U Tech’s Granville Sewell recalls:
Author’s note: To paraphrase Barbara Mandrell, I was ID when ID wasn’t cool. What, intelligent design still isn’t cool, you say? Oh…well, compared to 1985 it is.
I offer for your interest the Postscript to my 1985 Springer book, Analysis of a Finite Element Method: PDE/PROTRAN. This Postscript draws an analogy between the evolution of the software described in the book (now calledPDE2D) and the evolution of life, and it is primarily about irreducible complexity, although Michael Behe would not coin that term until 11 years later. It is also clear that I was an intelligent design proponent then, though I had never heard of that term either at the time.
In fact, as far as I knew, I was the only ID proponent in the world in 1985. I had never heard of anyone else who doubted unguided evolution yet didn’t believe in what would today be called “creationism.” Of course I now know that there were many of us, especially in the more mathematical sciences. We just didn’t have any way to publicly share our ideas then, since all scientific publications were controlled by Darwinists, who allowed less dissent than Pravda in the USSR. Well, they still are, but it is now occasionally possible to express dissenting viewpoints, and now we have the Internet, which makes it harder to completely suppress controversial points of view.
I included my ideas in a Postscript because there was no other way to express them in the scientific literature (believe me, I tried!). More.
Anyone with other stories to share about the very early days?
Note: Sewell is the author of In the Beginning.
See also:
Granville Sewell’s important contribution to physics: Entropy-X
and
Granville Sewell on how to challenge a scientific consensus
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