Intelligent Design

In the Face of an Aspiring Baboon: A Response to Sahotra Sarkar’s Review of Science vs. Religion?

Introduction

Some will wonder why I expend such great effort in responding to Sahotra Sarkar’s negative review of my Science vs. Religion? I offer four reasons: (1) The review was published in the leading on-line philosophy reviews journal (which offers no right of response). (2) Word of the review has spread very fast across the internet, especially amongst those inclined to believe it. Indeed, part of the black humour of this episode is the ease with which soi disant critical minds are willing to pronounce the review ‘excellent’ without having compared the book and the review for themselves. (3) The review quotes the book sufficiently to leave the false impression that it has come to grips with its content. (4) Most importantly, there is a vast world-view difference that may hold its own lessons. Sarkar and I were both trained in ‘history and philosophy of science’ (HPS), yet our orientations to this common subject could not be more opposed. Sarkar’s homepage sports this quote from Charles Darwin: ‘He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke’. I take this to be wishful thinking on Sarkar’s part.

My response is divided into 4 parts:
1. The Terms of Reference: Start with the Title
2. What to Make of the Philosophical Critique of ID?
3. Sarkar’s Particular Criticisms I: The More Editorial Ones
4. Sarkar’s Particular Criticisms II: The More Substantive Ones

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I see all these scientists and science teachers in this video proclaiming they see “God’s Hand” in the universe all day long then in the same breath they say design detection is bogus. So what exactly do they “see” that convinces them that God’s hand is all over the place? Obviously it isn’t rational evidence that can weighed, measured, or otherwise rationally evaulated because that would be science and furthermore it would be the science behind intelligent design. Personally I think these people are either liars who are not convinced they see God all over the place or they are being truthful in becoming convinced of things with no rational evidence which technically means they are hallucinating and probably shouldn’t Read More ›

Expelled wins the next legal step.

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Sampling a song can be fair use, rules US court

OUT-LAW News, 21/08/2008

The producers of a film defending the anti-evolutionary theories of Intelligent Design probably did not infringe copyright when they used a sample of John Lennon’s song Imagine in the film, a New York court has ruled.

Judge Richard B Lowe III ruled in the Supreme Court of the State of New York that “fair use is available as a defence in the context of sound recordings.” Past rulings outlawed the use of even very short music clips without copyright holders’ permission.

Premise Media Corporation and others produced Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, a film which claimed that exponents of Intelligent Design theory are being unfairly criticised and censored for their association with it. . . . Read More ›

For those with a penchant for masochism, check out Ken Miller on the Dennis Prager show discussing his book about how ID is threatening America’s soul. (The Miller segment begins at 11 minutes.) As usual, Ken completely misrepresents ID and ID theorists, and argues that the ID movement threatens to destroy science in America. Miller argues that ID proponents view science as a “cultural construction” and “relativistic knowledge” instead of the objective search for truth. He claims that the ID movement seeks to undermine the view that science is a way to find out the truth about nature, and that it tells stories to support a worldview (gag). Dennis challenges Miller to explain how belief that there is design in Read More ›

The paper whose abstract lies below the fold has been cited as supportive of intelligent design here by my friend Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute . I’m afraid I disagree with Casey’s analysis but I don’t have access to the full paper and would welcome review of my take on it from someone with access and expertise in virology. I’ve never agreed that ID, per se, predicts that “junk DNA” isn’t really junk. That’s a prediction based on young earth creationism. If an omnipotent designer created a perfect human genome 6,000 years ago then we might reasonably expect most of it today would still be functional. Design detection in and of itself does not predict any specific state of perfection or decay in the design. Thus the common assertion that “ID” predicts junk DNA will have function is not strictly an ID prediction at all but rather a young earth creation science prediction. Failure to make the origin of the predictions clear in these cases is a big reason why we keep getting slapped down in courts. It’s too transparent that design detection alone doesn’t predict things about junk DNA. You have to add in some young earth creationism to get there.

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I’ve been thinking today about the ACLU’s favorite former liquor control board member (i.e., Judge Jones) and his decision in the Dover case.  In my post today I want to focus on only one of Jones’ many errors – his reliance on the subjective motives of the Dover school board members in striking down the ID policy in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School Dist. 400 F.Supp.2d 707, 748-762 (M.D.Pa. 2005).  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.

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I blogged on this almost a year ago here: Front loading passes peer review in Cell Cycle Cell Cycle has a policy of making articles availabe without subscription after one year passes from initial publication. It’s been just over a year. The full paper is at: http://www.landesbioscience.com/journals/cc/article/shermanCC6-15.pdf

Yes, Calgary Herald columnist Rob Breakenridge has felt the need to respond to my response to his abuse of anyone who does not worship Darwin. Could anyone here help Breakenridge’s readers understand better why the world in general does not worship Darwin?

In a Dec 21, 2005 American Spectator article, Jay Homnick wrote: It is not enough to say that design is a more likely senario to explain a world full of well-designed things…Once you allow the intellect to consider that an elaborate organism with trillions of microscopic interactive components can be an accident…you have essentially “lost your mind”. How has it happened that a majority of our intellectuals have lost their minds? I think I can explain. When one becomes a scientist, one learns that science can now explain so many previously inexpliable phenomena that one comes to expect that nothing will escape the explanatory power of our science forever (though the big bang, quantum mechanics and the fine-tuning of the Read More ›

When I first started covering this beat, about six years ago, it was pretty straightforward. Earnest people were trying to convince me that blind cave fish losing their eyes was just the same thing as creatures developing eyes in the Cambrian. Bacteria junking fancy equipment to survive antibiotic assaults was just the same thing as creating the equipment in the first place.

Life forms, I was told, self-assemble gradually from their component parts via natural selection, without design or purpose, just the way the Corvette had.

Shut up, they explained.

So what’s different now? Unbelievable explanations, not content to remain small and unbelievable, have grown grand and incomprehensible. Increasingly, I hear that there are many universes, and ours just happens to work. Richard Dawkins flirts with this, and here’s another quite recent attempt to make the multiverse plausible.

I am told, those other universes must be out there because if they aren’t, we have no explanation for the fine tuning of our universe, and Darwinism doesn’t work.

As Antony Flew says, it’s like the boy whose teacher wouldn’t believe that the dog ate his homework. So the boy changed his story: A huge pack of dogs ate his homework.

The story must be true because Read More ›

Nick Matzke’s problematic evolutionary narrative of the Type Three Secretory System (TTSS) into the bacterial flagellum quickly made it into a peer reviewed journal while the response from the ID camp took two years longer. Our position, which I mentioned several times in the past, was that the flagellum preceded the TTSS in nature and thus the TTSS represents a devolution from flagella rather than flagella being evolved from a TTSS. Nick had it ass-backward. No surprise there. Devolution is much easier than evolution, Nick. Always look for devolutionary explanations first. I’d like to say that devolution being far easier than evolution is something that ID predicts but alas, it’s predicted by nothing more than common sense. Of course ID Read More ›

We’ve come a long way since Laplace’s nebular hypothesis… Solar System Is Pretty Special, According To New Computer Simulation ScienceDaily (Aug. 8, 2008) — Prevailing theoretical models attempting to explain the formation of the solar system have assumed it to be average in every way. Now a new study by Northwestern University astronomers, using recent data from the 300 exoplanets discovered orbiting other stars, turns that view on its head. READ ENTIRE ARTICLE

Having reported news on the ID scene for about five years now, I could give a number of reasons why I think ID is slowly winning the intellectual battle, but let me focus on just one for now: The increasingly preposterous claims made by anti-ID zealots.

At the high end, we have this editorial in New Scientist, in which we are advised,

But perhaps we have the very notion of intelligence wrong. Scientists are beginning to see that the toughest problems – how to control complex traffic flows, for example – are better solved through the random evolution or self-organisation of artificial systems than by human reasoning (see “Law and disorder”). Such thinking appears to be moving towards the mainstream, as societies increasingly face complex problems that overwhelm the human mind. Engineers are finding that their task is not so much to find solutions as to design systems that can discover their own.

If the NS editors were right, we should see non-life evolving slowly into life all around us, but for some reason we don’t. The most fundamental lesson early biologists learned was that life does not self-organize – i.e., it is NOT spontaneously generated; it is passed on, life to life.

Not only should spontaneous generation be true if they are right, but so should magic, Magic, after all, is simply another name for sudden self-organization.

That’s right folks – just toss the bedclothes into the air and they’ll come down in a perfect mitred-corner bed. Just toss whatever into the stew pot, sans cookbook, and you’ll evolve a gourmet dinner. How generations could have come and gone, and no one ever noticed that before is beyond me. Cinderella’s* fairy godmothers, after all, did the housework via self-organizing sprinkles of magic dust.

My point is that if they need to descend to arguments like this in order to avoid considering design, they might as well start examining design seriously. It’s not going away; in fact, the signal is getting louder all the time.

And what’s all this stuff about “complex problems that overwhelm the human mind”? Read More ›

This discussion was spawned in the Artificial Life commentary and I think it deserves thread of its own. First of all Laws of Nature are those things which are observed over and over and over again without exception. We need not have physical theories to explain them. One such Law of Nature is the law of gravity. We have observed its effects countless times without exception. Mass is attracted to other masses. We don’t have a physical theory to explain the mechanism by which gravity works but due to empirical observations it is considered a law nonetheless. An exception may exist that disproves the law but until an exception is observed the law remains intact. Another law that doesn’t get Read More ›

An interesting article talking about the progress, or lack thereof, in evolution of computer “life”.

Can we make software that comes to life?

A few choice snips:

On January 3 1990, he started with a program some 80 instructions long, Tierra’s equivalent of a single-celled sexless organism, analogous to the entities some believe paved the way towards life. The “creature” – a set of instructions that also formed its body – would identify the beginning and end of itself, calculate its size, copy itself into a free region of memory, and then divide.

Before long, Dr Ray saw a mutant. Slightly smaller in length, it was able to make more efficient use of the available resources, so its family grew in size until they exceeded the numbers of the original ancestor. Subsequent mutations needed even fewer instructions, so could carry out their tasks more quickly, grazing on more and more of the available computer space.

A creature appeared with about half the original number of instructions, too few to reproduce in the conventional way. Being a parasite, it was dependent on others to multiply. Tierra even went on to develop hyper-parasites – creatures which forced other parasites to help them multiply. “I got all this ecological diversity on the very first shot,” Dr Ray told me.

Hmmm… starts out complex and then gets simpler and simpler. Yup. That’s how Darwin described it. Right? Oh hold it. That was our side who said life had to begin with all the complexity it would ever have because RM+NS can’t generate CSI. Read More ›