Casey Luskin of the Discovery Instintute will be producing a 10 part response to Barbara Forrest’s take on Kitzmiller v Dover. She was an expert witness on the winning side of that case. He is the author of Traipsing Into Evolution, which exposes the fallacious reasoning employed by Judge Jones.
A Discovery Institute talk on the book was recently aired on C-SPAN, watch it here.
Coyote Blog: A Skeptics Primer for “An Inconvenient Truth”
I’m halfway through, it is well done. (even handed, as well)
In the post Conservatives Against Intelligent Design, Indian Cowboy reveals the astounding ignorance of what ID proposes which is sadly so common among those who oppose it, especially those who do so because they consider it a “perversion of science”.
I’ve looked at his prior posts and see nothing indicating depth where this issue is concerned. The rub with ID proponents isn’t and has never been ‘evolution’, but the Darwinian inference those changes and ultimately life itself is a result of undirected mutations and chance. This is not provable by any experimental standard Indian Cowboy would consider good science. I’d challenge him and others to point me to the experiment designed to observe random and undirected mutations over vast time without any intelligence influencing the mutations!
From a blog entry I wrote a few months back:
When critics dismiss ID arguments out of hand as ‘not Science’, they attempt a pass on addressing the arguments that are being put forward for this theory.If one were to study intelligence and come up with general rules or properties of intelligence, would critics consider that science? If they were then to apply those rules to observable and documented processes or structures in nature (for instance, the ATP synthase motor), is that science?
The fact is, critics do not know if the micro-evolutionary process of adaptation is built in (ie ‘designed’) or if it is part of a larger purposeless process. They start with the premise it must be the latter and circle around to prove their original premise.
NDE proponents do not know that natural processes account for the origin of life. That is simply a matter of their own faith! Got gaps? Natural selection or infinite monkeys on infinite typewriters eventually producing the works of the old Bard is the answer!
I’m wide open to science and believe in the scientific method and the rigor of review and critique. It is critical to a decent understanding of our physical world. But I also know that with humans, the philosophic framework by which we view the world around us informs our conclusions about that world. Naturalists deny this when they deny their faith in science to provide the answers and their faith that observable, quantifiable nature is the means to all ends of understanding.
The bottom line? Critics should practice a little more intellectual honesty with their own faith based narrative and acknowledge the science upon which the nascent ID movement draws the design inference.
Intelligent Design is more a modifyier of Evolutionary Theory (in all its forms), than a replacement. I know of few ID proponents who discount the mountains of science showing the earth and universe to be very old and living things to undergo change over that time.
Is anyone game for polite exchange on the topic? Help resurrect this old post on my forum and join in!
Mark Frauenfelder posts at Boing Boing - profile of neutron bomb inventor. He links to a Charles Platt piece (pdf, txt or PDB) on Sam Cohen, the inventor of a nuclear weapon he considered ‘the most moral weapon”.
Platt’s piece is thought provoking, not only becaues he’s overtly anti-war and perhaps isolationist (not that there’s anything wrong with that), but also because of his ruminations on the psychological make up of people who seek power and eventually make policy:
Representative Melvin Price was the most senior member of the JCAE, and had played a major role in formulating nuclear policy for more than a decade. Supposedly he was an expert on all things nuclear, but his response may have bothered Cohen more than any other. At the end of a briefing, Price asked only one question: “What’s a neutron?”Perhaps Cohen should have known what to expect, yet still he was appalled. Elected representatives on committees that established policy at the highest level were motivated by base self-interest, expediency, and petty rivalries. They were not only ignorant, but uninterested in educating themselves. Given a choice between saving public money and spending it, they preferred to spend it. Allowed the option of destroying a city or leaving it unscathed, they opted to destroy it. Forced to choose between maximizing human suffering on innocent civilians or minimizing it, they chose to maximize it.
Journalists were not much better. They could have learned the ethical basis for the neutron bomb easily enough if they cared to do so, but, they didn’t care. They took the lazy way out, quoting cheap shots from peace activists’ press releases, which never failed to tag the bomb as the “ultimate capitalist weapon.” Cohen took grim solace when Leonid Brezhnev denounced him publicly as an “international war criminal,” but the vilification he received in his own country was hard to endure.
This was when Cohen was testifying before Congress, advocating the development of his inexpensive weapon, that would minimize destruction of property and environment, while achieving the war objective of killing enemy soldiers.
His experience should serve as a reminder to us all, especially those who support the Iraq War, about the venality and stupidity of elected officials, especially when it comes to control over the deadly US arsenal and the funds to build it - and the fear tactics all those in power use to keep the normal folk from fundamentally questioning why so much of their tax money must be spent on systems that are outdated, but are built in powerful Congressmen’s districts and states.
Read the essay, it is well written and gives a smidgen of insight into our atomic bomb past.