If Uncommon Descent (UD) is not suffering from our departure, then why has the Discovery Institute’s Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture stooped to lame promotion of the site? I’m referring to an ID the Future podcast, “Eric Anderson: Probability & Design.” It begins with Casey Luskin singing the praises of UD.
[Eric Anderson…] for the past year has been a contributing author about intelligent design at the great intelligent design blog, UncommonDescent.com. So, quick plug for Uncommon Descent. If you’re an “ID the Future” listener and you’ve never checked it out, go to UncommonDescent.com. And it’s a great ID blog, kind of like EvolutionNews.org. It has many participants, and many contributors, of which Eric is one of the main authors there.
And it ends with Casey Luskin steering listeners to UD.
And I would encourage our listeners to go check out the blog Uncommon Descent. That’s Uncommon, and the last word is spelled D-E-S-C-E-N-T, dot com. So “descent” like you’re going down into something. So UncommonDescent.com.
Well, it doesn’t quite end there. Anderson, whose “main focus is analyzing the logical and rhetorical bases of arguments to help people understand the strengths, weaknesses, and underlying assumptions used in the debate over evolution and intelligent design,” closes by tacitly characterizing us as illogical fools:
Well, I’ll just add that when we look into some of these arguments — this is just one example of an argument, that we’ve analyzed today — but when we have critics put forward arguments against intelligent design, what I’ve typically noticed, and found upon closer scrutiny, is that when you parse through it, you find that it actually underscores the whole validity of the approach that’s been taken by the major proponents of intelligent design, in formulating a careful approach to design detection.
Anderson lives up to Jeff Shallit’s characterization of him, revealing that he is laughably far behind the curve. He’s not worth my time. And there’s something wrong if you think that he’s worth yours. Then again, he was about the best choice Luskin had for the interview.
UD degenerated into a madhouse long ago. Barry Arrington has done everyone a favor, having finally gone too far, and given us a clear reason to do what we should have done already. I know that some of you are itching for him to post something that permits you to rationalize a return to UD. Please work to kick your UD habit for good.
I offer as “methadone” the Discovery Institute releases on ID, including the news feed Evolution News and Views, the podcast series ID the Future, and the YouTube channel DiscoveryScienceNews. There’s also the DI’s Center on Human Exceptionalism, with prime pickings for the philosophically inclined. Now, I know that you get no rush at the thought of this. None of the big fish would argue (and argue about arguments, and argue about arguments about arguments) with you. But you would get a rise out of the UD minnows — a fix, though not what fully feeds your habit. For a change, they’d be responding to you, rather than you to them. Wouldn’t that be an improvement?
To close on a positive note, I want to emphasize how amazing it is to see the travesty of discussion at UD shut down. To be honest, I didn’t think you could do it. You have my sincere thanks for exercising the discipline that you have.
Mung’s reaction to my questions regarding Mung’s thoughts on heat shock protein evolution we also telling. Happy to imply they could not have evolved, it seemed to me, but not interested in actually taking a clear position on it and discussing it. They are simply not interested.
I think the reason UD is starving is because ID is dead.
And ID is dead because no virtually ID papers are being published. And that can’t be because of prejudice from mainstream journals, because they aren’t being published in BIO-complexity either.
If ID was alive, either BIO-complexity would be full of contributions, or there would be plenty in the mainstream journals. But there isn’t.
The “current volume” of BIO-complexity is “Vol 2014” and contains four papers, of which two are reviews, and one is a “critical focus”. The one research paper has, as senior authors, two members of the editorial board.
There are a couple of mainstream journal papers by Ewert Dembski and Marks, but, as we have seen, they don’t really say anything about ID, and the authors seem reluctant to make any connection between “Active Information” and ID.
In some ways, the “Active Information” story pretty well undermines the original CSI concept IMO.
Gregory,
Acronyms, IMHO, should be capitalised.
Not if to do so would be to beg the question.
Human?
OK. Would you like to write an OP putting forward your argument as to why the human body plan couldn’t have evolved? I’ll give you author rights now (if you don’t already have them).
Yup. Many people think that Elizabeth is too kind and accommodating to such slime. But she does have the patience of a saint, and an impressive breadth of knowledge she shares effectively, and this is her blog, and she welcomes who she will. Even giving people like Sal a 10,001th chance.
Kind of the opposite of UD..
Does that give you a hint?
Welcome to TSZ, CharlieM.
I knew that Luskin had interviewed Torley. That was unsurprising, as he had been referenced in articles at ENV (five, I count now — two in the month prior to the interview). Note that the podcast was not cross-posted at ENV. Googling for it, I get 604 hits.
There was, to my knowledge, no reason for Luskin to interview Anderson. (I find no prior references to him at ENV.) The podcast was cross-posted at ENV, and the ENV post was echoed at various websites. I’d sorta, kinda, almost guess that Luskin knew he was going to post at ENV when he compared UD to ENV. Googling, I get 64,500 hits. The cross-posting makes just a wee little bit of a difference in visibility.
I listened to the beginning and the end of Part 1 of the Torley interview, and heard only the briefest mention of his association with Uncommon Descent. At the beginning of Part 2, Luskin says:
There’s no mention of UD at the end of the podcast. You see this as comparable to the pitch in the Anderson interview? When I know that the number of commenters at UD has fallen dramatically, and I hear Luskin claim the opposite, I strongly suspect that he’s up to something — not on general principles, but as a matter of long acquainance.
In the other interview, he says that Vince Torley is a Ph.D. philosopher who teaches in Japan, not that he teaches English in Japan. That’s the way Casey operates.
EL said:
I think the capacity of the human mind to see what it wants to see is virtually unlimited. I think that while people can say all sorts of self-serving things, what they do is a better indicator of what they really think.
As long as you guys are here attacking ID and UD, it paints a pretty clear picture to the contrary. What’s worse, intellectually speaking – someone who defends a thing because they believe it to be a thriving concept, or someone who attacks a thing they say is already dead?
So where are the articles by ID scientists, William? I agree that that “the capacity of the human mind to see what it wants to see is virtually unlimited” but how are you managing to see ID articles that aren’t there?
Or, if they are, can you list them?
And why is BIO-complexity empty?
For instance, why are there no articles in BIO-complexity by kairosfocus about FSCO?
EL:
What difference does it make to what I said? Why are you here attacking/arguing against that which you say is dead?
Ah, you mean how they say that FSCO/I can be calculated at UD but then don’t actually calculate it? Or when they say “body plans are too complex to have evolved” but then refuse to name a specific “body-plan”?
Yes, I agree. What they *do* or rather *don’t do* is very telling.
Worse? To have “worse” you need an objective standard to judge what’s worse by. As an atheist I don’t have one of those so such questions are meaningless. If everything is meaningless what does it mean for one thing to be “worse” then another?
You forget who you are talking to I think.
I’m saying, to be more precise, that ID as a project appears to be dead. It was supposed to be the science of detecting design. But nothing seems to be happening. No output.
Sure, there are still people posting articles about how ID inferences are valid, and as long as Somebody Is Wrong On The Internet there will be people like me who want to put them right (or, conceivably, be put right). And there are still lots of interesting things to talk about anyway.
But as a scientific project ID appears to be dead. Oddly, not even its UD advocates seem interested in the science.
It does not matter if we think it is dead or not. Rather, it’s the people lying about it that is the problem, the people using it to sneak religion into schools that is the problem.
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2015/06/louisiana_science_education_school_boards_principals_and_teachers_endorse.html
I know ID is vapid, you know it also. Yet it still finds it way into schools because people who should know better pretend it’s science.
If ID’s only sign of life is that people are still attacking it, that’s a bit sad for ID right?
What about that time you defended FSCO/I as a calculable entity, yet it turns out you were merely claiming that someone else was claiming that it could be calculated? That’s worse than both of those things.
If people pointing out the vacuity of an idea was valid evidence against its vacuity, then I suspect some Law Of Thought would have been violated.
But I do think that the human body plan evolved, I just don’t think it evolved by unguided, natural processes. I don’t have author rights at the moment, but if you are sure you are happy about me writing an OP, I will.
Perhaps you may wish to note the following points before you agree:
1. My time spent online is limited so my contribution will be pretty sporadic, so I would ask for some patience from contributers.
2. I do have some sympathies with ID but I am no spokesperson for it. My opinions are my own.
3. I have no official connection with the ID movement.
4. Since leaving school a very long time ago I have had no formal academic education to speak of.
5. Obviously my argument wouldn’t be framed in the way you have put it above.
EL said:
I don’t see how you arrive at the conclusion that “ID is dead.” The books on it that have been written to date have been very well received by the public and sold very well. There is a long, continuous history of published articles. As far as I know, the Biologic Institute and Evolutionary Informatics Lab are still in operation, having published as recently as last year. Looking over the archives of Bio-Complexity, it seems to contain about the same number of articles as any prior year.
So, from all of this, where would one conclude that ID is “dead”? The facts don’t indicated this. Nor do the facts indicate that UD is “starving”.
Bio-Complexity has not published a single article this year.
In 2010, when it started, it published 3 research articles.
In 2011 it published two.
In 2012 it published two
In 2013 it published one.
In 2014 it published one.
A journal that produces fewer research articles five years after it is founded than in its founder year is not a thriving journal.
So, is that because ID has gone mainstream? No, it isn’t. With the exception of the Bioinformatics Lab’s output on Active Information, there is nothing recent. And nobody at UD wants to discuss that, apparently, and Winston Ewert and his colleagues seem extremely reluctant to discuss it here.
So yes, I think it’s fair to say that ID is dead, as a scientific project. It can’t even fill its own journal with output by its own editors.
OMagain said:
If I remember correctly, I actually calculated it (at least my understanding of it) for a small post. It’s relatively easy to do for certain things – length of a functioning node string (like a paragraph of letters/words), number of variables available per node, take into account the general number of variations that could impart the same function (meaning), you end up with the basic FSCO/I value of the string.
What I said was that I don’t know how it would specifically be applied to specific biological artifacts, and that it was for others to make that case.
What evidence do you have that it did not?
Or is your ‘evidence’ the fact that nobody can prove it was not guided, as WJM holds?
I have a relevant quote handy.
If that’s how you remember it, that’s how you remember it. This explains many many things.
Right. And none that I am aware of have made it.
And that’s the point. It’s easy enough to compute probabilities for something in which you know the entire population of possible configurations, and something about their probability distributions.
But we know neither of those for biological artefacts. And without that, you can’t do the calc.
Ha. I’d like to see you take into account the general number of variations that could impart the same function (meaning) for a given string.
For example, how many other strings are there that will impart the same function (meaning) as this string:
?
And, please, no need to limit yourself to English. I look forwards to seeing the “basic FSCO/I” of that string, or your excuses.
EL said:
The year isn’t over. Do they update on a continuous basis, or do they release their journals at the end of each year?
It’s not a dead one, either.
No, I don’t think it’s fair to say that. I think it would be fair to say that there’s been a slow down of peer-reviewed, published work, but I don’t think that 5 months into 2015 with no listed new articles or books for 2015 is evidence that ID is “dead”.
I think the real question is, what’s the point of asserting that it is dead, and then continuing to argue as if it’s not?
Hardly.
William @ ud
Seems clear to me. It can be calculated handily. Just not by any living person it seems. Or did you mean that someone claims it can be calculated? Perhaps you’d like to revise that now, is there a way that FSCO/I can be calculated for any real work biological object or not?
What’s especially odd is that you actually do seem to know how to calculate it for specific biological artifacts
That’s the trouble with making it up as you go along. It’s hard to keep it all consistent. Whereas real science is of course consiliant.
WJM, why don’t you write up a paper supporting your claim that “intent” is a physical force which can move matter and submit it to BIO-Complexity? It seems to be exactly the kind of “science” they thrive on, the rare occasions they actually publish.
Perhaps something deep in their hearts is telling them not to go there. Specified complexity is an “information-theoretic marker of intelligence.” Active information is supposedly created by intelligence. However, specified complexity and negative active information differ by an additive constant. So if one measure doesn’t tell you that an event is due to intelligence, just switch to the other.
Eric Anderson, with his superior capacity for “analyzing the logical and rhetorical bases of arguments,” might realize that he has to stop saying that major ID proponents have been “formulating a careful approach to design detection,” if ever he were to let active information in the door.
To be fair, I have to admit that the skeptics seem uninterested that ID theory now contradicts itself in a major way. I’m guessing they expect math they couldn’t possibly understand. I’ve been struggling to find the magic words to convince folks that if they try, they will get it. Does a picture help?
It’s an online journal, so no reason to sit on papers until the end of the year.
And a journal that can only muster one or two research articles (and not much more in the way of comment) per year is clearly not thriving, any way you look at it.
It has a vast editorial board – a membership that hugely outweighs the number of authors it actually publishes.
This is wildly atypical for a scientific journal, or indeed any research journal.
It looks dead right now.
I do. Promising scientific leads do not “slow down”. And I’m not even counting books. Books are not peer-reviewed.
As a scientific enterprise it is dead. As a cultural one, it still has life yet. Hence the wedge.
William,
If ID is not dead what are the most significant advances that ID has made in the last, say, 5 years?
Name the top 3.
It is “dead” as in “as a scientific project it has dried up”. I’m not arguing “as if” that is the case. I’m arguing to point out that it is the case, and why.
CharlieM,
Thanks for this. I find it helpful that you’ve given Lizzie something to think about re: just who she wants to take on. Imo, stcordova & Mung are both abusing this site by playing games (which is a kind of condescending IDist hobby among some in the IDM). But hey, they’re doing it here and not at UD because of the oppressive communicative conditions there.
Just curious, by ‘school’ do you mean tertiary education, like college or university, or secondary school?
Btw, wrt to ‘sympathies,’ many theists when the IDM started wanted to believe that IDists might do something fruitful. They have been largely, if not entirely disappointed by the lack of progress of IDT in 20+ yrs.
I second this. I’m sure he’ll get right on that after KF submits his FIASCO paper.
What is it evidence for? A thriving research community? Do say.
Abusiveness is not the new goalpost. For me, abusiveness has always been the goalpost. If a person can discuss an issue without being abusive, I will engage them. If they chose to be abusive, I will call them on it, in a civil fashion. Why is that so hard to understand.
Again, the only time you have questioned Barry’s moderation is when you defended Joe’s abusive behaviour. That is some record to be proud of.
I think that you over estimate how well they have been received. And the popularity of a book says very little about the validity of the science within the book. Chariots of the Gods also sold very well.
Gregory,
Hi Gregory,
I mean secondary education.
If the ID movement is flogging a dead horse I would ask those who criticise it, why bother? It seems to me that it is doing a service by challenging the orthodoxy. Look at the time and effort people like Nick Matzke put into trying to come up with a conventional explanation for the appearance of the bacterial flagellum. This was prompted by the ID movement. People should not just look at the output of pro ID departments to guage its productivity, they should also take account of papers and articles written against it but motivated by it.
To the contrary, I assume that I’m telling myself lies. I seek them out, and try to reduce the difference between my beliefs and reality. Sometimes I manage to change what I am, and sometimes I have to accept what I am. I’ve been doing this since college, and I’ve dealt with many painful realizations. I have the sense that I’ll be hit by a wave of them soon.
Wow, that is extreme. Most of the people near and dear to me are evangelical Christians. My question for them is: “Why, with the emphasis you place on salvation, do you worry about nonessential aspects of interpretation of the Bible?” My favorite nephew, who has a master of divinity degree, admitted that it was a good question, and that he hadn’t thought about it. Others in my family couldn’t handle it. They had predictable comebacks that weren’t actually responsive.
It’s a delicate issue, because of the battle among atheists over “accommodationism.” I have not the least interest in classifying myself in terms of god — whatever that means. And I love my family. I sent them all email, a couple years ago, taking my best shot at persuading them to at least look at the BioLogos site. None of them did. I’m not trying to turn them into disbelievers. I’m just suggesting that they might have a way of entering the 21st Century. It’s up to them.
Some of the family have swallowed The Truth Project hook, line, and sinker. I learned that at Thanksgiving dinner, with the extended family gathered round. It was disturbing. There’s absolutely nothing I can say to them now.
Anyway… I’m a real person, and a struggling one as well.
You’ve hit on something there. It’s always fasciated me how few of those articles use the phrase “intelligent design” or “the designer”. Are you familiar with that body of work? What proportion of it would you hazard a guess was positive evidence for ID and what proportion is poking holes in Darwin?
Charlie M,
Every few months some anti-ID critic says “ID is dead”. Before that, it was “ID doesn’t produce any peer-reviewed papers.” Before that it was, “ID proponents don’t do any real research.” Before that it was, “There are no real scientists involved in ID.”
It’s a narrative reification process. They give ground grudgingly (without ever admitting it explicitly) as evidence to the contrary mounts, but keep announcing and insisting how useless and/or dead ID is every inch of the way.
Remember, William, you don’t care if your beliefs are true. You only care if they “work” for you.
You can continue believing in ID long after the corpse has cooled.
Would you care to go on the record on how many years it will be before “Darwinism” or “evolutionism” or whatever you want to call it is defeated and ID takes it’s place?
Though I was raised YEC, and then was ID/OEC, been following this conversation since I listened to Philip Johnson debate Will Provine, when I was 14, been a long-time reader at UD and PT, and remain a devout and convinced theist (though I don’t think TTOE threatens theism in any meaningful way and so am not above learning more about it), I too recently have pretty much given up on UD. I still look around over there every once in awhile. But the acrimony is just too strong recently. And it gets uninteresting when “you folks” aren’t around over there.
I now follow this site more closely and generally find it to more hospitable – even affording me (though I haven’t utilized it yet) the opportunity to create OP’s.
They are contradictory indicators of design. I’d thought that Dembski and Marks had let specified complexity die. For some reason, Ewert made it his master’s thesis. Ewert, Dembski, and Marks published this year on algorithmic specified complexity.. So specified complexity and active information are both on the table, though Dembski relegated the former to a single footnote in Being as Communion. Dembski and Marks are preparing the second edition of No Free Lunch, and I think they’re in a tough spot.
Assume that we have a specified target. As the probability of “hitting the target” goes down, specified complexity goes up precisely as much as active information goes down. Is that friendlier way of putting it?
EDIT: Algorithmic Specified Complexity was Ewert’s doctoral dissertation. His master’s thesis was on active information. So we’ve got one man advocating both measures.
The next major makeover of ID has begun. Can you describe it to me? If so, how did you learn of it?
I’ve never understood why the DI feels the need to publish. They say that the complexity of the cell could not have arisen through natural processes. So why don’t they just claim that pretty much every paper published in Science, Nature, Cell, PNAS, JMB etc etc is a pro-ID paper, even though the authors don’t realize it?
RodW,
They do! UD have posts where they would have an abstract and highlight words like “design”, “complex” and “unexpected” and that would be evidence for “unwitting” support for ID.