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.

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.

This is a "apples and oranges" argument. I don't believe that comparing an environment (soup, which is not a structure) against an entity is a viable comparison at all.

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...

From a top-down viewpoint, you are correct in stating that a cell tends to reduce the information that it uses to that which it actually needs, thus significantly reducing entropy (note that the information richness is not affected - just the info that the cell uses). But from a bottom-up perspective (actually putting the cell together from its disparate parts as well as interacting with other cells in the case of multi-celled creatures), the information needed is much more complex. For example the information-richness inherent in an amoeba is much higher than that in a diamond.

An information-rich environment is needed to get the individual parts of the cell working together. At some point, there is a thing called irreducible complexity. This is the point that without an information-rich environment life simply could not exist. You might liken this to a complex computer program which regulates how the various parts of the cell interact with each other and to outside stimulii.

So I believe that my question as to how such structures could have evolved is still valid.

I can understand this only from an end user frame of reference. Otherwise it's just plain incorrect.

Thanks for the backup.

When music CDs first came out, the vinyl crowd jumbed out and asserted the encoding to digital lost important aspects of the original "message". I thought this was pretty far fetched and still do. Most of the original CDs were made from analog masters that had been tweaked for vinyl and had gross amounts of frequency response distortion.

That said, there are analog processes that contain infinitely more "information" than any possible digital representation. The combined location and path of an electron might serve as a modest example.

The brain is not digitally pure. It does not process information so much as it behaves as a single entity. The electrical and chemical activity of the brain is far more fluid and complex than any anything modeled in silicon. I will listen to arguments opposing this view just as soon as I see a computer that can navigate as well as a housefly with as few active components. This is not a trivial software difference. It is a whole different kind of computing that we frankly don't understand at all.

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

So far, every time jennyp shows you up you just post "*Yawn*." Now we're supposed to evolve life all over again for you? I mean, even it we did it you could just say, "Where's the proof it happened that way the first time?" Or you could just say "*Yawn*" and otherwise ignore.

Again, as I've heard it, you'd need to add water every 1000 miles or so, coal a bit more often than that.

I can't find that on the stanleysteamers.com page and find it startling, even allowing that some Stanley models had forty-gallon water reservoirs. I'd be generally interested in any sort of performance data you have on Stanleys. I was surprised to see that they held on into the '20s. The real heyday of steam cars was over by sometime much earlier, I think. The Model T was out by about 1905, right? Needs a crank, but dirt cheap and utilitarian.

I'm no expert on Stanleys and most of what I think I know is just what I remember hearing and reading. As I recollect hearing it, the issue was decided in the 20's when they perfected electric starters. Much prior to the 20's, gas cars had their own share of problems. It took them a long time to come up with the idea of coils and spark plugs; the early engines had mechanical "clackers", like lighting a match inside the combustion chamber... Oil was provided to the engines via a hand pump at first and a lot of the things we took for granted by the 50's really hadn't been perfected for more than a generation or so. In the 1950's there were still a lot of people driving around who had made the transition from horses to cars in their forties and were never really safe to be with.

Simple. He's made his choice in the "fight or flight" decision.

In the 1950's there were still a lot of people driving around who had made the transition from horses to cars in their forties and were never really safe to be with.

My grandfather always liked to fall asleep on a return trip, the horse being perfectly capable of managing the trip home unsupervised. In his later life, he wrecked at least two cars that way.

I remember reading somewhere that there are actually 3 choices to "fight" or "flight". "*Yawn*" is sometimes chosen when the individual stays on the fence between the 2 choices for too long. It's a way of running away from the choice itself.

But I think Exnihilo & I got off to a bad start, since he responded to Junior's post which said basically the same thing as I did.

Interesting post. Personally, I wouldn't be surprised if we never did "get behind the Big Bang" - so there will always be room for those who want to believe in a personal authority figure out there outside of the natural universe to find One. However I think there is too much progress being made on abiogenesis to believe that some good, reasonably detailed plausible explanations won't ever come out.

Given that no present religion has the capacity to write a new testament, is it not perhaps time to start asking what God has been about, recently? We just finished a century about which God surely would have a new message, if he exists. 3000 years ago he was willing to provide guidance on good hygiene. Doesn't it occur to anyone to ask, why didn't God at least give us a policy on Cambodia?

Now there's some interesting food for thought!

I marvel at the deliberate rudeness of typing out "yawn," with or without asterisks.

Well, it's not so bad when you consider it to be a shorthand way of saying: "I'm unable to best my opponent on the Intellectual playing field, and thus will henceforth refuse to debate her, lest I further expose the shortcomings of my argument, and will use a denegrating remark as a subterfuge to camoflage my cowardice."

Now, what pantywaist cried foul on CrabTree's 171? And why did the moderator go along?

This is very difficult to understand, or to accept. Post 171 is one that I praised as being genuinely thoughtful. I have my suspicions as to who pushed the button. But why in the world would the moderator do such a thing? I can see the writing on the wall, and I guess I won't be around much longer at this rate. In case I'm suddenly gone, it's been fun.

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