How STILL Not to Debate Intelligent Design (Liars for Evolution)

FOLLOW-UP STATEMENT BY WILLIAM A. DEMBSKI ON THE PUBLICATION OF ROBERT PENNOCK'S NEW BOOK WITH MIT PRESS

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.

One other thing I should mention: Bass has had at least one artlcle published in Infinite Energy Magazine that I know of, possibly more.

Infinite Energy Magazine is taken seriously. It's editor, Mallove, was one of the best and brightest at MIT who left MIT because of the manner in which cold fusion research was dealt with there. The French and Japanese, last I heard, were still spending money on this line of research, so that the first Pons-Fleischmann mobile you see will probably say Toyota or Mitsubishi on it rather than Ford or GM.

My brother occasionally attends antique car shows and auctions and tells me he's had a Stanley Steamer up to 105 mph in the Chicago area and had to shut it down for fear the old-tech tires wouldn't handle it very long; the idea of a steam-powered car isn't all that alien a thing.

It is even possible that humans are sub-minds of a much larger intelligence, but that is less likely than us being independent of a much larger intelligence in my estimation. I really like the concept that we are individual manifestations of Intelligent, Universal Consciousness - it fits a spiritual paradigm. If this is true, mental telepathy and such will become commonplace as we progress. I have experienced non-physical communication in a very limited degree but even that has no apparent explanation except for a Universal Intelligence.

There is strong evidence that telepathic communications amongst humans was common before the flood and was, in fact, the normal means of communication.

For evidence that some animals retain some of this capability, check out the story of the little African grey parrot Nkisi on Rupert Sheldrake's www site. Sheldrake is the former director of studies for cellular biology at Cambridge who you see occasionally on TV documentaries involving animal studies. He uses intelligent experiment design and statistical methodologies to study things which are normally termed paranormal. His "Seven Experiments Which Could Change the World" is also worth having. Paperback copies are around $15.

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.

I don't think that's quite what's going on in the ID camp. There is a big difference between stuffing x number of bb's into a given space so they conform to a "crystaline" structure as in diamonds, and finding bb's lined up in such a way as to spell out, in english, the method by which one builds an automated bb manufacturing plant, as in life. You are mixing "energy" and "information." ID theorists are applying the second law to information. You may or may not agree with this, but your statement of their contentions is not accurate.

There is no intrinsic difference between analog and digital hardware.

There is a huge difference between analog and digital computing. Analog computing is "instantaneous", limited only by the bandwidth of the components taken as a whole -- but no serial processing time. This is the only kind of computing that could have the performance of the brain when the components are limited to about 100 hz.

If you think of the brain as having 10s of billions of A/D converters, each with hundreds of simultaneous inputs, it'll take while to understand and mimic this complexity.

There is strong evidence that telepathic communications amongst humans was common before the flood and was, in fact, the normal means of communication.

Huh? The Bible is the source for the global flood story that most creationists beliefe (geology does not back up the Biblical contention) and the Bible does not mention mental telepathy. As a matter of fact, I can't think of any flood legends which mention mental telepathy. You've evidently been reading Madame Blavatsky or one of her minions; most of that mythology was made up from whole cloth in the late 19th century.

I find the above paragraph confusing. There is no real difference between analog and digital computing. We can make massively parallel clockless logic in silicon if we want to, but while it is arguably more efficient it is also very difficult to engineer reliable systems using it. In other words, there is no economic incentive to go there because it can't do anything that the current easy to engineer logic systems can't also do. There is nothing instantaneous about analog computing, at least not any more instantaneous than digital computing. "Digital" refers to the encoding mechanism used for transmitting information on a carrier. Regardless of the encoding mechanism, the carrier moves as fast as the carrier moves through the processor, whether transmitting digital or analog coded data.

Note that the brain is in every way slower than modern silicon. There are still plenty of software issues that can be improved on silicon, but the hardware is plenty fast (even if the software isn't up to the task in many cases). The differences in fundamental structure between the human brain and silicon makes them highly optimized for very different tasks. But whereas the human brain has a fixed computational capacity, computers are getting exponentially more powerful. Also, computers are far more capable in theory because anything the brain does can be perfectly emulated in software, while the brain cannot add any signficant new capabilities to what it already has. Electronics went from being able to add 100 numbers per second to billions per second. The human brain still can't add 100 numbers per second.

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?

This is a common misperception. In both cases you have to know the format. You have a carrier, which is the medium that you write your signal on. In electronics, this is frequently an electronic signal. Note that "analog" is used to mean different things. Information is encoded onto the signal any one of a hundred ways. Some methods are "digital", which serialize a piece of data as "bits", and some methods are "analog", which use various transforms on the carrier and similar to encode data. While it sounds like analog should carry more information ("instantaneous" values and all that), in practice they often carry much less. The reason is that analog systems are much more sensitive to noise, which causes the average information transmission rate to drop below that of digital formats in the real world. Not only that, but the faster you push the data, the worse analog systems perform. Still, at low data rates analog works pretty well.

There is a big difference between stuffing x number of bb's into a given space so they conform to a "crystaline" structure as in diamonds, and finding bb's lined up in such a way as to spell out, in english, the method by which one builds an automated bb manufacturing plant, as in life. You are mixing "energy" and "information." ID theorists are applying the second law to information. You may or may not agree with this, but your statement of their contentions is not accurate.

But there is essentially no difference between your two examples. Both are the result of endothermic processes, the ONLY difference being that one process is more complicated than the other and therefore probably requires more external energy to do its thing. Nothing in nature prevents this.

One very important thing to note though: There is NOTHING in information theory that requires a tendency towards either complexity or simplicity. In other words, the "2nd Law of Thermodynamics" doesn't apply to information theory, it only applies to Thermodynamics as the name of the bloody law implies. The derivation of the 2nd Law of thermodynamics that requires a tendency towards entropy is sourced from TRANSACTION THEORY, a different field of mathematics. The numerous attempts to apply the 2nd Law of thermodynamics to information theory are blatantly invalid, no matter how many times they try to do it.

Why couldn't it have happened naturally? Chance plays only a part in evolution -- there is a driving force which guides evolution and that is the environment. Individual mutations may arise by chance (and there is strong evidence they do) but it is the environment which determines which mutations make it into the breeding population and are thus handed down to the next generation.

I agree with everything you've said here. The question you begin with is a good one. It could have indeed happened naturally. This is the $64,000 question. Has it been demonstrated that random mutations and natural selection are capable of generating specified complexity? If it has, I am unaware of it. Dembski has said repeatedly that if it can be shown that these two mechanisms, or any set of natural mechanisms can generate specified complexity, his theory will be refuted completely.

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.

A few questions, and a few points. Why do you say that ID theory "invokes God", or says "God did it"? Intelligent design works on the premise that we have the ability to know (usually) when something is designed, and when it is not. Would you accuse an archaeologist of invoking the scribe-of-the-gaps when he finds a tablet and declares that a human intelligence created it?

Intelligent Design merely says that design, represented by specified complexity, is detectable. This is a widely known fact. Let's try and apply it to biology. Please tell me why asserting that biological complexity is the result of an intelligent designer, will stifle scientific inquiry? Would we want any less to know how this intelligent designer did it? I fail to see why we would cease to try and understand biological systems simply because we believe they have their origin in an intelligence. Isn't it odd that Newton, and the other Christian founders of science (which most were), didn't find their inquiry stifled? Upon what do you base your assertion anyway?

Finally, your last assertion states that "evolutionary theory is behind the great advances in the battles against diseases and cancer". It would be better stated that micro-evolutionary theory is beind these great advances. Speciation has nothing whatever to do with curing diseases. As has been pointed out before, no ID theorist denies that genes mutate, natural selection is a real phenomena, and that species share ancestry. Now, many ID theorists will differ in how deep said ancestry goes. Some believe in a common ancestor, others do not.

What is standard procedure when an editor is compiling a book of academic essays like this? I'm sure that, at the least, Pennock's publisher contacted Dembski's publisher, if only to find out where to send the royalty check? (Or do authors who got their essays included in a book normally get royalty checks?)

Usually, essays or chapters included in research books or text books are written upon invitation from the editor. Royalties are extrememly rare. It's considered an honor if not a time-intensive obligation to write such a chapter.

In this case, the compilation doesn't seem to be of that type, but rather a work by a single author who used previously published essays to put forth his thesis. If the copyright is held by another publisher, Pennock is under no obligation other than normal social protocol to contact Dembski.

sorry...didn't mean to send this reply to you in freepmail to clutter up your mailbox...I meant to reply in the forum. oops. That's twice I've done that today. *sigh*

Anyway...

I never claimed that natural laws must be suspended...the evolutionists claim this. Granted, creation, by a Prime Mover (Creator) is supernatural, but this is accepteable to creationists, because we are comfortable relying upon the Supernatural of a supernatural, or extranatural Being. Evolutionists of varying styles on the other hand, reject the supernatural and claim to use only naturalistic reasoning to support their views, when clearly their theories violate the first and second laws of thermodynamics...AKA...a natural law. In other words, an alleged process from disorder to high order.

According to the article..."Intelligent design refers to intelligent processes operating in nature that arrange pre-existing matter into information-rich structures"...in essence, higher order being achieved from random disorder.

What I said was that the ID theory flys in the face of, and contradicts/violates the first and second laws of thermodynamics...you know...those two pesky laws that are observed in every part of the known universe except for the various theories of evolution.

Forgive me if I am mistaken, but isn't your screen name derived from the notion that God created ex nihilo? If I am mistaken, please explain "out of nothing" in the context to which you ascribe yourself to the term...just so I understand for later.

peace

Example1: Mosquitos. Back in the 50's, we discovered DDT and began spraying mosquito infested areas with it. It was 99% effective. Several years later, the effectivity was down to about 50%. Why you ask? The mosquitos evolved. See the first applications killed 99% of the mosquitos in the area. The 1% that survived were naturally immune to it's effects - just by pure chance. Well, these 1% - being the only mosquitos left alive, mated and had little mosquitos. Since both parents were immune to DDT, the odds of the offspring being immune, due to genetics, was much higher. After several repeated sprayings, only the mosquitos capable of surviving DDT were left alive. The more they sprayed, the more immune the mosquitos became. They EVOLVED. Example2: is using anti-biotics. When pennecillin was discovered, it destoyed many, many bacteria. Today, it does not have the same effect for the same reasons I stated above. The bacteria that were immune to pennicillin survived and the ones that didn't - perished.

Both of these cases you gave ARE examples of evolution, but are NOT examples of Darwinian Evolution. The theory of evolution relates to the transmutation of species, i.e., like ocean life turning into land based life forms, which happened according to the theory of evolution.

The way that mosquitos or bacteria become immune to chemicals which used to be fatal are a result of losing the ability to metabolize the substance, through random mutations. If it's never ingested, it can't kill them. So, antibiotic resistance is an example of destructive evolution, and not an innovative, constructive process that creates complex systems.

Simply saying that random mutations can change an organism proves nothing. The creation of more complex organisms is adding new protein sequences to the DNA, and thereby adding something to an organism that it never had before. Losing a capability has nothing to do with Darwinian evolution.

No one denies that random mutations occur. That in itself is not evolution. The problems that exist for evolution theory are substantial. Intelligent Design theory is supported by many PHD's. Don't you think they're aware of something as obvious as bacteria becoming immune to antibiotics?

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