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.
--30--
File Date: 01.09.02
From Bombardier Beetles and the Argument of Design:
ping!
Too many other people tell me they find the arguments compelling and persuasive for me to take your word on such a thing.
He is making claims (without showing experimental evidence) that contradict ordinary measurements and experiments. If he wants to play scientist, he must play scientist, not just claim that certain things are wrong. Still sounds like "feelings" not experiment.
Irrelevant really, but let me just quickly point out the obvious assumptive flaw in your multiplication of "infinitesimal probabilities".
From my house, there are an extremely large number (billions) of directions I could travel. Only an infinitesimal number of those directions will lead me to Salt Lake City, therefore it is safe to say that if I travelled in any random direction from my house, the odds approach zero that I would end up in Salt Lake City. That is variation/mutation in action. However, evolution also uses selection i.e. following the path of least resistance. Lets say that from my house, I selected to only travel by viable routes, such as Interstates. My direction of travel is still random, but the odds of me arriving in Salt Lake City have dramatically improved because Salt Lake City just happens to be on an Interstate; if it wasn't, the odds of me getting there approach zero. The great thing about it is that I can try over and over again, billions of time if necessary, up until the point where someone drops a nuke or a meteor on my house.
Now lets say I want to go to Chicago via Salt Lake City. The odds are pretty good I'll end up in Salt Lake City, as previously demonstrated, but the probability of me randomly ending up in Salt Lake City and then randomly ending up in Chicago are multiplied together as you correctly pointed out. There are a couple problems though. First, once I get to Salt Lake City, that becomes my home and I can try random directions as many times as I want while its still around. Second, in evolution I'm not trying to get to Chicago, I'm trying to get to ANY city that just happens to be on the Interstate system. It could be Denver or Phoenix for all that it matters. When you add up the probabilities of me being in A city as opposed to being in a PARTICULAR city, the odds are very favorable indeed. As to why I would want to travel in the first place, that is simply environmental pressure. I have to move, but I don't know (or care) where.
My point being that the probability of any specific species occuring is irrelevant, because the odds of some unspecified speciation occuring is very high. Extinction happens when I never find my way out of Salt Lake City and the city is destroyed. The evolution folks are saying that, while they haven't seen an Interstate, it must exist because there are Mormons in Chicago and the odds of them getting there without an Interstate are zero. That and they've seen roads so an Interstate could plausibly exist. The creationist argument is that God put Mormons in Chicago to begin with, though the evolutionists are skeptical.
I have no clue whether or not the universe is infinite, and wouldn't claim to know otherwise. :-) Therefore, I have to approach the problems from both assumptions and study their ramifications without saying whether one is right or not since either premise would be very questionable.
Yes. The Cincy Group. Their web page vanished without a trace sometime in the last year or so, along with our chance to buy our very own element transmuter. All I can Yahoo up now is this page, en Français, with a dead link to the Cincy Scam.
None of which is ever going to stop Medved from posting his sillies without changing so much as a typo. Ever.
It would be falsified by a single test that could not detect finite state machinery generating what we generally call the mind. I actually find it fascinating, and the very first test that I am aware of was done as something of a parlor trick.
Well said. The days when "science" admitted its limitations are, I'm afraid, long gone.
Not with the application of external enthalpy. To frame it another way, if this were true it would make simple things like natural diamonds impossible.
Richard Bach makes no claims. He is making a metaphysical observation not a material scientific claim. It seems as though you are arguing the make up of paint and canvas and I am trying to focus on the painting. Granted, you must have paint and canvas to produce the painting but that is not its essence.
turns out there is a very powerful mathematical FACT that provides short cuts for evolution and also explains why we tend to see punctuated equilibrium and other kinds of discontinuous change in the fossil record.
The new insight is called "neutral networks". It turns out that in DNA there is a lot of what is called "degeneracy" ie that there are typically many different strings of DNA that code for exactly the same protein. Indeed for a 30 codon gene (ie a tiny one) a typical number of identical genotypes per phenotype is on the order of 25,000.
further, in a 30 dimensional space, many of those 25,000 genotypes will be connected in a chain a single mutation apart, forming a "network" of genotypes that all produce the same phenotype (ie protein).
a population will typically start with an original "founder" founder genotype, but under mutation mathematically it is clear that the population will entropically disperse across the "neutral network" of phenotypically identical genotypes. Since the neighbors on the network are "adjacent" the probability of a move on the network is quite reasonable.
Now imagine a "better place to be genetically" that is unfortunately a long distance from the original "founder" genotype. As you point out, the probabality of sya 20 mutations happening SIMULATANEOUSLY to go from point A to point B is extremely unlikely. But the population will NOT remain concentrated at the founder location in genotype space, it will fill the whole network. All it takes is ANY PART of the network to be near point B and migration by mutation becomes feasible.
now imagine network after network that represent fitter and fitter forms. Imagine (as is very likely mathemetically) that these networks are at some of their locations adjacent or near to other networks. this produces a highly favored and rather quick road for evolution.
I've been studying evoloution pretty seriously for a year. I came into agnostic on such key questions as "has there been enough time". Neutral networks provides a likely answer, that yes, there has been enough time.
Interestingly of course, those networks are a MATHEMATICAL reality a priori to physics and that have been there since before the universe existed! food for thought for those still looking for room for a deity.
This statement is plainly wrong. The ID movement seeks to save society by making "God did it" once again a respectable hypothesis in scientific theories.
#4. Materialism, Naturalism, Darwinism, all these isms, what do they have to do with me and my life?
Materialism (or naturalism) is significant because it tends to set the boundaries for what is right and wrong in contemporary society. It defines the "rules" that govern much public discourse. It dictates the terms of elite debate, so that even those who are not materialists have to presuppose it in the public square. It goes to the intellectual roots of contemporary society, even though it contradicts the stated justifications of most public institutions. In particular, materialism makes nonsense of the claim that the state must respect the "inalienable rights" of individuals "endowed by their Creator," even though many materialists appeal to such notions for rhetorical effect.
If materialists are right, then we created "God" rather than the other way around. A character of Doestoyevsky's once said: "If God is dead, then all things are lawful." At the very least, if materialism is correct, then there is no transcendent right or good apart from the material world. However, while materialists generally define matter or the material world as the fundamental reality, they often tolerate "spiritualities" compatible with the materialist axiom. A culture that is thoroughly materialistic can still foster a worship of the state, the individual, or nature itself. Inevitably, whatever happens to be the case defines what ought to be. So, in an authoritarian setting compromised to materialism, elite rulers can dictate what is right and true with impunity. In a democratic setting, majority sentiment, shaped by elite opinion, is the ultimate arbiter. In either case, where materialism holds sway, might makes right.
FAQ #4, Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture
The CRSC (Discovery Institute's ID arm) has gotten much more subtle in its statements lately, but they used to be much more forthright in their support for creationism and an explicitly supernatural creator:
... 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. ......but ultimately they just can't deny it without losing their movement's whole purpose for being. As they see it, the only way they can save society from nihilism is to get people in academia & other opinion leaders to believe again in a grand, supernatural authority figure who can, deus-ex-machina like, come down & "lay down the law", without having to explain or justify His decisions to us.
Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture, ca. 5/1997
After all, if an authority figure has to explain himself, then that implies we are able to critique his actions, and that opens up a whole can-o-worms, what with our messy, differing opinions & all. It's anarchy I tells ya, ANARCHY!!! One suddenly starts to understand how scared the Catholic Church must've felt when all those Protestant splinter groups started forming, each one pushing their own interpretation of the Bible.
Care to elaborate? That first sentence is pretty conceptual. I'd like to know what you refer to in the second.
Actually, I leave things more open-ended than that. My statement is based on a couple things. First, the universe is nowhere near thermodynamic equilibrium, so arbitrary processes emerge necessarily. Second, processes that have the properties required for intelligence emerge as a miniscule fraction of all the processes that occur which is perfectly allowable statistically. What I did not state, but which follows as a perfectly valid hypothesis (and which you kind of picked up on), is that there are processes that meet the criteria of "intelligent" that may operate over the span of the entire universe. 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. This plausibly allows for many things, but I don't think it can rationally be taken much farther than this with the limited information we have today.
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