The most dangerous innovation of ID creationism

At the Panda's Thumb, Richard B. Hoppe posts a link to a 1981 debate between Henry Morris and Ken Miller, and asks, "What arguments, if any, do contemporary ID proponents offer that Morris does not?" The overall response is that there's really nothing in "intelligent design" creationism that was not present in overt creationism. Unsurprisingly, everyone focuses on matters of science. I must say that this reflects a dangerous indifference to the role of philosophy in judicial tests of creationism.

Any test of the legality of teaching a form of creationism as science in public schools will hinge on demarcation of science and religion. My reading of the Kitzmiller decision is that demarcation was much more important than the specifics of science and pseudoscience entered into evidence. For instance (pp. 67-68),

It is notable that defense experts’ own mission, which mirrors that of the IDM [ID movement] itself, is to change the ground rules of science to allow supernatural causation of the natural world, which the Supreme Court in Edwards and the court in McLean correctly recognized as an inherently religious concept. Edwards, 482 U.S. at 591-92; McLean, 529 F. Supp. at 1267. First, defense expert Professor Fuller agreed that ID aspires to “change the ground rules” of science and lead defense expert Professor Behe admitted that his broadened definition of science, which encompasses ID, would also embrace astrology. (28:26 (Fuller); 21:37-42 (Behe)). Moreover, defense expert Professor Minnich acknowledged that for ID to be considered science, the ground rules of science have to be broadened to allow consideration of supernatural forces. (38:97 (Minnich)).

Prominent IDM leaders are in agreement with the opinions expressed by defense expert witnesses that the ground rules of science must be changed for ID to take hold and prosper. William Dembski, for instance, an IDM leader, proclaims that science is ruled by methodological naturalism and argues that this rule must be overturned if ID is to prosper.

By the way, we all laugh at Behe now, but he is really no worse a philosopher than the majority of scientists. I shudder to think how the trial would have gone if Pennock and Forrest had dropped out, and a couple of "philosophy is bullshit" scientists had testified that science proves naturalism true.

So what is the most dangerous innovation of ID creationism? The movement stopped trying to overturn methodological naturalism, and adopted a new perspective on the nature of nature. The physical Universe is now comprised not just of matter and energy, but also of information. There is conservation of mass-energy, but not of information, which is created (only) by non-material intelligence. Six years ago, the design inference was to non-natural (i.e., supernatural) cause, and mainstream scientists were denigrated as naturalists. Now intelligent design is a non-material, though natural, cause, and mainstream scientists are denigrated as materialists.

The change in ontology makes IDC much more slippery than it was in Kitzmiller. On a verbal level, IDC has stepped entirely within naturalism. It does not obviously appeal to supernatural explanations. Many physicists accept the notion that information is in some sense physical. Thus it is much harder today than it was six years ago to argue that IDC is not science and that teaching of IDC as science does not serve a secular purpose.

Of course, most of us regard an unobservable entity that creates physical stuff, whatever it may be, out of nothing as supernatural. But we really should worry about a judge who is disposed to accept intuitively that people are creative, and that what they create by virtue of intelligence is not matter, but the information that gives form to matter. On the face of it, this does not seem a religious claim. And when IDCists say they can measure the information created by intelligence, citing the peer-reviewed publications of Dembski and Marks, it does not seem an unscientific claim. I believe that it is of the utmost importance to develop a simple explanation of why such a seemingly innocent notion of creation of information must be regarded as super­naturalism.

A chuckle from William Lane Craig

Some of you know William Lane Craig as the evangelical Christian theologian from Biola University who often speaks favorably of “intelligent design” creationism. It happens that I just read one of his criticisms of the Jesus Seminar, a large group that gauged the historicity of the sayings and acts of Jesus reported in the four canonical gospels and the Gospel of Thomas:

Of the 74 [scholars] listed in their publication The Five Gospels, only 14 would be leading figures in the field of New Testament studies. More than half are basically unknowns, who have published only two or three articles. Eighteen of the fellows have published nothing at all in New Testament studies. Most have relatively undistinguished academic positions, for example, teaching at a community college.

Prof. Craig, you really should spend some time with Confucius. Not one leading figure in the field of biology has ever contributed to the “theory” of intelligent design.

Whatever the Jesus Seminar got wrong, something it got right was to place the burden of proof on those who would claim historicity of a gospel passage. Obviously, most scholars delving into the matter are Christians seeking to demonstrate the truth of what they believe. Sound familiar? This is not to suggest that traditional New Testament scholars are no better than ID creationists. The New Testament scholars truly know the subject matter, while ID creationists demonstrate time and again their execrable ignorance of the relevant science.

The three Isaac Newtons of Ypsilanti

Back on August 5, Clive Hayden, the moderator at Uncommon Descent, exclaimed, “Robert Jackson Marks II is THE CHARLES DARWIN OF INTELLIGENT DESIGN!” The occasion was the inclusion of Marks among The 20 Most Influential Christian Scholars at Superscholar.org:

Robert J. Marks II (b. 1950), Baylor University’s leading research professor, has emerged as the public face of intelligent design. As the movement’s premier scientist, he has been dubbed “the Charles Darwin of intelligent design.”

That hyperbole is old news. But the site’s list of 15 Professors Who Were Also Criminals just caught my eye:

Alan Turing was the Isaac Newton of the 20th century, and is seen by many to be the father of the Information Age.

Given that Superscholar.org is the absolute authority on such matters, what are we to make of the claim that Bill Dembski is the Isaac Newton of Information Theory?

The superabundance of Isaac Newtons has me thinking of The Three Christs of Ypsilanti:

To study the basis for delusional belief systems, Rokeach [a psychiatrist] brought together three men who each claimed to be Jesus Christ and confronted them with each other's conflicting claims, while encouraging them to interact personally as a support group. Rokeach also attempted to manipulate other aspects of their delusions by inventing messages from imaginary characters. He did not, as he had hoped, provoke any lessening of the patients' delusions, but did document a number of changes in their beliefs.

I suspect that, although he occasionally retreats from particular errors with “not-pologies,” Dembski will never give up the delusion that he is the Isaac Newton of his day.

The talk that could have killed me

Presentations seem to be hit-or-miss affairs for me.

My first talk on evolutionary computation, which I gave during the opening session of the Third Annual Conference on Evolutionary Programming (1994), was a hit. Hans-Paul Schwefel, one of the inventors of the evolution strategy, joined me for lunch that day. Prior to the conference banquet, I was buttonholed by a guy whose name I did not recognize from the EC literature. He was obviously very bright, and he complimented me on my work. Furthermore, he seemed to know a lot about directed evolution. I kept stealing glances at his name tag, wondering, "Who is this guy?" To be honest, if I had known how to break away politely, we’d have spoken for 5 minutes instead of 20. In the end, one of the conference organizers approached him to say, “We’re about ready to start now.” And he walked to the table at the front of the room with the “reserved” placard. After dinner, he gave the most brilliant talk I’ve ever heard. His name was Gerry Joyce. Many of you know of the sensational result, “Self-Sustained Replication of an RNA Enzyme,” that he and his student Tracey Lincoln published last year (see PZ Myers' explanation). The conference got even better for me on the last day, when David Fogel, last year’s president of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, asked me to serve as co-chair, with Thomas Bäck and Pete Angeline, of the technical program for the following year’s meeting. (Unfortunately, I had to resign that position due to illness.)

The “disbelief discourse” I recently gave to the Oklahoma Atheists was a miss, no matter that I put a huge amount of time into preparing it. Driving to the venue, I took two wrong turns. I arrived at precisely the time I was supposed to begin, with my anxiety sky-high. It turned out that the guy with the projector and screen showed up just when I did, but that didn't make me feel any better. Then it turned out that my Apple laptop would not connect to the projector. So I converted my presentation to PDF and, with two tries, got it onto a thumb drive. I plugged the thumb drive into a backup laptop that was perched on a chair, rather than the podium where I was supposed to stand (and where there was a microphone, as well as a voice recorder for the planned podcast). At that point, I was totally discombobulated. I needed to stand in front of the podium to deal with the laptop. The screen, to which I wanted to point, was well behind me, and I caught myself talking over my shoulder several times. The microphone stand was directly behind my foot, and I bumped into it several times. Worst of all, I occasionally dared to look into the faces in front of me, and saw clearly that things were not going well. “Must press on” was all that I could think. The bright side of the experience was the Q&A. There were some good questions, and I had a lot of fun answering them. I hope that some of you who were there will believe that I’m usually the guy you saw in the end. It was an embarrassing experience for me.

So how could this have killed me? Well, the following day, I felt some pain behind my right knee. I thought I had sat wrong while finishing my slides. Indeed I had, but there was more to the story than that. Several days later, I was admitted to the hospital with extensive clotting in my leg, and with three pulmonary emboli. At present, it appears that an autoimmune response is making my blood sticky (i.e., antibodies are attaching to hemoglobin cells).

Perhaps you can understand now why I started by reminiscing about a time when everything went well.

The identity of the Designer

The elusive Kilroy has left his mark in exceedingly improbable places, all around the world. The only reasonable inference is....

Image copyright: Patrick Tillery

What is the probability of life in the physical universe?

I’ll be giving a “Disbelief Discourse” to the Oklahoma Atheists and the Channing Unitarians on Tuesday, November 16, at 7:30 PM.

Channing Unitarian Universalist Church
2800 West 15th Street
Edmond OK 73012

The event is open to the public.

What Is the Probability of Life in the Physical Universe?

The question posed in the title has no objective answer, and creationists avoid confronting it directly. They instead give mathematically dandified arguments that particular features of life are objectively so unlikely to have arisen by natural processes that they must reflect supernatural intervention. Their conclusions imply that life is physically improbable, and thus their claims of objectivity are false. This simple rebuttal may seem unsatisfying to laypeople who believe incorrectly that scientists use math to prove the properties of nature. Consequently, the presentation will begin with an explanation of mathematical modeling in science.

Biosketch

Tom English flirted with creationism in his teens, and went so far as to deliver an anti-evolution talk to his biology classmates. What led him to abandon his naive beliefs about the truth and reconcilability of scripture and science, and to embrace methodological naturalism in scientific investigation, was a combination of studies in the Bible and the philosophy of science. After earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in psychology and English, respectively, at Mississippi College, and master’s and doctoral degrees in computer science at Mississippi State University, he began investigating evolution in computational processes. He independently proved what came to be known as the “no free lunch” theorem for optimization, and subsequently published six papers related to it. In empirical research, he obtained by computational evolution a predictor of annual sunspots activity that was far more accurate than any previously reported. Tom is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and has served as an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation. His most recent scholarly publication, coauthored by Garry Greenwood, is “Intelligent Design and Evolutionary Computation,” Chapter 1 of Design by Evolution.

“Dover II”: Forensic science is not engineering

It is no secret that William A. Dembski, who filed a brief before withdrawing as an expert witness for the defense in Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District, is looking ahead to “Dover II.” I just wrote the following in a response to “Conservation of Information in Search: Measuring the Cost of Success”:

The article is the first in a series of publications that makes no positive contribution to the design of search procedures, but instead develops and applies a formal approach to arguing that success in search evidences design. That is, Dembski and Marks have disguised as engineering what is actually an attempt at forensic science, appropriate to making cases in courts of law and public opinion.

I’d point out to anyone who might serve as an anti-IDC expert in Dover II that Dembski and Marks have not subjected their work to scrutiny as forensic science. They have done their damnedest to avoid calling attention to the fact that their engineering papers are really not about engineering. Thus they’ve evaded whatever appropriate scrutiny they might have gotten within an inappropriate community. You can count on it, nonetheless, that the defense will present their publications as peer-reviewed science when the next legal battle comes along.

My comments are also relevant to those of you who face in the court of public opinion the (few) IDC rhetoricians who have managed to write off complex specified information and move on to active information.

Of “bad boys” and insipid women

This morning I had breakfast in Midwest City, Oklahoma, home of Tinker Air Force Base. It seems that many military retirees live there. Sitting in the booth next to mine was a one-armed man who might well have been a Vietnam vet. After some time he was joined by a young couple and an infant child. The husband was a brawny guy with a buzzcut. He had a cowboy hat in one hand, the infant carrier in the other, and cowboy boots on his feet. His T-shirt, which looked brand new, was tucked ever-so-neatly into his bluejeans. On the back was an image of a bottle of beer emptying over the silhouette of a shapely woman. Here’s the text that went with it:

Why beer is better than women...

• A beer is always wet.
• Beer always looks the same in the morning.
• Beer is always happy to ride in the trunk.
• Beer always goes down easy.
• A beer doesn't change its mind after you've gotten the top off.
• When you change beers, you don't have to pay alimony.
• You can enjoy beer all month long.
• You can share a beer with friends.

Things turned utterly surreal when I heard the server ask, “How old is she?” Yes, she.

Grandpa did not seem thrilled to have the company. Eventually Daddy went out to his immaculate, humongous, white pickup truck and moved Baby Girl’s bag to Grandpa’s car. Then he left alone to do whatever manly stuff he was going to do in that T-shirt.

Perhaps I am making too much of this. For all I know, a buddy gave him the T as a tasteless gag when he was getting married, and he was off to visit the buddy… at 8 a.m. on a Wednesday.

Long ago, I’d have expressed disgust at the “bad boy” making a big display of his indomitability. I would have regarded both the mother and daughter as victims. But there’s nothing secret anymore about attraction to bad boys — I’ve seen first-hand that it runs high among feminist intellectuals, whom you would expect to be least susceptible — and I have to say that women are responsible for dealing with it. After all, we are talking here about guys who do not deceive women. The mother allowed the sexually exciting male she has snagged and foolishly expects to change to degrade and humiliate not only her, but her daughter and women in general.

Archive critiques of ID creationism

It is easy to forget, here in our echo chamber, that most of the world’s researchers care little about “intelligent design” creationism. When Dembski and Marks submit a paper like “The Search for a Search” to online journals founded and edited by Poles and Japanese, there is a good chance that the reviewers are unsuspecting of shenanigans.

Much of the online criticism of IDC could, with little modification, be packaged as rough drafts of scholarly papers, and uploaded to archives such as arXiv.org. What makes this worthwhile is that Google Scholar, and not just Google, indexes these archives. A Scholar hit with a title such as “Errors in ‘The Search for a Search’ of Dembski and Marks” stands a good chance of catching the attention of reviewers of future work by the authors. Of course, archiving a critique does not preclude linking to it from blogs.

Rob recently gave a response [PDF] to “The Search for a Search” that strikes me as a prime example of what should be uploaded to arXiv.org. (In any case, I recommend it to those of you who can deal with math.)

I intend to follow my own advice. Provided that the lead author does not object, I’ll soon archive a brief paper, and notify you of it.

Perfectionism and writer's anxiety

I used to think that I could learn to toss off remarks on the Internet. This post is my 20th at Bounded Science. But I have 24 un-posted drafts.

I recall ever-so-clearly copying sentences from the board when I was in the first grade. The other students had finished all ten, and I was on my fifth. The anxiety and shame I felt were incredible. I’ve since studied psychology and had some counseling. But I cannot begin to explain what was going on with that little guy.

I took the Scholastic Aptitude Tests back when there was no penalty for wrong answers. Although I knew to stop agonizing and start guessing when time was running out, I could not bring myself to do it. I left fairly large numbers of questions unanswered, and ended up with high (“DaveScot”) scores anyway.

Please don’t take this as backhanded bragging. My birthday is coming soon, and how little I’ve produced is weighing heavily on me. “To those whom much is given, much is expected.” I might have another 20 or 30 years in which my brain works well, and I’m wondering how to turn my life around.

The greater the scrutiny I expect a piece of writing to receive, the greater the problems I have with it. Writing for a journal ties me in knots. No matter that I see mediocre stuff in journals all the time, I can’t let go the notion that my own submission has to be absolutely fabulous.

The more I struggle to make my work fabulous, the worse it gets. The best prose I’ve turned out is, unfortunately, my dissertation (1990). What made it different? After gathering data compulsively, I had only a month to do the writing. There was a job in the offing, and my wife and son were depending on me. So I forced out a certain number of pages each day, revising little. Every now and then, I flip the book open, and find myself asking, “Is that really my work?”

I get annoyed when people like Dembski weigh my c.v. I’m well aware of my horribly low output. But anybody who attempts to diminish me when I speak about the area of research I’ve focused upon for 15 years has problems greater than my own.

I’ve begun writing a special post — a highly accessible presentation of my current understanding of “no free lunch” in optimization. Dembski and Marks are pushing an interpretation of the classic NFL theorem that is precisely backwards, and my goal is to get most of you to understand it better than they do. But let’s plan on my post being far from perfect, and on its improving with feedback from you.