Yes, I occasionally listen to the Intelligent Design the Future podcast. But I had trouble today downloading the latest episode:
For those who can’t or won’t read the image:
There was a problem downloading “Predictions from an Intelligent Design Perspective”
In Pinker’s How the Mind Works, there’s a brief passage on artifacts (pp. 327-329 in my copy) that caught my eye because of its connection with creationism.
Artifacts come with being human. We make tools, and as we evolved our tools made us. One-year-old babies are fascinated by what objects can do for them. They tinker obsessively with sticks for pushing, cloth and strings for pulling, and supports for holding things up. As soon as they can be tested on tool use, around eighteen months, children show an understanding that tools have to contact their material and that a tool’s rigidity and shape are more important than its color or ornamentation. Some patients with brain damage cannot name natural objects but can name artifacts, or vice versa, suggesting that artifacts and natural kinds might even be stored in different ways in the brain.
References:
- Brown, A.L. 1990. Domain-specific-principles affect learning and transfer in children. Cognitive Science, 14, 107-133.
- Hillis, A.E., & Caramazza, A. 1991. Category-specific naming and comprehension impairment: A double dissociation. Brain, 114, 2081-2094.
- Farah, M.J., 1990. Visual agnosia. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
(Emphasis added, and list of references expanded from endnotes and
bibliography.)
This seems to me to have a direct bearing on creationist arguments like William Dembski’s Mount Rushmore example:
Designed objects like Mount Rushmore exhibit characteristic features or patterns that point to an intelligence. Such features or patterns constitute signs of intelligence. Proponents of intelligent design, known as design theorists, purport to study such signs formally, rigorously, and scientifically. Intelligent design may therefore be defined as the science that studies signs of intelligence.
The theory of external delivery holds that certain features of how Christmas presents are delivered each year are best explained by an external source, not an internal source such as your parents.
On Monday, Phillip Johnson appeared on the ID the Future podcast, and talked about being interviewed for
Judgment Day, the Nova episode about Intelligent Design and the Dover trial.
He said that while the producer and crew were pleasant enough, but expressed concern that the interview would be mangled in editing, possibly to make it sound as if he were saying something he didn’t mean.
So I looked him up and asked him. He replied:
I didn’t spot any misquotation, but my interview was edited almost down to nothing (not by the team that interviewed me). I guess that is good. If I had said some silly things that the senior staff at WGBH could have used to discredit ID, those moments would have been shown on the program. If I could have picked the parts of the interview to be broadcast, I could have added a little more balance to a one-sided program.
(posted with permission.)
So no obvious quote-mining or distortion. I’ll be curious to see how this compares to PZ Myers’s interview for Crossroads Win Ben Stein’s Scorn Expelled.
Bill “The Isaac Newton of Information Science” Dembski gave a talk at Oklahoma University in Norman, entitled “Why Atheism is no Longer Intellectually Fulfilling: The Challenge of Intelligent Design to Unintelligent Evolution”. But it appears that instead of the usual audience bussed in from local churches, the talk was attended by a lot of OU faculty and students. From all accounts, he gave a pretty standard presentation, but was ripped to shreds in the Q&A session.
Start by reading Golfvixen’s liveblogging of the talk. Then proceed to ERV’s account (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3), and/or this summary at Further Thoughts (or better yet, this
roundup of coverage of the event[1]).
And finally, a Christian who didn’t manage to get into the talk, but describes the Q& A and the goings-on outside.
Oh, and I would have liked to link to Dembski’s own account of how the evening went, but I can’t find one.
[1] Yes, he links here. When two carnivals link to each other, does it form a merry-go-round?
(Updated Sep. 21 to add another link to Further Thoughts.)
Does anyone need more proof that Ron McLeroy, the newly-appointed Texas State Board of Education Chairman, is a superstitious asshat who’s out to cripple the state’s education system? Here’s what he told his church in 2005:
“Whether you’re a progressive creationist, recent creationist, young-Earth, old-Earth, it’s all in the tent of intelligent design,” McLeroy said. “And intelligent design here at Grace Bible Church is actually a smaller tent than you would have in the intelligent design movement as a whole, because we are all Biblical literalists…. So because it’s a bigger tent, just don’t waste our time arguing with each other about…all of the side issues.”
“Modern science today,” McLeroy complained, “is totally based on naturalism,” thus “it is the naturalistic base that is [our] target.”
What’s frightening is that this assclown is in charge of education in Texas. And as bad as that is, the effect of his militant ignorance won’t be confined to one state: Texas is the second-largest market for school textbooks (after California). This means that publishers will tone down the science in their books if they think it’ll make them more likely to sell in Texas.
Maybe we need a new rule: that someone in charge of X must not be ideologically committed to destroying X.
(HT Texas Observer → Texas Freedom Network → Americans United)
I ran across this article about my FABNAQ about Intelligent Design. Unfortunately, it’s in Japanese, which I don’t speak, and the Babelfish and Google translations are bad enough that I can’t even tell whether I’m being fisked or praised.
Are there any nipponophones in the audience who can take a look and give me a sense of what’s going on?
TR Gregory at Genomicron has a list of ten research projects for ID proponents, all having to do with non-coding DNA. An excellent list, and any ID researcher should jump on it, if only to demonstrate that ID is science.
(HT Freshbrainz)
DaveScot has an article over at Casa Dembski about Epulopiscium fishelsoni. Judging by the article that he links to (from the Journal of Bacteriology, 1998), this bacterium looks like a pretty interesting beastie: it changes size by up to 20 times. That’s individual cells, not variation in a population: a single E. fishelsoni can grow to become 10-20 times larger than it was some hours ago. Not only that, but at its largest, it’s over half a millimeter long, making it visible to the naked eye.
But what interests DaveScot is the size of its genome: about 1 trillion base pairs, more than 300 times as much as in humans, which he evidently takes to be evidence for intelligent design. Unfortunately, to do so he must ignore the conclusions of the very paper he cites.
Some of you may remember threads on time.com and Pharyngula where Egnor challenged “Darwinists” to say “how much new information can Darwinian mechanisms generate?”
For completeness, you should read those threads, but the summary is that when people tried to answer his question, e.g., by showing that point mutations increase the Shannon information of the genome, or pointing at the literature for gene duplication, Egnor said that wasn’t what he meant by “biologically meaningful information” and refused to provide a definition.
On the Mar. 26, 2007 episode of the ID the Future podcast, Casey Luskin interviewed Michael Egnor. They talked about these discussions. Egnor accused Darwinists of being angry and implied that they were unsure of the soundness of their own theory (start listening at 12:42, if you care).
Then (around 14:16), Egnor said
I, for example, if a Darwinist approaches me, and asks me politely about Intelligent design, I’m delighted to talk about it!
I took this as an invitation to ask him to clarify his remarks.
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