Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

“The Great Debate” — Scott & Trefil vs. Sisson & Dembski

“Should public schools teach Intelligent Design along with Evolution?” http://www.bu.edu/com/greatdebate Wednesday, November 2, 2005, 6:30-8:30 p.m. Tsai Performance Center, Boston University 685 Commonwealth Avenue Visit this page to view a live webcast of the debate: http://realserver.bu.edu:8080/ramgen/encoder/greatdebate.rm The Debate Participants: Affirmative Edward H. Sisson, Esq. Partner, Arnold and Porter, Washington, D.C. Mr. Sisson advised witnesses at the Kansas evolution hearings. Professor Bill Dembski, Ph.D. Senior Fellow, Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture Nick Barber Broadcast Journalism major, Boston University College of Communication +++++++++++++++++ Negative Eugenie C. Scott, Ph.D. Executive Director, National Center for Science Education. Professor James Trefil, Ph.D. Robinson Professor, George Mason University; co-author, Dictionary of Cultural Literacy. Neil St. Clair Broadcast Journalism and Political Science major, Boston University Read More ›

Deteriorata vs. Designorama

Deteriorata (old National Lampoon song) http://www.nationallampoon.com/flashbacks/deteriorata/default2.asp You are a fluke of the universe You have no right to be here And whether you can hear it or not The universe is laughing behind your back GIVE UP! Designorama You are the product of design Every hair on your head is numbered You are irreplacable and have every right to be here Whether you can hear it or not The designer is celebrating your existence REJOICE! [Thanks Dennis Wagner.]

The Edge of Peer Review

Robert Pennock’s Nature article with Richard Lenski on the evolutionary program AVIDA does not mention Michael Behe, irreducible complexity, or intelligent design (for a critique of that article, go here). And yet, when Pennock criticizes ID, the first thing he does is point to that article as a refutation of ID and, in particular, Michael Behe’s claim that irreducible complexity poses an obstacle to conventional evolutionary mechanisms. So, peer-reviewed articles that do not cite ID or its literature nonetheless constitute refutations of it, and yet peer-reviewed articles by ID proponents that do not explicitly mention ID (to avoid censorship) may not count as confirmations of it. The double-standard here is palpable. In this vein consider the following email I received: Read More ›

Fitness among Competitive Agents

Fitness among Competitive Agents: A Brief Note By William A. Dembski The upshot of the No Free Lunch theorems is that averaged over all fitness functions, evolutionary computation does no better than blind search (see Dembski 2002, ch 4 as well as Dembski 2005 for an overview). But this raises a question: How does evolutionary computation obtain its power since, clearly, it is capable of doing better than blind search? One approach is to limit the fitness functions (see Igel and Toussaint 2001). Another, illustrated in David Fogel’s work on automated checker and chess playing (see, for instance, Chellapilla and Fogel 1999 and Fogel et al. 2004) and, more recently, given a theoretical underpinning by David Wolpert and William Macready Read More ›

The Five Ds of Dodgeball Darwinism

Dodge, duck, dip, dive and dodge deny. http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/d/dodgeball-script-transcript-ben-stiller.htm

Design Inferences — Keeping Science Honest

“Michael Borowitz, at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, says: ‘The shapes of the major clusters are often similar but in any system there is noise, and those noisy dots are in the same place too. That’s hard to explain by biology. It is very difficult for me to believe that these were independent experiments.’” Details here: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8230.

Do 70,000 Australian scientists really oppose ID?

Yes, we’ve read it. But the claim that 70,000 Australian scientists oppose ID is comparable to saying that hundreds of thousands of U.S. scientists oppose ID because the AAAS has formally denounced it. Here’s something just in from an Australian colleague: One issue which has really been irritating is the ‘error’ which appeared in the national ‘Australian’ Newspaper (now being promulgated in other media, including overseas, e.g. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/21/intelligent_design/), in which it is claimed that 70,000 Australian scientists endorsed an open letter condemning ID as “unscientific”, and calling on schools to ban it from their classrooms. The actual web site from which the letter originates, although on the attack, doesn’t even say this: http://www.science.unsw.edu.au/news/2005/intelligent.html. In fact I would be classed as Read More ›

NABT trolling for controversy

Dear Colleagues: NABT has recently received several requests from the media (including CNN television and the Baltimore Sun newspaper) to interview teachers who have been pressured by parents, principals, school boards, etc. either to soften or eliminate the teaching of evolution or to include intelligent design into their curricula. If you have had this experience and would be willing to talk to the press, please reply with your contact information and a brief description of your situation. Thank you very much for your help. NABT is in the process of building a “press corps” to meet the media, and we appreciate your early willingness to step up to represent the association and the profession. Regards, Wayne W. Carley, Ph.D., CAE Read More ›

“The Compulsory Evolutionists”

Fred Plans To Devolve — Bacteria More Respectable
by Fred Reed

http://www.libertypost.org/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=113836

I read with what would be despair if I cared enough that the courts, this time in Pennsylvania, are again getting their knickers in a knot over Evolution. Oh help. There must be another planet somewhere upon which to hide. Read More ›

Favorable Court Ruling in California Lawsuit re Evolution Debate

For IMMEDIATE RELEASE on October 26, 2005

Citizens Have Right to Present Proposed Evolution Policy at School Board Meetings

School Officials Must Answer in Court for Alleged Religious Discrimination

Sacramento, CA In an important legal victory for citizens seeking to improve how evolution is taught in public schools, a federal judge has ruled that California citizens have a Constitutional right under the First Amendment to put proposed evolution policies on the agenda of local school board meetings for public debate and potential adoption, and that school officials who refuse such a request are subject to potential civil rights remedies in federal court. Read More ›

“Not just an American phenomenon” — The recent Prague ID conference

Here’s a report on the recent Prague ID conference by someone on the ground from our side — quite a different perspective from the AP report that appeared in the NYTimes and elsewhere.

On Saturday, October 22, 2005, almost 700 people from 18 nations gathered in Prague (Czech Republic) for a conference on “Darwin and Design”:

http://www.darwinanddesign.org

The conference was organized by Charles Thaxton, co-author of the now classic *The Mystery of Life’s Origin* (1984), and his wife, Carole. (The Thaxtons had originally planned to hold the conference several years ago, but their plan was put on hold when Charles lost his leg to cancer.) Read More ›

More “Even-Handed” Treatment of ID at Cornell

Provine Talks on Intelligent Design Debate
Defends theory of evolution
October 26, 2005
by Brian Kaviar
Sun Staff Writer

From http://www.cornellsun.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2005/10/26/435f266296320

William Provine, the C.A. Alexander Professor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, gave a lecture entitled “Evolution and Intelligent Design” at Alpha Delta Phi fraternity last night. The lecture came on the heels of Interim President Hunter R. Rawlings III’s condemnation of the push to teach intelligent design in public schools during the his State of the University Address. Read More ›