Intelligent Design

Ed Brayton reviews the new report to Rep. Mark Souder which argues that Richard Sternberg of the Smithsonian Institution, former editor of the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, was a victim of persecution. The evidence in the report itself fails to support that conclusion, which appears to be politically motivated. Brayton finds that: 1. What little ill-treatment Sternberg may have gotten (in fact, all of the comments expressing distrust and anger at Sternberg and urging his dismissal were made not to his face, but in private emails that he never saw) was largely self-inflicted, the result not only of his violation of procedures in regard to the Meyer paper, but in regard to several other instances of professional malfeasance and prior examples of poor judgement as PBSW editor. ...

The Discovery Institute has been trying to criticize last year’s Dover decision on the grounds that Judge Jones followed common judicial practice by copying text from the winning side’s Proposed Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law in setting out the facts of the case in his opinion. Now, it turns out that the Discovery Institute’s David DeWolf, John West, and Casey Luskin (the first two of which are the authors of the critique of Judge Jones just referred to) submitted a paper to the Montana Law Review about the Dover case that was virtually identical to content in the DI’s book, Traipsing Into Evolution, published in March 2006. This violated the journal’s requirement that all submissions be original content, not previously published elsewhere, and the authors were forced to rewrite and resubmit–after this was brought to the journal’s attention by a third party. The DI authors intentionally concealed this information. More details at Dispatches from the Culture Wars. UPDATE (December 20, 2006): The editor of the Montana Law Review has responded, pointing out facts that absolve the DI folks of any deception.

After a year of careful analysis of Judge Jones’ decision in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, the Discovery Institute has determined that the Judge made considerable use of the plaintiff’s Proposed Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law when writing the section on intelligent design as science in his decision for the plaintiff. Somehow, they think that this common practice of using the Proposed Findings of Fact from the winning side in crafting a decision makes Judge Jones a puppet of the ACLU, even though he’s a conservative justice appointed by George W. Bush. The Discovery Institute has issued a press release touting their findings as though it discredits the decision’s reasoning. This press release demonstrates that they are still smarting over the loss in Dover, still spending their time doing things that have nothing to do with scientific research, and that they have as much credibility on legal matters as they do on scientific matters. More by attorney Timothy Sandefur at the Panda’s Thumb. This press release by the DI was telegraphed by a talk given by Michael Behe earlier this month in Kansas. UPDATE (December 13, 2006): Ed Brayton analyzes the DI report in more detail, including responding to its claims that Judge Jones incorporated “errors” from the ACLU into the decision. UPDATE (December 14, 2006): More responses: Timothy Sandefur, “Is John West Dishonest or Just Ignorant?" and “Casey Luskin–Not Too Bright” at the Panda’s Thumb. UPDATE (December 20, 2006): Wesley Elsberry has looked at how much of the plaintiff’s Proposed Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law was actually used in Jones’ decision (and how much of that section of the decision came directly from the plaintiff’s filing). Ed Brayton summarizes at Dispatches from the Culture Wars. Casey Luskin has attempted to respond with a defense, but as Ed Brayton shows, he just keeps digging a deeper hole.

ID advocates Tim McGrew and Sal Cordova have accused P.Z. Myers of misrepresenting Jonathan Wells when he pointed out that Wells had selectively edited a quote from a paper by William Ballard in BioScience. McGrew wrote that “Myers is lying through his teeth” about the quotation appearing on p. 35 of Wells’ Politically Incorrect Guide to Intelligent Design. Myers points out that McGrew and Cordova have failed to see what’s right in front of them, and adds some red arrows to a scan of the page to help them see. Will either of them apologize for their IDiocy? UPDATE: They’ve admitted they were wrong about the quotation on p. 35, but argue that the text on the earlier pages is not guilty of the misrepresentation that Myers claimed with regard to the p. 35 quote.

Skeptic Michael Shermer is speaking about his new book, Why Darwin Matters, at noon on October 12 at the Cato Institute in Washington D.C. The Cato Institute is then showcasing a commentary on Shermer by “Intelligent Design proponent Jonathan Wells,” whose dishonest books Icons of Evolution and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism, have been shredded at The Panda’s Thumb. Wells, a follower of Rev. Sun Myung Moon, entered a Ph.D. program at the behest of Moon. Wells wrote: “Father’s [Moon’s] words, my studies, and my prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism, just as many of my fellow Unificationists had already devoted their lives to destroying Marxism. When Father chose me to enter a PhD program in 1978, I welcomed the opportunity to prepare myself for battle." Rev. Moon, who was crowned in a bizarre ceremony on Capitol Hill thanks to the support of a number of Congressmen, has also been supported by a variety of evangelical Christians who would ordinarily oppose cult groups whose leaders claim to be the second coming of Christ, such as Left Behind co-author Timothy LaHaye, his wife and head of Concerned Women for America Beverly LaHaye, Jerry Falwell, Family Research Council head Gary Bauer, Pat Boone, and Christian Coalition leader and Jack Abramoff pal Ralph Reed. Also involved with Moon have been former president George H.W. Bush and his son and President George W. Bush. (More on Moon and his connections to Christian and Republican leaders here and here.) Why is the Cato Institute giving a forum to a purveyor of pseudoscience and an advocate of Moon’s cult? Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that Richard W. Rahn, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, is also a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and writes for Moon’s Washington Times?

The Technology Liberation Front is a blog I’ve been reading for a few months for its quality contributions on issues involving technology, regulation, copyright, digital rights management (DRM), network neutrality, and so on. It covers a lot of the same topics as Ed Felten’s excellent Freedom-to-Tinker blog, with a strong libertarian bent. What a disappointment it was to see that the newest contributor, Hance Haney, comes from the Technology & Democracy Project at the Discovery Institute. While Haney is in Washington D.C. and is not affiliated with the intelligent design wing (the Center for Science and Culture), crackpot George Gilder is a senior fellow of the TDP. I commented to this effect at the Technology Liberation Front, which prompted a response from Lewis Baumstark: As I have no previous knowledge of Hance or the Discovery Institute, I prefer to allow him to live or die here on the merits of his debate and analysis, not on his link to a pro-ID institution.Lewis should remedy his ignorance of the Discovery Institute before coming to a conclusion about whether such an association taints Hance’s reputation and credibility–surely he would not have said the same if Hance was a representative of the (in some ways more honest) Institute for Creation Research or International Flat Earth Society. As readers of this blog know well, the Discovery Institute has a long history of dishonest and deceptive public statements and attempts to influence public opinion, public policy, and educational standards. Do a Google search for “Discovery Institute site:lippard.blogspot.com” or “Dembski site:lippard.blogspot.com” for numerous examples at this blog; many more can be found at scienceblogs.com (especially Dispatches from the Culture Wars and Pharyngula) or The Panda’s Thumb. Jim Harper of TLF responded to Lewis’s comment by writing “And the winner is . . . Lewis Baumstark! Curious. Courteous. Way to go, Lewis!” How odd that he would declare Lewis the “winner” when Lewis claimed ignorance of the Discovery Institute, or call him “curious” when his comment betrayed no interest in rectifying that ignorance. “Courteous,” I’ll grant. I agree with the comment at TLF from Cog (of the Abstract Factory blog): ...

At Dispatches from the Culture Wars, Ed Brayton has an excellent fisking of Seth Cooper, former attorney for the Discovery Institute. Cooper tries to argue that Judge Jones (of the Kitzmiller v. Dover School Board case) displayed bias and hostility towards Jon Buell of the Foundation for Thought and Ethics both in his behavior and by refusing to allow the FTE to intervene in the case. Brayton points out that there’s no evidence of any hostility in the questioning of Buell and that the facts and legal precedent strongly supported the refusal of FTE intervening one month before the end of discovery. He points out dishonesty by Buell, who falsely stated that “Neither “Creationism” nor its synonym, “Creation Science” was ever used in any Pandas manuscript, as alleged." The post is a pleasure to read, go see it here.

P.Z. Myers at Pharyngula reviews chapter 3 of Jonathan Wells’ new book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, as part of a series of critiques of the book which will appear at The Panda’s Thumb. The chapter, titled “Why you didn’t ’evolve’ in your mother’s womb,” includes quote mining of this sort: This is the heart of Wells’ strategy: pick comments by developmental biologists referring to different stages, which say very different things about the similarity of embryos, and conflate them. It’s easy to make it sound like scientists are willfully lying about the state of our knowledge when you can pluck out a statement about the diversity at the gastrula stage, omit the word “gastrula,” and pretend it applies to the pharyngula stage.As background, it’s important to note that the “developmental hourglass” (Myers provides a couple of diagrams to illustrate) is a summary of a century and a half of observations showing that organisms tend to be diverse in form in the earliest stages of development (blastula, gastrula, and neurula), converge on a similar form at the pharyngula stage (from which Myers’ blog gets its name), and then diverge again into a diversity of adult forms. Thus, if a creationist engages in the above tactic, they will take a quote about differences at an early stage and make it look like a denial of similarity at the pharyngula stage. Myers points out a specific example where Wells does exactly this with a quote from developmental biologist William Ballard. Wells writes, quoting Ballard: It is “only by semantic tricks and subjective selection of evidence,” by “bending the facts of nature,” that one can argue that the early embryo stages of vertebrates “are more alike than their adults."As Myers points out, multiple quotes stitched together in a sentence like this are a red flag in the writings of creationists and intelligent design advocates. The full passage Wells is quoting says: Before the pharyngula stage we can only say that the embryos of different species within a single taxonomic class are more alike than their parents. Only by semantic tricks and subjective selection of evidence can we claim that “gastrulas” of shark, salmon, frog, and bird are more alike than their adults.Ballard did not mean to assert that these “semantic tricks” and “subjective selection of evidence” are used to claim that there is similarity at the pharyngula stage, as he also writes: All then arrive at the pharyngula stage, which is remarkably uniform throughout the subphylum, consisting of similar organ rudiments similarly arranged (though in some respects deformed in respect to habitat and food supply). After the standardized pharyngula stage, the maturing of the structures of organs and tissues takes place on diverging line, each line characteristic of the class and further diverging into lines characteristic of the orders, families, and so on.This is a clear case of deceptive writing by Jonathan Wells. Read the rest, which includes further examples of dishonesty by Wells, at Pharyngula.

After Paul Nelson was misquoted in the Guardian, this was discovered by Nick Matzke of the National Center for Science Education and pointed out at the Panda’s Thumb blog. Here’s how Robert Crowther at the Discovery Institute reports the misquotation and Nelson’s letter and blog post thanking Matzke for pointing out the misquotation: Today there is another urban myth building up a head of steam, and being helped along by Darwinists, about Discovery Fellow Paul Nelson. Gaurdian [sic] reporter Karen Armstrong reports: ‘Great shakings and darkness are descending on Planet Earth,’ says the ID philosopher Paul Nelson, ‘but they will be overshadowed by even more amazing displays of God’s power and light.’ And yet this is pure rubbish because Nelson never said anything like this, and it turns out that Armstrong never even interviewed him. Nelson points this out in his letter to the Guardian demanding a correction. (Note to Paul: don’t hold your breath) Emphasis added. I can think of numerous examples of nonsense, misquotes, bad arguments, and urban legends that are spread around by the creationists (there are many in Mark Isaak’s index to creationist claims, including the “Lucy’s knee joint” issue that I tried for years to stop creationists from spreading), but real examples of urban myths “being helped along by Darwinists” are much harder to come by. Crowther supplies no evidence that this spurious Paul Nelson quote has been “helped along by Darwinists”; the evidence I have shows that evolutionists were the first to try to stamp it out. (Hat tip: Dave Thomas at the Panda’s Thumb.)

Casey Luskin, responding to a point in a book review by John Derbyshire, argues that Judge Jones was incorrect in his decision in Kitzmiller v. Dover when he wrote that Intelligent Design is not supported by any peer-reviewed publications. As Wesley Elsberry shows, Luskin’s argument is not with Jones but with the defense in the Dover case, and in particular with the testimony of Michael Behe, who agreed in cross-examination that “there are no peer reviewed articles by anyone advocating for intelligent design supported by pertinent experiments or calculations which provide detailed rigorous accounts of how intelligent design of any biological system occurred." Q. [Rothschild] Now you have never argued for intelligent design in a peer reviewed scientific journal, correct? ...