We’re not in Kansas Anymore

_{Clive Hayden

April 7, 2010

Education, Intelligent Design}

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I hesitate to bring attention to a blog, called Thoughts from Kansas, written by Josh Rosenau (a grad student completing a doctorate in the department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Kansas), because I don’t think it makes accurate arguments and doesn’t deserve to be promoted, even in a rebuttal. The blog amounts to inaccurate, prideful digs at ID and reminisces over a paper he wrote pertaining to what he perceives are the legal and social histories of Intelligent Design:

The paper’s title, “Leap of Faith: Intelligent Design after Dover” is a reference both to the chalky cliffs of the English Channel, to the town in which ID itself took a fall, and to the politically and economically suicidal effects of pushing creationism into public schools. Along the way, I was able to work in some other subtle digs at ID, including this summary of the recent history of the ID movement…

Way to work in subtle digs, it’s obvious he’s an unbiased academic who is only concerned with presenting the truth. Of course, ID has no basis in creationism, it is not concerned with any holy writ as a guide to its discipline. I’ve never read anything about “specified or irreducible complexity” in any sacred text nor encountered them in any religious observance.

William Dembski, once heralded on a book jacket as “the Isaac Newton of Information Theory,” has been reduced to rewriting and analyzing toy computer programs originally written for a TV series and popular books in the 1980s by biologist Richard Dawkins as trivial demonstrations of the power of selection. Dembski explained his poor record of publication in peer-reviewed scientific literature by saying, “I‘ve just gotten kind of blasé about submitting things to journals where you often wait two years to get things into print. And I find I can actually get the turnaround faster by writing a book and getting the ideas expressed there. My books sell well.” Alas, they don‘t convince mathematicians of his mathematical arguments…

Apparently Rosenau isn’t aware of the peer-reviewed IEEE publications from Drs. Dembski and Marks, Winston Ewert and George Montañez originating at their Evolutionary Informatics Lab:

Efficient Per Query Information Extraction from a Hamming Oracle “Winston Ewert, George Montañez, William A. Dembski, Robert J. Marks II”

Conservation of Information in Search: Measuring the Cost of Success “William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II”

Bernoulli’s Principle of Insufficient Reason and Conservation of Information in Computer Search “William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II”

Evolutionary Synthesis of Nand Logic: Dissecting a Digital Organism “Winston Ewert, William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II”

And Dr. Dawkins’ toy needed to be exposed as a farce, because a farce doesn’t illustrate anything except by deceit, and deceit is not an illustration. And alas, the Oxford mathematician John Lennox endorses Dr. Dembski’s mathematics. If you want to write a legal paper for the “lawyerly set”, at least get the story right. The rest of the paper is much of the same, a kind of disconnected cluster of arguments that reads like a brainstorm (concerned with quantity of arguments over quality), that could only persuade the uninformed.

Comments

By the way DieB, can you state for the record whether you believe partitioned searches will find targets better on average than the real Weasel. :-)scordova_{April 8, 2010
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So, the authors didn’t critique Dawkins’s weasel – and so, they indeed weren’t making an argument that supports ID….
Not necessarily because if the partitioned search performs better than Dawkins real weasel then a critique that demonstrates the insufficiency of the partitioned search will by implication demonstrate the insufficiency of Dawkins Weasel.scordova_{April 8, 2010
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7 Barb Disparaging Christian opponents of UcD in that fashion essentially says that they are delusional when they indicate that they are orthodox Christians. It also shows a huge sense of superiority on behalf of some. Of course one wonders if this does not get close to the unforgivable sin that Jesus talked about. Someone commented that doing this kind of thing on a blog is just fine. Sure in comments from unknown authors one expects that kind of noise but in the main posts No not from a leader of ID and also not from a from a writer of a book about ID. Dave Wgingoro_{April 8, 2010
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When will we see some ID-related research ? Yes, Dembski, et al have published all sorts of stuff that is anti-Evolution, but when will we see some results that tell us something about Design ? Just suppose it was universally agreed that Evolution is a dead duck, and every biologist in the world had chucked out all related publications, and the debate was over. Now, what can we say about Design ?Graham_{April 7, 2010
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gingoro: “Way to work in subtle digs” whereas at UcD the digs are not subtle but say things like EC/TEs are atheists or at best deists." Why is calling someone an atheist a "dig"? Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and PZ Myers are outspokenly atheist and believe in evolution.Barb_{April 7, 2010
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The quality of some of the objections to ID on this thread are as saddening as the quality of some of Josh Rosenau's objections to ID when we presented our respective papers at St. Thomas University last November. Much like the mistake that Clive Hayden highlights here, Josh also tried to make hay out of the fact that a monograph by ID proponent Paul Nelson hasn’t been published yet, but Josh completely ignored publication of many important ID scientific books and papers by William Dembski (The Design of Life, The Design Inference, No Free Lunch), Jonathan Wells (Icons of Evolution), Stephen Meyer (Signature in the Cell), Michael Behe (Darwin’s Black Box, The Edge of Evolution)--and many others in recent years. (Indeed Paul Nelson was a co-author of “Explore Evolution,” but Josh failed to mention this as well.) Similarly, Josh charged that Bill Dembski has been "reduced to rewriting and analyzing programs originally written in 1980's.” I’m not sure exactly what that means, but it was telling that Josh's presentation failed to acknowledge that Dembski now works with the Evolutionary Informatics Lab, has submitted multiple research papers for publication, and had recently published a peer-reviewed article on evolutionary algorithms. (Dembski has since published 3 more papers since Josh's presentation.) But somehow Josh failed to note Dembski’s research productivity. Taking a similar approach, Josh's partner from the NCSE Peter Hess said in his presentation that ID “does not yet have a working research program.” (A tired objection which we all know is false -- I blogged about this here.) In any case, this all seems to be not just using “glass half-empty” thinking about ID. It's more like “take the glass, pour out all the water, then step on the glass, and then mock the lack of water” attacks on ID. But having spent enough time watching the NCSE's approach over the years, you sadly come to expect these kinds of misrepresentations. Needless to say, we were ready to rebut these misrepresentations and the many students I interacted with at the conference were not persuaded by NCSE's arguments.Casey Luskin_{April 7, 2010
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gingoro,
“Way to work in subtle digs” whereas at UcD the digs are not subtle but say things like EC/TEs are atheists or at best deists.
Digs on a blog are one thing, his were from a supposedly academic paper.Clive Hayden_{April 7, 2010
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"Way to work in subtle digs" whereas at UcD the digs are not subtle but say things like EC/TEs are atheists or at best deists. Dave Wgingoro_{April 7, 2010
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As for Efficient Per Query Information Extraction from a Hamming Oracle: This paper is announced here at UncommonDescent as Deconstructing the Dawkins Weasel. Frankly, I have problems to see in which sense it does so...DiEb_{April 7, 2010
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off topic: This just up at ENV: Exploding the Darwin-Friendly Myth of Junk DNA http://www.evolutionnews.org/2010/04/exploding_the_darwin_friendly.html The paper: Human genome at ten: Life is complicated Excerpts: Non-coding DNA is crucial to biology, yet knowing that it is there hasn't made it any easier to understand what it does. "We fooled ourselves into thinking the genome was going to be a transparent blueprint, but it's not,,,,, as sequencing and other new technologies spew forth data, the complexity of biology has seemed to grow by orders of magnitude. Delving into it has been like zooming into a Mandelbrot set — a space that is determined by a simple equation, but that reveals ever more intricate patterns as one peers closer at its boundary.,,,, With the ability to access or assay almost any bit of information, biologists are now struggling with a very big question: can one ever truly know an organism — or even a cell, an organelle or a molecular pathway — down to the finest level of detail?,,,, "It seems like we're climbing a mountain that keeps getting higher and higher," says Jennifer Doudna, a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley. "The more we know, the more we realize there is to know.",,,, The regulation of gene expression, for example, seemed more or less solved 50 years ago., Just one decade of post-genome biology has exploded that view. ,,, "Just the sheer existence of these exotic regulators suggests that our understanding about the most basic things — such as how a cell turns on and off — is incredibly naive,",,,, Even for a single molecule, vast swathes of messy complexity arise,,,, Researchers now know that p53 binds to thousands of sites in DNA, and some of these sites are thousands of base pairs away from any genes.,,,it seems wilfully ignorant to try to understand p53 on its own. Instead, biologists have shifted to studying the p53 network, as depicted in cartoons containing boxes, circles and arrows meant to symbolize its maze of interactions.,,,, "Now, we appreciate that the signalling information in cells is organized through networks of information rather than simple discrete pathways. It's infinitely more complex." ,,,, In the heady post-genome years, systems biologists started a long list of projects built on this strategy, attempting to model pieces of biology such as the yeast cell, E. coli, the liver and even the 'virtual human'. So far, all these attempts have run up against the same roadblock: there is no way to gather all the relevant data about each interaction included in the model.,,, In many cases, the models themselves quickly become so complex that they are unlikely to reveal insights about the system, degenerating instead into mazes of interactions that are simply exercises in cataloguing.,,, the beautiful patterns of biology's Mandelbrot-like intricacy show few signs of resolving. http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100331/full/464664a.htmlbornagain77_{April 7, 2010
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The question is: have those four peer-reviewed papers anything to do with Intelligent Design? When announcing his paper The Conversation of Information in Search W. Dembski wrote
Our critics will immediately say that this really isn’t a pro-ID article but that it’s about something else (I’ve seen this line now for over a decade once work on ID started encroaching into peer-review territory). Before you believe this, have a look at the article. In it we critique, for instance, Richard Dawkins METHINKS*IT*IS*LIKE*A*WEASEL (p. 1055). Question: When Dawkins introduced this example, was he arguing pro-Darwinism? Yes he was. In critiquing his example and arguing that information is not created by unguided evolutionary processes, we are indeed making an argument that supports ID
But now, we read in the errata section of www.evoinfo.org
In the paper Conservation of Information in Search: Measuring the Cost of Success we mistakingly referred to Dawkins' Weasel as a partitioned search. This interpretation of Dawkins's simulation was, however, wrong. Concerning generations, Dawkins writes “The computer examines the 'progeny' of the original phrases, and chooses the one, however slightly, most resembles the target phrase...” Since “phrases” is plural, Dawkins uses more than one child per generation. Thus, our initial interpretation was incorrect. See further discussion on the Weasel Ware research tool page.
So, the authors didn't critique Dawkins's weasel - and so, they indeed weren't making an argument that supports ID....DiEb_{April 7, 2010
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