The Design of Life

My recent post , two below, on the ISU revelations on Gonzalez’s tenure rejection prompts three reflections: 1. There are two separate issues regarding the rejection of Gonzalez on account of his support for intelligent design. The first is whether ISU can in fact get away with that. The faculty themselves did not seem to believe that they could get away with it, hence the second issue: This second issue – and I believe in this case the more significant one – is that ID was denied as a factor, and came to light mainly through a public records request. In other words, there was double dealing, not transparency. 2. The people in the combox who are trying to come up Read More ›

UPDATED! Well, the jig is up now, re the Guillermo Gonzalez case. I’ve just seen the whack of documents Discovery Institute is releasing.

1. It appears that the decision had been made to turn Gonzalez down for tenure at Iowa State University before he had actually applied for it, and the reason was his advocacy of intelligent design.

Read this story in the Des Moines Register last week by Lisa Rossi

ISU President Gregory Geoffroy said in June that Gonzalez’s advocacy of the “intelligent design” concept was not a factor in the decision to turn down his request for tenure.

Geoffroy said he focused his review on Gonzalez’s overall record of scientific accomplishment as an assistant professor at ISU.

and then this one, after the Register got hold of the e-mails via a public records request:

The disclosure of the e-mails is contrary to what ISU officials emphasized after Gonzalez, an assistant professor in physics and astronomy, learned that his university colleagues had voted to deny his bid for tenure.

[ … ]

In response to a question about why the influence of intelligent design in the physics and astronomy tenure decisions was not acknowledged publicly by the university earlier, McCarroll said, “I can’t speak for every one of those individuals” who voted on Gonzalez’s tenure.

 (Clarification December 6, 2007: John West of the Discovery Institute (DI) has written to advise me that the Record did not make a public records request, but was shown the documents by ISU after DI had announced that it had obtained them and that they would be made public. It appears that, by ignoring the embargo, the Register scooped the other media, not DI. Still,  to their credit, they know a story when they see one. – d.)

2. The alleged tenure review was in fact a fishing expedition whose purpose was to find any grounds at all for denying tenure to a man who emerges clearly an outstanding scientist (in flat contradiction to some of President Geoffroy’s other claims), and far more so than the colleagues who were doing the fishing. For example, the fact that some of his widely cited papers were cited less often than others was grounds for a focus on the less widely cited ones. The fact that he published a textbook was dinged as an unwise use of his time.

Much of the most damaging stuff won’t make it to Gonzalez’s Regents’ appeal on a technicality, but it’s now going to be out there for all to see.

Anyway, brava! to journalist Lisa Rossi for exposing the vast credibility gap between what President Geoffroy was claiming to the media and the facts of the case. When oh when will administrators learn, do NOT tell stretchers to the media. Even journalists who support you get mad if they think you are lying. As I said, more later.

– Actually, Rossi for the Register scooped Disco on the e-mails business, publishing on Saturday what they were going to reveal at a press conference the following Monday. Both groups had filed public records requests but the newspaper won. But the Disco package is pretty amazing anyway, and brings out a lot of stuff that’s not in the Register. Read More ›

Mary Midgley’s “A Plague on Both Their Houses” purports to set the record straight about ID and evolution. ID is bad science, and evolution, when used to justify atheism, is bad philosophy. If both sides in this debate could only recognize the proper limits of science and philosophy, we could dispense with this needless controversy. Midgley’s analysis is disappointing. For it to work, ID’s scientific critique of and its counterproposal to standard evolutionary theory must fail. And for Midgley it does, as follows: Biologists have pointed out the feebleness of the mechanical analogy, of course. Organisms and their parts do not consist of separate items that must be put together deliberately in the workshop, but of continuous tissue, areas of Read More ›

Darwinian evolutionist E. O. Wilson insists that biology can do better than traditional faith, and meanwhile – in a fascinating passage that somehow signifies the passing of an old order – disses intelligent design.

Wilson insists that all the ID guys have to do is come up with “evidence” – so why don’t they?

The critics forget how the reward system in science works. Any researcher who can prove the existence of intelligent design within the accepted framework of science will make history and achieve eternal fame. They will prove at last that science and religious dogma are compatible. Even a combined Nobel prize and Templeton prize (the latter designed to encourage the search for just such harmony) would fall short as proper recognition. Every scientist would like to accomplish such a epoch-making advance. But no one has even come close, because unfortunately there is no evidence, no theory and no criteria for proof that even marginally might pass for science.

There is something almost obscene about a smug – and so they say – gentlemanly* prof sitting pretty at Harvard , writing this disingenuous garbage, in full awareness that none of his cowering colleagues will ask the obvious question: What happened to people who DID come up with evidence against Darwinism (and therefore maybe for intelligent design)?

What ABOUT Rick Sternberg, Guillermo Gonzalez, and Robert Marks? To say nothing of Mike Behe? Read More ›

Douglas Kern at Tech Central Station warned, in 2005 that intelligent design is going to win.

And why was that?

He starts with the claim that ID types are more likely to be fertile than others.

I will not hash that out here except to say this: If it means YOU, you might want to include a budget item for receiving blankets, gripe water, and soothers – and if you do not know what those terms mean, ask your nearest and dearest … 

Update note: Your nearest and dearest may even have some amazing news for you that will change your, um, “expectations.”  Like remember that night when you and she got along so well?  Okay, well, life goes on. No, really, it does, and this is how it does. )

He then argues that “the pro-Darwin crowd is acting like a bunch of losers”: Read More ›

A golden fossil turned to dross?

According to Natural Resources Canada:

To many mid-Victorian geologists and paleontologists these laminated green and grey rock specimens from altered limestones of the Canadian Shield of Ontario and Quebec were the most important fossils ever found because they constituted evidence of the existence of complex life forms deep in the Precambrian. J. William Dawson, the Principal of McGill University and one of the foremost geologists in Canada, named the fossil Eozoon canadense — the Canadian dawn animal. In his presidential address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1864, Sir Charles Lyell singled out this fossil as “one of the greatest geological discoveries of his time”. Charles Darwin, in the fourth edition of Origin of Species in 1866, was relieved to be able to cite the first fossil evidence that the succession of life on earth proceeded from simple unicellular organisms to complex multicellular animals and plants.

But what happened thereafter is a cautionary tale.

British physicist David Tyler, whose work I have been profiling recently, tells the story here, of how the fossil was greeted with tidings of great joy.

Charles Darwin welcomed the find and brought it into the 4th edition of the Origin in 1866. He wrote: “After reading Dr Carpenter’s description of this remarkable fossil, it is impossible to feel any doubt regarding its organic nature”. The problem for Darwin was that the earliest known fossils were complex, and his theory required something much simpler to precede the forms of the Cambrian Explosion. It was a relief when Eozoon appeared to provide evidence supporting gradualism.

In the 6th edition, Darwin modified the text to read: “The existence of the Eozoon in the Laurentian formation of Canada is generally admitted”.

But there was dissent. In this case, from geologist Professor William King and chemist Thomas Rowney at Queen’s College, Galway.

They did not think that Eozoon was in fact a fossil. And they had good reasons for thinking it wasn’t. They knew how it could have been formed without any input from a life form at all.

So what happened between 1866, when those Galway men were basically a problem to be seen off, and 1879 when the truth was eventually revealed?

As Tyler explains,

The characteristics of the ensuing controversy are the subject of an interesting paper by Adelman.* She points out that the Canadian geologists adopted a “diffusion” model of communication: “scientific facts were confirmed within the scientific community and then presented to the public.” London was the focus of their attention, because the opinion-formers were located there. “The ‘Eozoonists’ felt that the fossil’s credibility was established once the leaders of the scientific community in London had accepted it.” The dissenters, however, chose not to play this game.

And the Galway dissenters were treated with contempt, their credibility under severe question, for years. Their crime? Raising entirely reasonable objections against Darwinism. Read More ›

Nothing in the intelligent design controversy is more instructive than a convinced Darwinist making his true position very, very clear.

This happened again recently, I see, when Britain’s elite science journal Nature responded to US Senator Brownback, who had written in the New York Times (May 31, 2007). Pointing out that – when he famously raised his hand during a Republican debate – he did not dispute evolution as a process but did dispute the materialist deductions drawn from it, he said,

While no stone should be left unturned in seeking to discover the nature of man’s origins, we can say with conviction that we know with certainty at least part of the outcome. Man was not an accident and reflects an image and likeness unique in the created order. Those aspects of evolutionary theory compatible with this truth are a welcome addition to human knowledge. Aspects of these theories that undermine this truth, however, should be firmly rejected as an atheistic theology posing as science.

To which Nature’s editors responded in “Evolution and the Brain”, sniffing with obvious distaste (June 14, 2007), “With all deference to the sensibilities of religious people, the idea that man was created in the image of God can surely be put aside.” Read More ›

Despite its name – which means “hanger on” – the human appendix works for a living, according to recent research (helping kill germs). As British physicist David Tyler notes, despite the claim of evolutionary biologists from Darwin to the present day that the appendix is junk left over from evolution, the appendix actually has a function – and the current crop of evolutionary biologists try hard to avoid acknowledging that they were wrong about that. He comments, It might be hoped that Darwinian evolutionary biologists would acknowledge that errors have been made; that Darwin’s claim for the appendix being useless was a claim made from ignorance rather than knowledge; that their theory had coloured their understanding of the data; etc. Read More ›

In Tuesday night, a guest speaker spoke to my adult night school class in why there is an intelligent design controversy. He talked about the central problem of evolution: The fact that high levels of information are present in life forms that are supposed to be early and simple.

Some guests attended the talk, and one of them announced that if intelligent design is correct, scientists would not see the need to do any research because Goddunit. Or something like that.

The more I thought about what he was saying, the more it puzzled me. Finally, I realized:

For the materialist, the PURPOSE of science is to show that high levels of information can be created without intelligence.

Therefore, in looking for causes of events, the materialist accepts ONLY a solution that shows that high levels of information can come from random assembly (= without intelligence).

He has not shown that high levels of information can be created without intelligence. He assumes that his assertion is true and looks for evidence to support it.

Discoveries that disconfirm his initial belief are not treated as evidence.

Keep looking, he says, keep looking … that magic information mill has GOT to be somewhere! Read More ›

In a most interesting recent article in Scientific American (November 19, 2007), origin of life expert Paul Davies coments:

The origin of life is one of the great unsolved problems of science. Nobody knows how, where or when life originated. About all that is known for certain is that microbial life had established itself on Earth by about three and a half billion years ago. In the absence of hard evidence of what came before, there is plenty of scope for disagreement.

Yes indeed. Three decades ago, he notes, no one would have expected it to happen twice in the observable universe, because it was so unlikely:

That conservative position was exemplified by Nobel Prize–winning French biologist Jacques Monod, who wrote in 1970: “Man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he emerged only by chance.”

Yet researchers are now willing to entertain the very possibility St. Monod rejected. The mood has shifted in favour of a “cosmic imperative.” Read More ›

At the Huffington Post, Dan Agin has announced that  Dawkins’s famous selfish gene is laid off. Terminated. Pink slipped. Out of a job:

For nearly half a century, the evolution of human behavior has been presented to the public framed by the ideas of Edward O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, and a cohort of sociobiologists, evolutionary psychologists, and media gene-mongers. The scientific basis for the frame is the idea that the focus of Darwinian natural selection is the selfish gene, selection always acting within groups and never between groups — individual selection rather than group selection, the unit of selection the gene. From this has followed the selfish-gene evolutionary analysis of various human behaviors, especially the analysis of altruism.

Well, it seems that the father of sociobiology, E.O. Wilson has changed his mind: in the current issue of New Scientist (November 3, 2007), evolutionary biologists David Sloan Wilson and Edward O. Wilson effectively end the hegemony of the selfish gene idea: they review the field and declare in a voice loud and clear that group selection was mistakenly cast aside during previous decades, that the evidence for group selection is too strong to be ignored, and that the current ideas about how evolution works need to be revised.

The scientific revision, well-known to professional biologists, has actually been in the works for more than a decade (see, Wilson, D.S. & Sober, E. (1994). Reintroducing group selection to the human behavioral sciences. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 17(4): 585-654) but with this new article in the popular media the public revision begins.

Groups with more altruists (people who care about you) do better than groups with fewer altruists?

Okay, if that’s a big surprise, we need to change our idea of what constitutes a “big surprise.” But what big revision is now foreseen? Didn’t everyone except the village atheist know this already?

Akin goes on to enthuse, Read More ›

Music to some ears this: According to a recent article in the boston Globe, Neanderthal man died out because Neanderthal woman had to help him hunt. The Neanderthal extinction some 30,000 years ago remains one of the great riddles of evolution, with rival theories blaming everything from genocide committed by “real” humans to prehistoric climate change. But a recent study introduces another explanation: Stone Age feminism. Among Neanderthals, hunting big beasts was women’s work as well as men’s, so it’s a safe bet that female hunters got stomped, gored, and worse with appalling frequency. And a high casualty rate among fertile women – the vital “reproductive core” of a tiny population – could well have meant demographic disaster for a Read More ›

Here are some thoughts from law profs Brian Leiter (University of Texas at Austin – School of Law & Department of Philosophy) and Michael Weisberg of the University of Pennsylvania on why evolutionary biology is so far irrelevant to law. Note in particular, We argue, in particular, that (a) evolutionary psychology is not entitled to assume selectionist accounts of human behaviors, (b) the assumptions necessary for the selectionist accounts to be true are not warranted by standard criteria for theory choice, and (c) only confusions about levels of explanation of human behavior create the appearance that understanding the biology of behavior is important. What they are saying, I suspect, is that we are not entitled to assume that whatever we Read More ›

Some sources treat the origin of life as if we had any idea how it really happened. But that is most certainly not the case. One key topic of The Design of Life is origin of life (OOL) – specifically the reasons why it is so difficult to figure out (Chapter 8). In the context, it is worth remembering that recently deceased OOL pioneer Leslie Orgel of the Salk Institute for Biological studies (the “father” of RNA world – the idea that RNA molecules came first), had actually made the difficulties clear. For example, he said, There is no agreement on the extent to which metabolism could develop independently of a genetic material. In my opinion, there is no basis in Read More ›

NEWS Release  Contact: Aaron Cook at TimePiece PR & Marketing   (214) 520-3430 or acook@timepiecepr.com FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Publisher braces for controversy as definitive book on intelligent design hits market  DALLAS – November 19, 2007 – The Foundation for Thought and Ethics has just published The Design of Life. This definitive book on intelligent design (ID) comes as a shot across the bow to dogmatic defenders of Darwinian orthodoxy. Written by two key ID theorists, mathematician William Dembski and biologist Jonathan Wells, it presents the full case for intelligent design to a general audience.  Critics, in dismissing The Design of Life, contend that intelligent design has collapsed in the wake of the 2005 Dover trial. Author William Dembski responded, “Those Read More ›