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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Why do you say that ID theory "invokes God", or says "God did it"?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

This is an urban myth. All critters use all their neurons. Furthermore, there is a trade-off between breadth of data and predictive accuracy for any fixed amount of hardware. Different people use their hardware differently, though minor differences in hardware can make a big difference practical capability. What this means is that everyone is always using all their hardware and many differences from person to person have to do with both how much capacity they have AND how that capacity is allocated.

I disagree that it is an urban myth. There are too many verified instances of people doing absolutely spectacular (and in many cases, physically impossible) things to make one reasonably believe that we are using our hardware to full capacity.

It would seem so at first glance, but infinite recursion on any finite state machine is a finite state process. If it wasn't, it wouldn't be expressable on an FSM. Still for some FS processes, even computers that are astronomically larger than what we use today would only be able to poorly model them. And if the universe is infinite, it would in fact not be possible to model all things in the universe on a FSM.

Depends on the recursion. If it is a simple recursion, I'll agree. But if it is a multi-dimensional and variable recursion, I would argue that you have to know the state of each step in the process. While you can know the state of any given step, you cannot necessarily know the state of all the steps since the recursion is infinite. Of course, this is theory. In actual fact, recursion cannot be infinite without quickly running out of resources (which then ends the infinite recursion). But there are infinite process which are quite often modelled on FSM machines. Amongst others, pi and AI come to mind. While we may have the ability to find any given finite state, we cannot find all states. In certain instances, finite states are transitory and once we have gotten them once, the results are not reproducible again.

Reading your post 121, I snapped at your touting of "Infinite Energy Magazine" and let the bizarre last paragraph get by me:

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.

Darwin simply said species change in response to their environments.

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.

Diamonds are not information-rich structures.

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).

So, the "Intelligence" in ID boils down simply to "God."

So what? ID theory doesn't "invoke God", ID theory invokes mathematics and implies God. I think the real problem people have with ID is that it can imply God. People seem terrified of the prospect that they may have a higher authority to which they are subject.

The tablet usually does not consist of random words or sentence fragments interspersed among random letters.

Your problem is that you've assumed a priori that genetic sequences are random! Do living things appear to be the result of random genetic sequences? How would you define 'random'? I think this is at the heart of the matter.

The discovery of DNA revealed that at the core of life is a molecular message that contains a staggering quantity of information. A single cell of the human body contains as much information as the Encyclopedia Britannica-all thirty volumes of it-three or four times over. As a result, the question of the origin of life must now be recast as the origin of biological information.

Please explain specifically how it is that you have determined genetic information to be 'random'.

Says who?

Says every information theorist and mathematician alive. Specified complexity is a well understood concept. I would suggest that you visit your local college library and pick up a book on advanced mathematics in information theory.

Copernicus, Galileo, et al did their research in spite of, not because of, church doctrine.

Are you aware that this is the 21st Century? Again, you need to address my points and stop reciting history. Specifically tell me what in ID theory will stifle scientific inquiry. Please explain specifically why we would want any less to know how biology operates simply because we believe that genetic information has its origin in intelligence.

Where is the magic cutoff between micro-evolution and macro-evolution?

To my mind, the 'magic cutoff' is speciation. I do not believe that the mutations that we have observed are capable of creating macro-structures such as lungs, eyes, brains, etc. I think that to believe such is to have a faith as great as that in any God. Is it possible? Sure, it's possible, but science is a *long* way from demonstrating such. Right now, it's a nice story that seems to best fit the data. We have fossils, more primative in the strata becoming more complex as we move up, and we have observed mutations today. Then, we have natural selection acting upon gene alleles, giving rise to such fascinating phenomena as the finch beak size variations on the Gallapogos Islands. So, it is assumed that genetic mutations and natural selection alone are capable of creating the vast diversity of life found on earth. Why? Because we assume a priori that life *must* be explained in purely natural terms. Perhaps, one day it will be! I just find it preposterous when people suggest that genetic mutations and natural selection are capable of going from a single cell (previously a proto-cell with RNA) and going all the way to intelligent human beings capable of building space craft and sending them to other planets. It's fine if you wish to believe that, I just think it's a faith on par with any religious faith. It has been observed:

“The fruit fly has long been the favorite object of mutation experiments because of its fast gestation period (twelve days). X rays have been used to increase the mutation rate in the fruit fly by 15,000 percent. All in all, scientists have been able to ‘catalyze the fruit fly evolutionary process such that what has been seen to occur in (fruit fly) is the equivalent of many millions of years of normal mutations and evolution.’ Even with this tremendous speedup of mutations, scientists have never been able to come up with anything other than another fruit fly.” [Rifkin, Jeremy, Algeny (New York: Viking Press, 1983) p. 134]

While we are here, let me ask you two questions that I pose to all naturalists:

#1 “Evolution calls for the development of life itself and subsequent life forms from a purely natural process. Life does not function without the strictly controlled conversion of raw solar energy into useable energy. What are the specific, empirically evident original mechanism/process and pathway of specific, empirically evident mechanisms/processes that led from zero such conversion capability in raw matter to the multiple and varied mechanisms and processes that are inherent in every living organism as we know them?”

#2 “Evolution calls for the development of ever more volume and ever greater variety and complexity of data in the genetic code of living organisms as they allegedly first emerged, then progressed from, simplest forms to the present broad spectrum of variety. What specific, empirically evident original mechanism/process and pathway of specific, empirically evident mechanisms/processes have led from zero genetic data in raw matter to the vast array of voluminous genetic data inherent in living organisms as we know them?”

Good luck.

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