Category Intelligent Design

Some Good News From ID-Land

Bill Dembski
reports:

Judge Jones gets multiple honorary degrees, Ben Stein has his withdrawn

That’s referring to the fact that Ben Stein, the game show host who
recently narrated a movie blaming the Holocaust on evolution, was
invited to be a commencement speaker at the University of Vermont, but
when it was brought to the president’s attention what an anti-science
twatcicle Stein is,
“Stein withdrew from the ceremony“.

(The word “withdrew” makes it sound as though it was Stein’s idea. I
imagine this withdrawal is about as voluntary as when a cabinet
secretary or Wall Street CEO is caught snorting blow off the ass of an
underage Thai hooker while dressed in latex and leather, and promptly
offers his resignation.)

Next, Barry Arrington proposes a
draft
for an FAQ question on ID:

1] ID is “not science”

Leaving aside the fact that that’s not a question, Arrington’s answer
is a marvel of empty fluff with a superficial semblance of substance
that rivals that of Twinkies. It basically boils down to “ID is too
science! Is too, is too!”, but he uses a page of text to say it.

He starts with an
argument from authority
(William Dembski says it, so it must be true), and ends with a list of
features that scientific research has that ID doesn’t.

And in the middle, he whines about how unfair it is that the mean ol’
scientific establishment has excluded supernatural explanations a
priori.

It’s been said before, but it bears repeating: the mean ol’ scientific
establishment did not reject
non-materialistic/non-naturalistic/supernatural/magic explanations a
priori. It rejected them a posteriori. For centuries now,
natural explanations have been pitted against supernatural ones in
explaining various phenomena, from rainfall to the formation of
fossils to embryonic development. And natural explanations have always
won out, in the sense of being more in line with observable reality
and making useful predictions about future observations.

Of the thousands of times they’ve been tried, supernatural
explanations have never worked. From there, it’s a small step to the
conclusion that supernatural explanations don’t work.

And that is why scientists reject explanations that involve magic. Not
because of a hard-headed pre-commitment to naturalism, but simply
because magic never works.

Irreducible Complexity Still Not Disproven… Wait, What?

The story so far:

Back in 1996, when Intelligent Design was in its infancy (and pretty
much indistinguishable from today’s Intelligent Design), Michael Behe
defined an irreducibly complex system as:

composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that
contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of
the parts causes the system to effectively cease
functioning.

Recently, the Disco Tute
presented the bicycle
as an example of an irreducibly complex system, on the grounds that if
you remove one of the wheels, it doesn’t work anymore.

Carl Zimmer
responded
with a video of someone riding a bicycle with only one wheel. So
presumably bicycles aren’t irreducibly complex after all.

Now DonaldM at Uncommon Blithering
presents
this bizarre counterargument:

if you look closely at the photo you’ll notice it isn’t
just the front wheel that’s missing from this bicycle, but the entire
front wheel assmembly, including the handle bars and wheel
frame.

So, um, I guess the point is that if you remove exactly one part from
an IC system, it doesn’t work, but you can remove a whole bunch of
parts from an IC system, and it still works. Wait, what?

Elsewhere in the same post, Donald asks:

Perhaps the good Dr. Z would be so kind as to provide a
bibliography listing all the peer reviewed scientific research studies
that provide the detailed, testable (and potentially falsifiable)
biological models for any of the IC systems that Mike Behe
described in his ground breaking book Darwin’s Black
Box.

Might I suggest that Donald start with the articles and books about
blood clotting and the human immune system that were literally piled
up in front of Behe on the witness stand at the Dover trial? There’s a
good boy.

I’d like to remind him that “nuh-uh” is not a rebuttal.

Exploiting Personal Tragedy to Advance Ideology

You may have heard of the tragedy of Jesse Kilgore, the college
sophomore who commited suicide after, as
WingNut Daily reported,
reading The God Delusion and having a crisis of faith.

Now, just when you thought the Disco Tute couldn’t sink any lower,
they’ve produced a
melodramatic episode
of their Intelligent Design the Future podcast about this
(the “melo” part is literal: the whole ten-minute episode is
underscored with soft minor-key acoustic guitar and piano music, so
that it sounds like a cross between a eulogy and a soap opera). It
presents the same story that the WND article does: that Kilgore was a
good Christian kid who went off to a secular college, where a
professor either assigned, or challenged him to read The God
Delusion. After Kilgore went out to the woods and committed
suicide, his father found the book under his son’s bed, with a
bookmark on the last page.

The narrative is that Jesse Kilgore killed himself because he read
Dawkins’s book and lost both his faith and his will to live. Yes, it’s
as bad as I make it sound. If you thought the WND article was sleazy,
this is worse.

Now, I don’t know why Jesse Kilgore decided to end his life. No one
life can be summarized in an article and a ten-minute show. I’m sure
there was a lot more to him than we’ve seen. For all I know, he got a
girl pregnant and couldn’t live with that. He didn’t leave a suicide
note, so we’ll probably never know for sure. All we have is
speculation, mostly by grieving friends and relatives.

With that out of the way, the ID the Future show is a treasure trove
of wingnut tropes: we’ve got Good Kid vs. Bad College; Brainwashing
Professor; Reading Opposing Ideas Will Poison You; and many more. For
a group that keeps insisting that they’re not creationists, they seem
to have borrowed an awful lot of ideas from
Big Daddy.

There’s the assertion that Jesse felt alone because he was one of the
only Christians on campus. The school that he was attending,
SUNY Jefferson Community College,
is in northern New York state (unless, of course, both WND and IDtF
got it wrong, which is not something that can be excluded). I can’t
imagine any college campus in North America where most of the
population isn’t Christian.

Then there’s the notion that the nameless biology professor was using
his authority to tell students what to believe. From what little I’ve
seen of religious homeschooling techniques, I suspect that this is
projection: these people teach their kids that “these are the facts,
and they’re true because I said so”, and can’t imagine teachers
leading students to conclusions by showing them the evidence. And in
my experience, the latter is far more common on college campuses than
the former.

PZ Myers put it best (paraphrased from memory): “We don’t teach
students that the sky is blue. We teach them how to go outside and
look up. And yeah, if they come from an environment where they were
told that the sky is green, that’s likely to cause problems.”

And, of course, there’s the elephant in the room: Jesse killed himself
after reading The God Delusion, therefore he did so
because of it. Classic
post hoc ergo propter hoc.

The subtext, of course, is that learning is dangerous. So don’t go
getting any ideas about going to college and exposing yourself to
foreign ideas.

In fact, this theme is repeated several times: Jesse is said to have
been a fervent debater and defender of The Faith; he went to a secular
school because he wanted to challenge himself; everyone was sure he
could withstand anything secular academia could throw at him.
Throughout the piece, foreign ideas are talked about in the same terms
one would describe a disease.

Well, I’m sorry, but if your ideas can’t survive contact with reality,
they’re not worth holding on to. I’d say the lying taint-pustules at
the DI should be ashamed of themselves for promulgating such crap, if
I thought they could feel shame.

Me? Pissed? Oh, just a tad.

(See also
Ed Brayton’s post
at Dispatches from the Culture Wars.)

(Update, Dec. 19, 18:49: Oh, lookee! I beat that hack, O’Leary, to this story.)

Commentary Track for Expelled

Shane Killians has
released
a subtitle track for Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed
that aims to correct a lot of the errors and lies in the movie. So if
someone bought the DVD and wants you to watch it, you can add
subtitles so your
friend/relative/smizmar
can get a real-time rebuttal to the claims presented on screen.

The link above includes instructions for getting the subtitles to
display in some popular media players. In addition, I think MPlayer
should automatically pick up the .srt file (dunno about the
.ssa one).

You’ll also need to buy/rent/rip/bittorrent/teleport a video file of the movie, but you’re on your own for
that.

Unselfconscious Statement O’ the Day

Found at Dembski’s House of Evolution Denialism:

Uncommon Descent has been debunking anthropogenic global warming since the website began 3.5 years ago. We have a keen nose for bogus science here, folks.

Good thing there’s now a Micro Center in town, ‘cos I need a new keyboard.

Front-Loading: I Do Not Think It Means What You Think

One of the ID creationists’ favorite words is “front-loading”. From
context, I gather that it means that the output of an algorithm is
inherent in the algorithm itself. In other words, if you write a
detailed program that calculates the square root of 16, then that’s
just a long-winded way of having it print “4”. You could have saved
yourself a lot of time by just having it print “4” in the first place.

Front-loading comes up in two arguments: 1) evolutionary algorithms do
not demonstrate that evolution works, because the solution is hidden
in the code, and 2) the fact that complex organs exist is evidence of
the unfolding of God’s an unspecified intelligent
designer’s plan; the appearance of limbs and organs in the fossil
record is part of the unfolding of God’s the
designer’s plan and was front-loaded at creation some
unspecified point in the distant past.

Read More

Logic Fail

BarryA at Invisible Science Uncommon Descent:

I will demonstrate that under very clear United States Supreme Court precedent, the subjective motives of a policy maker are simply irrelevant in determining whether the policy violates the Establishment Clause.

Let us begin at the beginning – the Lemon test. In Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602 (1971) the Supreme Court established the following three-part test for determining whether a governmental policy violates the Establishment Clause: “First, the statute must have a secular legislative purpose;

(emphasis added)

Creationist logic:

Fail
Another ID Argument Doesn’t Stand Up to Scrutiny

Over at casa de Dembski,
DaveScot tries to debunk a debunking of an ID argument. It goes
something like this:

Michael Behe: The bacterial flagellum is irreducibly
complex, that is, all of its components need to be in place before
it’ll work. It can’t have evolved by gradual addition and improvement,
because none of the subparts do anything until they’re all put
together.

Nick Matzke: Ah, but the Type Three Secretory System (TTSS), a
sort of bacterial syringe, is made up of proteins that look an awful
lot like ones used in the flagellum. That is, you can build
something useful using just some of the parts requied for a
flagellum, and that gives natural selection something to work with.
For instance, the flagellum could have evolved by adding parts to a TTSS.

DaveScot:
Ah, but I have here a paper about a species of bacterium that started
out with a flagellum, but lost most of its parts through natural
selection, leaving only the parts needed to construct a TTSS.

To which I reply below the fold.

Read More

Plucky Documentary Plans Comeback

According to Fox News
and
Variety,
(… ← help yourself to a grain of salt) Yoko Ono has lost
her suit against the makers of
Expelled: No Intelligence Involved Allowed
for the unauthorized use of John Lennon’s Imagine. The
movie will be rereleased in theaters.

In related news, Expelled has gone from 9% on the
tomatometer
to 8%, which puts it in the same Outback as
Kangaroo Jack.

Dembski on Animal Rights

Reuters reports
that Spain is expected to pass a law granting rights to non-human apes:

MADRID (Reuters) – Spain’s parliament voiced its support
on Wednesday for the rights of great apes to life and freedom in what
will apparently be the first time any national legislature has called
for such rights for non-humans.

Dembski’s
reaction:

Here is one consequence of evolution being used to justify
strict continuity between humans and other forms of life. Discovery
Institute’s persistent stress on humans being made in the image
of God and that not being a privilege extended to the rest of the
animal world makes more and more sense. [Slippery slope
snipped.]

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