Why Were So Many Darwin Defenders No-Shows at the World’s Premier Evolutionary Conference?

_{Thomas Cudworth

July 9, 2011

Intelligent Design}

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I have often wondered whether the loudness and aggressiveness of many culture-war defenders of neo-Darwinian evolution bears any relationship at all to the actual scientific contributions of those defenders to the field of evolutionary biology. As it happens, we have at hand some evidence, albeit of a rough and ready kind, relevant to that question.

From June 17 to June 21, 2011, at the University of Oklahoma (Norman) campus, the conference “Evolution 2011” was in session. It was co-sponsored by three scientific societies – The Society for the Study of Evolution, The Society of Systematic Biologists, and the American Society of Naturalists. It was billed by its promoters as “the premier annual international conference of evolutionary biologists on the planet.”

That billing may be somewhat hyperbolic, yet two things are clear: the conference was huge, with an expected turnout of 1400-1500 people; and many of the big names of evolutionary biology were to be there. Jerry Coyne was to give an address; H. Allen Orr was to chair a session; and Gunter Wagner and Sergey Gavrilets, cutting-edge biologists from the famed 2008 Altenberg conference, were to be there as well. Hundreds of papers were scheduled, and the research contributors to the various papers and presentations, according to the index for the conference, numbered something like 2,000.

It is interesting to make a mental list of the Darwin-defenders who have been most active in the culture wars, whether by publishing popular books defending Darwin, by appearing as witnesses against school boards in court cases, by working for the NCSE, by running pro-Darwinian blog sites, or by attacking Darwin critics throughout cyberspace, and to see which of them either read papers or at least contributed to the research and writing of papers for this premier conference.

Let’s start with those Darwin defenders who are actively anti-religious or show contempt for religion in their writings and internet remarks. Conspicuously absent from the list of conference contributors were evolutionary champions Richard Dawkins, P. Z. Myers, Larry Moran, and Eugenie Scott.

Among those who have not attacked religious belief, but have violently bashed ID and/or passionately upheld neo-Darwinian theory, Paul Gross (co-author of Creationism’s Trojan Horse) and plant scientist Arthur Hunt (who has debated ID people live and on the internet) were not listed as contributors to any of the papers.

Among those who were active in the Dover ID trial, as witnesses for the plaintiffs, the no-shows include Kevin Padian, Robert Pennock, and Brian Alters.

Among the prominent Christian Darwinists, i.e., theistic evolutionists/evolutionary creationists, only Ken Miller was going to be there, and not to read a scientific paper, but to issue a cultural manifesto on why evolution matters in America today. The leading figures of Biologos – Darrel Falk, Dennis Venema, Kathryn Applegate, David Ussery, David Kerk, Denis Lamoureux – who have so often been presented, explicitly or implicitly, as experts on evolutionary biology – produced no papers for this conference. British scientists Oliver Barclay and Denis Alexander, who have posted several guest columns on Biologos, are not mentioned. The frequent UD commenter and Quaker TE Allan MacNeill, who has penned hundreds of thousands of words on UD and on his own blogs, apparently couldn’t manage 5,000 or so words for an original research paper for the conference, nor could the belligerent Calvinist TE and almost as prolific anti-ID blogger Steve Matheson.

Now of course statistics of this sort don’t prove anything about the competence or incompetence of any particular individual. There are all kinds of good reasons why a competent evolutionary theorist might not contribute to a particular evolutionary conference. Maybe some of these people elected to attend another evolutionary conference later this year, or early next year, or maybe their travel budget was exhausted. Maybe personal matters prevented them from going. Maybe some of them attended the conference, to keep up with the field, even though they contributed no paper. But one wonders why such a large number of rabid pro-Darwinists would be non-contributors at the premier evolution conference in the world, if they are as competent in the field of evolutionary biology as they make out. Could it be that most of these people, though possessing degrees in the life sciences, are in fact not trained specifically in evolutionary biology, and therefore had no original work to contribute?

I would be interested in hearing from readers about this. Of the people I’ve named, how many have read a paper at, or at least co-written a technical paper for, any secular conference on evolutionary biology in the past ten years? Or published a peer-reviewed paper specifically on evolutionary biology in a secular scientific journal in the past ten years? Are many of the loudest defenders of neo-Darwinian orthodoxy in fact unqualified to talk at an expert level about the latest theoretical and experimental work in evolutionary biology? And if so, why do they set themselves up as the world’s teachers when it comes to evolution? Why do they write so many blogs, post so many comments, put up so many nasty book reviews on Amazon, participate in so many anti-ID debates on the Darwinist side, if they aren’t experts in the field? Why don’t they let the real experts in evolutionary biology – the Coynes and Orrs and Sean Carrolls – do the public cheerleading and debating for evolutionary biology, and stick quietly to their own specialties of cell biology, genetics, developmental biology, etc.?

In most scientific areas, non-experts don’t pretend to stand in for experts. You don’t see solid-state physicists rushing onto the blogosphere to defend the latest view on black holes from Stephen Hawking. They leave the defense of cosmology to the cosmologists. But for some reason every medical geneticist, soil scientist, biochemist, developmental biologist, cell biologist, anthropologist, part-time first-year biology instructor, undergrad biology teacher at a Christian college, etc., thinks himself or herself an expert on evolutionary theory, and competent to debate it with anyone, any time. Normal professional humility goes out the window when defending Darwinian theory is concerned. That’s why I think it’s important to ask the question: how many of the self-appointed defenders of Darwinian evolution have demonstrated competence, proved by research and publication, in the field of evolutionary biology?

Comments

goodusername (not!): Your first paragraph shows the same lack of big-picture thinking that Eugenie showed in her reaction to Berlinski's question. With a philosopher as bright as Berlinski you have think about not only the question itself but the trajectory of the question -- where it's going. Yes, of course, he only asked her *directly* for a number. But why do you think he was asking here for a number? Do you think he would have cared if the answer was 327 rather than 328? He wouldn't have cared at all. The significance of asking for the number was twofold. First, he wanted a ballpark figure: are we talking about ten changes, a hundred changes, five thousand changes? The larger the number of changes required, the higher Mt. Improbable becomes. So not the exact number, but the order of magnitude of the number is important for assessing the plausibility of the neo-Darwinian mechanism. If the number were "ten billion", then it would be completely irrational of Eugenie to believe that neo-Darwinian mechanisms could do the job in the allowed time. So her acceptance that neo-Darwinian mechanisms could do the job in the allowed time implies (a) that she had at least a rough number in mind, and that it was sufficiently low; or (b) that she hadn't thought about the number at all. If it's the latter, it would show that her thinking was fundamentally sloppy and unscientific. And if it's the former, she should have been able to give a rough, ballpark figure. (Even Ken Miller, later in the debate, realized the reasonableness of providing a ballpark figure, and tried to do so in a half-baked way.) The second reason for asking for a number is that if one doesn't know roughly how many steps one has to account for, one cannot construct a plausible evolutionary pathway. It is true that there might be many evolutionary pathways from artiodactyl to whale, some of the involving maybe 300 steps, some 325, some 275, etc. But there won't be any that involve 10, or 12, or 20 steps. Without a ballpark figure, you can't even get started. Aside: The comparison with dogs is misleading, for dogs, despite many superficial variations, are all of one species, and the *genetic* (as opposed to superficial phenotypical) differences are much smaller than the genetic differences that have to be crossed from artiodactyl to whale. Regarding your second paragraph, no, I *don't* think it is commonly done. Please give me the names of books and articles where you have seen lists of the necessary morphological changes needed to get from artiodactyl to whale. I'm not talking about alleged fossil intermediate forms here. I'm talking about physically necessary morphological changes. You don't need to know a thing about fossils to enumerate these. A whale has flippers. You have to get from feet to flippers. Is that *one* major change at the molecular/genetic level, or would it require *several* smaller changes, each requiring its own molecular/genetic pathway? What about moving the blowhole on the skull? Is that *one* change, easily accomplished by a so-called "point mutation", or does it requires several independent changes which are not going to happen together? Is the change to marine lactation *one* step, or does it require changes to several bodily systems, each involving one or more genetic changes? If you can't roughly enumerate the basic gross physical changes required, you can't even get started on the list of protein and DNA changes that would be necessary. This point is well made by Sternberg in his whale video, which someone mentioned above. Note that if Eugenie had answered the question, instead of using up the allotted time in stalling, Berlinski could have used her answer as a springboard to the higher-level theoretical question of evolutionary pathways, as I've just done. And this is what ID people find so frustrating with Darwinists; they constantly avoid getting down to nitty-gritty, especially in public debates. It's of course not to their advantage for the public to see how much trickier it is to get neo-Darwinian changes to major organs, systems and body plans than those tidy little tree diagrams in popular science books suggest.Thomas Cudworth_{July 19, 2011
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Thomas Cudworth, “However, the theoretical question posed by Berlinski remains: How can one be sure that Darwinian mechanisms could have accomplished X if one cannot spell out even a hypothetical pathway by which they could have done so? Or cannot even state how many morphological changes (let alone genetic changes) would be required?” --She wasn’t asked about a hypothetical pathway (at least in the linked video). She was asked to literally put a NUMBER on how many changes are necessary to go from cows (cows?) to whales. It’s an absurd question. To illustrate how absurd it is, ask yourself how many changes are necessary to go from one breed of dog to another? Almost every anatomical feature is different from one breed to the next. Every bone changes – in multiple ways. The hair, teeth, ears, tail, paws etc all change – sometimes subtlety, sometimes dramatically. To try to ACTUALLY count – literally - the number of changes (does “hair” count as one change or is each hair counted separately?) would be insane. Apparently in the video above Berlinski actually created such a list of the morphological changes from cows to whales and “stopped at 50,000” – I’d love to see the list. I wonder how long a list it would be to go from Doberman to Chihuahua. “If I were on their side, and were working on whale evolution, I would have dozens of diagrams of comparative anatomy of whales and artiodactyls all over my desk and walls, and books of comparative physiology open all over my study, and would, before even beginning to enter on any particular evolutionary speculation, enumerate the major and minor anatomical and physiological differences between the two creatures I was trying to connect, and determine how many things would have to be altered.” --You don’t think this is commonly done?? How do you think those reconstructions of hypothetical intermediates (those things that Creationists endlessly laugh at as imaginary) are constructed? Just something someone doodled out on their lunch break? I’ve seen literally what you mentioned – in person and often on television on programs about whale evolution – of walls and desks covered with drawings (a WHOLE lot more than “dozens") which are years of work reconstructing fossils and proposed links between fossils in the offices of paleontologists. Paleontologists often rely on such reconstructions to get an idea of where to look for intermediates, as such reconstructions can help discern what environment to look in (should we look at the site of an ancient shallow sea? Perhaps the shoreline?)goodusername_{July 19, 2011
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Oh boy. I don't know quite how I'd distinguish a monograph from another kind of writing, but I'd put many of Dembski's papers here in the the category of monograph: http://www.designinference.com/ Which wikipedia, for what it's worth, defines as: "A monograph is a work of writing upon a single subject, usually by a single author. It is often a scholarly essay or learned treatise, and may be released in the manner of a book or journal article. It is by definition a single document that forms a complete text in itself. An author may therefore declare his own work to be a monograph by intent, or a reader or critic might define a given text as a monograph for the purpose of analysis. " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monograph I guess I was using the word in that sense. I know he hasn't published a great deal of peer-reviewed papers, so I guess I used the word "monograph" to indicate the kind of scholarly self-sufficient exposition of a thesis you'd expect from a peer-reviewed paper. As opposed to some more informal writings on that site. I have not read any of his books. Is that clear? I can't imagine that it is important, but if I inadvertently led you to believe that I had read some of his books then I hope I have now put you straight. I have not. I have read a large number of his online "monographs" aka self-sufficient treatments of his ideas, including his application of NFL theorems to evolutionary algorithms that are available on his website, and his 2005 treatment of CSI in which he claims to review, clarify and extend the ideas in No Free Lunch and The Design Inference. Is that clear now?Elizabeth Liddle_{July 19, 2011
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Elizabeth, How do you define monograph? How do you define book? Is a monograph a book? How many monographs has Dembski written? There's a couple points that can be made here.Mung_{July 19, 2011
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Mung, for goodness sake, what is your point?
Febble (aka Elizabeth Liddle): I have read a fair number of Dr. Dembski’s monographs and writings, although I have not read the book “No Free Lunch”. However, I have read his piece: Intelligent Design as a Theory of Information

Elizabeth Liddle (aka Febble): no I have not read any of Dembski’s books, as I have already said.
Spit it out, man, I can tell it's bugging you.Elizabeth Liddle_{July 19, 2011
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lastyearon (297): No, it was not a lie. However, it was an error. My memory betrayed me. I haven't looked at the video in several months. I remembered two things: (1) That Ms. Scott did not answer Berlinski's question, but rather brushed it off; (2) that she was very angry at him for asking it. My memory of the first point was correct. My memory of the anger was clearly wrong, so I apologize to Ms. Scott for misrepresenting her reaction. I have no idea why I remembered anger; perhaps I conflated the memory of that episode with the memory of some other event where Ms. Scott showed anger. In any case, I misreported what happened, and I thank you for correcting this misrepresentation before it spread any further. However, the theoretical question posed by Berlinski remains: How can one be sure that Darwinian mechanisms could have accomplished X if one cannot spell out even a hypothetical pathway by which they could have done so? Or cannot even state how many morphological changes (let alone genetic changes) would be required? I find it astounding that champions of neo-Darwinism do not find this even an interesting question, let alone an essential one. If I were on their side, and were working on whale evolution, I would have dozens of diagrams of comparative anatomy of whales and artiodactyls all over my desk and walls, and books of comparative physiology open all over my study, and would, before even beginning to enter on any particular evolutionary speculation, enumerate the major and minor anatomical and physiological differences between the two creatures I was trying to connect, and determine how many things would have to be altered. Only after I had done that would I move to the genetic level to start trying to explain how Darwinian mechanisms could have done the job. But apparently, by a kind of divination, Darwinian science is allowed to skip this nitty-gritty descriptive and comparative work, intuiting evolutionary pathways invisible to normal intellects and producing beautiful cladistic diagrams linking artiodactyls and whales. Darwinian biology apparently has secret shortcuts that normal empirical sciences do not possess. Whenever they expected me to believe something that was at first sight impossible or improbable, my physics and my chemistry teachers always showed me all the steps. As a result, I knew they were not bluffing, and respected their knowledge, to the point where sometimes I would accept things from them without being shown all the steps. However, the neo-Darwinians *never* show me all the steps; they never even show me a *tenth* of the steps. And they wonder why I do not accord to them the trust that I put in my chemistry and physics teachers. I would think that the answer to that should be quite obvious. Trust has to be earned. Isn't it about time the neo-Darwinians earned it, by producing some full evolutionary pathways for major organs or body plans?Thomas Cudworth_{July 18, 2011
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LYO: It is quite clear to me that Ms Scott became flustered, angry and resorted to intemperate, dismissive language. (I also think Dr Berlinsky could perhaps have been gentler in manner and tone.) More importantly, it is clear that -- at the time when whale evo was being touted as the latest headlined icon -- there was no real substance behind the claim. Ms Scott patently had no clue as to the way the body plan level transformation could or did occur, and on what empirical evidence apart from a priori assumptions and the usual just so stories. And, she was not at all pleased to have that publicly exposed, as her manner and language revealed. I suggest you view the video by Sternberg -- a qualified evolutionary biologist -- here. (A significantly older Berlinski takes up the point further here, too; estimating 50,000 transitional forms to make a cow into a whale. if you think him wrong, explain why on empirical data, bearing in mind also Sternberg's observations on pop genetics and evo.) Let's see where the balance of evidence is on the issue of body plan origination and the origin of associated bio-information and its fixing in reasonable pops under reasonable conditions. On the OP topic, this would have been a splendid contribution of Dr Scott et al to the relevant conference. GEM of TKIkairosfocus_{July 18, 2011
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Dr Cudworth: I wonder if this 1997 panel debate is the money shot. GEM of TKIkairosfocus_{July 18, 2011
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Thomas Cudworth, you said..
When Eugenie Scott, in public debate with David Berlinksi, was asked the question how many morphological changes would be needed to turn a land mammal into a whale, she flew into a rage (literally).
Which is a lie. Here's the link to the video of the debate (go to 00:39 to hear Berlinsky's question) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5aC6RMurkElastyearon_{July 18, 2011
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Elizabeth Liddle (aka Febble):
no I have not read any of Dembski’s books, as I have already said.
Mung_{July 18, 2011
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Febble (aka Elizabeth Liddle):
I have read a fair number of Dr. Dembski’s monographs and writings, although I have not read the book “No Free Lunch”. However, I have read his piece: Intelligent Design as a Theory of Information
Mung_{July 18, 2011
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In other words, the next step is to apply the codification of design inferences in (2) to natural systems and see whether it properly leads us to infer design.”
And you don't see the difference between that and your original assertion? What they do instead is to say: the pattern of life must, because of these equations, be designed.Mung_{July 18, 2011
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Elizabeth Liddle:
What they do instead is to say: the pattern of life must, because of these equations, be designed.
Let's try this again. Who is they and where do they say "the pattern of life must, because of these equations, be designed." What is this "pattern" you're talking about which you've named "the pattern of life?" Where did you get that phrase from? Which ID theorist? Elizabeth Liddle:
Well, Dembski argues that “Specification” is the “pattern that signifies intelligence” and that living things display this pattern, allowing us to infer that they were designed.
Where does Demski say, "the pattern of life must, because of these equations, be designed?" Where does Dembski say "living things display this pattern, allowing us to infer that they were designed?" In particular, where does he say that in his 2005 paper? The remainder of your post is a red herring so yes, I'm going to ignore it.Mung_{July 18, 2011
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Well, I was fairly convinced that Nick’s pathway was plausible. What was wrong with it? Nick Matzke's pathway is not plausible. The problem with cooption in this case is that a functional shift from one protein to another often requires several individually non-adaptive mutations, and the higher the number of individually non-adaptive mutations are required for the functional shift to take place, the less likely it is that that scenario is true. Note that, for example, there ~200 amino acid residues in FliF that remains unaccounted for. That is to say that the origin of those ~200 residues which have no homologues is largely a mystery. How did those ~200aa residues in FliF which are not found in YscJ acquire the functional specificity needed for FliF to function? And the origin of FliG offers difficulties, of course. Given that MgtE (FliG's homologue) is only 20% similar in sequence identity to FliG, it is extremely implausible for the modern MgtE to evolve into the modern FliG. Yet there is no reason to suppose than an ancient MgtE could plausibly evolve into an ancient FliG, since that evolution would probably require the crossing of a neutral gap of several individually non-adaptive residues. There are numerous problems with Matzke's scenario, and I've only scratched to surface here.LivingstoneMorford_{July 18, 2011
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kairosfocus: It was on Telic Thoughts. I think the heading was "Oldie but Goodie" or "A Blast from the Past". There is a picture of Berlinski on the still video. It's just a segment of a longer debate between a whole mob of participants on both sides, and many people speak; the but the revelatory moment for me was Eugenie's reaction to Berlinski. That reaction perfectly expresses why all the thoughtful neutrals are inclined to think ID people might be more reasonable. The side that shouts down its opposition almost always has some serious weaknesses that it's trying to cover up.Thomas Cudworth_{July 18, 2011
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I mean a step-by-step recipe for building a bacterium with a flagellum, out of a bacterium with no flagellum, not even a partial flagellum.
Which of the many flagella and partial flagella do you mean. Why do you exclude "partial flagella" when there are so many sub-components functioning in bacteria that are not motile? Is it not self-evident that if sub-components are found to have functions in real living bacteria, that the concept of irreducibility is flawed, at least in the case of flagella?Petrushka_{July 18, 2011
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"We are not communicating. Are you sure that you have read what I wrote? ..." Ah, but you *are* "dialogging"; and for some persons, mouths-in-motion is what gives life its meaning.Ilion_{July 18, 2011
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Elizabeth: We are not communicating. Are you sure that you have read what I wrote? Do you realize what I mean by an evolutionary pathway? By an evolutionary pathway to the flagellum, I mean a step-by-step recipe for building a bacterium with a flagellum, out of a bacterium with no flagellum, not even a partial flagellum. I want to see the flagellum going up in stages before my very eyes, as I can watch a skyscraper going up in stories before my eyes. I want a morphological description of the bacterium for each intermediate stage, an explanation of the selection advantage of each stage, and a list of DNA bases that had to be altered to get to that stage, and what the substitutions were, and the exact locations where all this took place along the bacterial genome. And of course that implies I need a count of the number of necessary stages (10? 20? 100?), and also I need a full discussion of mutation rates and the time-frame that is being hypothesized, so that I can see whether wildly optimistic estimates of favorable mutations are being employed, etc. Now, has Nick provided a pathway *in accord with my specifications*? If so, *where*? (It wouldn't be in a journal article, I can tell you that. A 500-page book, minimum, complete with many diagrams of both DNA sections and morphological changes, would be needed to cover the details I've asked for.)Thomas Cudworth_{July 18, 2011
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Dr Cudworth: Do you have a link to the vid and/or transcript of the debate? GEM of TKIkairosfocus_{July 18, 2011
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Well, I was fairly convinced that Nick's pathway was plausible. What was wrong with it?Elizabeth Liddle_{July 18, 2011
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Easy to answer, Elizabeth: "So Nick only needs to posit a plausible stepwise pathway to infirm Behe." Nick has *not* posited a plausible stepwise pathway from bacterium without flagellum to bacterium with flagellum. Nor has any biologist, living or dead. I specified what is needed for a plausible stepwise pathway. Reread it, then tell me the book or article in which such a pathway has been proposed, for the flagellum or for any major organ or body plan. You won't find any such pathways. In fact, Darwinians deny that they should have to provide them. When Eugenie Scott, in public debate with David Berlinksi, was asked the question how many morphological changes would be needed to turn a land mammal into a whale, she flew into a rage (literally). Yet it was a perfectly reasonable question, one which every mammal evolutionist should be daily trying to answer. Her denial that Darwinians need to produce such answers was revelatory of the degree to which adherence to Darwinian mechanisms has become an article of faith, detached from honest empiricism. With a mentor like that, I don't expect Nick to get very far explaining the origin of the flagellum or of anything else.Thomas Cudworth_{July 18, 2011
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Why does he, Thomas? I mean, Behe's position is that the flagellum is "Irreducibly Complex" - that there is no plausible stepwise pathway that leads to it. So Nick only needs to posit a plausible stepwise pathway to infirm Behe. I once made the analogy with the Old Man of Hoy. http://www.flickr.com/photos/mountainandshore/4084206511/ If you saw a photograph with people on top, you might say: there is no way they could have climbed that: they must have been dropped from skyhooks. But if Nick or someone were to look carefully, and show that indeed there is a way up, we have no reason to infer a helicopter. They still might have been dropped from skyhooks; they might have climbed but not taken Nick's route. But we can no longer say they must have been lowered by skyhooks, because Nick has shown there is at least one route that is climbable. Moreover, not only is it climbable, but we know that people can climb; we also have no evidence for skyhooks.Elizabeth Liddle_{July 18, 2011
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Nick wrote (58): "The most ironic thing about this debate is that all the published work which ID guys cite in favor of “flagellum-first” rely explicitly on phylogenetics results, which only make sense if evolution is accepted. So to make these arguments at all they have to accept common ancestry over billions of years of evolution. Which, again, means they’ve lost the main debate." This is true only for ID proponents who are confused. I think that it is clear that all the leaders of the ID movement are speaking for the sake of argument. That is, *if* Darwinian evolution were true, and *if* the so-called experts are right, the flagellum post-dates the TTSS, and therefore its origin cannot be explained by the TTSS. And this logic is unassailable. So that leaves the Darwinists without the only viable intermediate step they have come up with. We are in complete darkness as to the transitional phases in the phenotype from no-flagellum to full flagellum, if we can't use the TTSS as a bridging form. All we can do is tell Darwinian fairy tales about imaginary organelles or parts that might have served viable functions en route to the flagellum, and later been co-opted, etc. But it's all free invention, until the Darwinians can (a) describe the physiology of each of the transitional organelles or parts that they have in mind; (b) show that the transitional organelles or parts would be selected, and specify the environment in which they would be selected, and show that that enviroment in fact existed in the earth's past; and (c) specify the genomic changes that would have to occur to produce said organelles and parts. The greatest evolutionary biologist on the planet is not even 1% of the way toward providing this sort of account. So if Nick intends to spend his life explaining the evolutionary origin of the flagellum, he's got his work cut out for him. (And then after he's done that, he has to repeat for the avian lung, the bat's sonar, the cardiovascular system, etc.)Thomas Cudworth_{July 18, 2011
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Excellent :) Thanks, Thomas. I have found it true of Dembski's scientific articles as well.Elizabeth Liddle_{July 18, 2011
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Mung, Elizabeth: The agreement I spoke of was that, in the books Elizabeth has read, she finds the ID writers calm and non-polemical in tone and focused on scientific rather than religious questions in contents. As for article vs. book, I agree with Elizabeth that an article can be judged on its own merits as an article. My point was not to defend any particular article by Dembski, but only to point out that there is important material in his book that is not in his articles, and to make the more general point that when ID writers put so much stress on longer treatments, it is unreasonable to avoid the longer treatments and seek out only online articles. But Elizabeth has since clarified that she has in fact read some ID books (other than Dembski's) and is working on Meyer's book now, so I don't think we are really disagreeing.Thomas Cudworth_{July 18, 2011
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Aha: I just found the UD thread in the archives where I first made may case for Dembski's error: https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/id-in-the-uk/ And let me take the opportunity to repeat: I appreciate being here and the welcome I have received in my second incarnation :)Elizabeth Liddle_{July 18, 2011
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I should like to observe that, in my view, Dr. Liddle invariably posts in good faith, good humor, and with enormous patience and courtesy. The treatment meted out to her on this forum, often by those who would like us to believe they uphold the highest standards of decency, is nothing short of deplorable. For shame!FrogBox_{July 18, 2011
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Mung:
Elizabeth Liddle: This, incidentally is the first scientific error Dembski makes – he sets up his hypothesis incorrectly, and so finds himself in a position where no other hypothesis, by definition, can account for the data.
A lie.
Mung, a lie is a deliberate untruth, right? I do not lie. If my statement is untrue, then it is a mistake. Please tell me why you think it is untrue. I think it is true, and I am willing to support my case. Therefore it is not a lie. It would only be a lie if I thought it was true. If I think an untrue statement is true, making it is not a lie but a mistake. Do not tell me again that I am lying. Thank you.Elizabeth Liddle_{July 18, 2011
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Mung:
Elizabeth Liddle: What they do instead is to say: the pattern of life must, because of these equations, be designed. Huh? What is “the pattern of life”?
Well, Dembski argues that "Specification" is the "pattern that signifies intelligence" and that living things display this pattern, allowing us to infer that they were designed. If he isn't arguing that, tell me what you think he is arguing here: http://www.designinference.com/documents/2005.06.Specification.pdf
Cite a source please, for an ID theorist, preferably one who is well known, to substantiate your assertion.
I take it that Dembski is well known enough. Let me also cite: "At the heart of my codification of design inferences is the notion of specified complexity, which is a statistical and complexity-theoretic concept. Provided this concept is well-defined and can effectively be applied in practice, the next question is whether specified complexity is exhibited in actual physical systems where no evolved, reified, or embodied intelligence was involved. In other words, the next step is to apply the codification of design inferences in (2) to natural systems and see whether it properly leads us to infer design." http://www.designinference.com/documents/2000.11.ID_coming_clean.htm That seems to me to be saying that if we can detect specificied complexity in physical systems, we can infer design. Obviously these physical systems include living things. Or are you saying that Dembski and other IDists do not think that living things exhibit specified complexity?
I say you just made it up. I say that the most likely response, if we get one, is that: a) you were misunderstood (we didn’t read your whole post!) b) you didn’t really mean wh you wrote, you meant something else.
Well you often don't read my posts, and you often misundertand me, but in this case you seem to have understood perfectly well. So do I take it that you do not think that specified complexity is exhibited by living things? Or that it is, but it doesn't imply design? Or that ID has nothing to do with any of these issues and that Dembski is out to (free) lunch?Elizabeth Liddle_{July 18, 2011
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Mung:
Elizabeth Liddle:
If there is key point in his books that he does not make in his articles, then it does not say much for his articles!
Sure, blame your failure to perform due diligence on Dembski. He should have known you would not read his books, but only his online articles.
Yes, he should. What point is there in writing an article that only makes sense if you also read a book? Especially when the article itself claims to review, clarify, and extend the book? How would any paper ever get through peer-review if it did not stand alone? An scientific paper is not a dumbed down precis. Quite the reverse. A scientific paper must provide all the information the reader needs to evaluate the argument. Retreating to: "well she admits she hasn't read the books" is to concede that the papers themselves do not make sense alone. I doubt that is what Dembski would want to claim. There may well be persuasive alternative arguments in his books that I am unaware of. But the ones he presents in his articles I do not find persuasive, and I am willing to go through each one, if you like, and tell you exactly why.Elizabeth Liddle_{July 18, 2011
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