ID Supporters Interviewed; Count the Misrepresentations

Oh, look, a religious group interviews two ID supporters while claiming to examine the biological theory of evolution. No need, of course, to interview a real biologist.

Here are some brief comments:

1. "evidences": why is it that creationists nearly always use "evidence" in the plural, while almost everyone else considers it a mass noun?
2. McLatchie: "information uniformly traces its source back to an intelligent cause"; "We know in all realms of experience of cause and effect that information uniformly traces its source back to an intelligent cause"; "specified complexity uniformly comes from an intelligent source". McLatchie shows that he is a good little parrot who is able to read Stephen Meyer and regurgitate him practically word-for-word. Don't let the fact that all these claims are lies deter you, Jonathan!
3. Bridges: "We know that the Darwinian mechanism are [sic] not capable of building this type of information and the only known source is something like conscious activity." Another lie. In fact, we know that evolutionary algorithms can produce extremely complicated designs. Creationists always sidestep this objection; you can't even find a reference to Sims in any of the major ID books.
4. McLatchie: "or if you could demonstrate that some mechanism other than intelligent design could explain specified complexity then that again would destroy the design inference. So intelligent design is falsifiable". To the extent that's true, it's been falsified. Of course, "specified complexity" is a charade, as Elsberry and I have shown. But even using the bogus definitions of Dembski, it's easy to generate specified complexity (as we also showed in that paper).
5. McLatchie: "intelligent design predicts that the ratio of functional to non-functional sequences should be astronomically small", "whereas the neo-Darwinian scenario predicts that it should there should be a relative abundance of stable and functional protein folds within combinatorial space". Of course, this is false. Intelligent design doesn't make any such prediction, because the intelligent designer is not constrained. He could make functional sequences abundant or rare, as he chose.
6. Bridges: "if 99% of the relevant data set [i.e., the fossil record] is missing how could a theory dealing with that data set purport to give us a literally true story of the type of organisms that lived in the past and their potential genealogical relationships?". Well, Bridges just shows that he knows nothing about science. 99% of most of the relevant data sets in geology, biology, astrophysics, and other fields are not available for us to study directly; yet we still have accurate theories about orogeny, stellar evolution, and so forth. Heck, 99% of the data about my grandparents' emigration to the US is missing, but I can still give you a literally true story of how they got here.

If the interviewer had really wanted to understand evolution, he could have interviewed Jerry Coyne or Richard Dawkins or dozens of other scientists. But, of course, he doesn't. His goal is to prop up the faithful.

Similarly, you're never going to see Jonathan McLatchie or J. T. Bridges being interviewed by an actual science program. The only way they can get airtime is in religious forums like this. So much for the pretense that ID is actually about science.

Two Online Courses

You have a choice. You can either shell out some unspecified amount of bucks to take a online course on "Darwinism & Intelligent Design" run by ID hack Tom Woodward.

Or you can take a free online course about genetics and evolution run by an actual biologist.

I doubt that Woodward could even pass a final exam in an evolutionary biology course. Of course, that doesn't prevent him from prattling on ignorantly about it.

Creationists Try to Do Mathematics - Again

It's always amusing when creationists try to do mathematics.

At the recent very silly Engineering and Metaphysics conference, there were at least three different talks with mathematical content.

But the funniest by far was by Eric Holloway, whose masterful work I admired once before. You can watch Eric

• claim that intelligent design will revolutionize all human thought
  
• shamelessly promote Dembski's "complex specified information", without mentioning that this bogus concept has been debunked in detail
  
• claim that physics deals with only two kinds of "agents"
  
• claim that a "search process" is not an "algorithm" - and then later talk about "search algorithms" (!)
  
• confuse the complexity classes NPC and EXPTIME
  
• claim that all polynomial-time algorithms depend on "incrementally find[ing] better solutions"
  
• confuse finding solutions with maximizing a function
  
• claim that the travelling salesman problem can be solved in polynomial time (at 19:14)
  
• claim that humans can solve the travelling salesman problem in linear time
  
• repeat Stephen Meyer's lie that "only intelligent agents create information"
  
• claim that "clouds" have "no information" (and hence imply that weather prediction can be done without any information at all!)
  
• claim that a specific instance of a maze can be changed, by removing a wall, into an NP-complete problem - thus making two fundamental errors in one sentence
  

All good stuff! You can see why creationists have to set up their own parallel pseudoscience conferences, because junk like this would be laughed out of any real scientific or mathematics conference.

More Evidence that ID Isn't Science

Are you a young religious fundamentalist who feels threatened by the theory of evolution? Then this summer program run by the Dishonesty Institute may be right for you!

Of course, you'll need to prove that you are devoted to the Truth. That's why you'll need a "recommendation from a professor who knows your work and is friendly toward ID, or a phone interview with the seminar director."

Copy here, for when it disappears down the DI memory hole:



Yes, that's exactly how real science works. I remember well when I wanted to study theoretical computer science at Berkeley: one of the requirements was that I get a recommendation from someone who knew my work and was friendly toward computational complexity.

Not.

I mean, could it be any plainer that ID is a religious and political movement? It's just like when politicians set up "free speech zones" to keep out protesters, or when creationist organizations demand statements of faith.

No real scientific organization demands a "statement of faith" or that applicants to educational programs be "friendly" to the prevailing view. That kind of stuff is reserved for areas where questioning the evidence is not tolerated -- like intelligent design.

The Creationists' Big Lie

This recent post by Cornelius Hunter exemplifies, in one sentence, the special combination of arrogance and ignorance that creationists possess:

Random events are simply not likely to create profoundly complex, intricate, detailed designs.

Even if one is able to come up with a rigorous scientific definition of terms like "profoundly complex", "intricate", and "detailed", this is a remarkably arrogant claim. How does Hunter know this to be true?

The answer is, he doesn't; he just believes it because his religion demands it. And it isn't true: we have abundant evidence from the field of artificial life that the claim is false.

To look at just a single example, take the work of Karl Sims. He has shown that virtual creatures can evolve intricate and novel locomotion strategies by a process of mutation and natural selection. This 1994 video shows some of the behaviors that evolved.

There's a good reason why none of the principal ID creationists (Dembski, Behe, Berlinski, Hunter, Luskin, etc.) address the challenges to their claims posed by artificial life: the rebuttal is so devastating that they can find nothing to say.

You Can Lead a Creationist to Knowledge...

...but you can't make him think, as this post at Uncommon Descent makes clear.

It doesn't matter if bad creationist arguments are debunked, because they just keep bringing up the same bad arguments over and over again, as if no one ever explained why they are bad.

Here we have lawyer Barry Arrington (not a mathematician or biologist, as far as I can see) explaining Dembski's concept of design detection and making exactly the same bogus claims we debunked long ago.

Problem #1: the notion of "specification" is incoherent. Arrington says “ten straight flushes in a row" is a legitimate specification because "This pattern is not post hoc". OK, how about "100 straight flushes in a row, except one is not". Is that legit? Why or why not? How about "50 out of 100 deals are straight flushes"? Is that legit? Why or why not? How about "one straight flush, then a straight, then a flush, then 3 consecutive 4 of a kind, then two more straight flushes"? Why or why not? We explain the problem in detail in our paper.

Bottom line: there is a good way to decide about the reasonableness of a "specification" -- namely, Kolmogorov complexity -- but it is not anywhere near as simple as "valid" or "invalid" or "independent" or "not independent". When you use Kolmogorov complexity as your basis for deciding about specifications, then you get the theory of Kirchherr, Li and Vitanyi, not Dembski's theory.

Problem #2: Even if you can make the notion of "specification" reasonable, we showed that Dembski's claim about the "law of conservation of information" is bogus. The result is that his conclusions about design don't follow.

Problem #3: The proper way to do probability, the way that everyone else except creationists does it, is to pre-specify a region and then see if your observation matches that region. If you do so, and the probability of hitting the region out of the whole space is very very very small, then the proper conclusion is not "design"; it is simply that you estimated the probabilities wrong. It could well have occurred because a person arranged it that way, but it could also be because you didn't know about some non-human process that could result in the same observation. In our paper we illustrate this with some examples.

That's what makes creationism different from legit science: creationists just pretend that criticism doesn't exist and recycle the same bad arguments over and over.

No, Virginia, Intelligent Design Isn't Dead

I recently received this query from a young girl:

Dear Recursivity:

Some bloggers, like Jason Rosenhouse and Jerry Coyne, have said that intelligent design is dead. Papa says, "If you read it on Recursivity, it's so." Please tell me the truth; is ID really dead?

(signed) Virginia O'Hanlon, 115 W. 95th St., New York

and here is my reply:

Virginia, those little bloggers are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except what they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men's or children's, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the Christian god and his inordinate fondess for beetles.

Yes, Virginia, intelligent design still lives. It flourishes as certainly as fundamentalist and evangelical Christianity exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no creationists. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias! There would be no childlike faith then, and everyone would have to read biology textbooks and learn what the theory of evolution actually says. Bill Dembski and Michael Behe and Phil Johsnon would be out of jobs. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which religion fills the world would be extinguished.

Not believe in an Intelligent Designer! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to try to find traces of the Intelligent Designer, but even if they did not see Him, what would that prove? Nobody sees the Designer, but that is no sign that there is no Designer. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see, like David Berlinski's mathematical achievements or Denyse O'Leary's command of the English language. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that's no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

You may tear apart the baby's rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only religion and intelligent design, not science, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding, except maybe Howard Ahmanson's checkbook -- if you know what I mean.

No Intelligent Designer! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, we will continue to smear scientists and destroy public education. As long as there are credulous Christians and Muslims looking for something, anything, to prop up their faith, intelligent design will live. As long as there are Religious Right warriors like Bruce Chapman able to dole out the big bucks to third-rate law school graduates like Casey Luskin, intelligent design will live. As long as there are ignorant sociologists hoping to cash in like Steve Fuller, ID will live. As long as faux journalists like Denyse O'Leary need you to buy their books, ID will live.

Don't believe everything you read, Virgie baby. Intelligent design's still around.

A New Self-Published Creationist Book?

Oh, lookie!

Our local creationists at the University of Guelph, Kirk Durston and David Chiu, have teamed up with wacky David Abel and Donald Johnson on a book!

(Kirk Durston is the creationist who thinks that his god magically calms angry bulls, and David Chiu is the guy who stuck in an irrelevant citation to Dembski's work in a paper having nothing to do with Dembski, and told me he did it as a "courtesy".)

Judging from this excerpt, it's not likely that real scientists will take it seriously, with laughably bogus claims such as
- "Fifteen years ago, it started to be realized that `junk DNA' was a misnomer."
- "All known errors during replication result in a decrease of both Shannon and functional information"

I wondered who would publish this drivel. It's a place called "Longview Press". Never heard of it? I hadn't either. But this page suggests that it's just David Abel's private little enterprise. Wow, what a surprise.

It's in keeping with the intelligent design vanity journal, Bio-Complexity, which seems to have a hard time finding papers to publish (7 in 2 years). But hey! It has no problem publishing papers by people who are on the editorial team. And look: David Abel is there, too.

And they wonder why we call it pseudoscience.

Addendum 1: even the University of Guelph library, where Durston and Chiu are based, doesn't have the book in its collection.

Addendum 2: Thanks to Bayesian Bouffant for pointing out the self-congratulatory description of the book on Amazon. I especially love this part: "Change in the FSC of proteins as they evolve can be measured in “Fits”— Functional bits. The ability to quantify changes in biofunctionality during evolutionary transition represents one of the most important advances in biological research in recent decades. See especially, Durston, K.K.; Chiu, D.K.; Abel, D.L.; Trevors, J.T. 2007, Measuring the functional sequence complexity of proteins, Theor Biol Med Model, 4, 47".

Well, if it's "one of the most important advances in biological research in recent decades", then it's amazing how few citations there are to this groundbreaking paper. ISI Web of Science lists exactly 4 citations, 3 of which are self-citations by Abel and Trevors. Wow, that is sure important and groundbreaking.

Challenge: Identify this "Design Theorist"

Without using a search engine, see if you can identify this "design theorist" from quotes from his 1992 book:

• "The product of the total number of these identified relationships would thus give an `overall probability' for assessing if what we are seeing ... favors a design --- or merely chance."
  
• "What is the probability for this being merely a random situation?"
  
• "Some critic will immediately leap up and shout, `But, that's assuming a strictly random process.... [subject] is not a random process..."
  
• "Which gives less than one chance in a hundred million that this unique relationship ... is random!"
  
• "If we are looking at multiple levels of connection and association, Occam's Razor would tell us to choose the simplest model for it -- which here appears to be that we are looking at Design!"
  
• "What are the odds against that randomly occurring?"
  
• "The product of the two preceding probabilities ... leads to an overall probability of less than one chance in 70 trillion that this ... is the result of merely random forces!"
  
• "...is direct support for the Intelligence Hypothesis..."
  
• "...the overall probability is overwhelming-- That what we are observing ... [is] ... designed."
  
• "We are seeing `the products of Design' ... and all that that implies."
  

Hint: It is someone with the same kind of credentials and respect as our other beloved "design theorists".

Those Creationists are Just so Darn Cute When They Try To Do Math

From Eric Holloway, we learn:

Interestingly, Kolmogrov complexity is uncomputable in the general case due to the halting problem. This means that in general no algorithm can generate orderliness more often than is statistically expected to show up by chance. Hence, if some entity is capable of generating orderliness more often than statistically predicted, it must be capabable, at least to some extent, of solving the halting problem.

From the moronic misspellings of "Kolmogorov" and "capable" to the moronic misunderstanding of algorithms, what they can generate, and the halting problem, this is just too funny for words.

But remember, Uncommon Descent is destined to replace the New York Times as the respected source for news!

See me at Polaris 2011 in Toronto - July 16

I'll be speaking at the Canadian science fiction & fantasy convention Polaris in Toronto on Saturday, July 16, and you're invited to attend.

My talk is at 1 PM and is entitled "Misinformation Theory: How Creationists Abuse Mathematics" and is described here. It's part of the skeptical track sponsored by the Centre For Inquiry and its Committee for the Advancement of Scientific Skepticism. Three others, including Larry Moran of Sandwalk, will also speak.

Review of Monton's "Seeking God in Science"

Bradley Monton is a philosophy professor at UC Boulder and a self-proclaimed atheist. He's written a little book (147 pages for the main text, not counting the preface, endnotes, index, etc.) entitled Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design, which I finally had a chance to read. It consists of four chapters:

1. What is intelligent design, and why might an atheist believe in it?
   
2. Why it is legitimate to treat intelligent design as science
   
3. Some somewhat plausible intelligent design arguments
   
4. Should intelligent design be taught in school?
   

I'm afraid this book is not very good. Monton comes off as rather naive (displaying little understanding of the abundant and documented dishonesty in the ID movement) and ignorant of science, the history of intelligent design creationism, and its role in the creationism-evolution wars.

The first chapter of the book is devoted to one of my least favorite philosophical games: trying to create a definition for a concept that covers all possible cases, by starting with a definition and iteratively refining it. He spends 25 pages (pages 16-40) playing this game with the concept of "intelligent design" itself, in a tedious and unenlightening way (for example, he even addresses the possibility that God is biologically related to humans!) and here is what he comes up with (italics in original):

"The theory of intelligent design holds that certain global features of the universe provide evidence for the existence of an intelligent cause, or that certain biologically innate features of living things provide evidence for the doctrine that the features are the result of the intentional actions of an intelligent cause which is not biologically related to the living things, and provide evidence against the doctrine that the features are the result of an undirected process such as natural selection."

Now I don't particularly like this game (although it has a long history -- philosophers have enjoyed applying it to "chair", for example), because for almost any definition proposed it is easy to come up with some outlandish counterexample. Still, as a mathematician, I enjoy and admire precision, so perhaps it's not a game completely without value. But after reading his definition I could only mutter, All that work! - and he still has an imprecise and unusable mess.

Unusable, since key terms like "intelligent cause" and "undirected process" are not defined or made rigorous. Could it be, as other commentators have already observed, that when we try to define "intelligent cause" we discover that natural selection itself could be considered intelligent by our criteria? Could it be that intelligence is a continuous measure, not a discrete quality, so that speaking of an "intelligent cause" is essentially meaningless unless the amount of intelligence is quantified?

Mess, because by calling intelligent design a "theory", Monton begs the question.

Imprecise, because this definition doesn't cover much of what the intelligent design advocates themselves discuss. For example, in Dembski's book No Free Lunch, he spends a good 10 pages discussing the case of Nicholas Caputo, an election official accused of rigging elections. Dembski implies that his intelligent design methodology can help resolve the case of whether Caputo cheated. But this case has nothing to do with a "global feature" of the universe or a "biologically innate" feature of living things.

Monton seems rather naive about the intelligent design movement. For example, on page 12, he claims, "As a matter of public policy, the Discovery Institute opposes any effort to require the teaching of intelligent design by school districts or state boards of education." But this claim could only be made by someone who doesn't understand (a) that the Discovery Institute has a long history of dissembling and (b) that intelligent design, as practiced by its leading proponents (Behe, Dembski, Meyer) is largely a negative program of casting doubt on the theory of evolution, or examining its supposed deficiencies. Therefore, Discovery Institute programs like "Teach the Controversy" and "Critical Analysis of Evolution" are, in fact, just covers for getting intelligent design into the classroom. This is abundantly clear to most people who have studied the intelligent design movement in any depth.

Part of the book is devoted to analyzing the views of pro-science philosophers, such as Taner Edis, Massimo Pigliucci, and Robert Pennock. Needless to say, Monton thinks they have it wrong in many ways; they are "sloppy" and "confused". But much of his criticism seems misplaced. For example, he gives the following advice to Barbara Forrest: she "focuses too much on attacking the proponents of intelligent design for the supposed cultural beliefs they have, instead of attacking the arguments for intelligent design that the proponents of intelligent design give". But Forrest has never said that intelligent design advocates are wrong because of their cultural beliefs; rather, she has fearlessly and tirelessly explored the goals and strategies of intelligent designers, as well as the sociological and political connections between intelligent design creationism and the religious right. Monton is apparently unconcerned with these details, and that's his right. But then his criticism amounts to "I don't share your interests", and that's rather pathetic.

Monton is a fan of Laudan, citing the following passage approvingly: "If we would stand up and be counted on the side of reason, we ought to drop terms like "pseudo-science" and "unscientific" from our vocabulary; they are just hollow phrases which do only emotive work for us." I strongly disagree. As I mentioned already, almost any definition or classification is subject to exceptions, but it's still useful to be able to say something is a chair or not a chair, even if we cannot always agree about the boundaries. Science, as a social process, has a number of characteristics, and it is perfectly legitimate and useful to point out that creationism and its modern variant, intelligent design, fail to share many of these characteristics.

There are signs that although he thinks intelligent design merits a book-length treatment, Monton hasn't really grappled with the issues. For example, on page 17, he cites a beehive as an example of a feature of the universe that "indisputably exist[s] as a result of an intelligent cause" and then, in a footnote, says that "It was surprising to me that some readers objected to this line of thought, saying that ... bees ... aren't intelligent." Well, I'd guess that this surprise comes largely from the fact that Monton hasn't really thought deeply about what intelligence is. We now know a lot about algorithms and naturally-occurring tools to perform computational processes, but Monton doesn't seem to know anything about it. But then he has some real misconceptions about mathematics and computing, claiming that computers can't represent irrational numbers. (I've addressed this misconception here.)

Several times in the book, Monton refers to the Newtonian account of physics and argues it has been "refuted". On page 50, he uses it to argue that false scientific theories can still count as science (so if intelligent design has been refuted, it could still be considered science). On page 152, he uses it to argue that false scientific theories are routinely taught in high school science (so intelligent design, even if false, could still be caught). But this black-white classification of theories as either "false" or "not false" doesn't even come close to capturing the status of Newtonian physics. Yes, it doesn't give the right answers for particles moving at high velocity, for example. But I can't think of a single scientific theory that unfailingly predicts the outcome of every single experiment. It is more correct, I think, to view theories and equations as our models of reality and to have a good idea of their shortcomings and applicability. No one uses special relativity to solve simple problems in kinematics; they use Newton and they don't apologize for it. If we classify theories purely as "true" or "false" then we lose the nuance that some "false" theories are pretty damn good and others are worthless.

Chapter 3 summarizes some of the arguments of intelligent design advocates, such as alleged "fine-tuning", the origin of the universe, the origin of life, irreducible complexity, and the simulation argument. There is not really much analysis that is new here, but I found his discussion of the simulation argument the most interesting part of the book.

Chapter 4 addresses the question of whether intelligent design should be taught in school. By "taught in school", Monton means "taught in public high-school science classes" (although he takes two whole pages to explain this - an example of how clunky the writing is). One of the objections Monton addresses is "we wouldn't be teaching a real controversy", and he answers this by citing Michael Behe as an example of a real scientist who disagrees with the scientific consensus. Ergo, there is a real controversy. But if Monton's definition of "real controversy" is "one scientist disagrees" or even "a handful of scientists disagree", then there is a "real controversy" about relativity, heliocentrism, and the germ theory of disease. Indeed, it would be hard to come up with a scientific theory for which there is no controversy in Monton's sense. Monton's position is absurd. There are controversies, and then there are controversies; it's not a black-and-white term. The "controversy" over evolution is exactly like that over relativity: a very small number of experts in the field, and a larger number of cranks, disagree with current consensus. That doesn't mean their objections merit coverage in science class. I'm not opposed to teaching controversies, but let's teach some real ones.

Finally, I'd say that the book, and Monton himself, seems curiously disengaged from the extensive mainstream criticism of intelligent design. To give one illustration, he doesn't cite much of the literature arguing against the claims of intelligent design advocates. Nowhere will you find any mention of, for example, the fine article of Pallen and Matzke (published in 2006 in Nature Reviews Microbiology) -- although other articles of Matzke are cited -- or the article of Wilkins and Elsberry (published in 2001 in Biology and Philosophy). He lists two conferences where he's presented his work, and both of them were hosted by the "Society of Christian Philosophers". Four people are listed as endorsers on the back of his book, and three of them are non-biologist critics of evolution (Berlinski, Dembski, Groothuis). And Monton has a blog, but he doesn't allow any comments on it. I can't help but think Monton's book would have been much better if he had made more attempts to be engaged with those who disagree with him.

Nobody - Even Creationists - Seems to Know How To Calculate Dembski's "CSI"

Back in 2001, when I was on sabbatical in Tucson, Arizona, I decided to spend some time trying to understand Dembski's "complex specified information" (CSI) to see if there was anything to it. The result was my long paper with Elsberry, where we concluded that CSI was a hopeless, incoherent mess that didn't have the properties Dembski claimed. A shorter version of the paper has recently appeared in Synthese.

Now, over on Uncommon Descent, there is an amusing thread which demonstrates our conclusion. Nobody, not even the creationists, can seemingly agree on the most simple assertions about CSI. That's because it's a hopeless, incoherent mess.

My Annie Hall Moment

One of the best moments in Annie Hall occurs when Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) is standing in line at the theater with Annie Hall (Diane Keaton), listening to a guy pontificate behind him. When the guy mentions Marshall McLuhan, Singer pulls out McLuhan from behind a poster, who then proceeds to say "You know nothing of my work!"

Singer then says, "Boy, if life were only like this!"

Well, perhaps what just happened to me is not up to that standard, but here goes anyway:

Over at Uncommon Descent, writer "DonaldM" uses the satiric experiment of physicist Alan Sokal to argue against "dogmatic Darwinism" and for "the sunshine of Truth".

I wrote to Alan Sokal and asked him what he thought of DonaldM's ramblings. Here are excerpts from his e-mail to me (ellipses, as usual, denote omissions):

Many thanks for drawing my attention to that strange blog item... I don't really understand the logic of how that ID guy is purporting to use me!

I mean, I looked at Paul Greenberg's article in the Jewish World Review that he cites http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/greenberg070610.php3?printer_friendly and it seems to be a straightforward piece supporting my contention that there is such a thing as objective reality (though he didn't get quite correct his purported quote from me). But then the ID guy seems to overlook the obvious irony in the paragraph from Greenberg that he quotes, and takes it literally -- or else he just drops the subject there, says that "All this reminds me" of something else that is vaguely related, and goes on with his own pet story.

Now, that story makes a valid point, namely that how one interprets evidence is affected (though not determined) by the preconceptions one comes with. But if we are having a contest about who is more open to having his or her preconceptions be refuted by inconvenient evidence, then I would have to say that -- though no one is perfect -- scientists win hands down over the devotees of sacred texts. (I know, I know, they will respond in a chorus: ID is not religion, and our support for ID does not arise from any religious commitment but simply from our dispassionate analysis of the scientific evidence. Yeah, right.)

...


Isn't it great that life is like this!

Everything in its Proper Place

Tony McManus sent along this picture from the Chapters bookstore in Waterloo, Ontario, showing that at least some bookstores recognize a charade when they see one.

The Vacuity of Intelligent Design

Lawyer and ID advocate Barry Arrington has a post up at Uncommon Descent in which he says that ID is not bogus because his grandfather could tell the difference between an arrowhead created by prehistoric Native Americans and a rock. Arrington writes, "In my grandfather’s judgment each rock he added to his collection was different from the thousands upon thousands of rocks he rejected because it bore complex marks that conformed to a specified pattern."

Let's remember that ID advocates claim to have provided a mathematically-rigorous method to detect design. In The Design Inference and No Free Lunch, William Dembski supposedly laid out a series of mathematical steps required to infer design. These steps require a pattern specification, a rejection region, a list of background knowledge, etc., etc. Now, the ability to tell a genuine artifact from a natural rock would be of great benefit to archaeologists. So where is the specification for arrowheads? What is the rejection region? What is the background knowledge? Why aren't ID "theorists" publishing papers in archaeology journals providing their revolutionary method for distinguishing artifacts from natural objects? This was one of our challenges from 2003. Here it is 7 years later, and not a single intelligent design advocate has taken it up. ID is scientifically vacuous.

Arrington says, "Once one concedes that at least in some instances intelligent agents leave behind objectively discernable indicia of design, the intellectual jig is up – you have left the door wide open for the theory of intelligent design." Why? The examples he cites - forensics, archaelogy, cryptology - aren't about design in the abstract, but rather about the specific case of human design. No archaeologist holds up an artifact and pronounces, "This was made by an intelligence." Rather, part of archaeology (and not even the most interesting part *) is about distinguishing human-made artifacts from natural ones. We recognize artifacts not because they satisfy some "design inference", but because we recognize them as the characteristic product of human activity, and because they fit into a larger picture of our understanding of a culture obtained through other means (e.g., radiometric dating).

Arrington writes, "My grandfather knew absolutely nothing about the Indians that carved his points; yet that did not preclude him from making a design inference. Similarly, ID acknowledges that the empirical evidence tells us nothing about the identity of the designer, who may be natural or supernatural." But this is untrue. When we find an arrowhead, we infer it was made by people, who are biologically identical to us, with the same basic needs of food and shelter -- not by intelligent crabs, robots, or magical beings. Because of this, we can deduce the purpose of an arrowhead, and with more work, we can determine what kinds of animals were killed and how they were butchered. With radiometric dating, we can figure out when the events took place. And it's not just the arrowhead that tells us something about the people that made it: multiple lines of confirming, independent evidence (from DNA analysis of native Americans to studies of butchered bones) can help build a picture of the arrowhead's creator.

But ID advocates don't even know that there was any agent around at the time they claim DNA was created, and they offer no independent way to check that this agent existed. Further, they don't allow us to inquire about the nature of the agent. ID is vacuous because, contrary to the claims of advocates, it doesn't provide anything that scientists actually want.

* The interesting part is to determine who made an artifact and why, and how it fits into our understanding of the culture. For example, when archaeologists discovered Bronze Age wall paintings at Thera, they didn't proclaim "These were made by an intelligence!" Such a pronouncement would be regarded as idiotic. The interesting question is to determine the purpose: were they purely decorative, part of a shrine, or did they have some entirely different meaning? However, ID advocates tell us that we are not allowed to inquire as to the nature and purpose of the designer, at least when the designer is the one (ones?) who designed DNA.

A Test for Intelligent Design

Intelligent design advocates claim over and over again that their pseudoscience is just "the study of patterns in nature that are best explained as the result of intelligence". They claim to have a mathematically-rigorous way to detect design. Oddly enough, however, they have been unable to apply their methods to anything outside toy examples.

Wesley Elsberry and I posed eight challenges to intelligent design advocates in 2003. Now, almost seven years later, none of those challenges have been met.

Well, here's another opportunity for ID to prove its worth. The Cygnus bubble is a very unusual configuration discovered in July 2008. Although some think it is a nebula, others have suggested it is a Dyson sphere, proposed hallmark of an advanced civilization. Resolving this question is precisely what ID claims to be able to do.

So, how about it, intelligent design advocates? Let's have your answer, including full calculations.

The Fruitlessness of ID "Research"

Scientists point out, quite rightly, that the religio-political charade known as "intelligent design" (ID) is not good science. But how do we know this?

One of the hallmarks of science is that it is fruitful. A good scientific paper will usually lead to much work along the same lines, work that confirms and extends the results, and work that produces more new ideas inspired by the paper. Although citation counts are not completely reliable metrics for evaluating scientific papers, they do give some general information about what papers are considered important.

ID advocates like to point to lists of "peer-reviewed publications" advocating their position. Upon closer examination, their lists are misleading, packed with publications that are either not in scientific journals, or that appeared in venues of questionable quality, or papers whose relationship to ID is tangential at best. Today, however, I'd like to look at a different issue: the fruitfulness of intelligent design. Let's take a particular ID publication, one that was trumpeted by ID advocates as a "breakthrough", and see how much further scientific work it inspired.

The paper I have in mind is Stephen Meyer's paper “The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories”, which was published, amid some controversy, in the relatively obscure journal Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington in 2004. Critics pointed out that the paper was not suited to the journal, which is usually devoted to taxonomic issues, and that the paper was riddled with mistakes and misleading claims. In response, the editors of the journal issued a disclaimer repudiating the paper.

Putting these considerations aside, what I want to do here is look at every scientific publication that has cited Meyer's paper to determine whether his work can fairly said to be "fruitful". I used the ISI Web of Science Database to do a "cited reference" search on his article. This database, which used to be called Science Citation Index, is generally acknowledged to be one of the most comprehensive available. The search I did included Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index. Even such a search will miss some papers, of course, but it will still give a general idea of how much the scientific community has been inspired by Meyer's work.

I found exactly 9 citations to Meyer's paper in this database. Of these, counting generously, exactly 1 is a scientific research paper that cites Meyer approvingly.

By contrast, let's compare Meyer's work with another paper, in the same field, of roughly the same length, and published in the same year:

W. G. Joyce, J. F. Parham, and J. A. Gauthier, "Developing a protocol for the conversion of rank-based taxon names to phylogenetically defined clade names, as exemplified by turtles", Journal of Paleontology 78 (5) (2004), 989-1013.

This paper has been cited 60 times since 2004, according to ISI Web of Science, by researchers writing in journals such as Systematic Biology, Journal of Anatomy, Bulletin de la Société Géologique de France, Proceedings of the Royal Society B - Biological Sciences, Journal of Morphology, Zootaxa, Journal of Ornithology, Naturwissenschaften, Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, etc., etc. Clearly there is a substantial difference in opinion of this paper, versus Meyer's.

Now let's look at all 9 papers that have cited Meyer's work, as reported by ISI Web of Science. I have read every paper, except paper 4 (Luskin); for that paper I had to be content with an abstract.

1. J. Giles, "Peer-reviewed paper defends theory of intelligent design", Nature 431 (7005) (Sept 9 2004), 114. A one-column news article in the news section of Nature about the publication of Meyer's paper. Not a scientific research paper.

2. K. M. Helgen, "Meyer paper: don't hang the Soc. Wash. out to dry", Nature 432 (7020) (Dec 23 2004), 949. A letter to the editor defending the reputation of the journal that published Meyer's article. Money quote: "Given the Proceedings’ taxonomic focus, Meyer’s ID paper is clearly out of place. Its publication represents a lapse of the journal’s usual editorial policies, and has been swiftly repudiated (www.biolsocwash.org). However, although the publication of Meyer’s paper is lamentable, it need not be used to trivialize the Proceedings’ long, respectable and ongoing tradition of cataloguing global biodiversity." Not a scientific research paper.

3. Mark Terry, "One nation, under the designer", Phi Delta Kappan 86 (4) (Dec 2004), 264. Abstract. Full paper (subscription required). This journal is a professional journal for educators. The paper's subtitle reads, "Mr. Terry alerts readers to a new, more insidious anti-evolutionist strategy. And the redefinition of science is only the first step." Meyer's paper is discussed, as follows: "The supposed "scientific revolution" is a creation of public relations. A science teacher cannot go to any major science journal or scientific organization and find out about all this new research - because there is none. In the fall of 2004 an ID article by a Discovery Institute Fellow appeared in the Proceedings of the Biological Association of Washington, a venerable but formerly obscure journal dealing with subtle taxonomic issues. The flurry of responses to the article gives a good picture of the current state of ID as science: the governing council of the journal almost immediately disavowed the article's publication." Not a scientific research paper.

4. C. Luskin, "Alternative viewpoints about biological origins as taught in public schools, Journal of Church and State 47 (3) (Summer 2005), 583-617. First page. A journal of law and social science. Luskin is "Program Officer in Public Policy and Legal Affairs" at the Discovery Institute. Not a scientific research paper.

5. B. H. Weber, "Emergence of life", Zygon 42 (4) (Dec 2007), 837-856. Zygon is self-described as a journal of "religion and science", but I would consider it a philosophy journal. A review article. Of the nine papers, this is the one that is the closest to a scientific research article that cites Meyer approvingly: "The emergence and increase of novel, specified, functional information remains the crucial issue." He thinks that Meyer's questions have been answered by "the new science of emergent complexity".

6. J. Koperski, "Two bad ways to attack intelligent design and two good ones", Zygon 43 (2) (June 2008), 433-449. Again, Zygon is self-described as a journal of "religion and science", but I would consider it a philosophy journal. This article focuses on the rhetoric of intelligent design and its opponents. Not a scientific research paper.

7. Emilia Currás and Enrique Wulff Barreiro, "Integration in Europe of human genetics results obtained by Spaniards in the USA: A historical perspective", Scientometrics 75 (3) (2008), 473-493. This is the strangest paper of the nine. It purports to be about "the mobility of Spanish biochemists from Europe to the United States over the past 80 years". It cites Meyer as follows: "In the context of cancer research, the (chemical and reductionist) search for the molecular basis of cancer induction is combined with the holistic vision of the close relationship between form and function in physiology [Shimkin, 1974; Meyer, 2004; Marra & Boland, 1995]". Although it is about "form", Meyer's paper doesn't mention "cancer" or "physiology" at all. Perhaps the citation was really meant to refer to something completely different? In any event, this paper is more a historical discussion, not a scientific research paper.

8. S. L. Shafer, "Critical thinking in anesthesia: Eighth honorary FAER research lecture", Anesthesiology 110 (4) (2009), 729-737. Full paper here. An article criticizing various anti-scientific trends. Here is how he cites Meyer: "One can find many Web sites devoted to intelligent design. However, the story in the peer-reviewed literature is quite different. Of 99 articles identified by a PubMed search of intelligent design (on November 14, 2008), the majority are defenses of evolution against claims of intelligent design. Not appearing in the search is the single scientific article supporting the claims of intelligent design written by Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute. This article was published without peer review in a nonindexed journal and was subsequently retracted by the journal for insufficient scientific merit." Not a scientific research paper. [Update: Shafer's claim about "published without peer review" is not correct, and the paper was not actually formally "retracted". "Disavowed" is more like it.]

9. Juan E. Carreño, Fernando Hansen, et al., Some considerations about the theory of intelligent design, Biological Research 42 (2) (2009), 223-232. Full paper here. An article, critical of intelligent design, in an obscure Chilean biology journal. However, the topic is more about philosophy than science. Money quote: "We also reject the claim that ID is a legitimate scientific theory, because it does not exhibit the classical characteristics that a scientific kind of knowledge must have." Not a scientific research paper that cites Meyer approvingly.

The grand total: exactly 1 paper (Weber's) can be said to be a scientific paper that cites Meyer approvingly, and even that is subject to debate.* This meager record does not support the claim that ID is a scientific revolution with far-reaching consequences.

ID advocates are constantly telling us that intelligent design is a new scientific paradigm that will prove fruitful. Five years after ID's flagship "peer-reviewed" paper, that does not seem to be the truth.

* No doubt ID advocates will produce other papers, published in obscure venues, that cite Meyer, that I missed. For example, Google scholar lists a few more, including:

10. Fernando Castro-Chávez, "Hepatology Microarrays, antiobesity and the liver", Annals of Hepatology 3 (4) (Oct-Dec 2004), 137-145. Full paper here. A case of inappropriate citation. The only citation to Meyer comes in the final paragraph, which reads "... to better describe the identity and function of genes and genomes, composers of a natural, complex, and precise biological software that as a genetic program, contributes to the healthy programming and the pathological reprogramming of life." The author appears to be an intelligent design advocate. I predict that inappropriate citation -- the bogus insertion of citations to pro-ID papers in irrelevant contexts -- will become more popular in the future, as creationists attempt to bolster their case that ID is scientific.

11. Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig, "Mutation breeding, evolution, and the law of recurrent variation", Recent Res. Devel. Genet. Breeding, 2 (2005), 45-70. Full paper here. Lönnig is a well-known creationist. The only references to Meyer appear on pages 61 and 64: "Thus, in accord with the laws of probability, examples and cases relativizing the law of recurrent variation have not been observed so far (35, 43, 46, 65, 77, 78, 88, 95, see also note 2)." and "For an additional detailed discussion of further points and possible
objections, see (see 1-9, 15, 20, 21, 23, 27, 30, 35, 38, 39, 43-57, 61, 65, 77-80, 86, 88, 90, 91, 94, 95)".

But ISI Web of Science also misses a number of articles critical of Meyer. In any event, the citations I have found do not support the extravagant claims made for ID and for Meyer's article. So far, ID is not proving frutiful for science.

Paper Rebutting Dembski Finally Out

Back on my previous sabbatical, in 2001-2, I spent a couple of months reading WIlliam Dembski's book, No Free Lunch, which he was kind enough to send me. I chose to do that for a number of reasons: first, I was interested to see if his claims about a mathematical refutation of Darwinism were true; second, a sabbatical is the time to tackle some unusual project you don't usually have time for; and third, I have an interest in pseudoscience and pseudomathematics. Reading it led to some fun discussions with Wesley Elsberry and we eventually produced a long, 54-page refutation of many of Dembski's claims.

But then, what to do with it? I had heard Dembski and Ruse were co-editing a voume, so I briefly entertained the idea of submitting it for inclusion there. But I was worried Dembski would refuse because the paper was sharply critical of his work, and after talking to Ruse I had second thoughts and decided to look for another venue. We chose a journal whose subject matter included biology and philosophy, but the paper was eventually rejected -- not because of the quality of the paper, but because the referees felt that spending 54 pages to debunk what they perceived as anti-evolution crackpottery was not a good use of their journal's space.

Finally, we were invited to submit the paper to a special issue of the journal Synthese, and we did so. The paper went through multiple rounds of refereeing, with the referees suggesting that more and more be cut. Now that it has finally appeared, it is down to a measly 34 pages. Luckily the long version is still available online.

If you can't read the Synthese version because you don't have a subscription, just write me and I'll be happy to send you a copy.

This is the longest interval I've ever had between finishing a paper (2002) and the time it appeared (2009). And it's likely to be my only paper in a philosophy journal. I predict that the intelligent design community will continue to ignore all the criticisms (which have been available to them for years) and continue to pretend that CSI is actually a coherently-defined entity, and that the "law of conservation of information" holds. I predict lots of breast-beating, and excuses for not addressing our criticisms, but no response that deals forthrightly with all the errors we found in Dembski's work.

Big Surprise

Michele Bachmann, intelligent design advocate, is a pathological liar. Who would have guessed?