. Mathews…)

Posted by brauer on April 14, 2005 | Comments (109) | TrackBack (0)

Bill Dembski complains of the injustice of being referred to, with his Discovery Institute colleagues, as an “Intelligent Design Creationist.” It’s possible, he writes, to believe in Intelligent Design and to not be a creationist, therefore the term “Intelligent Design Creationist” cannot be accurate. This criticism makes the logically dubious claim that since some ID advocates are not creationists then “Intelligent Design Creationists” don’t exist. However, as long as there is a brand of creationism that is identifiable as being of the “Intelligent Design” flavor, then there is such a thing as “Intelligent Design Creationism.” (It is this flavor of creationism, as creationism, that Rob Pennock and Barbara Forrest address in their criticisms.) The “Intelligent Design” strain of creationism deserves special notice because it is particularly insidious. Unlike its predecessor “Scientific Creationism,” IDC has attempted to present a false public face devoid of any commitment to theological particulars.

The emergence of “Intelligent Design Creationism” from “Scientific Creationism” is not a haphazard conjecture. The connections are very well researched, and many of the players and their tactics are exactly the same. As the current advocates of ID, including Bill “any view of the sciences that leaves Christ out of the picture must be seen as fundamentally deficient” Dembski make clear (when they are speaking to an audience of like-minded believers), Intelligent Design is the bridge between science and theology (see, for example, Dembski, W., 1999, Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science & Theology, InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, Ill.).

Continue reading  “Cryptic Ichthus”

Posted by brauer on April 13, 2005 | Comments (298) | TrackBack (0)

What if you held a debate and nobody but your supporters came?

It’s quite likely that you’d be able to boast about the poor reception your opponent got from the audience.

This seems to have been what happened at a debate held last week on the Princeton campus between Lee Silver, a Princeton molecular biologist, and Bill Dembski, a seminary professor. The debate, titled “Intelligent Design: Is It Science?” was sponsored by the “Intercollegiate Studies Institute” (a conservative think tank in Wilmington, Delaware). Notably absent was any publicity that might have resulted in the attendance of scientists, or even of unscreened Princeton students.

Continue reading  “Dembski holds debate on ID as science, forgets to invite scientists”

Posted by Steve on April 12, 2005 | Comments (101) | TrackBack (0)

Collins, head of the Human Genome Project, was interviewed on Tucker Carlson’s Unfiltered.  Here’s what he had to say about ID:

Carlson: What do you think of this statement read to the Dover, Pennsylvania public school children that the theory is just a theory and explaining briefly intelligent design? Is that that be read to kids?

Collins: It sounds as if it’s a good idea to suggest anybody listening to a discussion about science to keep your mind open and to be sure that facts are actually backed up by data. But, of course, that statement is full of a lot more than scientific facts and data and concerns about them. It is a statement that reflects a battle that’s going on right now. And in my view, an unnecessary battle. So let me explain why I say that. As somebody who has watched our own D.N.A. sequence emerge, our own instruction book over the course of the last few years, all three billion letters of our code, and watched how it compares with that of other species, the evidence that comes out of that kind of analysis is overwhelmingly in favor of a single origin of life from which various forms were then derived by a process which seems entirely consistent with Darwin’s view of natural selection. By saying that, some people listening to my words will immediately conclude that I must therefore be opposed to any role for god in the process that’s not true. But I’m not an advocate of intelligent design, either.

Carlson: Why?

Collins proceeds to lay the smack-down.

The whole interview is interesting, as Collins is a theistic evolutionist with strong Christian convictions, yet is perfectly comfortable with science.  There are thousands of scientists like him, which pretty much puts the lie to the frequent cre/ID refrain that one can’t accept both evolution and believe in God at the same time. 

(Hat-tip to “ex-preacher” on IIDB.)

Posted by Reed on April 05, 2005 | Comments (41) | TrackBack (2)

The Discovery Institute’s Wishful Thinking Division has a piece by Jay Richards arguing against relativity based on an insight derived from a New Yorker article: “ Did Einstein really show that time is an illusion?.”

Sean Carroll at Perposterous Universe has taken it apart: “Time-saving tips for understanding Einstein.”

And here’s a little request for anyone else who wants to point out flaws in Einstein. Whatever else you might think, Einstein was a smart cookie. Nothing he said was sacred (my first published paper proposed a theory that violated some of Einstein’s ideas, as have several of my subsequent papers), but you should at least understand what he said before you claim to improve on it. So take a gander at the problem sets for my course in general relativity, and have a go. If you get an average of over 50% on all the sets (as all of the students in my class did), I’ll give your ideas a respectful hearing. Otherwise, you should go back and hit the books if you expect anyone to take you seriously.

Posted by Wesley R. Elsberry on April 05, 2005 | Comments (96) | TrackBack (0)

I wrote a letter to the editor of “The Daily Californian” concerning David Berlinski’s op-ed piece that ran there on April 1. I reproduce it here as an open letter.

Re: David Berlinski’s little white lies

David Berlinski claims to be looking for what is true. It is odd, then, that he spreads easily-discovered falsehoods in his April 1st essay.

Continue reading  “A Response to Berlinski”

Posted by jkrebs on April 02, 2005 | Comments (326) | TrackBack (0)

I was on Tom Conroy’s radio show ‘Conroy’s Public House’ last Wednesday (KLWN, 1320 AM in Lawrence, Kansas), along with lawyer John Calvert of the Intelligent Design network.  (I will report more on this as time allows.)

A listener sent this email to Tom with some questions for me, and Tom asked me to reply.  These are good questions which contain a number of important misconceptions about science,  Here are some brief responses.

The questions

A question of the man defending naturalism (Jack Krebbs) [actually Krebs]. He said that there was no scientific evidence for design. What scientific evidence can he point to that would point to naturalism? What scientific evidence can he present that demonstrates that something must be scientific in order to be true?  What scientific evidence is there that demonstrates that the scientific method brings true knowledge?

Continue reading  “Response to radio listener's questions”

Posted by Nick Matzke on April 01, 2005 | Comments (56) | TrackBack (0)

I’ve decided that this April 1 Dembski post on the new DI/ID/ARN/ISCID superblog (“ The Truth about How I Got into ID”), and this April 1 op-ed by David Berlinski in the Daily Californian (“Academic Extinction,” hat-tip to Talk.Origins), must be April Fools jokes. 

But it’s so hard to tell with these guys.  Give your opinions in this thread.

Posted by Reed on April 01, 2005 | Comments (53) | TrackBack (1)

Not satisfied with having just the Media Complaints Division, the Discovery Institute has created a new blog, humbly entitled Intelligent Design the Future.  Contributors to the blog include C(R)SC fellows like Dembski, Wells, and Behe.  The purpose of the blog is to explore “issues central to the case for intelligent design, from the Big Bang to the bacterial flagellum and beyond.”  I guess we’re supposed to get some insight into the “evidence” for intelligent design from this new blog.  Not surprisingly, they don’t allow comments.

Posted by Steve on March 24, 2005 | Comments (43) | TrackBack (0)

USA Today has a short article about the on-going creationist attacks on science education, and the understandable irritation this is causing among leading scientists and educators:  ‘Call to Arms’ on Evolution.

It’s kind of the same old thing — presenting it as a he-said/she-said issue and giving the ID advocates space to state their falsehoods.  But of course that’s not good enough for the Discovery Institute’s Media Complaints Division, which finds it necessary to complain about every news article that doesn’t specifically advocate ID using pro-ID talking-points and spin.  The DI’s Rob Crowther has a lot of silly things to say about the article, but this is the silliest:

The letter [from the NAS] singles out for criticism people who don’t believe in the big bang, that the earth is older than 10,000 years a [sic] plate tectonics. Please. I challenge you to find a serious, leading intellectual ID proponent who does not subscribe to the big bang or does not believe the earth is billions of years old. It’s ludicrous to try and demean design theory by mistakenly equating design theorists with other non-scientific anti-evolutionists.

Challenge accepted.

Continue reading  “Challenge Accepted”

Posted by Ian Musgrave on March 22, 2005 | Comments (34) | TrackBack (1)

As noted in my previous post, on 16 February Dr. Vincent Cassone debated Intelligent Design advocate Dr. Michael Behe. The debate was sponsored by the TAMU Veritas Forum.

One of the items in this  outline of the debate is a recurring theme for Behe.

“Behe … Brings up the clotting cascade, and points out an error made by Russ D