Posted on 01/10/2002 8:12:15 AM PST by Exnihilo
January 9, 2002: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
FOLLOW-UP STATEMENT BY WILLIAM A. DEMBSKI ON THE PUBLICATION OF ROBERT PENNOCK'S NEW BOOK WITH MIT PRESS
How STILL Not to Debate Intelligent Design By William A. Dembski
Robert Pennock has just published _Intelligent Design Creationists and Their Critics_ with MIT Press. It includes two essays by me. In a press release dated yesterday, I claimed that Pennock never contacted me about their inclusion. Pennock now claims that he did. He said. She said. Who's right?
Consider the facts. Pennock published two essays of mine in his new book: "Who's Got the Magic?" and "Intelligent Design as a Theory of Information." With regard to the second essay, did he ever in any way refer to that essay, whether directly or indirectly, in any of our correspondence prior to the release of his book? No. He never even hinted at it, and there's no way it could be said that he contacted me about its inclusion in his volume. Pennock therefore never laid out which essays of mine he intended to include.
What about the other essay, "Who's Got the Magic?" Did Pennock ever advert to that essay in any of our correspondence? In April 2001, Pennock sent an email to my colleague Paul Nelson asking him to forward it to me. Nelson did forward Pennock's message to me. I had received no email from Pennock before that date and nothing after until the publication of his book. I read Pennock's email with only two pieces of relevant background knowledge: (1) that he was putting together an anthology for MIT Press titled _Intelligent Design Creationists and Their Critics_ and (2) that my colleague Paul Nelson was a contributor to the volume and that he had been explicitly informed that he would be a contributor. My working assumption before receiving Pennock's email was that I would not be a contributor since I had not been similarly informed.
Pennock's forwarded message contained two items relevant here: (1) a short biosketch of me with a request that I correct it for inclusion in "my anthology" (no description of the anthology beyond this was mentioned -- Pennock simply assumed I knew what he was referring to) and (2) an engimatic reference to being able to "add our Meta exchange when I sent in the ms [sic]."
Regarding the biosketch, Pennock did not state that this was a contributor biosketch. With a title like _Intelligent Design Creationists and Their Critics_, I took it that Pennock was compiling a "rogues gallery" of ID proponents and simply listing me as one of the rogues. He never used the word "contributor" or anything like it to refer to me in connection with his anthology.
Regarding Pennock's reference to "our Meta exchange," he never referred to my actual essay by title. The Meta exchange comprised my piece on www.metanexus.net titled "Who's Got the Magic?" and his response there titled "The Wizards of ID." I had never signed over the copyright for "Who's Got the Magic?" to Pennock or anyone else for that matter. Was it therefore our entire exchange that he was planning to add, with copyright permissions requests (that never came) still down the road ? Or was it just his portion of the exchange and a summary of mine that he was planning to add to "the ms"? Was his mention of adding it to "the ms" a reference to the MIT anthology or to some other work? Finally, the one other ID proponent whom I knew to be a contributor to Pennock's anthology (i.e., Paul Nelson) had been explicitly contacted about being a contributor. I hadn't.
Pennock's forwarded message was ambiguous at best. Indeed, it came as a complete surprise when I learned last week that my essays were included in his volume. My surprise was not unjustified. I therefore continue to maintain that Pennock never contacted me about the inclusion of my essays in his volume. Indeed, the very fact that Pennock's one piece of communication with me was a forwarded message should give one pause. Pennock, who casts himself as the defender of scientific correctness against ID reactionaries, has been remarkable for being able to uncover obscure work of mine (cf. his previous book with MIT Press titled _Tower of Babel_).
Pennock has been following the ID movement intently for at least ten years. I'm one of the most prominent people in the ID camp. My association with Baylor University and Discovery Institute is common knowledge. Pennock could easily have contacted me directly and informed me explicitly that I was to be a contributor to the volume. Instead, he sent a letter through an intermediary. There was a hint in that forwarded letter that one paper of mine might be appearing in some mansucript, which after the fact proved to be more than a hint. But I saw no reason to give it a second thought without further clarification from Pennock -- clarification he never offered. And what about the other paper, about which there was no hint?
So much for he-said-she-said, my-word-versus-your-word. Such clarifications are needed to clear the air. But they really sidestep the central issue. By not contacting me about the inclusion of my essays in his volume, Pennock merely added insult to injury. The central issue, however, is not the insult but the injury. The injury is that Pennock situated my essays in a book that from its inception cast me and my colleagues as villains and demonized our work.
I'm still a junior scholar, early in my academic career. I don't have tenure. When my contract runs out at Baylor University, I'll have to hustle for another academic job. Under normal circumstances, I would love to have articles of mine (popular or technical) appear with prestigious academic presses like MIT Press. But the inclusion of my essays in _Intelligent Design Creationists and Their Critics_ do not constitute normal circumstances.
To fair-minded individuals in the middle with no significant stake in the controversy over Darwinism and intelligent design, I ask: Would you like your work subjected to the same treatment that Pennock and MIT Press gave to my work and that of my colleagues? If you were a feminist scholar, would you want your work to appear in a book titled _Misguided Liberationist Women and Their Critics_? If you were a Muslim scholar, would you want your work to appear in a book titled _Fanatical Believers in Allah and Their Critics_? If you were a Marxist scholar, would you want your work to appear in a book titled _Marx's Theory of Surplus Value and Other Nonsense_?
"Creationism" is a dirty word in contemporary academic culture and Pennock knows it. What's more, as a trained philosopher, Pennock knows that intelligent design is not creationism. Intelligent design refers to intelligent processes operating in nature that arrange pre-existing matter into information-rich structures. Creation refers to an agent that gives being to the material world. One can have intelligent design without creation and creation without intelligent design.
The central issue is not that Pennock and MIT Press wanted to publish my essays but that they wanted to situate them in such a way as to discredit me, my work, and that of my colleagues. When I debated Darwinist Massimo Pigliucci at the New York Academy of Sciences last November, he stated: "Any debate between creationists and evolutionists is caused by the failure of scientists to explain how science works and should in no way be construed as a genuine academic dispute whose outcome is still reasonably doubtful." Pennock would agree, though he would add that the failure is also on the part of philosophers and not just scientists.
According to Pigliucci and Pennock, intelligent design proponents are not scholars to be engaged on the intellectual merits of their case. Rather, they are charlatans to be discredited, silenced, and stopped. That's the whole point of _Intelligent Design Creationists and Their Critics_. It's not a work of scholars trying to come to terms with their differences. It's not a work attempting to bring clarity to a "genuine academic dispute." It's a work of damage control to keep unwanted ideas at bay. It's what dogmatists do when outright censorship has failed.
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File Date: 01.09.02
Is the crystaline structure of a diamond not an inherent characteristic of carbon, given certain conditions?
Yours in Truth,
Invoking God for every unexplained phenomenon has a tendency to stifle investigation into that phenomenon. Why should we strive to learn anything if the answer is "God did it, 'nuff said?" If man just blindly accepted, based on faith, that God was behind everything, we'd still believe lightning bolts and rainbows to be mystical signs from God and not the natural phenomena they really are. The same goes for evolution. Contrary to what many creationists claim modern biology is founded upon evolutionary theory. One need only pick up a copy of Scientific American to learn that evolutionary theory is behind the great advances in the battles against diseases and cancer.
I've read some of his other papers, which share much with this one. To address the problems with his paper point by point would require a paper nearly as long.
The short version is that he "proves" mathematics primarily with analogy and anecdote rather than rigorous mathematics. He misuses information theory and must only have a passing familiarity with it. The most annoying thing is that he frequently uses the "common" definition rather than the mathematical definitions of the terms used in information theory to prove his point. As you may know, many of the core terms used in information theory have mathematical meanings that in practice are quite different than the common definitions understood by most people.
Dembski basically seems to talk a very smooth pseudo-math, and capitalizes on the fact that people don't understand the difference (or that a difference even exists) between the mathematical definitions and the common definitions of the words he uses. Since he is theoretically a mathematician and could easily look up and understand information theory in detail, I can only conclude that he is being intellectually dishonest.
Now that's strange. Maybe some big multinational corporation bought them up to suppress the product to keep their own profits up. What's also strange is, this website doesn't seem to link to anything concerning Bob Bass either. It's like Bob Bass never existed! Was Bob Bass, "one of America's best mathematicians", disappeared???
However, this page on some site that has something to do with cold fusion & other, ummmm, unjustly neglected technologies, has a bunch of his emails to other people. But not their responses. Curiouser and curiouser. What happened to those other people? And why did their emails to him disappear??? I smell a conspiracy of Gribblean proportions...
'Least that's what that little van Pelt girl told me ...
I have no clue whether or not the universe is infinite, and wouldn't claim to know otherwise.
I didn't ask if you KNEW, I asked what you THOUGHT. The reason I asked is because I value your perspective. Please critique my take on this.
Life only makes sense to me if the universe is infinite. It doesn't make sense to me that "something" can originate from "nothing" - that is a clear contradiction. So, since there is something now, there must have always been something, just in different form, always going through the intelligent process of change (which we only faintly understand).
Just as numbers exist to express the principle of mathematics, we exist to express the principle of Life. Numbers are not limited by time or space - they can be manifested anywhere at anytime. Maybe also, we are not limited by time or space and can be manifested anywhere at anytime - maybe this human experience is just one of the infinite possible manifestations. Or, maybe not - but it is a lot more fun to think it is.
There is no intrinsic difference between analog and digital hardware. Both analog and digital are an information coding format. In practice, modern digital has more real world resolution. The biggest problem with interfacing with the brain is that our man-made computational hardware format (mostly-serial clocked logic) is very different than the computational hardware format of the brain. This makes it a very difficult engineering problem, though not impossible. Some very significant improvements in silicon/neuron interfacing technologies have been made in the last few years.
All the information could definitely be captured and decoded in theory. The problem is that we aren't very good at working with that type of hardware because it is so very different from what we are used to working with. The problems are slowly being worked out and eventually it will become a reality, probably sooner than later.
I once had a heated disagreement with a fellow freeper about logical fallacies. He made a point by point refutation of my usage, but on further consideration (and some cooling off) he agreed with me that while I was not following the strictest standard definitions, better ways did not exist to describe the variations I was addressing.
Yeah, the first test of finite state machinery on the human mind was done at Bell Labs by an engineer whose name I forget off the top of my head. The thing was, I believe it was originally done as a lark (you can pull minor "impossible" feats with it for fun and profit). The significance wasn't identified until much later. By "test", there are mathematical tests that can detect "finite state machine-ness". The relevant conditions and caveats can be found with the theory; it needs to be understood to really grasp the capabilities and limitations. You can't prove that something is a finite state machine; the best you can hope for is to demonstrate ad infinitum that it can't behave as anything BUT a finite state machine.
Huh? I thought digital was meaningless unless there is an agreement between sender and receiver? Analog gives information regardless of a receiver's understanding, and so is not a "coding format." Did I miss something?
You need to hang with a better crowd. Bass is about 20 years older than I am and a pure academic type; I'm more of a generalist. The only real similarity you're noticing is that both of us write intelligently.
Diamond is an unstable allotrope of carbon. In fact, diamonds will eventually decay left to their own devices, though not soon enough to bother re-writing the "diamonds are forever" line. Diamond is more structured than graphite, and has less entropy. The "specific conditions" required to create diamond from graphite are the application of energy and pressure. Without an external energy source, graphite won't become a diamond because it would be going against thermodynamics. Only local decreases of entropy are allowed, and even then only by expending much enthalpy. Biology works the same way. Under specific conditions (the application of external energy sources) biology can decrease entropy. Absent an external energy source, biology stops working.
The problem with the common argument from the creationist/ID camp is that biology can't evolve without violating thermodynamics. However, under the conditions necessarily premised for that to be true (no external energy sources), biology couldn't even survive.
Ironic isn't it? This is exactly the path being followed by ID theorists.
No, there's a certain crackpot intensity, with zany colloquial strawmanisms and compulsive parentheticals:
Bass:
G&E faked the punk-eek diagram to look something like a bush by postulating that there are hidden horizontal jumps [shown in dotted lines] which connect the vertical straight lines! In other words, the creature goes off stage to some unseen anteroom where a Goldschmidt-Schindewolf ("hopeful monster") macro-mutation takes place. (G&S admitted that an intellectually honest student of the fossil record can only postulate that "one day a reptile egg cracked open and a bird walked out.")That last bit: I wouldn't have been surprised if he continued with, ". . . and what does that bird mate with?" Really. This guy is a distinguished academic?
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