Over at www.overwhelmingevidence.com there is a flash animation featuring Judge Jones spouting inanities (inanities that he actually did write or say). There’s been a design inference made that it’s my voice in the Jones animation. A disgruntled former UD commenter KeithS slowed it down and lowered the pitch. Well, it’s true, it actually is me. But that’s only temporary. We are inviting Judge Jones to do himself. Stay tuned.
As I was reading the appendix to the report from Congressman Souder’s office an email from Sue Richardson, a research associate at the National Museum of Natural History, struck me as a fine example of the attitudes pervading the science establishment. I reproduce it here. Read More ›
The staff investigation has uncovered compelling evidence that Dr. Sternberg’s civil and constitutional rights were violated by Smithsonian officials. See Rob Crowther’s links: here
Lauren Sandler in her book Righteous (p. 204-205) offered the following:
intelligent design proponents keep quiet about the idea that [Judge] Jones’s decision opens new legal support to teach thier views in philosophy and religion classes. “We do not question that many of the leading advocates of ID have bona fide and deeply held beliefs which drive their scholarly endeavors. Nor do we controvert that ID should continue to be studied, debated, and discussed….” Jones wrote, suggesting that intelligent design is a legitimate field of study outside biology class. This is a victory to an intellignt design movement…
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The basic elements of NeoDarwinian evolution, showing a gene on a molecular clock epicycle (A) with a fossil deferent (C) and a phenotype equant (B). More
ID is dead and has been defeated by real science. But if so, why is Judge John E. Jones III the plenary speaker at the big Botany & Plant Biology Joint Congress this summer (see below)? Could it be that the scientists at this meeting have failed to defeat ID on scientific grounds and thus are looking to do it in on legal and political grounds? Plenary Speaker Judge John E. Jones III Plenary Address Sunday, July 8, 7:30 pm Title & Location to be Announced ———————————— In 2005 Judge Jones presided over the landmark case of Kitzmiller v. Dover School District, after which he held that it was unconstitutional to teach intelligent design within a public school science curriculum. Read More ›
Dates from the molecular clock: how wrong can we be? by Mario Pulquérioa and Richard Nichols, School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, University of London More
Back in 1985 Denton wrote of the Molecular Clock Hypothesis which was concocted by Schlemiel Zuckerkandl:
…the idea of uniform rates of evolution [molecular clocks] is presented in the literature as if it were an empirical discovery. The hold of every evolutionary paradigm is so powerful that an idea [molecular clocks] which is more like a principle of medieval astrology than a serious twentieth-century scientific theory has become a reality for evolutionary biologists…the biological community seems content to offer explanations which are no more than apologetic tautologies.
Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (1985)
Well this principle of “medieval astrology” used by evolutionary biologists continues to come apart.
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Reed Cartwright at PT offers the following assessment of the Biologic Institute as described by Celeste Biever in her recent NEW SCIENTIST article (go here for Biever, here for Cartwright). Clearly, the Discovery Institute has established the Biologic Institute a few decades too late. The Institute for Creation Research and the Creation Research Society have been doing research to challenge naturalism for a long time. They are so prestigious in the field that they have even created their own research journals for publishing their papers. This does not bode well for the Discovery and Biologic Institutes because they will have a hard time breaking the stranglehold that those two research centers have on the industry. For decades now, the ICR Read More ›
The latest edition of New Scientist has some juicy articles including one on the new ID-friendly scientific reseach organization, Biologic Insitute. See TelicThoughts: Trojan Horses. The other surprise is the case of ID-friendly creationist John Baumgardner who has been published in prestigious scientific journals like Science and Nature. He was presented along side 2 Nobel Laureates as a maverick thinker. See: Opinion special: Lone voices in science.
Between 160 and 240 million years of cumulative divergence between two tiny worms resulted in the genomic divergence by sequence comparison you’d expect over that time yet virtually no phenotype divergence. Once you’re a nemotode you’re always a nematode? Who would have predicted that… Caenorhabditis comparative genomics [18 November 2003] Analysis of the sequence revealed that major evolutionary changes in genomes do not necessarily lead to gross physical changes in the adapted organism. “C. elegans and C. briggsae diverged 80 to 120 million years ago, somewhat longer ago than human and mouse,” Stein wrote in an E-mail to us. “By several measures, the two nematode genomes are very much scrambled relative to each other – far more than human and Read More ›
A hilarious flash animation of Judge Jones as a pull-string doll appears over at www.overwhelmingevidence.com. The humor is, granted, adolescent, but this is a site for high school students, and they are, after all, the ones that Judge Jones’s decision disenfranchised.
Judge Jones tours the American countryside seeking the adulation of our intellectual elite and extolling the genius of his Kitzmiller v. Dover decision. The press release below indicates that Jones let the ACLU essentially dictate his decision. Instead of original and impeccable reasoning, Jones uncritically took extensive material from the ACLU’s proposed “findings of fact and conclusions of law” and either copied it directly or modified it ever so slightly. Outside the legal system this is called plagiarism. But since judges are allowed to draw on briefs of the parties, this is called legal scholarship. Even so, courts frown on decisions in which judges extensively copy and paste from other briefs — which is exactly what Jones did! Wired Magazine voted Jones one of the sexiest geeks of 2005. Time characterized him as a legal genius. Truth be told, Jones is a narcissistic putz.
In case you have trouble downloading the Discovery article cited below, i.e., “A Comparison of Judge Jones’ Opinion …”, I’ve uploaded it on the UD server here: www.uncommondescent.com/documentation/Comparing_Jones_and_ACLU.pdf.
“Masterful” Federal Ruling on Intelligent Design Was Copied from ACLU
Seattle — The key section of the widely-noted court decision on intelligent design issued a year ago on December 20 was copied nearly verbatim from a document written by ACLU lawyers, according to a study released today by scholars affiliated with the Discovery Institute. [Go here.]
“Judge John Jones copied verbatim or virtually verbatim 90.9% of his 6,004-word section on whether intelligent design is science from the ACLU’s proposed ‘Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law’ submitted to him nearly a month before his ruling,” said Dr. John West, Vice President for Public Policy and Legal Affairs at Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture.
“Ironically, Judge Jones has been hailed as ‘an outstanding thinker’ for his ‘masterful’ ruling, and even honored by Time magazine as one of the world’s ‘most influential people’ in the category of ‘scientists and thinkers,'” said West. “But Jones’ analysis of the scientific status of intelligent design contains virtually nothing written by Jones himself. This finding seriously undercuts the credibility of a central part of the ruling.”
The study notes that, while judges routinely make use of proposed findings of fact, “the extent to which Judge Jones simply copied the language submitted to him by the ACLU is stunning. For all practical purposes, Jones allowed ACLU attorneys to write nearly the entire section of his opinion analyzing whether intelligent design is science. As a result, this central part of Judge Jones’ ruling reflected essentially no original deliberative activity or independent examination of the record on Jones’ part.”
Jones’ copying was so uncritical that he even reprinted a number of factual errors originally made by ACLU attorneys.
For example, Jones claimed that biochemist Michael Behe, when asked about articles purporting to explain the evolution of the immune system, responded that the articles were “not ‘good enough.'” Behe actually said the exact opposite: “it’s not that they aren’t good enough. It’s simply that they are addressed to a different subject.” Jones’ misrepresentation of Behe came directly from the ACLU’s “Findings of Fact.”
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Alternate title: The Sound of the Tree of Life Exploding Comparing the sequence to other species also turned up a big surprise. When the researchers compared the human ultraconserved element to all the DNA sequences in the public database GenBank, the closest match was to DNA from the coelacanth… Okay, so maybe it didn’t explode but some branches are bent and something is definitely fishy here. Rubin, Haussler, and Bejerano sure do turn up some interesting things. Our closest relative on the tree of life according to ultra-conserved DNA is a fish that’s been around unchanged for at least 360 million years. Mobile DNA part of evolution’s toolboxThursday, May 4, 2006Written by Howard Hughes Medical Institute “The big question is Read More ›
The Intelligent Design movement begins with the publication of The Mystery of Life’s Origin by Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley, and Roger Olsen (Philosophical Library, 1984) and Evolution: A Theory in Crisis by Michael Denton (Alder & Adler, 1986). These two books presented a powerful scientific critique of evolutionary theory. Moreover, they set the tone for subsequent publications by refusing to mix the scientific evidence for design with theological views about creation.
-Bill Dembski in The Intelligent Design Movement