You be the judge. I welcome commentary and contrary accounts as the comment by McGrew has not been independently confirmed. Here is what professor Tim McGrew had to say:
Let me put that more bluntly: Myers is lying through his teeth. Literally. He is actually that dishonest.
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…this book is poised to become the authoritive textbook on the theory of intelligent design.
(Note: Unexpectedly, this months-long problem has just got solved, shortly after the bloggers started complaining publicly about it. – d.)  Web guy Micah Sparacio permits me to publicize this problem at the Post-Darwinist, so I thought I would mention it here too, for the benefit of our blog readers and commenters: On approximately the 19th of September, the blog operated by Bill Dembski and friends Uncommon Descent was delisted from the Google search index. No reason has ever been given for why the site was delisted, despite requests for reinclusion. This blog has tens of thousands of legitimate links, especially from trusted institutions of higher education. This blog had been around for well over a year. This blog has Read More ›
When I blogged recently on the media coverage of the intelligent design controversy, I remarked, “Then the big challenge is to find a publication that actually wants the real story. That means readers who want the real story. Only those readers can help you.”
A commenter wrote to ask,
Do you have any ideas on where we will find such readers? Should we be concentrating on informing believers? Will this be resisted by interested parties? Will we then divide our house? Should we concentrate on convincing religious and political power brokers?
ID is often accused of being a media beat up rather than a scientific controversy. Will we reinforce that view if we concentrate on media?
These are challenging questions, so let me take them in turn:
– Do you have any ideas on where we will find such readers? Anywhere there are Internet-linked terminals. There is no shortage of people who question the worldview of the ”Darwinoids”, as a journalist friend calls them. The difficulty is that we are in a transitional phase between reliance on print/broadcast media and reliance on the Internet. The latter operates fundamentally differently from the former because it does not empower the big over the small. Don’t believe me? Look what the Swift Vets did to John Kerry, or the pajamaheddin did to Dan Rather. The swifts and the pajamas were nobodies – apart from the fact that both groups knew something that the public would be very interested to discover.* In the legacy media, both groups would be promptly stifled because they did not fit the story template that had already been hammered out. (Everyone who mattered knew that Kerry was a good officer, you see, and Bush was a bad airman.)
Only on the Internet could these nobodies have succeeded because anyone who can use a search engine could find out what they had to say. Read More ›
Two biologists claim to close a “major gap in Darwin’s theory” of evolution.
(excerpt)
Darwinian evolution is widely advertised to be a fact, as firmly established as the shape of the Earth. Defenders of the theory insist that there is no scientific controversy over it, and people who question or criticize it are typically accused of being ignorant or religiously motivated. Yet every few years a book comes alongâ€â€written by scientistsâ€â€claiming to remedy some major flaw in evolutionary theory.
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1. Paul Nelson is such a cool and brilliant guy
2. I’ve never met him before
3. There are lots of extras at the event he is speaking at, such as:
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Here’s what I told a friend who was complaining about how his national media cover the ID controversy.
Media go through at least four stages in getting comfortable with covering any new issue, including ID:
(There are more than four stages, but no national media that I know of are there yet, collectively, with ID.)
1. First, both print and broadcast media gallop in all directions at once to find traditional sources of support for their existing approaches. Prof. Bumph and Dr. Justzo are leading candidates, as is the entire Society for Circular Solidarity AND the Society for Solid Circularity. Whatever huffing, yelping or caterwauling the esteemed above can provide will certainly be reported. If media can drag foolish politicians in, they will jump at the chance. We KNOW how to cover politicians.
That should settle everything, right? Read More ›
Mustafa Akyol is some one you should know. Check out his blog, where he describes this latest development in Turkey: http://www.thewhitepath.com/archives/2006/10/turkish_minister_supports_intelligent_design.php.
It’s hard to find a Darwinist more extreme than P. Z. Myers (though they do exist). Darwinian extremists like Myers are the reason these people are so hard to parody (see http://cedros.globat.com/~thebrites.org/index.htm, The Brites, which has temporarily closed its doors). Have a look at Myers’s most recent escapades: http://www.townhall.com/Columnists/MikeSAdams/2006/10/30/philippians_413. I want to encourage discussion not so much of Myers’s escapades as Mike Adams’s handling of a very hostile situation (exacerbated above all by Myers, who then, apparently, wussed out). I especially want to encourage someone to upload the video and provide a link here.
Accepted July 2006
Physics of Life Reviews
[Update: thanks to Todd for a link to the full paper:]
Self-organization vs. self-ordering events in life-origin models
[Update: IDers Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley, and R.L. Olsen were cited as well!! They wrote the book in 1984 which is considered the beginning of the modern ID movement. Also, critical remarks were made indirectly of Dawkins.]
Self-organization vs. self-ordering events in life-origin models
by David Abel and Jack Trevors
Self-ordering phenomena should not be confused with self-organization. Self-ordering events occur spontaneously according to natural “law propensities and are purely physicodynamic. Crystallization and the spontaneously forming dissipative structures of Prigogine are examples of self-ordering. Self-ordering phenomena involve no decision nodes, no dynamically-inert configurable switches, no logic gates, no steering toward algorithmic success or “computational halting”.
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Gareth Cook’s article on the new Harvard origin of life project in the Boston Globe, reads like a press release (except for the very end where he actually quotes Michael Behe). Bill blogged on it, wondering how seriously they would take any evidence of intelligent design.
Starting with $1 million a year, we are told, Harvard will
bring together scientists from fields as disparate as astronomy and biology, to understand how life emerged from the chemical soup of early Earth, and how this might have happened on distant planets.
On the whole, this “Origins of Life in the Universe Initiative” is good news for the ID guys, first because the Harvard project seems to acknowledge what everyone who looks into the question soon finds out – that origin of life studies have been at an impasse for decades. Read More ›
How much play do you think ID is going to get in Harvard’s new origin of life initiative: President Bush recently said intelligent design should be discussed in schools, along with evolution. Like intelligent design, the Harvard project begins with awe at the nature of life, and with an admission that, almost 150 years after Charles Darwin outlined his theory of evolution in the Origin of Species, scientists cannot explain how the process began. Now, encouraged by a confluence of scientific advances — such as the discovery of water on Mars and an increased understanding of the chemistry of early Earth — the Harvard scientists hope to help change that. ”We start with a mutual acknowledgment of the profound complexity Read More ›
Bench science, like book editing, is independent of content under normal circumstances.
But as Thomas Kuhn points out in Structure of Scientific Revolutions, paradigms determine what counts as evidence.
Mark what follows:
If materialism is assumed to be true and Darwinism is the creation story of materialism, then Darwinism is the best available explanation for the history of life.
So Darwinism is treated as true.
I am NOT saying that that follows logically.
Materialism could be true but its orthodox creation story could be untrue at the same time. Some other materialist story could better account for the evidence, for example. Read More ›
I am Richard Dawkins’ worst nightmare — a former militant atheist and Darwinist, who finally realized that everything he believed about everything that mattered was wrong. My conversion came from many sources, too numerous to outline in a brief post, but one of them was reason and examination of the evidence. Since my conversion I have come to know many wonderful people whose lives have been transformed for good in truly miraculous ways through their religious faith. One of them is the pastor of our church, Gary Kusunoki, who is a true saint in the traditional sense of that word. Gary founded Safe Harbor, an international relief organization. He has repeatedly risked his life to help “the least, the last, Read More ›
At Vere loqui, Martin Cothran notes that Richard Dawkins’The God Delusion, provides ammunition to ID advocates.
ID theorists are familiar with the accusation that ID is both unfalsifiable and anyway, already falsified. (The fact that the two claims can be maintained comfortably at once illustrates the extent to which materialism and Darwinism function as ideologies. In general, all arguments in support of an ideology, even contradictory ones, feel good to the ideologue. He attacks others for not supporting his view even when his view is literally incomprehensible.)
Dawkins will have none of that, however. He wants to be consistent. He accuses the National Center for Science Education of being the “Neville Chamberlain school of evolutionists,” because it misguidedly appeases religious people by insisting that ID is not science (and therefore the religious people should ignore ID in favor of Darwinism). Dawkins would prefer that NCSE attack the religious people’s beliefs. Read More ›