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
Good point. Calculus was invented by Wilhelm Von Leibniz, a devout Christian. I think he may have been a Lutheran minister. He was attempting to understand how the universe is structured, i.e., he believed that all creation is composed of huge numbers of discrete pieces. This involved not just matter but motion, time, etc. Because these pieces (he came with some term for them) were so huge in number, everything appears to be continuous. Calculus of course adds together infinite numbers of diffential pieces of things.
PMFJI, but three words: vertebrate blood clotting.
The genes involved in blood clotting have been shown to be closely related to a smaller number of genes in the distant ancestor species (information increase), and the functional steps from the original pancreatic enzyme to the current refined, multistep self-catalyzing process (specified complexity) are plausible (not IC). And the theory has survived an attempt at falsification from Behe intact.
I saw a documentary on diamonds recently. They heated up a diamond with a blowtorch, then dropped it into water. The diamond burst into flame, danced around the water surface, & then disappeared! YEOW!
The forces behind the ID movement certainly hope people think it does.
... This rigid scientific materialism infected all other areas of human knowledge, laying the foundations for much of modern psychology, sociology, economics, and political science. Yet today new developments in biology, physiscs, and artificial intelligence are raising serious doubts about scientific materialism and re-opening the case for the supernatural. ...
Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture, ca. 5/1997
Because otherwise the ID theory falls into a logical trap. If the biodiversity around us was not created by a supernatural (outside nature) being, heretofore known as "God" it must have been created by a natural being, heretofore known as "Nate." Nate must have come from somewhere; he either came from "God" (so why have a middleman and not just say God did it?), another natural being (ad infinitum -- but somewhere an original natural being had to arise, either through the actions of God or naturally), or he arose naturally. Now, if Nate or any of his predecessors arose naturally, why couldn't the biodiversity of Earth? So, the "Intelligence" in ID boils down simply to "God."
Intelligent design works on the premise that we have the ability to know (usually) when something is designed, and when it is not.
Do we? Crystals have regular symmetrical structures. In general regular structures have a tendency to be artificial ("there are no straight lines in nature," et al), so therefore crystals are artificial, right? DNA is a hodge podge of "information" some of which is no longer used (you don't have a tail, yet the DNA coding for a tail still exists and an occasional mutation activates this coding from time to time). Crystals look far more artificial than DNA does.
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?
The tablet usually does not consist of random words or sentence fragments interspersed among random letters. Some natural phenomenon have been mistaken in the past for artificial phenomena. For example, the metallic spheres found around extinct and active volcanos were once thought to be man-made. Now they are known to be created by the volcanos themselves. The human brain often sees order where there is none. The most common example of this is seeing faces in rocks or clouds. There is name for this phenomenon, but unfortunately it skips my mind at the moment.
Intelligent Design merely says that design, represented by specified complexity, is detectable. This is a widely known fact.
Says who? What is this "specified complexity" beyond which everything is artificial? Natural substances behave in complex manners under certain conditions (liquid helium flows uphill, electrons can cross move room point A to point B without crossing the intervening space, etc.). Any threshold of complexity beyond which one declares everything to be artificial is, perforce, arbitrary.
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?
Upon the historical reaction of religious authorities to scientific inquiry. Galileo was not the first persecuted for his research; Copernicus was roundly denounced for his heliocentric view of the universe. The heliocentric theory was far better at modelling planetary motion, including the retrograde movement of some planets than the church-accepted geocentric model. The church's proclamation that the Bible explicitly states God placed the Sun and Moon (the greater and lesser lights of Genesis) in the heavens, which the Bible also states are "above" the Earth specifically indicates the Earth is the center of everything, therefore, "God did it, 'nuff said." Copernicus, Galileo, et al did their research in spite of, not because of, church doctrine. Newton came along a century later when a lot of the old church-mandated paradigms were collapsing. Eventually, the modern heirs of the church will come to accept that evolution is as tried and true as the heliocentric model and biological inquiry will not be tarred with the "anti-Christian" brush any longer.
Where is the magic cutoff between micro-evolution and macro-evolution? Where do the accumulation of mutations suddenly stop and not allow the crossing of species lines? Or, if you are one to accept speciation, why cannot the accumulation of mutations in the daughter species continue to move those daughter and granddaughter species further and further apart, eventually leading to different genuses (geni?). If we go back far enough, why can't the accumulations of mutations not even lead to different kingdoms in the great (to the nth power) granddaughter species?
Huh? Darwin simply said species change in response to their environments. And that is what happened to the mosquitos in question. Similar mechanisms could account for life moving from sea to land; it wouldn't have happened in a generation, or even in several generations, but life would slowly have adapted to life out of water. For instance, paleontological evidence shows that legs developed among fully aquatic animals to facilitate movement in plant-filled shallow water. Because they were living in shallow waters, such critters may have left the water for short periods to escape preadation (much like flying fish do today). Lungs, which also developed among aquatic critters, would have facilitated the animal staying out of water for longer and longer periods of time. It is quite easy to postulate a gradual move by animals from sea to land and voila! The fossil record pretty much backs this up.
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.
I was not attacking steam-powered cars. Why do you even inject this?
Steam cars are perfectly feasible but not particularly competitive with later technologies, compared to which they are inefficient and dangerous. Just for one thing, no matter what you heat the water with, you have to carry a lot of water or make lots of stops for same.
Your brother wasn't just risking a wreck. He might have learned something about steam burns had he popped a gasket. (Assuming Stanleys even had gaskets.)
Steam cars are not so much alien as anachronistic.
No, he didn't simply say species change in response to their environments. He said they evolve in the direction of greater complexity. This is a totally different statement than simply saying that they change. The mutations of the mosquitos and bacteria were not adding complexity. If anything, they reduced it, but not in a way that reduced their survivability. That's known as destructive evolution, which has nothing to do with constructive evolution.
A small number of the mosquitos and bacteria probably already possessed the mutation that makes them immune, before the invention of DDT and antibiotics. Naturally, after each application, they constituted a higher percentage of the survivors, and they will succeed in reproducing by virtue of surviving. Eventually, virtually all have the mutation. This has nothing to do with something acquiring more complex characteristics and evolving into an entirely different species.
Humans possess various mutations. Perhaps there's something about the immune system of some people that makes them less able to endure low temperatures, for example. If the weather had suddenly become much colder some time in the past (before the means to heat homes or any homes at all existed), those people would have been more likely to die at a young age before reproducing. After a few generations, the percentage of people with the deficiency would have significantly decreased. There's no way such a process leads to evolving into an entirely different species, and is not an example of evolution theory.
Give me examples of how the fossil record backs this up. In other words, showing the progression from the species which could live only in water and had no legs or lungs, to the one which had the legs and lungs but was still primarily aquatic, to the one which lived out of water entirely.
This is true. They are low-entropy structures. One thing I have avoided doing but should have done is smack down the idea of "information-rich structures". That term is completely meaningless in any rigorous sense, at least insofar as information theory is concerned. There are only low entropy and high entropy structures. I've been using "information-rich structures" to mean "low entropy", which is the closest useful approximation.
A pot of soup on the stove provides a more information rich structure than a bacteria, but it doesn't mean the soup is scientifically meaningful. If you look at life at the cellular level, biology actually tends to reduce the "information richness" of its environment, but it also decreases the entropy. So not only are the ID people wrong in this case (in using that term), but they are REALLY wrong (because even that term doesn't apply).
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