I.D. Rift Hits Baylor Again (Controversy surrounds University's Evolutionary Informatics Lab)

Baptist Press ^ | 09/05/2007 | Erin Roach

[SirLinksalot]

WACO, Texas (BP)--Baylor University officials ordered the shutdown of a personal website of one of a handful of the school's distinguished professors because of anonymous concerns that the site, hosted on the university’s server, supported Intelligent Design.

Robert Marks, distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at Baylor, launched a website called the Evolutionary Informatics Lab in June to examine whether Darwinian processes like random mutation and natural selection can generate new information.

Marks' conclusions, as explained on the website, placed limits on the scope of Darwinism and offered scientific support for Intelligent Design.

In July, a podcast interview with Marks appeared on a website run by the pro-ID Discovery Institute, and a week later Benjamin Kelley, dean of engineering at Baylor, told Marks to remove the Evolutionary Informatics website immediately.

"This is a big story, perhaps the biggest story yet of academic suppression relating to ID," William Dembski, a research professor in philosophy at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, told Baptist Press.

"Robert Marks is a world-class expert in the field of evolutionary computing, and yet the Baylor administration, without any consideration of the actual content of Marks' work at the Evolutionary Informatics Lab, decided to shut it down simply because there were anonymous complaints linking the lab to Intelligent Design," Dembski said.

Dembski himself was at the center of a controversy involving Baylor and Intelligent Design in 2000 when he was removed from his post as director of the school's Michael Polanyi Center for Complexity, Information, and Design after refusing to rescind a statement supporting Intelligent Design as a legitimate form of academic inquiry.

Lori Fogleman, director of media communications at Baylor, told Baptist Press Sept. 5 that the school's objection to the website involves standards by which something can or cannot attach its name to Baylor.

"This isn't about the content of the website. Really the issue is related to Baylor's policies and procedures of approving centers, institutes, products using the university's name," Fogleman said. "Baylor reserves the exclusive right to the use of its own name, and we're pretty jealous in the protection of that name. So it has nothing to do with the content but is all about how one goes about establishing a center, an institute, a product using the university's name."

In response to the dean's order to remove the Evolutionary Informatics website, Marks requested a meeting with Baylor legal counsel to resolve the matter. Six days before the scheduled Aug. 9 meeting, Kelley entered Marks' Baylor webspace and, without his consent, removed all references to the Evolutionary Informatics Lab, according to a timeline Dembski sent to BP.

The Aug. 9 meeting involved John Gilmore, an attorney who advised Dembski in 2000 and now represents Marks, Baylor Provost Randall O'Brien, Kelley and Baylor attorneys including Charles Beckenhauer, chief counsel for the school. Baylor officials asked that Marks add a disclaimer to his website and remove anything that could imply the lab is a Baylor initiative.

"Randall O'Brien signs off on the EIL site going back up and closes the meeting with prayer," Dembski's timeline states.

An Aug. 21 e-mail from Beckenhauer to Gilmore included what the Baylor chief counsel called his "proposed fixes" to the website, which by then existed only as a mirror site, not viewable by the general public. Gilmore responded by saying the matter had been settled at the Aug. 9 meeting with the provost and that Beckenhauer's recommendations were out of line.

On Aug. 30, Beckenhauer told Gilmore via e-mail that "there is now a long trail of information that inappropriately links independent research to the Baylor name," and he said the website issue centered on "misleading representations of your client and his collaborator (Dr. Dembski)."

Research papers that Dembski and Marks wrote jointly were on the website, and Dembski said his connection with the lab had been evident from the start.

Beckenhauer said the Aug. 9 meeting was not meant to be a final agreement, and he expressed concerns that Marks and Dembski had created a "trail of inaccuracies" that would lead people to believe Baylor had given direct support for what in reality was an independent project.

"All the circumstantial evidence points to John Lilley, Baylor's president, as being behind this effort to stamp out ID at Baylor," Dembski told Baptist Press. "The provost was at the crucial Aug. 9 meeting; the president wasn't. Lilley is the only one with the authority to overturn what the provost agreed to at that meeting."

Dembski, in comments to the Southern Baptist Texan newsjournal Sept. 4, underscored the hypersensitivity surrounding Intelligent Design in scholastic institutions these days.

"You have to understand, in the current academic climate, Intelligent Design is like leprosy or heresy in times past," he said. "To be tagged as an ID supporter is to become an academic pariah, and this holds even at so-called Christian institutions that place a premium on respectability at the expense of truth and the offense of the Gospel."

Dembski said he knows of several faculty members at Baylor who support Intelligent Design, but they are mostly younger faculty who don't have tenure and don't speak up on the topic. An old guard at Baylor, he said, supports secularization.

"John Lilley, in attempting to pacify that old guard, and perhaps because of a sense of foreboding about how Baylor might be perceived in the wider university culture if it were seen as supporting Intelligent Design or as even allowing it merely a presence, has therefore decided to come down hard against it," Dembski said.

Intelligent Design "in a sense became a poster child" of what immediate past president Robert Sloan tried to accomplish at Baylor, seeking to rescue the Baptist General Convention of Texas-affiliated school from its slide into secularization before he resigned under pressure in 2005, Dembski noted.

Aside from the hot-button issue of Intelligent Design, Dembski said the way the Baylor administration has dealt with Marks in this case is "inexcusable by any standard, certainly Christian but even secular."

"I've been at MIT, Princeton University, Notre Dame, Cornell, Northwestern and the University of Chicago, and at none of these schools have I ever have witnessed the shameful treatment that Baylor has accorded to Robert Marks," Dembski said.

"... [Marks] was a star in his department at the University of Washington in Seattle for 26 years before Baylor recruited him, and now Baylor is subjecting him to treatment that even so 'liberal' and 'secular' a place as UW would find unconscionable," Dembski added. "Yes, there are academic freedom issues here, but at this point the issue is one of plain decency."

Robert Crowther of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture told Baptist Press the institute is watching the Marks situation from an academic freedom standpoint.

"We're deeply concerned that the administration at Baylor University has really not shown any support for academic freedom or freedom of scientific inquiry in shutting down a website and a research project of one of their distinguished faculty," Crowther said. "We find that very troubling. It does show a certain trend at Baylor."

Crowther said he believes Intelligent Design has become such a controversial issue in academia because of the scientific threat it poses. The Scopes Trial should have settled the issue, he said, but discoveries since then have altered the discussion.

"What has changed is the science. We know things now and there are new discoveries being made all the time that are leading a number of scientists to not just question Darwinian evolution but to actively pursue research into Intelligent Design," Crowther said. "The thing that is driving this really is the science. We wouldn't be having the debate if there wasn't something going on in science that was causing a lot of questions to rise from most of the scientists."

[b_sharp]

"Without significant verification that bias cannot occur without intelligence then the lack of bias in a given sample does not falsify intelligent design." - b_sharp

"Incorrect. One can have bias without having Intelligent Design, in fact. Gravity will bias a system, for example (i.e. things fall down).

"It's the converse that differs. One can't have Intelligent Design without bias.

My mistake.

So:
We have natural phenomena which can produce bias.
We have intelligent designs that have to contain bias.
And we have natural phenomena which produce no bias.

I take it then that bias cannot be used to identify ID.

"That's why the lack of bias in a system falsifies ID for said system.
Emphasis mine.

What nonsense is this? You require that the ToE have an overriding falsifying criteria but you believe ID is falsifiable because you have come up with a criteria that putatively falsifies a specific case? Come on.

By your own standards given for Evolution, that a single tenet or sub theory, or even the whole theory, be falsifiable through a single criteria, give me a single falsifying criteria for ID that will falsify the theory, not just a 'system'. If you can't do that then you will have to change the conditions you impose on the ToE to match those of ID.

Is it possible for an intelligent designer to design a system without bias? If so then the lack of bias does not falsify the system as the product of an ID. Only if your ID is incapable of producing systems without bias and the procedure used to determine bias is error free and gives no false negatives is a lack of bias a falsification.

[Texas Songwriter]

This is the wrong thing to do. Science has always prided itself on open debate. it has always been its greatest strenght. It is not scientific debate which I.D. has to be fearful of, but scientific censorship. As Max Planck stated, "A new scientific truth does not triumphy by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather its opponents eventually die off, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.."

It will take several generations for a new intellectual rigor is restored. Let the debate be open, free, honest, and without vice or vitriole.

[b_sharp]

"No tenant or even sub-tenant of the Theory of Evolution has a published, peer-reviewed falsification criteria. The entire superset of ToE is unscientific, and has always been unscientific...based upon this glaring and unforgivable, inexcusable omission."

Not that I in any way agree with that statement, but:
What "published, peer-reviewed falsification criteria" does ID have? The Theory of General Relativity? Quantum mechanics? Any other theory?

Pretty much every paper published in a peer-reviewed journal includes a review of potential test results which would falsify the hypothesis being tested. This is just as true of papers in biology/geology/population genetics/genetics/genomics/paleontolgy/etc. as any other.

[b_sharp]

"Science has always prided itself on open debate"

Absolutely, as long as the debate is about science and is backed by rigorous methodology and evidence.

Anything else would open the doors to serious debate between obvious nonsense such as Astrology, which is in no way equivalent to any science and sciences such as Astronomy. There have to be constraints on what can be debated, and those constraints must be methodologically and evidence based. It is up to the ID group to show that not just the identification of design in areas where we have knowledge of the designer and his capabilities and methods, but the identification of designs where we have no knowledge of the designer, his capabilities or his methods, is science. This has yet to be done.

I suspect that even Max would question the DI's version of science.

[SirLinksalot]

Last time I checked, Electrical and Computer Engineering Professors is where I MYSELF am sure to go to get the cutting edge ideas in evolutionary biology

So many assumptions lie behind this statement that I feel some clarifications have to be made :

1) The above statement assumes that just because someone is an EE and Computing expert, this is all he will ever be and in his lifetime, and no matter how much he learns or researches, he will never learn anything about cutting edge ideas in evolutionary biology. This of course insults the intelligence of Dr. Marks and most other scientist who did not get their PH.D. in biology.

2) The above statement assumes that the lab is going to be filled *only* with electrical engineering and computing experts and no experts in biology, which of course isn't true. COLLABORATIVE EFFORTS have always been the order of the day and that was the intent of the grant.

3) The above statement makes it evident that you haven't read any of the papers produced by the Evolutionary Informatics Lab. If you had, you would realize that they fall squarely within the field of evolutionary computing, WHICH IS PROF. MARKS’S AREA OF EXPERTISE.

4) The use of the word "crank" shows your bias. Without even so much as critquing the work thus far produced, you simply throw in a loaded word as if this means something.

It is true that Baylor's administration has the right to pull the plug on any lab or study it does not deem fit... but if Dembski's description of the strange circumstances behind the withdrawal of support is true ( and I have no reason to believe it is false ), I am inclined to believe that the reason is more "political" than science related.

[allmendream]

If I were hired to teach Biology and then set up a Baylor web page expounding upon history I would be a crank. It would hardly matter if I actually had read lots of history and knew a bit of what I was talking about. I would also be stealing the imprimatur of respectability for my views by posting it under Baylor’s banner, when they did not hire me for my views on history.

It would also not help my case (of not being a crank)if I was expounding upon a view of history upon the margins of what most historians believe, some sort of historic revisionism mayhap, or a view of history that discounts historic research methods. Perhaps the actual History Department at Baylor might think I would be a crank, and not want to have Baylor’s name associated with this fringe view of History by someone not hired to teach History.

[allmendream]

“You have to understand, in the current academic climate, Intelligent Design is like leprosy or heresy in times past,” he said. “To be tagged as an ID supporter is to become an academic pariah, and this holds even at so-called Christian institutions that place a premium on respectability at the expense of truth and the offense of the Gospel.”

Dembski, in comments to the Southern Baptist Texan newsjournal Sept. 4

OFFENSE OF THE GOSPEL??? Anyone want to argue that Dembski isn’t doing biblical apologetics now? Or that ID is a Trojan horse for creationism. That quote gives the game away. What a DUMB-Ski.

[SirLinksalot]

If I were hired to teach Biology and then set up a Baylor web page expounding upon history I would be a crank.

This assumes that there is no OVERLAP between Biology and the history of biology and this again assumes that a biologist cannot gain expertise in the history of biology. I reject both assumptions. Of course, the assumption that a teacher of biology who expounds on biology is a crank ignores the fact that Zoologist Richard Dawkins presumes to lecture on morality and psychology by calling those who raise their children to believe in God akin to "child abusers" is still a "respected" Oxford professor.

It would hardly matter if I actually had read lots of history and knew a bit of what I was talking about.

Disagree. It MATTERS. Just because one has gaind expertise in one field does not mean he/she cannot gain expertise in another field, not if the fields have some overlap such as engineering and biology.

I would also be stealing the imprimatur of respectability for my views by posting it under Baylor’s banner, when they did not hire me for my views on history.

I do not question the imprimatur of Baylor. They have every right to do what they want as the administrators. I of course question the term -- respectability. This incident does the university little good in the respectability department. Maybe to you, but not to me.

It would also not help my case (of not being a crank)if I was expounding upon a view of history upon the margins of what most historians believe, some sort of historic revisionism mayhap, or a view of history that discounts historic research methods.

And you have discovered that Dr. Marks expounded on the the margins ? How ? Based on what research criteria ? Based on what evidence presented in the papers he wrote ?

Perhaps the actual History Department at Baylor might think I would be a crank, and not want to have Baylor’s name associated with this fringe view of History by someone not hired to teach History.

I would have more respect for Baylor's faculty if someone named X (not an academic historian) presented something about history that is novel and thus far unknown or thus far not recognized and the faculty members actually STUDIED his claims, his papers, his thesis and then made sound arguments based on reason and good arguments to either support or oppose Mr. X

Simply calling Mr. X a crank without so much as providing any sound, scholarly refutation of his work that can be seen and read by all does nothing to impress me, even when you are a Baylor History professor.

No wonder the majority of Americans aren't buying evolutionists. Instead of providing sound arguments to refute people like Dembski and/or Marks, you use high-handed tactics and shut down the work they do. Yeah right -- very convincing.

[SirLinksalot]

Let the debate be open, free, honest, and without vice or vitriole.

You might as well be talking to a brick wall. If people like the Iowa State Univeristy administrators ( who denied a good professor -- Guillermo Gonzales tenure ), and now Baylor U are any indication, it simply shows that there are many who will not allow this free and open honest investigation you clamor for, for fear that their personal worldview will be affected.

I may be wrong, but I suspect that money is somehow behind all this. Maybe big funder has threatened to halt research funds or take research projects elsewhere if ID is allowed to coexist with evolutionary research. We just might see this someday and if it does, I won't be surprised.

Unfortuantely, the only thing I see that will counteract this is for a well connected alumni to object to the treatment that Prof. Marks is getting.

However, as long as alumni sympathetic to Dr. Marks remain silent and continue to donate without registering any protest, this treatment of professors like him will continue.

[js1138]

ID proponents could put a rather rapid end to their persecution simply by publishing a testable hypothesis that is consistent with currently available data, and which projects data yet to be found.

One can only characterize as crank science, a conjecture that asserts an unspecified entity did something at some unspecified time using unspecified methods for unknown reasons.

It is difficult to argue against the proposition that a entity having infinite capabilities might have been the cause of everything we see. Perhaps gravity really is a manifestation of angels pushing and pulling things around. Prove otherwise.

Science, of course, does not attempt to prove otherwise. It simply asks the question, “Can we find regularities in nature that obviate the need for hypothesising demiurges having arbitrary means, methods and motives?” Anyone not asking this question is not engaging in science.

I still haven’t received an answer to my question about whether you are authorized to publish Dembski’s writings under your Freerepublic screen name. If not, you have exposed FR to possible legal consequences.

[allmendream]

How can I.D. be at once a persecuted view that is marginalized by mainstream Scientists, and yet also somehow ‘not on the fringe’ of what most Biologists believe and practice?

Try to have it both ways much?

[SirLinksalot]

A true scientist would welcome Marks’ research as an excellent opportunity to test theories and as a challenge to do better. Other responses but reflect on that person’s character.

If you looked at Prof. Marks work, he has impressive credentials and is one of the nation’s leaders in the field.
At the University of Washington, where Prof. Marks was on faculty for 26 years, he ran The Computational Intelligence Applications Lab. Prof. Marks ran it, with no approval from anybody, with Mohamed El-Sharkawi. They wrote numerous papers together and got millions in grants for this lab.

I think a music scholar (The college president, John Lilley) telling Dr. Marks what he can and can’t pursue scientifically has to be the height of presumption.

Now if as you say you want a testable hypothesis published, why not let the group that Prof. Marks leads to continue their work so that they CAN publish the results of their work ?

THEN, after they do publish their work, you can actually critique it.

You can’t call it crank science when the VERY ENDEAVOR itself ( open for all to observe and critique) is shut down from the beginning. You call it crank, I call it intellectual suppression.

Again, Is it any wonder why a vast majority of Americans don’t take Darwinism seriously ? Do yoy think supporting this suppression is going to help the Darwinist cause ? If reason and evidence are on the Darwinist’s side, what is there to fear ?

[SirLinksalot]

Baylor is a Southern Baptist university, isn’t it?

Yes it is. And now, even other universities have observed what has happened. See this report from Syracuse University's student paper :

[SirLinksalot]

I still haven’t received an answer to my question about whether you are authorized to publish Dembski’s writings under your Freerepublic screen name. If not, you have exposed FR to possible legal consequences.

Dembski's writings are on his blog site and there is not a cease and desist order to prevent others from sharing what he writes.

If there is, I'd be the first to desist.

At any rate I quote him when I copy it ( see post #1 for instance ) and DO SAY THAT IT IS HIS WORDS.

Also, there are other Evo types in FR who copy entire pages of EVO websites into FR, why don't you express similar concern ?

[SirLinksalot]

It is considered “fringe” only by people who want to call it that, not because they have provided sound empirical and reasoned refutations for it.

[allmendream]

So you maintain that it is a persecuted view, persecuted by the mainstream of Scientists, yet is also somehow not a ‘fringe’ view of those selfsame Scientists?

Actually ID isn’t even a ‘fringe’ Scientific view, it is an anti-Scientific view. Primitive man saw lightning and explained it by a Sky-god throwing mystic bolts. Reasonable man flew a kite with a key and found that it was ‘electricity’, a earthly phenomenon that could be produced and measured. Now “Intelligent Meteorologists” explain that the static charge of the atmosphere is insufficient to produce bolts of lightning without the intervention of a lighting ‘designer’.

ID gives up the ghost on common descent and the age of the earth, only to say that the system of mutational divergence and natural selection that is inherent in the system of life created by God is somehow a weak mechanism and insufficient to the task; so like a child with a poorly designed radio controlled car, he has to reach down and turn the wheel by hand.

It is piss poor theology and shoddy philosophy and it is not Science, not until you can measure the designer (HE who is beyond all measure).

[js1138]

If there is, I'd be the first to desist.

At any rate I quote him when I copy it ( see post #1 for instance ) and DO SAY THAT IT IS HIS WORDS.

Oh really?

You were challenged on the seventh post on that thread, but you never explained why you failed to provide a link or credit to the author. You have been asked many times to explain this, most recently on this very thread.

[js1138]

...so like a child with a poorly designed radio controlled car, he has to reach down and turn the wheel by hand.

Producing such wonders as E.coli, which could not have evolved stepwise via natural selection. ;)

[SirLinksalot]

You were challenged on the seventh post on that thread, but you never explained why you failed to provide a link or credit to the author. You have been asked many times to explain this, most recently on this very thread.

Simple, I forgot ( I believe I said it before ). And ever since then, I try my best to refer to Dembski or anyone else when I quote them.

Now that my explanation is given, what next ? Are you going to dredge a matter that is over a year old again ? For what purpose ? How does this prove Neo-darwinism is a better explanation to nature than intelligent design ?

My interest is in your arguments. You insist on going personal. Why is that ?

[SirLinksalot]

So you maintain that it is a persecuted view, persecuted by the mainstream of Scientists, yet is also somehow not a ‘fringe’ view of those selfsame Scientists?

Yes. One does not have to be fringe to be persecuted. The view that nature is intelligently designed is THE MAINSTREAM American View. It is mainly in academia where discussions of it or its presentation is being restricted.

To call it fringe, you will have to call the vast majority of Americans fringe.

Actually ID isn’t even a ‘fringe’ Scientific view, it is an anti-Scientific view.

HA HA HA. Making a statement and showing it are two different things. You've just made a statement, you haven't SHOWN it to be so.

Primitive man saw lightning and explained it by a Sky-god throwing mystic bolts.

Just as modern man see complexity in life and attribute it to the random arrangement of atoms.

Reasonable man flew a kite with a key and found that it was ‘electricity’, a earthly phenomenon that could be produced and measured.

Uh huh, and reasonable men like Marks are trying to determine how "evolving systems incorporate, transform, and export information" if it is indeed possible. Such things can be simulated, and probability bounds measured.

So, what's unscientific about that ?

Now “Intelligent Meteorologists” explain that the static charge of the atmosphere is insufficient to produce bolts of lightning without the intervention of a lighting ‘designer’.

Huh ? When did people like Marks, Dembski and Behe conclude that ? Is that how you argue ? Applying a thought to people who never made such claims ?

ID gives up the ghost on common descent and the age of the earth,

Actually a lot of intelligent design proponents still hold to common descent. So, you are creating a strawman here and also showing your ignorance of ID literature and arguments.

only to say that the system of mutational divergence and natural selection that is inherent in the system of life created by God is somehow a weak mechanism and insufficient to the task; so like a child with a poorly designed radio controlled car, he has to reach down and turn the wheel by hand.

Another strawman argument. ID never mentions God nor is ID interested in identifying the designer. I copied the Q&A from Discovery Institute (see post #29) PRECISELY to counter this strawman argument. It seems you don't even bother to try to understand the ideas being presented by ID proponents. You're more interested in creating a caricature.

It is piss poor theology and shoddy philosophy

Oh, and the view that matter by itself is sufficient to create human beings without intelligent input isn't shoddy philosophy right ? And and when an alternative idea comes along that promises a scientific alternative to materialistic theories of biological and cosmological evolution -- an alternative that is finding increasing theoretical and empirical support, and when its proponents try to set up a group to actually TEST this alternative idea, the materialist try their best to suppress it, it isn't considered shoddy ??

and it is not Science, not until you can measure the designer (HE who is beyond all measure).

Once again, ID IS NOT INTERESTED in IDENTIFYING or MEASURING the designer. It isn't their goal. Their main interest is DESIGN DETECTION.

Here is what ID proponents posit : "The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, and are not the result of an undirected, chance-based process such as Darwinian evolution."

Such a theory is eminently testable...

As the IDEA CENTER ( an Intelligent Design Think Tank proposes ),

You make OBSERVATIONS :

(1) Take many parts and arrange them in highly specified and complex patterns which perform a specific function.

(2) Rapidly infuse any amounts of genetic information into the biosphere, including large amounts, such that at times rapid morphological or genetic changes could occur in populations.

(3) 'Re-use parts' over-and-over in different types of organisms (design upon a common blueprint).

(4) Be said to typically NOT create completely functionless objects or parts (although we may sometimes think something is functionless, but not realize its true function).

ID even makes certain predictions (if their hypothesis is true ):

(1) High information content machine-like irreducibly complex structures will be found.

(2) Forms will be found in the fossil record that appear suddenly and without any precursors.

(3) Genes and functional parts will be re-used in different unrelated organisms.

(4) The genetic code will NOT contain much discarded genetic baggage code or functionless "junk DNA".

The above are just examples of how they intend to proceed with their study.

In other words Intelligent design proponents theorize that life is here as a result of the purposeful action of intelligent designer(s), standing in contrast to Darwinian evolution, which postulates that life exists due to the chance, purposeless, blind forces of nature.

Notice any mention of God at all ? I don't.

The fact is ID proponents (like Dembski and Marks) are working hard to focus on the merits of the ID theory. They deliberately leave preconceptions out of their description of the physical evidence. They do this not to fool anyone, but to honor science in hopes of a fair hearing. They strive to allow the theory to stand alone on its merits. Why? Precisely because they KNOW the implications of a fair hearing for ID. But even this very act of "trying" is being suppressed. That is the tragedy. I suspect that it is because scientists are also human. They don't want their worldview crashing down on them after years of work.