Posted on 11/03/2003 12:05:39 PM PST by Heartlander
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A Response to Eugenie Scott and the NCSE By William A. Dembski Discovery Institute November 1, 2003 |
| Originally published Oct. 10, 2003 Eugenie Scott’s letter of September 30, 2003 to members of the Texas State Board of Education purports to show that intelligent design research is not published in the peer-reviewed literature. But in fact, Scott has purposely failed to disclose certain key items of information which demonstrate that intelligent design research is in fact now part of the mainstream peer-reviewed scientific literature. I can substantiate the charge that Scott has purposely failed to disclose key information in this regard. Scott and I have met at several conferences and debates, and we correspond typically a few times a year by email. Here is a paragraph from an email she sent me on December 3, 2002 (in context, Scott is disparaging my work on intelligent design because, so she claims, it has not been cited in the appropriate peer-reviewed literature): “It would perhaps be more interesting (and something for you to take rather more pride in) if it were the case that the scientific, engineering, and mathematical applications of evolutionary algorithms, fuzzy logic and evolution, etc., referenced TDI or your other publications and criticisms. In a quick survey of a few of the more scholarly works, I didn’t see any, but perhaps you or someone else might know of them.” The abbreviation “TDI” here refers to my book The Design Inference (more about this book in a moment because Scott disparages it also in her letter of September 30, 2003). Now the fact is that this book has been cited in precisely the literature that Scott claims has ignored it. I pointed this out to her in an email dated December 6, 2002. Here is the key bibliographic reference, along with the annotation, that I sent her: Chiu, D.K.Y. and Lui, T.H. Integrated use of multiple interdependent patterns for biomolecular sequence analysis. International Journal of Fuzzy Systems. Vol.4, No.3, Sept. 2002, pp.766-775. The article begins: “Detection of complex specified information is introduced to infer unknown underlying causes for observed patterns [10]. By complex information, it refers to information obtained from observed pattern or patterns that are highly improbable by random chance alone. We evaluate here the complex pattern corresponding to multiple observations of statistical interdependency such that they all deviate significantly from the prior or null hypothesis [8]. Such multiple interdependent patterns when consistently observed can be a powerful indication of common underlying causes. That is, detection of significant multiple interdependent patterns in a consistent way can lead to the discovery of possible new or hidden knowledge.” Reference number [10] here is to The Design Inference. Not only does this article cite my work favorably, but it makes my work in The Design Inference the basis for the entire article. When I sent Scott this information by email, she never got back to me. Interestingly, though, she has since that exchange dropped a line of criticism that she had previously adopted; namely, she had claimed that intelligent design is unscientific because intelligent design research is not cited in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. There’s no question that it is cited (and favorably at that) in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. What about actual intelligent design research being published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature? Scott doesn’t want to allow that my book The Design Inference properly belongs to this literature. In her letter of September 30, 2003, she remarks that this book “may have undergone a degree of editorial review” but it “did not undergo peer-review in the sense in which scientific research articles are peer-reviewed.” She then adds that The Design Inference “does not present scientific research -- Dembski’s book was published as a philosophy book.” Every one of these remarks is false. What’s more, their falsity is readily established. Editorial review refers to a book submitted to a publisher for which the editors, who are employees of the publisher and in the business of trying to acquire, produce, and market books that are profitable, decide whether or not to accept the book for publication. Editorial review may look to expert advice regarding the accuracy, merit, or originality of the book, but the decision to publish rests solely with the editors and publishers. Peer-review, on the other hand, refers to journal articles and academic monographs (these are articles that are too long to be published in a journal and which therefore appear in book form) that are submitted to referees who are experts in the topic being addressed and who must give a positive review of the article or monograph if it is to be published at all. The Design Inference went through peer-review and not merely editorial review. To see this, it is enough to note that The Design Inference was published by Cambridge University Press as part of a Cambridge monograph series: Cambridge Studies in Probability, Induction, and Decision Theory. Scott doesn’t point this out in her letter of September 30, 2003 because if she had, her claim that my book being editorially reviewed but not peer-reviewed would have instantly collapsed. Academic monograph series, like the Cambridge series that published my book, have an academic review board that is structured and functions identically to the review boards of academic journals. At the time of my book’s publication, the review board for Cambridge Studies in Probability, Induction, and Decision Theory included members of the National Academy of Sciences as well as one Nobel laureate, John Harsanyi, who shared the prize in 1994 with John Nash, the protagonist in the film A Beautiful Mind. As it is, The Design Inference had to pass peer-review with three anonymous referees before Brian Skyrms, who heads the academic review board for this Cambridge series, would recommend it for publication to the Cambridge University Press editors in New York. Brian Skyrms is on the faculty of the University of California at Irvine as well as a member of the National Academic of Sciences. It is easy enough to confirm what I’m saying here by contacting him. Scott either got her facts wrong or never bothered to check them in the first place. What about Scott’s claim that The Design Inference “does not present scientific research—Dembski’s book was published as a philosophy book.” It is true that Cambridge University Press officially lists this book as a philosophy monograph. But why should how the book is listed by its publisher be relevant to deciding whether it does or does not contain genuine scientific content? The Library of Congress Control Number (LCCN) for The Design Inference is QA279.D455. As any mathematician knows, QA refers to mathematics and the 270s refer to probability and statistics. Is Scott therefore willing to accept that The Design Inference does present scientific research after all because the Library of Congress treats it as a mathematical and statistical monograph rather than as a philosophical monograph? How this book is listed is beside the point. I submit that the book makes a genuine contribution to the statistical literature, laying out in full technical detail a method of design detection applicable to biology. Scott can dispute this if she likes, but to do so she needs to engage the actual content of my book and not dismiss it simply because the publisher lists it one way or another. Also, it’s worth noting that up until I pointed out to her that The Design Inference is cited in the peer-reviewed mathematical and biological literature, her main line of argument against the scientific merit of my work was that it wasn’t being cited in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. As I showed above, this line of criticism is no longer tenable. I’ve discussed at length Scott’s treatment of my own work because this is where I’m best qualified to speak to the issue of peer review in relation to intelligent design. As for the other claims in her letter of September 30, 2003, let me briefly offer three remarks: **Discovery Institute is only the tip of the iceberg for scientists who support intelligent design. Intelligent design research is being published in precisely the places Scott claims it is not being published. What’s more, intelligent design has a developing research program. For some details, see the attached ID FAQ that I handed out on September 10, 2003 at the textbook hearings in Austin. It is also available on my website: http://www.designinference.com/documents/2003.09.ID_FAQ.pdf. **Scott’s charge that critics of Darwinian evolution, like me and my colleagues at Discovery Institute, “misquote” or “quote-mine” the work of scientists has degenerated into a slogan. As a slogan, its effect is to shut down discussion before it can get started. Scientists have no special privileges over anyone else. If they say things that are false, inaccurate, or stupid, they need to be called to account. Reasoned discourse in a free society demands that people, and that includes scientists, confront the record of their words. One can dispute what the words meant in context, but it is not enough merely to assert that the words were quoted out of context. **Finally, in her letter of September 30, 2003, Scott objects to my use of a statement she made in an interview with Salon. I am supposed to have implied that “Scott believes that textbooks should not discuss arguments about how evolution occurs.” She protests that she “was not discussing doubts about how evolution happened but rather doubts about whether evolution happened.” (Emphasis hers.) But if she really believes that there are many views of how evolution occurred, why does she and her lobbying group the NCSE support only one view on how evolution occurred, namely, the Darwinian view? Why, for instance, isn’t she demanding that the biology textbooks describe the controversy between neo-Darwinists (like John Maynard Smith) and self-organizational theorists (like Stuart Kauffman)? Neither disputes whether evolution has happened. Yet the self-organizational theorists strongly dispute that the Darwinian view adequately explains how evolution occurred. All the textbooks ignore the self-organizational challenge to Darwinism. If Scott is such a champion of pluralism concerning how evolution happened, why isn’t she pressing for the inclusion of self-organizational theory in the biology textbooks? Why do all her lobbying efforts promote neo-Darwinism as the only view of how evolution occurred that’s appropriate for the textbooks? I submit it is because, as she said in her Salon interview, to do otherwise will only “confuse kids about the soundness of evolution as a science.” In other words, to ensure that kids are not confused about whether evolution occurred, textbooks need to tell them only one story about how evolution occurred, namely, the Darwinian story. This isn’t education. It’s indoctrination. THREE FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ABOUT INTELLIGENT DESIGN Textbook Hearing, Austin, Texas, September 10, 2003 (available at www.designinference.com after September 10, 2003> by William A. Dembski What is intelligent design? Intelligent design is the science that studies how to detect intelligence. Recall astronomer Carl Sagan’s novel Contact about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (or SETI). Sagan based the SETI researchers’ methods of design detection on scientific practice. Real-life SETI researchers have thus far failed to detect designed signals from distant space. But if they encountered such a signal, as the astronomers in Sagan’s novel did, they too would infer design. Intelligent design research currently focuses on developing reliable methods of design detection and then applying these methods, especially to biological systems. Does research supporting intelligent design appear in the peer-reviewed literature? Here are a few recent peer-reviewed publications supporting intelligent design in biology. There is also a widely recognized peer-reviewed literature in physics and cosmology supporting intelligent design (see, for instance, the work of Paul Davies, Frank Tipler, Fred Hoyle, and Guillermo Gonzalez). • W.A. Dembski, The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres, 1998). This book was published by Cambridge University Press and peer-reviewed as part of a distinguished monograph series, Cambridge Studies in Probability, Induction, and Decision Theory. The editorial board of that series includes members of the National Academy of Sciences as well as one Nobel laureate, John Harsanyi, who shared the prize in 1994 with John Nash, the protagonist in the film A Beautiful Mind. Commenting on the ideas in this book, Paul Davies remarks: “Dembski’s attempt to quantify design, or provide mathematical criteria for design, is extremely useful. I’m concerned that the suspicion of a hidden agenda is going to prevent that sort of work from receiving the recognition it deserves. Strictly speaking, you see, science should be judged purely on the science and not on the scientist.” Quoted in L. Witham, By Design (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2003), p. 149. • D.D. Axe, “Extreme Functional Sensitivity to Conservative Amino Acid Changes on Enzyme Exteriors,” Journal of Molecular Biology, 301 (2000): 585–595. This work shows that certain enzymes are extremely sensitive to perturbation. Perturbation in this case does not simply diminish existing function or alter function, but removes all possibility of function. This implies that neo-Darwinian theory has no purchase on these systems. Moreover, the probabilities implicit in such extreme-functional-sensitivity analyses are precisely those needed for a design inference. • W.-E. Loennig & H. Saedler, “Chromosome Rearrangements and Transposable Elements,” Annual Review of Genetics, 36 (2002): 389–410. This article examines the role of transposons in the abrupt origin of new species and the possibility of an partly predetermined generation of biodiversity and new species. The authors’ approach in non-Darwinian, and they cite favorably on the work of Michael Behe and William Dembski. • D.K.Y. Chiu & T.H. Lui, “Integrated Use of Multiple Interdependent Patterns for Biomolecular Sequence Analysis,” International Journal of Fuzzy Systems, 4(3) (September 2002): 766–775. The opening paragraph of this article reads: “Detection of complex specified information is introduced to infer unknown underlying causes for observed patterns [10]. By complex information, it refers to information obtained from observed pattern or patterns that are highly improbable by random chance alone. We evaluate here the complex pattern corresponding to multiple observations of statistical interdependency such that they all deviate significantly from the prior or null hypothesis [8]. Such multiple interdependent patterns when consistently observed can be a powerful indication of common underlying causes. That is, detection of significant multiple interdependent patterns in a consistent way can lead to the discovery of possible new or hidden knowledge.” Reference number [10] here is to William Dembski’s The Design Inference. • M.J. Denton & J.C. Marshall, “The Laws of Form Revisited,” Nature, 410 (22 March 2001): 417; M.J. Denton, J.C. Marshall & M. Legge, (2002) “The Protein Folds as Platonic Forms: New Support for the pre-Darwinian Conception of Evolution by Natural Law,” Journal of Theoretical Biology 219 (2002): 325–342. This research is thoroughly non-Darwinian and looks to laws of form embedded in nature to bring about biological structures. The intelligent design research program is broad, and design like this that’s programmed into nature falls within its ambit. What research topics does a design-theoretic research program explore?
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 Discovery Institute is a non-profit, non-partisan, public policy think tank headquartered in Seattle and dealing with national and international affairs. For more information, browse Discovery's Web site at: http://www.discovery.org. |
Why would an intelligent designer not only put broken genes in the design, but put the same exact broken gene in closely related species?
Well then, maybe I don't understand it. But to me, unless ID can demonstrate the designer himself, they simply have no case -- unless they can show that: "biological structure X could not possibly have evolved by any natural means." If they can't do that (it's my understanding that they haven't done it yet), all they have is some interesting biological topics for investigation. A list of grad-school research projects, perhaps, but that's all.
Are you saying that intelligence, sensitive response, self-organizing behavior are "unnatural" in biology?
No.
Intelligence may be "supernatural" in one particular sense; however, that's the one and only sense of the word -- the metaphysical sense -- that science cannot get at. It must stick to the empirical; and it has plenty of observable "small-i" instances of biological intelligence to keep it busy.
I agree. Somewhat. This is probably a bad usage of "supernatural." Immaterial maybe.
The empirical evidence from the human genome sequence, for example, strongly implies a lack of design. Most things seem randomly jumbled together at the molecular level.
I've used the all-time killer signature graphic maybe twice in my FR career. One thread got deleted and the other is in the Smokey Backroom.
Seem would seem to be the operative word, RightWingNilla.
Question: When we say that something is "random," what does that mean? Does it mean that that's what things really are as they are in themselves? Or could it mean that something is going on that we don't understand? And if we did understand it, we'd have a theory, maybe even a law?
You don't need to produce a designer, PH, to make the empirical observation that nature displays characteristics of design. It is science's job to investigate such matters -- empirical ones, that is. Metaphysics has no place in science.
Actually, I did.
Random refers to the outcomes of a process, or interaction. It's the variables that can have the property of following a random probability distribution. If the process involves interaction with more, or less many different entities of varying effect, such as reactivity, the encounter can be random, but the actual effect of the encounter depends on the properties of what is encountered.
Random as in we can identify taletale signs within the human genome of events that occurred in our evolutionary history that correspond exactly to what we know about how mutations occur without any human intervention. Duplications, fusions, deletions etc.
The data does not (so far) in any way suggest intelligence was used in the "design" of the human genome.
The only way the ID "hypothesis" works is to massage the definition of these words to the point where they have no meaning.
It's the job of science to resist hypothesizing unnecessary entities. Simply having no current explanation for a phenomenon is not a reason for assuming a designer. No brick walls are in sight.
There is no a priori assertion here. ID does not make claims about the designer. You are making a logical assumption: that where there is design, there has to be a designer.
Reminds me of the story of the little kid on Christmas morning, who (seeing a pile of horse manure under the Christmas tree) says, "Gee! There's got to be a pony around here someplace!" Of course, it is possible the horse manure was a cynical "Christmas present" from a malicious person....
You seem to want to force an argument about semantics. But at the end of the day, the assumption of a designer is not one that science, per se, needs to accept or dwell on to do its job. Science can study design perfectly well without studying the putative designer.
Would you feel better if we didn't call it design, but something else? Like maybe, "natural symmetry," "natural geometry," or "universal patterning?"
None of these is particularly good, however; for none captures the idea of purposiveness in nature. Biological organisms act as if they're purposeful. Maybe you could come up with a better term than "design" -- something a lot more "neutral."
I wasn't imputing motives to you in the absence of any evidence. What evidence I had before me, you put there. I had to try to make some sense of it. Because I didn't consider the evidence dispositive, I said "perhaps" -- as in "perhaps the observation applies in your case, perhaps it doesn't."
You wrote: "Is it not the case, then, that a theory that makes assertions about the nature of the designer - e.g., whether or not a designer has the attribute of existence - is, by its very nature, non-scientific?"
Sure. But the designer is not the issue for science. So questions of existence or non-existence of a putative, extra-cosmic designer are irrelevant. It is you, not I, who wants to drag the Designer in here. I myself would be quite content just to stick to the empirical.
As Alamo-Girl has already pointed out, there's nothing in ID that says "designer" refers to only one specific creative intelligence.
I think any putative scientific theory is non-scientific if it is predicated exclusively on a metaphysical notion. May I point out that such things as materialism, random walk, determinism, natural selection are examples of metaphysical notions?
I personally don't think President Bush is all that uneducated or stupid. He mangles his diction once in a while, but he's a bright guy with an Ivy League education who probably knows BS when he sees it. Not that it matters with regard to what's BS and what isn't. Whether or not he knows it when he sees it, I do.
Look, you miss the point. You throw around this creationist label with venom at those who see problems with neo-darwinism. Now, if I (or anyone) posted:
"On the issue of evolution, the verdict is still out on how God created the Earth."
B. I would be told, “God does not belong in science.”
III. I would be called, “Creationist.” (and all that it implies)
So let me get this straight… Is this statement now OK when addressing education?
I agree with the statement. Does this somehow make ‘me’ “uneducated or stupid”?
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