Category Archives: intelligent design

late nightness

this is funny and is taking the sting out of the jarring sound next door, but if the car in the parking lot does not shut it’s alarm off i’m going to throw a brick at it. argh.

Kansas Outlaws Practice Of Evolution

The Onion

Kansas Outlaws Practice Of Evolution

TOPEKA, KS—Any living being that undergoes genetic modification favoring survival could face jail time under the new law.

A Shitty Debate: Meyer vs. Ward

It seemed too good to be true. The paleontologist Peter Ward and Intelligent Design proponent Stephen Meyer having what the moderator David Postman claimed to be a friendly discussion at Town Hall in Seattle. What a dissapointment! Ward’s constant name-dropping and pointing at the audience for support from respected scientists detracted from his argument against ID, an argument pivoting on the proposition that ID will make the U.S. less economically competitive. The way Ward squirmed in his chair and dropped one-liners–’this book is trash, it’s just crap’–ought to show how ridiculous one may look when an opponent’s arguments are countered by mockery and zoo noises and should be fair warning to those who principally cite the pastafarians for their refutation of ID. Ward’s opponent, on the other hand, came off quite cool, quite collected, and actually had a substantial hunk of meat to his argument, as opposed to Ward’s argumentative style, that being something along the lines of a Chicken McNugget. Pastafarian quoters beware, Meyer isn’t dumb. He did, after all, receive schooling at Cambridge, a university with admission criteria just a tad more selective than the University of Washington’s and where, legend has it, some smart guys found something important back in the ’50s. It is unfortunate that a stronger opponent to ID was not in Ward’s seat. We may then have seen a real debate.

Examples of subject matter that could have been really interesting but turned out shitty:

- Ward questions Meyer on what he means by ‘Darwinism’, suggesting that it is a strawman argument, yet fails to convincingly follow up on this idea of a fallacy at play.

- In response to teaching the controversy, Ward hits on the notion of Intelligent Design, not as a scientific theory, but as a movement–a very interesting point. He then says ‘Hmmmmm’, followed by ‘The cat is out of the bag’ and makes hand motions to this effect. Nothing more.

- Audience request: please state your personal religious views. Meyer confesses to being a Christian, Ward confesses to being a Druid (this week).

I was just watching bits of the debate again but I can no longer. Shiver.

Watch the debate here or download the audio here

neuroscience vs. intelligent design?

A little blurb on an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education relates that the debate over ID may be spreading in subject matter. To quote:

// The supporters of intelligent design are also moving beyond evolution to other areas of research that might mesh well with their guiding philosophy of a creative entity that manifests itself in nature. As its long-term goal, the Discovery Institute has vowed to push what it calls design theory beyond biology and cosmology into such fields as psychology, ethics, philosophy, and the fine arts.

// At the AAAS meeting, James A. Murray, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Central Arkansas, reported on several signs that the neurosciences could emerge as a major battleground soon. The conflict is brewing because most scientists who study the brain are convinced the mind is produced entirely by neural activity, and that there is no metaphysical component to the mind.

// In fact, while many religious leaders see no discord between evolution and theology, Mr. Murray wonders whether the direction of neuroscience research will prove unpalatable to religious people. “There is more of a concern that with neuroscience, there may not be as much room for compatibility,” he said in an interview. “It could be considered threatening to religious beliefs for people who believe in a soul.”

While the Society for Neuroscience has issued a statement on intelligent design and evolution, it will be interesting to see if intelligent design proponents hone in on evolution as it relates to neuroscience. For starters, here’s one blurb from the Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness Center (IDEA), an ID organization:

// Consciousness, Free Will, and Mind-Brain Studies. Is conscious will an illusion—we think that we have acted freely and deliberately toward some end, but in fact our brain acted on its own and then deceived us into thinking that we acted deliberately. This is the majority position in the cognitive neuroscience community, and a recent book makes just that claim in its title: The Illusion of Conscious Will by Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner. But there is now growing evidence that consciousness is not reducible to material processes of the brain and that free will is in fact real. Jeffrey Schwartz at UCLA along with quantum physicist Henry Stapp at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are two of the key researchers presently providing experimental and theoretical support for the irreducibility of mind to brain (see Schwartz’s book The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force).

Nothing about evolution mentioned, although irreducible complexity is invoked. (As a side note, click here for a roundtable discussion on the mind/soul debate from Science & the City). As I am continuing to distract myself from finishing this paper, I will simply leave off now with a link to papers by Henry Stapp. Again, much more on this to follow…


from toothpaste for dinner

ken miller on intelligent design

Ken Miller, the biologist and witness for the Dover trial (and not to be confused with Ken Miller), presented a lecture (originally scheduled as a debate) at Case Western Reserve University on January 3, 2006. Miller’s home page contains links to the lecture, although I also found one floating around on youtube. Miller’s a showman but the arguments he puts forward are quite convincing. There’s also an evolution resources page available on his site. I’m still rummaging around for a back and forth between an ID supporter and opponent, although this comes close.

Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting

The point on Intelligent Design supporters jumping the scientific process in order to teach the controversy is quite a crucial one, as is Miller having to relabel the sticker placed on his text (shown above) to warn students that all scientific theories, and not merely evolution, should be judged critically. As far as teaching the controversy is concerned though, would it not make more sense to touch on epistemology, logic, and the philosophy of science? To suggest that evolution is dogmatic while replacing it with another dogma, that of irreducible complexity, is far from a sound education. Give me a debate in science education, but, dear professors and teachers, why not equip us students with the means to think scientifically, logically, mathematically, and rationally? It seems to me this is a lot closer to ‘teaching the controversy’ and will leave us far more prepared to face our dissertations, and maybe even our ethics review boards.

And hey, check this out.