William Dembski Comes Face to Face With the Closed-Mindedness of Young Earth Creationism

Disgraced Christian Comedian Mike Warnke once upon a time referred to someone as being so narrow-minded that he “could look through a keyhole with both eyes.” That is, apparently, what William Dembski found when he attempted to engage the young earth creationism movement about some of their core claims. He has a fairly lengthy post on his own site, in which he reposts an updated interview that he did with The Best Schools.

I, and others (here, here and here), have been very critical of Dembski over the years because of his persistent misunderstanding of the basic workings of evolution.   Nonetheless, I share his consternation.  A bit back, he wrote a book titled The End of Christianity (which I am embarrassed to say I have yet to read) in which he addressed the notion of evil within a Christian context that allowed for an old earth creation. He writes:

What I was dealing with in The End of Christianity is a more narrow problem, namely, how to account for evil within a Christian framework given a reading of Genesis that allows the earth and universe to be billions, rather than merely thousands, of years old. I’m an old-earth creationist, so I accept that the earth and universe are billions of years old. Young-earth creationism, which is the more traditional view, holds that the earth is only thousands of years old.

The reason this divergence between young-earth and old-earth creationists is relevant to the problem of evil is that Christians have traditionally believed that both moral and natural evil are a consequence of the fall of humanity. But natural evil, such as animals killing and parasitizing each other, would predate the arrival of humans on the scene if the earth is old and animal life preceded them. So, how could their suffering be a consequence of human sin and the Fall? My solution is to argue that the Fall had retroactive effects in history (much as the salvation of Christ on the Cross acts not only forward in time to save people now, but also backward in time to save the Old Testament saints).

Make no mistake, Dembski still does not accept biological evolution, at least not to the level that is traditionally accepted within the scientific community.

The overall reaction he received surprised him, although in hind sight, some of it should have been predictable:

Ken Ham went ballistic on it, going around the country denouncing me as a heretic, and encouraging people to write to my theological employers to see to it that I get fired for the views I take in it.

That's the “both eyes” part.  Then he says something that I have thought for some time, and it is something that has been touched on by writers such as Mark Noll and Karl Giberson:

There’s a mentality I see prevalent in conservative Christian circles that one can never be quite conservative enough. This got me thinking about fundamentalism and the bane it is. It’s one thing to hold views passionately. It’s another to hold one particular view so dogmatically that all others may not even be discussed, or their logical consequences considered. This worries me about the future of evangelicalism.

I have seen this mentality rise within the young earth creation community. To an extent, it has always been there, in that there is, in published book after book (no scholarly articles), no possibility broached that the strict, literal reading of the Primeval History cannot be correct.  This is a serious problem within fundamentalist evangelicalism and is part and parcel of the entire problem that the movement has with any sort of reasoned academic debate.

It is also the same mentality that encourages the break with the historical church and the writings of the church fathers, to the point where many fundamentalist evangelicals are so busy trying to be evangelical that they don't know what "Christian" actually means.  One last quote from Dembski drives this point home:

Fundamentalism, as I’m using it, is not concerned with any doctrinal position, however conservative or traditional. What’s at stake is a harsh, wooden-headed attitude that not only involves knowing one is right, but refuses to listen to, learn from, or understand other Christians, to say nothing of outsiders to the faith. Fundamentalism in this sense is a brain-dead, soul-stifling attitude. I see it as a huge danger for evangelicals.

The young earth creation movement is the embodiment of this mindset.

I encourage you to read the whole interview.  He has some very damning things to say about how the fundamentalist evangelical world treated him after the book came out.

Klinghoffer Responds to the Retraction

David Klinghoffer followed up his initial post about the grasping hand paper with a post involving its inevitable retraction.  Called Censorship in Real Time, he writes:

That was fast. The sound of one hand clapping? Now, it's no hands. Besieged by a furious mob of censors, the editors at the peer-reviewed journal PLOS ONE have retracted a paper on the "architecture" of the human hand that repeatedly invoked notions of "design" and a "Creator."

This was in the works so it is not a surprise that it happened. It is true that there was a good deal of hand-waving in the process but the claims had no place in a paper of that sort. Then Klinghoffer writes this:

I must note here that the theory intelligent design does not infer a "Creator," a religious idea that goes beyond what the scientific evidence says. ID infers a source of intelligence, and leaves it to others to argue about the identity of the source.

This comment is illogical on its face and cuts to the heart of the position that the Discovery Institute has tried to take.  Something either arose by chance or it was created.  It cannot be neither.  If it did not arise by chance, which is the position of many of the DI fellows on different aspects of our anatomy (eye, blood-clotting cascade), then it was created.  If it was created, then by whom or what?  ID absolutely does infer a creator.

While it is quite true that they do their best to deflect attention away from the Christian God as the source of these creations,  it was shown pretty conclusively at Dover that the two are linked at the hip.  This is further exacerbated by public pronouncements by prominent ID proponents such as William Dembski that ID represents the Logos of John's Gospel restated in information theory (1999) as well as their preferred choice of venues for conferences.

That being said, whether or not it is the Christian God or Cosmic Muffin,  it is a “creator.” 

Is Bio-Complexity Dead?

Is the Intelligent Design journal Bio-Complexity dead?  A visit to the web site indicates that no new articles have been published in 2015, after only four in 2014.  Panda's Thumb had a review of the 2014 “issue” last December.  They were not kind.  Jeffrey Shallit wrote:

How many papers did Bio-Complexity manage to publish this year? A grand total of four! Why, that's 1/8th of a paper per member of the editorial team. By any measure, this is simply astounding productivity. They can be proud of how much they have added to the world's knowledge!

Looking a little deeper, we see that of these four, only one is labeled as a "research article". Two are "critical reviews" and one is a "critical focus". And of these four stellar contributions, one has 2 out of the 3 authors on the editorial team, two are written by members of the editorial team, leaving only one contribution having no one on the editorial team. And that one is written by Winston Ewert, who is a "senior researcher" at Robert J. Marks II's "evolutionary informatics lab". In other words, with all the ideas that ID supporters are brimming with, they couldn't manage to publish a single article by anyone not on the editorial team or directly associated with the editors.

What happened to the claim that ID creationists stand for ideas? One research article a year is not that impressive. Where are all those ideas Klinghoffer was raving about? Why can't their own flagship journal manage to publish any of them?

As 2015 draws near, don't expect that we will get any answers to these questions. Heck, not even the illustrious Robert J. Marks II can manage to respond to a simple question about information theory. 

Ouch! As I noted to my wife last night, while it is a flawed approach, even young-earth creationism can generate hypotheses for testing (That none of them pan out is, somehow lost on the supporters of this view, however).  ID cannot even generate testable hypotheses.  Despite protests to the contrary, their methodological construct violates a basic principle of science:

“Even if I can show that your hypothesis to explain something cannot be supported, that does not automatically mean that mine can.  Mine has to be independently tested.”  

ID automatically assumes that if evolutionary theory cannot explain something then it can be explained miraculously.  Aside from Howard Van Till's observation—even if it was done miraculously, no explanation is provided for exactly how it was done—as we have seen from the work of Stephen Meyer (here and here) and Michael Behe, even the science behind this work is questionable.

Other problems abound, from Douglas Axe's fundamentally mistaken idea that if you can't evolve a modern protein into another modern protein, then evolution doesn't work, despite the fact that the two proteins represent the end points of long evolutionary sequences (a somewhat more sophisticated version of Kirk Cameron's “Crocoduck” argument) to William Dembski's mathematical assumptions that incorrectly model evolutionary behavior.

Unless I miss my guess, this is the last we will see of Bio-Complexity, as it disappears into the mists of time along with Progress in Complexity, Information, and Design which ceased publication in 2005, after a short run of four years. 

HuffPo: Intelligent Design's Final Days?

The intelligent design movement has labored under the premise that its attacks on evolution are not based on religion but on solid science and that arguments that promote intelligent design have no teleological motive.  This denial of religiosity on the part of the DI led, of course, to the church of the flying spaghetti monster, a parody based on the idea that the “intelligence” that was not attributable to God could, then, be attributable to any form of intelligence.

Well, now the mask is off.  Michael Zimmerman, the founder of the Clergy Letter Project, which can be thought of as a kind of response to the Discovery Institute's Dissent From Darwin list (but not to be confused with the hilarious Project Steve list) has written a piece for the Huffington Post titled Intelligent Design's Final Days?  He believes so.  This is why:

An article in the TFN Insider points out that Faith Bible Church in the Woodlands north of Houston will host a conference this weekend that explicitly links this form of creationism to "essential Christian doctrines." This is of particular significance because the most important talking point of those who promote intelligent design is that it has absolutely no link to Christianity in particular or to religion in general.
The description of the conference is clearly at odds with this perspective.

As Zimmerman points out, this conference is being attended by the movers and shakers of the intelligent design movement, with such luminaries as John West, Stephen Meyer and William Dembski. In fact, all but one of the speakers is a Discovery Institute senior fellow, with the sole exception being Melissa Cain Travis, who has written several books for the YEC-oriented publisher Apologia.While Zimmerman is quick to say that all of the main speakers have publicly distanced ID from Christianity, it should be pointed out that in 1999, William Dembski was quoted as saying that intelligent design was “the Logos of John’s Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory” and design leader Paul Nelson has publicly accepted the YEC perspective, co-authoring a book called A Case for Young-Earth Creationism: A Zondervan Digital Short.   Therefore, when these folks say that design is irrespective of Christianity, it is with a wink and a nudge.  The designer could be anybody but really, it is God.

Nonetheless, Zimmerman is correct in his observation that this conference represents a sea change of sorts in the movement.  They have, if you will, gone from latent to blatant.  Zimmerman puts it succinctly: “All three of these intelligent design stars are now comfortable moving away from their previous position and saying what all of us have known from the beginning: intelligent design is linked to “essential Christian doctrines.”  It now becomes clear that they have been “cdesign proponentsists” all along. 

Donald Prothero Writes A Withering Review of Darwin's Doubt

On the Amazon page for the new Stephen Meyer book Darwin's Doubt, there is a review of the book by Donald Prothero, who is responsible for one of the best books on the fossil record in recent memory, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters.  Of creationists (sensu lato), he writes:

They either cannot understand the scientific meaning of many fields from genetics to paleontology to geochronology, or their bias filters out all but tiny bits of a research subject that seems to comfort them, and they ignore all the rest.
Another common tactic of creationists is credential mongering. They love to flaunt their Ph.D.'s on their book covers, giving the uninitiated the impression that they are all-purpose experts in every topic. As anyone who has earned a Ph.D. knows, the opposite is true: the doctoral degree forces you to focus on one narrow research problem for a long time, so you tend to lose your breadth of training in other sciences. Nevertheless, they flaunt their doctorates in hydrology or biochemistry, then talk about paleontology or geochronology, subjects they have zero qualification to discuss. Their Ph.D. is only relevant in the field where they have specialized training. It's comparable to asking a Ph.D. to fix your car or write a symphony--they may be smart, but they don't have the appropriate specialized training to do a competent job based on their Ph.D. alone.

This credential mongering was, of course, true with the modern progenitors of all subsequent creationist works, The Genesis Flood and Scientific Creationism, both written by Henry Morris, a hydraulic engineer with no training in any of the major earth or biological sciences.That they were accepted uncritically by masses of Christians is, to this day, astounding.  Onward.

Prothero, who is a palaeontologist, has found Meyer's book unimpressive:

Almost every page of this book is riddled by errors of fact or interpretation that could only result from someone writing in a subject way over his head, abetted by the creationist tendency to pluck facts out of context and get their meaning completely backwards. But as one of the few people in the entire creationist movement who has actually taken a few geology classes (but apparently no paleontology classes), he is their "expert" in this area, and is happy to mislead the creationist audience that knows no science at all with his slick but completely false understanding of the subject.

This is the same sort of experience I had with the abysmal Bones of Contention, written by Marvin Lubenow some years back, where every page had some sort of error on it.  I felt beaten down by the time I was finished and, despite having the best intentions of reviewing it, I never did because I couldn't stomach picking it up again.

Meyer's central focus of the book is the Cambrian "explosion," in which life seems to have proliferated and diversified during what Meyer argues is too short a time for evolution to have occurred.  After correcting Meyer's understanding of how long the Cambrian was, he addresses a persistent problem:

The mistakes and deliberate misunderstandings and misinterpretations go on and on, page after page. Meyer takes the normal scientific debates about the early conflicts about the molecular vs. morphological trees of life as evidence scientists know nothing, completely ignoring the recent consensus between these data sets. Like all creationists, he completely misinterprets the Eldredge and Gould punctuated equilibrium model and claims that they are arguing that evolution doesn't occur--when both Gould and Eldredge have clearly explained many times (which he never cites) why their ideas are compatible with Neo-Darwinism and not any kind of support for any form of creationism.

It is immensely disappointing to see this kind of problem over and over in ID writings. This example is similar to the lack of understanding of natural selection and adaptive valleys and peaks that William Dembski exhibits in his writings.  He seems to make the same errors consistently to the point where people don't even comment on what he has written because he won't address any of the criticisms. This is common of most ID writers.  I am currently piecing through Science and Human Origins by Luskin, Axe and Gauger and am encountering the same errors that I took Casey Luskin to task for three years ago.

You should read the whole review in all of its caustic glory.  I will probably get around to reading it but have too many other things to read right now. 

Gonzalez Won't Teach ID

Guillermo Gonzalez has made a public attestation that he will not teach intelligent design at Ball State University.  As the Muncie Star Press reports:

Gonzalez, who was hired by BSU this summer as an assistant professor in the department of physics and astronomy, is best known for his advocacy of intelligent design.

“As I communicated to members of the department during my interviews, I plan to continue my research on astrobiology and stellar astrophysics,” Gonzalez said in a statement issued this week.

The statement reported that he will not be discussing intelligent design in the classroom, and that he did not discuss intelligent design when he taught at Iowa State University, either

That may not be enough to soothe folks like Coyne and Harris but it is a huge step forward to placate the faculty at Ball State, I am sure. It is important for him to distance himself from the modern ID movement in this sense and for them to understand that. The anti-science comments made by the faculty at Iowa State are not without merit.

It is one thing for ID supporters to believe that the universe is created and guided by an intelligence. It is another for modern ID supporters to, having no theoretical constructs of their own, take pot shots at organized science in support of their ideas.  At least "mainstream" creationism, warts and all, has a testable framework. You can test the hypothesis "the earth was created six-thousand years ago." That's easy. Trying to test the hypothesis "God created the heavens and the earth," That's hard.  Add to that the fact that the public face of ID as purveyed by people like David Klinghoffer, Cornelius Hunter, William Dembski and David Berlinski is rabidly "anti-Darwinian," and you have a science credibility problem.  Gonzalez is wise to stay well away from that. 

Feedback!

I am reminded of that fantastic section of Emerson, Lake and Palmer's live version of Aquatarkus where Greg Lake channels feedback through his bass into the speakers (at the 19:02 mark). As Panda's Thumb notes, it seems that the Discovery Institute, after years of negative press about the fact that they don't allow feedback on their hit pieces, are testing the waters. I am not optimistic. A year back, I found a piece by Cornelius Hunter to be incorrect in places. How was I able to voice this? I had to write the PR guy and lawyer Casey Luskin, who then relayed the message to Dr. Hunter, who then wrote me a very arrogant and condescending message. After debating whether or not to answer it and fearing I would write something that I would later regret, I just walked away. Let's see what Wesley Elsbury writes:

Discovery Institute Senior Fellow William Dembski’s weblog, “Uncommon Descent”, has comments enabled, but the moderation there is generally so ham-fisted that only a few voices of dissent have lasted more than a week or two. The various inconsistencies of moderation and proclivity to stifle dissent have their own thread at “After the Bar Closes”., and discussion of content at UD has occupied three long-running threads ([1], [2], and [3]).

For a reminder of one particularly bad exchange, a read of Pharyngula's account is instructive. We shall see what we shall see.

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Dembski/Hitchens Debate

Christopher Hitchens, who is battling esophageal cancer, and William Dembski will debate whether or not God is good at Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, TX on November 18. Here is the blurb in the campus newspaper from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. It reads, in part:

Dembski and Hitchens will debate the existence of a good God during a conference for the Biblical Worldview Institute at Prestonwood Christian Academy in Plano, Texas. The debate will be hosted in the worship center at Prestonwood Baptist Church from 8:40 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. It will also be webcast on www.pcawebcast.com.

I hope that Dembski can go toe to toe with Hitchens but given his reluctance to defend his own research from criticisms, I fear the worst.

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Complexity Can Evolve Without High Cost

Was R.A. Fisher wrong? It has always been thought that with complexity comes a general lack of evolutionary adaptability. The consensus about human evolution is that early primates were able to exploit their environments because they had a generalized bauplan and could adapt to whatever came down the road. This was true from the teeth to the skeletal structure. Now, in an article for Phys.Org, research by Jianzhi "George" Zhang and colleagues has challenged the idea that the evolution of complexity carries a high cost:

When Fisher first wrote about the cost of complexity, he argued that random mutations---which, along with natural selection, drive evolution---are more likely to benefit simple organisms than complex organisms.

"Think of a hammer and a microscope," Zhang said. "One is complex, one is simple. If you change the length of an arbitrary component of the system by an inch, for example, you're more likely to break the microscope than the hammer."

Looking at pleiotropy, the idea that individual genes can affect a range of traits, the authors found something surprising:

For simplicity, mathematical models of pleiotropy have assumed that all genes in an organism affect all of its traits to some extent. But Zhang's group found that most genes affect only a small number of traits, while relatively few genes affect large numbers of traits.

What's more, they found a "modular" pattern of organization, with genes and traits grouped into sets. Genes in a particular set affect a particular group of traits, but not traits in other groups.

In addition, the researchers learned that the more traits a gene affects, the stronger its effect on each trait.

And how does this relate to the topic of this blog? The author writes:

The new findings help buffer evolutionary biology against the criticisms of intelligent design proponents, Zhang said. "The evolution of complexity is one thing that they often target. Admittedly, there were some theoretical difficulties in explaining the evolution of complexity because of the notion of the cost of complexity, but with our findings these difficulties are now removed."

One of the general complaints that has been made against those who espouse ID is that there is either a persistently simplistic model of evolution employed or an incorrect one. Recent works by Michael Behe, William Dembski and Stephen Meyer have focused on the presumed inability of evolutionary models to account for "specified complexity." They also make the specious argument that there can never be an increase in information under these models. Studies like these, which operate out of a predictive model, show otherwise.

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Forthcoming Book by Dembski and O'Leary Takes Aim at Theistic Evolution

William Dembski and Denys O'Leary are releasing a book called Christian Darwinism: Why Theistic Evolution Fails As Science and Theology. The PR announcement from O'Leary, at Uncommon Descent, starts thus:

In Christian Darwinism: Why Theistic Evolution Fails As Science and Theology (Broadman and Holman, November 2011), mathematician Dembski and journalist O’Leary address a powerful new trend to accommodate Christianity with atheist materialism, via acceptance of Darwinian (“survival of the fittest”) evolution.

I sure hope the book is better than that opening paragraph. It is not clear to me that Denys O'Leary understands science and the scientific enterprise at all. The implication in this paragraph is that evolution=atheistic materialism. How did a biological process manage to become synonymous with atheistic materialism? This is only the case if you don't understand evolution. Dembski has demonstrated repeatedly that he does not (here, here and here). She continues:

Dembski and O’Leary insist that this conflict has nothing to do with the age of the Earth. Darwinism is, as they will show, the increasingly implausible creation story of atheism, which diverges at just about every point from the Christian worldview on which modern science was founded.

I need to read the book before I make wholesale interpretations but if it is what she is painting it to be, it is yet another of the myriad of straw men coming out of the Discovery Institute that strive to link evolutionary theory with atheism and every sort of evil that has seen the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This is little different from the attacks on evolution by Henry Morris, who blamed it for all immoral activity on the globe—despite the fact that such activity dates from biblical times. Abraham, after all, didn't say to God "But LORD, surely I can find ten people that don't believe in evolution in those two towns!"

As long as attention can be deflected away from the status that evolution holds as a scientific theory, the anemic attempts to attack it on those grounds can be hidden. She ends this way:

Reactions – not only praise but criticism – are expected and much appreciated! Regular updates will be provided at www.uncommondescent.com, so persons who wish to comment on the project can post there.

This would represent a sizable change in policy for these guys. The Discovery Institute, as I and others have noted, does not publish the email addresses of its fellows and does not provide an avenue for comments. UC does, but only in limited fashion, as this experience with William Dembski shows. My suspicion is that they would only publish positive comments and treat any negative comment, no matter how substantive as being from a troll.

By the way, while it is customary for an author to plug an upcoming book, it is not common to phrase it in the context of a review and to do so this glowingly. That is, at least, conflict of interest. Further, to do it in the third person, as O'Leary does here is pretentious.

Something else to put on my reading list.

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BIO-Complexity: A New Journal

The Discovery Institute is promoting a new peer-reviewed journal, BIO-Complexity, which is funded by the Biologic Institute, an arm of the Center for Science and Culture. Here is the mission statement:

BIO-Complexity is a peer-reviewed scientific journal with a unique goal. It aims to be the leading forum for testing the scientific merit of the claim that intelligent design (ID) is a credible explanation for life. Because questions having to do with the role and origin of information in living systems are at the heart of the scientific controversy over ID, these topics—viewed from all angles and perspectives—are central to the journal's scope.

Jay Richards has written a story about the new journal on the Discovery Institute's main site in which, along the way, they commit another terminological inexactitude.One of the major complaints voiced by those espousing ID is that they cannot get heard. Richards claims that the peer review process is a Catch-22 because, while an article has to face review and revision, if it has a hint of "design" it is rejected. He writes:

But surely, you might ask, there’s an open-minded editor at some journal somewhere who would give ID a fair shake? I do know of one such editor, Richard Sternberg, who several years ago sent out for review an article by some guy defending a design perspective and then, when the article passed peer-review, Sternberg published it. If there are any remaining open-minded editors willing to send out similar articles for peer-review, the Sternberg affair reminds them what will happen if they do.

This account is wholly and completely false. Here, in fact, is what happened.

• Stephen Meyer (some guy) wrote a paper on the Cambrian Explosion called The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories, which showed up in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington in 2004. The paper was reviewed quite negatively in many places, Panda's Thumb being one, the Paleontological Association being another.
  
• Richard Sternberg handled the entire editorial process himself. He claims that he sent the paper out to several individuals to read but has never identified who these people were.
• A statement issued by the Council of the Biological Society of Washington, the publishers of the journal states that the paper never would have made it through the review process had it been done so correctly. It reads:

  The Council, which includes officers, elected councilors, and past presidents, and the associate editors would have deemed the paper inappropriate for the pages of the Proceedings because the subject matter represents such a significant departure from the nearly purely systematic content for which this journal has been known throughout its 122-year history.

  
  
• The paper was withdrawn subsequent to publication when it was pointed out that the quality of the science was unacceptable.
  

Following the Sternberg affair, the American Association for the Advancement of Science issued a statement on Intelligent Design. All the Sternberg affair should tell prospective article writers is what happens when the proper procedures for peer review aren't followed. The whole publication of the article has the appearance of having been done "under the table." It is not encouraging that a writer for the Discovery Institute cannot get the basic facts right regarding so prominent an incident.

Beyond this, however, there is a further, perhaps deeper problem inherent in this whole endeavor. Much of Richards' post (and indeed much of the writings of most ID supporters) laments the fact that intelligent design cannot get a "fair shake" in the academic community as a whole and that, with the advent of this new journal, things will be different.

Why, then, is the editorial board composed almost entirely of Discovery Institute fellows or people that are already known to be sympathetic to the intelligent design argument? The editorial board for the journal consists of thirty individuals. This list includes Michael Behe (Darwin's Black Box, The Edge of Evolution), Scott Minnich, William Dembski (No Free Lunch), Richard Sternberg, Robert Marks, Jonathan Wells (Icons of Evolution) and Douglas Axe to name a few.

This is how the review process is set up:

Manuscripts submitted as Research Articles or Critical Reviews that fall within the stated scope and adhere to the journal's standards of originality, clarity, format, and tone are assigned to a member of the Editorial Board for peer review. Two or more reviewers will be consulted for each reviewed manuscript. Authors are encouraged to suggest suitable reviewers, though the Editor may elect to use other reviewers.

Now here's the real catch-22 situation: in order to gain much needed credibility, the BIO-Complexity editorial board must employ reviewers that are well-known in the biological community and can competently vet (or not) a given paper. Without this assurance, the scientific community will have no way of knowing how any given ID-supportive paper was reviewed and no credibility will have been gained. This is exacerbated by the fact that the Discovery Institute does not have a good track record in published literature supporting intelligent design.

To give up the identity of the reviewers, on the other hand, compromises the "anonymous reviewer" aspect of the process. Compounding this might be the reluctance of many well-respected biologists to want to be known as having reviewed an ID-supportive paper.

This was all gone about the wrong way. One way that this could have worked is if an isolated researcher without ties to the Discovery Institute decided to start a new biocomplexity journal and recruited known experts in the field. Then, and only then, could papers be submitted in an impartial way and only then would ID stand on its own merits. The way BIO-Complexity is currently set up, with a heavily pro-ID editorial board, it already looks like the fix is in.

What would they do with a paper that is sent out to an anonymous reviewer who tears it up? The only paper in recent memory other than the Meyer 2004 paper that has attempted to support intelligent design in an academic setting is the Dembski/Marks paper from a few months back which was criticized (here and here) as having little bearing on biological systems and mathematically unsound.

The only other way that this would work is if competent scholars in biological complexity were to submit papers. Then the journal would probably get a wide variety of papers, some supportive of ID (maybe) and some not. Even if some of them were not supportive, though, the board would be foolish not to publish them. If it only accepted ID friendly papers which were then reviewed by the biological community as a whole and found wanting, it would be another nail in the coffin for the scientific argument for ID.

The Discovery Institute have set themselves up a huge task here and are finally putting their cards on the table. Lets see what kind of hand they have.

William Dembski "Admits" to Something We Pretty Much Already Knew

Ed Brayton of Dispatches from the Culture Wars has called William Dembski on the carpet for being a creationist. The problem is that we have known all along that William Dembski is a creationist. He just hasn't admitted it until now. The Discovery Institute tried valiantly to disassociate itself from the term "creationism" some years back. John West wrote in 2002:

Scientists and scholars supportive of intelligent design do not describe themselves as "intelligent design creationists." Indeed, intelligent design scholars do not regard intelligent design theory as a form of creationism. Therefore to employ the term "intelligent design creationism" is inaccurate, inappropriate, and tendentious, especially on the part of scholars and journalists who are striving to be fair. "Intelligent design creationism" is not a neutral description of intelligent design theory. It is a polemical label created for rhetorical purposes. "Intelligent design" is the proper neutral description of the theory.

As Barbara Forrest has shown in devastating fashion, however, this may be true figuratively but is not true practically. About William Dembski, she writes this:

Dembski contends that ID proponents must “engage the secular world, reproving, rebuking, and exhorting it, pointing to the truth of Christianity and producing strong arguments and valid criticisms that show where secularism has missed the mark” (quoted in Forrest and Gross, 2005, 200).

Brayton points out that Dembski complained bitterly about being labeled a creationist by Robert Pennock, and it is not clear in what sense Pennock meant "creationist." Dembski has stated on many occasions (here and here, for example) that, in terms of the age of the earth, ID has no horse in the race and that he is not a creationist. Imagine everyone's surprise when he took off the mask and said "I am a creationist":

Johnny T. Helms' concerns about my book THE END OF CHRISTIANITY as well as his concerns about my role as a seminary professor in the SBC are unfounded. I subscribe to the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 as well as the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy. I believe Adam and Eve were literal historical persons specially created by God. I am not, as he claims, a theistic evolutionist. Within the Southern Baptist seminaries, both old-earth and young-earth creationism are accepted positions. True, young-earth creationism remains the majority view in the SBC, but it is not a litmus test for Christian orthodoxy within the SBC. I'm an old-earth creationist and the two SBC seminaries at which I've taught (Southern in Louisville and Southwestern in Ft. Worth) both were fully apprised of my views here in hiring me.

I don't have a problem with Dembski being a creationist. It is also perfectly fine to stand up and say "I am a Christian!" I am also a creationist. I just happen to be a old-earth theistic evolutionist as well. That's not the problem. The problem is that many within the ID camp want to claim that ID has absolutely nothing to do with belief in God but is amenable to the pursuit of science by itself. The public agenda of those promoting ID, however, is very bent on linking it with Christianity. Dembski himself has said:

Intelligent design, on the other hand, readily embraces the sacramental nature of physical reality. Indeed, intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John’s Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory." - quoted from Dembski, W., A., Kushiner, James M., (editors), Signs of Intelligence: Understanding Intelligent Design, Brazos Press, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2001.

The long and glorious history of the Wedge Document also belies the "neutral description" of the activities of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and culture. Contrast that with the quote that began this post. It is this air of deception that makes people think twice about the whole enterprise.

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Darrel Falk Reviews Signature in the Cell

Darrel Falk of the BioLogos Foundation has also read Stephen Meyer's Signature in the Cell. He strongly recommends the book on philosophical and theological grounds, arguing that Meyer has crafted a very readable book that addresses the philosophical nature of science and the scientific enterprise. Then the other shoe drops:

There is no question that large amounts information have been created by materialistic forces over the past several hundred million years. Meyer dismisses this without discussing it. What about at the very beginning, 3.5 billion years ago? Everyone doing the science, Meyer notwithstanding, would say the jury is still out. There are some very elegant feasibility experiments going on at the present time. However, it is far too early for a philosopher to jump into the fray and declare no further progress will be made and that this science is now dead. If the object of the book is to show that the Intelligent Design movement is a scientific movement, it has not succeeded. In fact, what it has succeeded in showing is that it is a popular movement grounded primarily in the hopes and dreams of those in philosophy, in religion, and especially those in the general public. With all due respect for the very fine people associated with the ID movement, many of whom I have met personally and whose sincerity I greatly appreciate, our hopes and dreams need to be much bigger than this. The science of origins is not the failure it is purported to be. It is just science moving along as science does—one step at a time. Let it be.

Indeed. It is indicative of the whole debate around ID that the debate is carried out in the public arena rather than the halls of science. Books like Meyer's are geared to the general public, not to the scientific community. William Dembski has, additionally, argued that by publishing books instead of articles, he can reach a broader audience. Maybe so, but he circumvents the review process when doing this, thus robbing ID of a much-needed credibility that it desperately needs.

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More Problems for the Dembski/Marks Paper

The Metropolis Sample takes the most recent swipe at the Dembski/Marks paper here. The paper is extraordinarily mathematical (imagine that!) and way over my pay grade, but the conclusions are clear:

The fundamental lesson here is that the Dembski-Marks approach to evaluating model assumptions is both arbitrary and a poor reflection of scientific reasoning. Model assumptions are not accepted or rejected based on a numerical measure of how many logical possibilities that are ruled out or how far probability distributions deviate from uniform measures. Rather, model assumptions are accepted or rejected based on predictive and descriptive accuracy, domain of applicability, ability to unify existing models and empirical knowledge, and so on. Merely talking about target sets requires assumptions that impose structure on the search space and processes related to it. Dembski and Marks (2009a) mention “a simple self-replicating molecule, an autocatalytic set, or a lipid membrane” as examples of biological targets. However, these chemical concepts presuppose model assumptions from physics, chemistry and biochemistry and they could hardly be independent of the chemical processes by which they are thought to arise.

As others have stated, Dembski and Marks do not understand how biological systems operate and how selection operates. This hampers their ability to correctly model a biosphere.

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Casey Luskin, Darwin's Dilemma and the First Amendment

Casey Luskin has a piece on the "brouhaha" that has erupted over the canceled presentation of the ID-promoting film Darwin's Dilemma at the California Science Center, which is affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution. He makes a case that the "Darwinian Thought Police" swooped in and made such a stink that the center canceled the event.

In the process of giving us some background, Luskin tells us what, at this point, can only be called a lie about the Cambrian explosion. He writes this:

There are two ways that modern evolutionists approach the Cambrian explosion, or what has been called “Darwin’s dilemma”:

A. Some freely acknowledge that the Cambrian fossil evidence essentially shows the opposite of what was expected under neo-Darwinian evolution.

B. Others deal with the Cambrian explosion by sweeping its problems under the rug and trying to change the subject.

Succumbing to pressure from Darwinian elites, the California Science Center chose option B.

If Luskin had done any research about the Cambrian explosion, he would know that this isn't true. I have posted about that here, and here. There is also a good post at Pharyngula about it. P.Z. Myers characterizes it thus:

But another important lesson, and one that creationists like to hide, is that while this was a sudden event in a geological sense, it wasn't actually all that rapid in human terms. The evolution of the canonical Cambrian forms was drawn out over tens of millions of years. They didn't just come out of nowhere, either; while individual lineages are cryptic, we see a slow aggregate increase in the complexity of multicellular animals in the fossil record that culminated in the flowering of large-animal diversity in the Cambrian.

I've had many creationists try to use the Argument from the Cambrian Explosion as a fait accompli against evolution (most recently, just this week). It's actually an argument from ignorance, though, since the data certainly does not fit a sudden creation by divine or alien fiat. It does fit with the idea of the appearance of these animals as a product of prior history, though…even though there are many mysteries about the details, the big picture does not require miracles or the supernatural.

To put this time-frame into perspective, humans weren't even on the planet ten million years ago.

So, this little fact sort of hits Luskin's credibility while he is trying to make his impassioned plea. Onward. About the Smithsonian, he writes:

The California Science Center is affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution, which has a long history of opposing academic freedom for ID.

In 2004, a pro-ID peer-reviewed scientific article authored by Stephen Meyer was published in a Smithsonian-affiliated biology journal. Once the Biological Society of Washington (BSW) realized it had published a pro-ID paper, it repudiated Meyer’s article, alleging the paper “does not meet the scientific standards of the Proceedings.” Of course the BSW cited no factual errors in the paper; they just didn’t like Meyer’s conclusions.

Well, no that's quite right either. This has since become known as the "Sternberg Peer-Review Controversy," and was featured in the movie Expelled! as an instance of academic censorship. The paper by Meyer was called The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories¹ and was, according to Sternberg, peer-reviewed by himself and three other reviewers, although he has never identified who they were. A statement was released by the Council of the Biological Society of Washington disavowing the paper and its contents. Subsequently, it was criticized by a number of authors, one of which was Robert Weitzel, who argued that Meyer had improperly made use of William Dembski's specified complexity, a concept that has been roundly criticized (recently, in fact) as being both inappropriate for biological systems (here and here) and for being mathematically fuzzy. Common speculation is that Meyer's article would have not made it through the first round of review had it undergone the normal peer-review process. I have read this article. Like the recent Dembski/Marks article on specified complexity, it makes unwarranted conclusions about the nature of the data. Luskin is absolutely correct that they didn't like the conclusions of the paper. Unfortunately, he completely mischaracterizes why.

Luskin continues:

The story picks up in 2006, when a congressional staff investigation found that "Smithsonian's top officials permit[ted] the demotion and harassment of [a] scientist skeptical of Darwinian evolution.” The persecuted scientist was Smithsonian research biologist Richard Sternberg, who experienced retaliation for overseeing the publication of Meyer’s paper.

As the NCSE documents show, Sternberg was neither demoted nor harassed in this incident. He was an unpaid editor who resigned from his job six months before the publication of the article. As for ruination, his research associates position was renewed in 2006 for three more years.

For the rest of the article, Luskin asks why the center reneged on its promise and squelched freedom of speech. Interestingly, throughout the article, he never once mentions the event that might have triggered the reaction in the first place: the Dover/Kitzmiller trial. At the end of the trial, which was nothing short of disastrous for Team Intelligent Design, presiding Judge Jones addressed the concept of ID in the context of religious thought. Citing theologian John Haught, Judge Jones wrote:

Dr. Haught testified that this argument for the existence of God was advanced early in the 19th century by Reverend Paley and defense expert witnesses Behe and Minnich admitted that their argument for ID based on the “purposeful arrangement of parts” is the same one that Paley made for design. (9:7-8 (Haught); Trial Tr. vol. 23, Behe Test., 55-57, Oct. 19, 2005; Trial Tr. vol. 38, Minnich Test., 44, Nov. 4, 2005).The only apparent difference between the argument made by Paley and the argument for ID, as expressed by defense expert witnesses Behe and Minnich, is that ID’s “official position” does not acknowledge that the designer is God. However, as Dr. Haught testified, anyone familiar with Western religious thought would immediately make the association that the tactically unnamed designer is God, as the description of the designer in Of Pandas and People (hereinafter “Pandas”) is a “master intellect,” strongly suggesting a supernatural deity as opposed to any intelligent actor known to exist in the natural world. (P-11 at 85). Moreover, it is notable that both Professors Behe and Minnich admitted their personal view is that the designer is God and Professor Minnich testified that he understands many leading advocates of ID to believe the designer to be God. (21:90 (Behe); 38:36-38 (Minnich)).

Although proponents of the IDM occasionally suggest that the designer could be a space alien or a time-traveling cell biologist, no serious alternative to God as the designer has been proposed by members of the IDM, including Defendants’ expert witnesses. (20:102-03 (Behe)). In fact, an explicit concession that the intelligent designer works outside the laws of nature and science and a direct reference to religion is Pandas’ rhetorical statement, “what kind of intelligent agent was it [the designer]” and answer: “On its own science cannot answer this question. It must leave it to religion and philosophy.” (P-11 at 7; 9:13-14 (Haught)).

Further, William Dembski has stated that Intelligent Design "is just the Logos of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory."²

Therefore, the decision to not show the ID film Darwin's Dilemma might just as easily be seen as adhering to the First Amendment by not showing a film that is clearly religiously-based. It is certainly this fact that led to the protests in the first place.

CSC did not help itself in the matter by issuing no formal press release about the cancellation (at least none that I could find) although Jeff Rudolph, head of the center stated that the cancellation had to do with "contract issues, an argument that is echoed by Doc Bill over at antievolution.org (although you have to read around the sarcasm).

Either way, it is clear that this likely does not reflect a case of suppressing academic freedom as much as a case of the center acting prudently or in line with their signed contract. Luskin has blown this up way out of proportion and, in the process carefully bent the truth to suit the Discovery Institute's purposes.

¹Meyer, Stephen C. (2004) The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories. Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington vol. 117, no. 2, pp. 213-239

²William A. Dembski, (1999) Signs of Intelligence: A Primer on the Discernment of Intelligent Design, Touchstone, July-August, 84.

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