2005

Go here: http://www.aclupa.org/legal/legaldocket/intelligentdesigncase/dovertrialtranscripts.htm.

Here’s a note from a colleague in the biological sciences: I’ve been following this issue off and on for about 20 years, but I haven’t been in the thick of it like you. Has it ever been this hot in the scientific community or the public at large? I get the sense we have entered into a completely new realm, one from which there will be no return. It seems the activation energy for a generation-long, painful, Kuhnian shift has been ignited. I don’t know, but I can’t see this going back to the same old status again. When university presidents have to make long-winded appeals for faculty to bring everyone back into line. When dismissal and denigration are seemingly Read More ›

On October 21, President Hunter R. Rawlings III of Cornell University issued a “State of the University Address” that was devoted entirely to, as he perceives it, the threat of ID (go here for his address). Cornell’s IDEA Club has now officially replied (go here).

In 2002, Samuel Chen, then a high school sophomore in Pennyslvania, invited Michael Behe to speak at his high school (the event is described here under the title “Darwin’s Dictatorship”). Chen has since graduated and is now a college student at Baylor. Here are his thoughts about the ongoing ID trial Kitzmiller v. Dover — it’s the vitality of younger scholars like him that is going in the end to win the day for ID:

Intelligent Design, Education, and Liberty: What is Going on in Dover?

Dear Friends,

As many of you are now aware, the issue of intelligent design and evolution has continued to escalate in various settings across the United States of America. State legislators have proposed bills and heard testimonies while school districts and state school boards have changed science standards. The debate is currently being spotlighted in Dover Area School District in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Read More ›

Design theorists who are religious believers are often charged with duplicity for not explicitly identifying the intelligence that they claim is responsible for certain forms of biological complexity with the God of their religious faith. But this charge is itself ill-intentioned. As far as the science of ID goes, there is no way to get from the data of nature to the God of, say, Christianity (or any other deity for that matter). Moreover, there is no reason to think that even if the God of Christianity (or of any other religious faith) is the source of creativity behind the world, that such a God acted immediately without the aid of intermediate teleological organizing principles (i.e., through secondary causes that Read More ›

Okay, it’s finally becoming clear why all the backlash against ID. No, it’s not that ID is raising the wrong questions. No, it’s not that ID has been shown to be false (certainly Kirschner & Gerhart haven’t shown that). It’s that IDs proponents are, in the words of Marc Kirschner, “ill-intentioned.” Ah, yes, the old “argument from wickedness,” a favorite tool of scientific refutation.

Missing links
Proponents of Intelligent Design have exploited a vexing question at the heart of Darwin’s theory. Now, say two leading biologists, scientists can – and must – answer back.
By Peter Dizikes | October 23, 2005 Read More ›

[From a colleague:] Marc W. Kirschner and John C. Gerharrt are important players in the evo-devo movement. They have a new popular book that is just out titled The Plausibility of Life (Yale, 2005). It summarizes a good deal of work in their earlier textbook and several important articles. In the new book, the authors go much further here in admitting that life and evolution are indeed implausible on the standard neo-Darwinian interpretation. They call their own position “facilitated [meaning non-random] phenotypic variation” (as opposed to facilitated genetic [neo-Lamarckian] variation, which they deny). They hem and haw to a certain extent, and try to soften the blow to their neo-Darwinist colleagues, but in many places they say that non-random, functionally Read More ›

[From a colleague in Germany:] Recently your name in connetion with ID did appear in several (liberal) newspapers here in Germany, mostly of course accompanied by unqualified critic. You surely experience this yourself often enough in the US, lately I saw e.g. a scientist and ID-opponent on the O’Reily Show (Fox News) directly attacking ID and you. O’Reily tried to defend a bit, but he is no scientist. . . . As a representative of our German Anti-ID-Artciles, I have attached one from the “Süddeusche Zeitung” from July 12th 2005 [for the article, go here]. We see this whole movement as a stirring up of the (atheistic) science community also here in Germany. I would no go so far to Read More ›

This academic year may be pivotal for Cornell University (a school at which I spent half a year doing research on probability theory back in 1986) as its president just spent nearly the whole of his State of the University Address speaking about intelligent design: Read More ›

From a contact in Australia:

Last night on TV and today in all newspapers ID was derided as “not science.” See below the transcript of our ABC National Broadcaster’s treatment of ID in the program “Catalyst” last night: www.abc.net.au\cayalyst. It is followed by a specially timed letter for all Australian Newspapers today proclaiming “It’s not Science”

Read More ›

Check out http://origins.mcmaster.ca/about.html. Will ID get a fair hearing at this institute?

[From the 14Oct05 review in Science of Andreas Wagner’s new book:] Wagner does a wonderful job of outlining the parameters of the debate [over robustness, or how organisms achieve stability under perturbation]. He recognizes two basic difficulties. One is a catch-22: the more robust a system becomes, the less variable it is (by definition), and the less raw material there is available for selection to act on. A possible — but as yet unsubstantiated — solution to this dilemma is that environmental variation is always present. Thus, so long as selection acts to reduce environmental noise, genetic robustness might be expected to evolve in parallel. A more basic conundrum is that robustness must involve non-additive genetic interactions, but quantitative geneticists Read More ›

Aristotle was one of those creationists in a cheap toga who concluded that the abundant design in nature points to an intelligent cause even if that cause isn’t visible. “For teeth and all other natural things either invariably or normally come about in a given way; but of not one of the results of chance or spontaneity is this true,” he wrote in The Physics, a book that the ACLU would argue violates the separation between church and state. . . . Scientists who stood alone used to inspire a little more deference in the left. But Michael Behe is one nonconformist they won’t defend. The silencers of unpopular science once feared ACLU lawyers. Now they retain them. MORE

This just in from a friend of mine: “Into The Cool; Energy, Thermodynamics, and Life, by Eric Schneider and Dorion Sagan, devotes several pages to “demolishing” your contributions, pp 319-322. No surprise, given the ludicrous proposals they make about the origin of life, Benard cells explaining physiology, etc. When they stick to expositions from the great names in thermodynamics, especially contributions to open systems, and energy flow, they seem to be OK (I am not expert!).” Can someone send me a pdf scan of those four pages? Thanks.

The Antikythera mechanism: The clockwork computer Sep 19th 2002 From The Economist print edition An ancient piece of clockwork shows the deep roots of modern technology. . . . MORE