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
Oops, that's Shinola. Sometimes I can't tell the difference
I'll kill a couple birds here with one stone. Solving a differential equation IS a process; it doesn't matter if you do it or a computer does. In fact, anything that can be expressed as an algorithm is a process and the act of execution does not require intelligence by definition.
One of the questions that no one has asked is "what is the definition of intelligence?". It is a very good question, and the handwaving popular definition is meaningless. Intelligence is a PROCESS with some specific properties that I won't bother going into here for the sake of brevity. Because it is a process, it is expressable as an algorithm. What this means is that intelligence itself is nothing more than a process expressable on any engine capable of computation (which is damn near every bit of matter in the universe). This topic is a book length discussion on mathematics; Springer-Verlag publishes a couple good ones that cover the relevant mathematics if you really want to learn this stuff.
Therefore, intelligent design is ultimately lame because it is trivially reduceable to "scientific naturalism" as you put it. At least creationism is derivative from a totally different (though arguable) premise. Note that "rules" have to exist in any system that hasn't decayed to perfect entropy. The exact nature of what we are calling rules here is essentially arbitrary, but they are an emergent property of any system that hasn't bottomed out to heat death.
"The only-exception-in-the-universe-to-the first-&-second-laws-of-theromodynamics-so-we called-it-something-else-with-a-deceptive-title" theory.
*sigh* Anything so as to have an excuse to not bow the knee.
Like Carl Sagan said about the "theory of gravity" (That's right - it is also a THEORY). See, we have no idea WHY gravity works. We know it does (or else we would all be flying off the earth now from the rotational inertia). We haven't found a gravity wave, beam, or particle....but we still have gravity. In the same vein, we HAVE evolution. It happens all around you all the time. To deny it is to deny reality. It's obvious from your post that you know less than nothing about evolutionary throry....so, I'll give you the primer. It doesn't happen "because you want to fly - you evolve wings". Even a simpleton can do better than that. Here's 2 examples.
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.
Now, to deny THIS reality is the mark of an idiot.
Now, if you want to argue Intelligent Design (which, given it's name is obviously way above you), you might be able to convince some that, even though evolution exists, it was caused by God. But, that argument requires considerable thought, knowledge, mathematics, ans skill.
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 would argue that to make a computer that knows all finite-states would be impossible with our current understanding of computing technology. For one thing, there is the infinite recursion problem, because you also have to know the finite states inherent in the computers, but since you recurse, you also have to know all those states too...).
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.
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.
Yes, we understand and accept this ... this is simple survival of the fittest.
The question is ... how does this help to explain the existence of the Bombadier Beetle?
Regardless of Aristotle, every test and measurement (both scientific and mathematical) indicates that the human mind is an extremely complicated but otherwise boring piece of finite state machinery. This isn't proof of course, but there hasn't been the contrary test result to show otherwise and tons that support that hypothesis going back half a century.
Very good at math in general, and at the forefront of my field in my area of specialty. Which is kind of funny because I hated math when I was in engineering school, largely because engineering math was and is painfully boring. Fortunately, I never actually worked as a real chemical engineer after college and ended up pursuing a totally different field instead.
HuH? All I saw were a bunch of facts together with a little humor and wit, pointing out the folly of believing in fairy tales.
What you seem to be getting close to is that intelligence is the whole PROCESS of existence. Intelligence and existence being synonymous, one can not be without the other and all the "sub-processes" of life are ultimately based upon that intelligence. Having intelligence as a synonym for God works for me and God being the Source of existence then fits in fine.
Translated, you said: "The 1st 3 paragraphs are mine, and the rest of the post is an extended quote from Bass." Is this correct?What part of that post was yours and what part was you quoting Bob Bass?
I'd like to know precisely so I know who to ridicule for which whopper of a claim.
As I see it, God put people like yourself on this planet to shine shoes and do menial chores for people like Bob Bass. I suspect most people reading your attempts at thought would agree.
I take it you haven't read Dembski's paper on specified complexity? If you can find the holes, I'd sure appreciate it if you could show them. Here's the URL: intellegent design as a theory of information.
How would you recognize if this were an incorrect statement?
What do you think - is it or not?
Dembski is no stranger to controversy, and I'm not referring here to his theories! Apparently Dembski has a reputation as being somewhat reckless & thin-skinned in academic circles.
If this means what I think it means -- that the brain could theoretically be halted like a computer and it memory dumped for analysis -- I think you're wrong.
Everything about the brain suggests a lot of analog processing going on. Not to mention there has never been any demonstration that even the simplest information can be captured and decoded.
There has been a tremendous effort to replace damaged sensory inputs -- hearing for example -- with computerized prosthetics. The results so far indicate two things: we don't know how sound is converted into usable nerve impulses, and the brain is so adaptable that it can learn, with time and effort, to use crappy inputs.
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