Tiktaalik roseae and the Discovery Institute

The Discovery Institute wants to argue that Tiktaalik roseae is not a transitional fossil (images here). Nick Matzke dissects the DI's claims at The Panda's Thumb.

DI continues to lie about the Dover case

Now the Discovery Institute is claiming (via Michael Francisco, on the DI's EvolutionNews blog, reporting on an American Enterprise Institute article co-authored by former DI policy analyst, attorney Seth Cooper) that the newly elected Dover Area School Board intentionally cost the school district $1 million in legal fees by refusing to rescind the illegal policy in December, after the trial was over and before Judge Jones had issued his ruling. This is at odds with the fact that their rescinding the policy would not have changed the outcome of the trial or the awarding of legal fees, which is why they didn't do it until after the ruling came.

What's worse, they have attributed malice and conflict of interest (now retracted, to the original source's partial credit) to one of the new board members who was also a plaintiff in the lawsuit regarding this decision, even though he was not yet on the board at the time of the December discussion (there was no vote) on changing the policy due to a runoff election.

And further worse--on William Dembski's blog, someone who pointed out the facts had their comment deleted.

There's nowhere to place the blame for the $1 million in legal fees except on the original board who put the policy in place over the warnings and objections at the time that their action was unconstitutional--and perhaps to some extent on the Discovery Institute advisor who they initially spoke with about what policy to adopt, Seth Cooper.

UPDATE (April 5, 2006): Michael Francisco has revised the wording of his blog post, probably to make it less actionable under defamation laws. Ed Brayton points out the specifics of his revisions.

Eugenie Scott gives the Robert S. Dietz memorial lecture

Genie Scott of the NCSE gave a talk on "Creationism and Evolution: Current Perspectives" to a standing-room-only audience of several hundred at the ASU Physical Sciences building. This crowd came out to see her despite the fact that Jared Diamond was speaking at ASU at the same time, about his book Collapse.

The lecture began with a few words about Bob Dietz, who was a strong supporter of evolution and critic of creationism, and showed a few slides of him and his book, Creation/Evolution Satiricon: Creationism Bashed.

Genie gave an overview of creation science, comparing and contrasting it with evolution. She pointed out the logical flaw of the "two model approach" in assuming that evolution and creation are the only two possibilities and that falsifying evolution is all that's needed to prove creationism.

There followed a discussion of the Paluxy river mantracks, and how Glen Kuban's work led even the Institute for Creation Research to stop using them as evidence that humans and dinosaurs lived together. She talked briefly about some problems with the ark story and the misidentification of geological features as fossilized arks (another example which creationists themselves have refuted).

Genie described the NCSE Grand Canyon raft trips, pointing out how they teach both the evolution and creationist sides of the story, while the ICR raft trip only teaches the creationist version. She put up a photo of Steve Austin and his book Grand Canyon, Monument to Catastrophe, along with a photo of "Stone Cold" Steve Austin, pointing out that they should not be confused, even though the creationist Steve Austin does work on cold stone. (This reference worked well with the young audience--my expectation was for a comparison photo of Lee Majors as the "Six Million Dollar Man" as the joke.) She spent some time describing how the Grand Canyon is composed of thousands of layers of sediment which the creationists claim to have been laid down through repeated walls of water and sediment precipitation. This set the stage for Austin's claims about the canyons around Mt. St. Helens, where a 30' deep ditch was cut by water in seven days--thirty feet of unconsolidated ash and loose sediment doesn't compare to four thousand feet of individual layers of shales, limestones, sandstones, etc.

Since the event was at ASU, home of the Institute of Human Origins, she mentioned Donald Johanson tiring of correcting bogus creationist claims about Lucy's knee joint.

She then turned to intelligent design, or "creationism light," which she described as consisting of only a single philosophical claim--that you can detect the evidence of things that are designed and are the products of intelligence, and in particular the product of a divine designer. ID has proposed two concepts for identifying design, Behe's irreducible complexity and Dembski's design inference. She described the Discovery Institute and the Wedge Document, and pointed out that there are many criticisms of Behe's irreducible complexity and Dembski's complex specified information on the web. The structure of the ID arguments, she argued, is the same as that of creation science--that evolution can't do it, therefore it must be intelligent design. Michael Behe's favored example of the bacterial flagellum was shown in an animated slide, and Genie pointed out that they like to use examples of complex systems where we haven't yet developed full explanations, but they ignore other examples of apparently "irreducibly complex" systems where we do have full explanations, like the evolution of the mammalian ear (which she proceeded to illustrate).

She gave a history of the intelligent design movement and its roots in creationism--covering the 1981 McLean v. Arkansas decision, Jon Buell's formation of the Foundation for Thought and Ethics, and the publications of Thaxton, Bradley, and Olsen's Mystery of Life's Origin and Of Pandas and People. She described the science of the latter as awful, giving as an example its treatment of genetic distances between organisms based on cytochrome c, a demonstration that the authors don't understand evolution (a topic discussed in the Dover case).

Wesley Elsberry's work on word counts of "creationis[t/m]" vs. "intelligent design" in the sequence of manuscripts that became Of Pandas and People was graphically depicted, showing the former dropping to zero and the latter increasing to the level of the former in 1987, after the creationists lost at the U.S. Supreme Court in Edwards v. Aguillard.

She briefly commented on William Dembski's draft of version three of Of Pandas and People, which used "sudden emergence" instead of "intelligent design," and about the Discovery Institute's move to a "teach the controversy" position which it has held for a few years, and its model policy for school boards to teach the "strengths and weaknesses" of evolution adopted by the Grantsburg, Wisconsin school board in December 2004.

She listed seven states that have introduced anti-evolution legislation this year (Alabama, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Utah), promoting books critical of intelligent design and creationism (including Young and Edis' Why Intelligent Design Fails, Pennock's Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics, Forrest and Gross's Creationism's Trojan Horse, Miller's Finding Darwin's God, Shanks' God, the Devil, and Darwin, Isaak's Counter-Creationism Handbook, and her own Evolution vs. Creationism, which she was pleased to announce had just been reviewed in the New York Times Book Review. She showed a screen shot of Amazon.com listing her book with a sales rank of #284, though she noted this is an hour-by-hour rank and she had to wait until late on Sunday night to get the shot.

In closing, Genie noted that Bob Dietz was a real scientific iconoclast who advocated views that were outside of the mainstream when he initiated them--that seafloor spreading occurs and is evidence of continental drift, that moon craters are asteroid impacts not volcanoes, that shatter cones are evidence of meteoritic impacts. He didn't respond to criticism by starting a policy institute, hiring a PR firm, and lobbying to have his theories taught in public schools--he responded by doing scientific work, by doing research, by writing and presenting papers. That's the work that needs to be done to get things taught in public school science classes.

Afterward, there was a small reception outside the auditorium, and Genie was swamped with people asking questions for quite some time. I was surprised that there were no obvious creationists or intelligent design advocates--those who were present (I'm sure there were some there) kept their views to themselves.

The story behind the Wedge Strategy becoming public

The Seattle Weekly has published a story on the Discovery Institute, including original scans of the "Wedge Strategy" and the story of how it was leaked to the Internet by Matt Duss and Tim Rhodes. More at Pharyngula, including the Wedge in PDF.

I found this paragraph interesting, considering how much the Discovery Institute spends on PR:

Seattle Weekly began making inquiries for this story in mid-2005, but neither Chapman nor any Discovery Institute fellow has been willing to be interviewed. A last attempt to elicit comment, e-mailed to spokesperson Rob Crowther on Jan. 4, elicited the following: "With the start of the new year all of the Fellows and staff are quite busy and their schedules are completely full. I think you'll find more than enough information on our website that you are welcome to quote from. If you want to submit questions in writing, I'd be happy to pass those along and see if anyone has time to respond, but I can't make any guarantees." A number of questions were submitted; none was answered.

Discovery Institute and the status of Intelligent Design as science

The Discovery Institute has lately taken the position (argued by law student Michael Francisco) that Judge Jones was wrong to even consider ruling on the question of whether Intelligent Design is science. This position has been refuted in detail by Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars, by John Pieret at Thoughts in a Haystack, and by Mike Dunford at The Questionable Authority.

I have one critique of Dunford's argument--I believe he is conflating two positions in order to create a contradiction on the part of the Discovery Institute when he points out that they argued that he should rule on the constitutionality of Intelligent Design, but should not have ruled on whether Intelligent Design is science. These are distinguishable issues and one could hold both simultaneously without contradiction (though not necessarily without error). Where the Discovery Institute contradicted the recent argument from Michael Francisco is that its expert witnesses and its amicus brief did argue for the scientific status of ID, as Brayton and Pieret point out.

How you can tell the Discovery Institute isn't doing science

Mike Dunford compares their PR output to their scientific output at The Questionable Authority. They put out a press release at a rate of 0.44 per day, but scientific papers at a rate of 0.0046/day. Another way of looking at it is that it took them over 20 years to generate the 34 papers on their list, but their last 34 press releases have come in the last 77 days (since November 10, 2005).

Skeptics using Intelligent Design for fundraising

The two major skeptical organizations in the U.S.--Michael Shermer's Skeptics Society and Paul Kurtz's Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) (or, actually, its parent organization, the Center for Inquiry)--have both decided to use combatting the threat of Intelligent Design as a major platform of their most recent fundraising campaigns.

The Skeptics Society sent out a card-sized folded mailing with a photo of Darwin on the front with the caption "Help us keep religion out of the science classroom!" The inside reported on recent events, such as Cardinal Schonborn's New York Times piece that the Discovery Institute and their PR agency, Creative Response Concepts, helped arrange. It continues with facts about the amount of funding the Discovery Institute receives, quotes from Phillip Johnson, William Dembski, and Jonathan Wells, Harris and Pew poll results showing the general public's ignorance on evolution. So how will collected funds be used to combat Intelligent Design? Apparently Shermer has a new book coming out this year titled Why Darwin Matters: Evolution, Design, and the Battle for Science and Religion (Henry Holt/Times Books), copies of which will be sent "to every Congressman, Senator, and Governor in America, along with the relevant state boards of education, and state legislative bodies contemplating passing pro-creationist legislation." That doesn't strike me as a particularly productive way to combat ID--I suspect most of the recipients will not read the book.

There are other bullet items listed--publication of "a special volume of essays on evolution and Intelligent Design creationism collected from the pages of Skeptic magazine, to be published by the Skeptics Society and widely distributed to science teachers throughout America to give them the intellectual tools they need to deal with ID and creationism." Another is to "distribute free copies to teachers" of the existing booklet How to Debate a Creationist. That sounds much more worthwhile, though I think that it would be more productive to give teachers tools like Eugenie Scott's Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction and Mark Isaak's Counter-Creationism Handbook (the online version of which is here--some of the best teacher and student resources are already free and online).

The bonuses for contributors include a free book from a selection of six for $100 "Supporters" (In Darwin's Shadow by Tim Callahan is the only one that appears directly relevant to the topic). $500 "sponsors" get a free 3-year subscription to Skeptic; $1000 "benefactors" get two free tickets to the 2006 Skeptics Society conference on "The Environmental Wars"; and $5000 "patrons" get dinner with Shermer and "a world-renowned scientist (to be announced)" and a private tour of Mt. Wilson's 100-inch telescope and use of the 60-inch telescope, along with the gifts the other levels get.

The Center for Inquiry sent out a more elaborate package, including a DVD presentation promoting the "New Future Fund," a campaign to raise $26.6 million, "the largest sum ever raised in the name of humanism, skepticism, and scientific naturalism." The four major goals for the use of the money are "Legal Activism," "Opposing Creationism/Intelligent Design," "Transnational Development," and "Outreach and Education." The second item, "Opposing Creationism/Intelligent Design," discusses Intelligent Design, and says that "CSICOP is fighting back, mobilizing grassroots outreach and expert scientists when ID proposals threaten. We're especially aggressive online, publishing a stable of online columnists and a dynamic new website, Creation & Intelligent Design Watch." The website has a pretty substantial amount of content, with the November/December Skeptical Inquirer (a special issue on "Evolution and the ID Wars") as the centerpiece (along with other CSICOP-related articles, including many of Chris Mooney's Doubt and About articles), links to items appropriate for classroom use on the left side, and links to current news stories on the right side.

Now, I'm all in favor of a diversity of approaches to promote critical thinking and combat Intelligent Design's political actions, but everyone should keep in mind that the two organizations actually doing the most in this arena are the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), which is the only organization devoted entirely to fighting creationism and promoting accurate teaching about evolution, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which has provided the legal support for every major creation/evolution courtroom battle. By all means support the Skeptics Society and Center for Inquiry's programs, but if Intelligent Design is a concern, please be sure to support the NCSE and ACLU.

Casey Luskin's lack of integrity

Casey Luskin offered a commentary (on the Discovery Institute's "Evolution News & Views" blog) on Kenneth Miller's testimony in the Dover case in which he expounded on chromosomal fusion and evidence for common ancestry between apes and humans. Mike Dunford and P. Z. Myers responded, pointing out numerous errors and misunderstandings in Luskin's argument. Luskin's commentary has been enshrined as a paper at the IDEA Center website called "And the Miller Told His Tale."

If Luskin or the Discovery Institute were serious about "teaching the controversy," they'd at least acknowledge the existence of these responses. But even the trackbacks for the blog entry remains empty...

Phyllis Schlafly defends liars, by lying

Ed Brayton gives a rebuttal to what is perhaps the most egregiously dishonest critique of the Dover decision so far, by Phyllis Schlafly. John West of the Discovery Institute links to the Schlafly piece with approval.

Two examples which support the heading I've chosen: Schlafly writes of Judge Jones:

He smeared "fundamentalists," impugned the integrity of those who disagree with him by accusing them of lying and issued an unnecessary permanent injunction.

Judge Jones' accusations of lying were directed at two individuals who testified in the trial, Dover board members Alan Bonsell and William Buckingham, not at "fundamentalists" or "those who disagree with him." And he made the accusations because those two board members were lying, as I've previously described (about Bonsell here, about Buckingham here, and there's more in the decision here) and may end up facing perjury charges.

Schlafly further expands upon her misrepresentation of Jones' criticism of these two dishonest board members:

He lashed out at witnesses who expressed religious views different from his own, displaying a prejudice unworthy of our judiciary. He denigrated several officials because they "staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public."

Jones never mentions his religious views, and does not denigrate these board members for expressing religious views different from his own, but for lying. Here is the passage from Jones' decision that Schlafly is dishonestly commenting on:

It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy. (p. 137 of the decision)

Ed addresses more of Schlafly's dishonesty at Dispatches from the Culture Wars.

Daniel Morgan v. Jonathan Witt

Daniel Morgan has posted a response to Jonathan Witt's criticism of his summary of the Sternberg Saga.

Morgan has admitted where he's made mistakes--can Witt and the Discovery Institute give that a try?

Casey Luskin and William Dembski Dishonesty

I'd like to call attention to two recent articles over at Dispatches from the Culture Wars. The first is about Casey Luskin, blogger for the Discovery Institute. The second is about William Dembski, the "Isaac Newton of information theory."

In the first piece, Brayton writes about how Luskin has referred to Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education as "Darth Vader." Brayton quotes Luskin: "In the past I've compared Eugenie C. Scott to Darth Vader because she is full of internal contradictions, knows in her heart she's lying, powerful, persuasive, and most importantly, she travels around representing the dominating power (the Empire) and fighting the good guys. All in the name of ...well, I'm not exactly sure what her motivation is yet. It's certainly not truth."

Yet Luskin provides no examples of lies or ulterior motives, and has used false statements to argue against statements she has made. In one example: "I asked her why she thinks ID isn't science. She said it isn't science because it does not refer to natural law (a reference to Ruse's testimony which he later recanted)." Brayton, speaking directly to philosopher Michael Ruse, asked him if, in the face of criticisms from other philosophers about his position on the demarcation between science and non-science (e.g., see Larry Laudan's piece in Ruse's book But Is It Science?), he holds that Intelligent Design is non-science. As Brayton writes, "He replied that it is non-science because it does not refer to natural law. If Ruse has recanted, he appears to be unaware of it."

As Brayton notes in the same piece, when he's made charges of dishonesty against William Dembski, he's backed them up--and he's done so yet again, showing that Dembski has continued to misrepresent the work of Douglas Axe. In a 2000 paper, Axe did work which focused on a particular gene which confers resistance to certain antibiotics. As Brayton summarizes the paper, "it showed that this particular enzyme could retain most of its function even if it was hit with a major mutational event that resulted in changing as many as 10 of its amino acid residues simultaneously, could retain some of its function (and thus still be capable of selection) even if a mutation resulted in as much as 20% of its total amino acid residues being substituted simultaneously, and that if 40 mutations happened simultaneously, it would stop functioning."

Dembski, however, summarizes it this way: "But there is now mounting evidence of biological systems for which any slight modification does not merely destroy the system’s existing function, but also destroys the possibility of any function of the system whatsoever (Axe, 2000)."

Brayton points out that Matt Inlay criticized Dembski for this misrepresentation on The Panda's Thumb back in February, and that Inlay has shown that Dembski has known this is a misrepresentation for at least two years. Brayton concludes:

Dembski has crossed over a line at this point, I think. I don't think it's any longer possible to maintain that he is merely an ideologue undergoing cognitive dissonance, or that he's just engaging in wishful thinking of the type we are all probably prone to when defending ideas we have a personal stake in. He is now simply lying outright, and he has to know that.

Discovery Institute attempts to backdoor testimony into the Dover trial

This is old news, but I haven't noted it here before--the two planned expert witnesses from the Discovery Institute for the Dover trial were Stephen Meyer and William Dembski, who both withdrew from the case. The DI attempted to back-door their testimony into the trial in the form of an amicus brief. The judge ruled that the brief was inadmissible, concluding:

In addition, after a careful review of the Discovery Institute’s submission, we find that the amicus brief is not only reliant upon several portions of Mr. Meyer’s attached expert report, but also improperly addresses Mr. Dembski’s assertions in detail, once again without affording Plaintiffs any opportunity to challenge such views by cross-examination. Accordingly, the “Brief of Amicus Curiae, the Discovery Institute” shall be stricken in its entirety.

A fuller quote (as well as a Fuller quote) may be found at Stranger Fruit.

I seem to recall reading a comment from the judge with respect to DI's legal representation that he wasn't running a law school... if I find it I'll update this entry with a link.

Michael Behe Disproves Irreducible Complexity

In the Dover trial, Behe was questioned at some length about what was demonstrated in the paper he co-authored with David Snoke, "Simulating Evolution by Gene Duplication of Protein Feature that Requires Multiple Amino Acid Residues," which the Discovery Institute lists as a peer-reviewed journal article supporting intelligent design.

At the Dispatches from the Culture Wars blog, Ed Brayton quotes a long section from Behe's cross-examination about this paper about what it actually demonstrates. It has been represented as demonstrating that a particular kind of irreducibly complex system cannot evolve. What it actually shows is something rather different. As Ed puts it:

Yet what does he admit under oath that his own study actually says? It says that IF you assume a population of bacteria on the entire earth that is 7 orders of magnitude less than the number of bacteria in a single ton of soil...and IF you assume that it undergoes only point mutations...and IF you rule out recombination, transposition, insertion/deletion, frame shift mutations and all of the other documented sources of mutation and genetic variation...and IF you assume that none of the intermediate steps would serve any function that might help them be preserved...THEN it would take 20,000 years (or 1/195,000th of the time bacteria have been on the earth) for a new complex trait requiring multiple interacting mutations - the very definition of an irreducibly complex system according to Behe - to develop and be fixed in a population.

In other words, even under the most absurd and other-worldly assumptions to make it as hard as possible, even while ruling out the most powerful sources of genetic variation, an irreducibly complex new trait requiring multiple unselected mutations can evolve within 20,000 years. And if you use more realistic population figures, in considerably less time than that. It sounds to me like this is a heck of an argument against irreducible complexity, not for it.

The full exchange quoted at Dispatches is worth reading, and more commentary can be found at The Panda's Thumb, where John Timmer points out that

Based on the math presented there [in Behe & Snoke], it appears that this sort of mutation combination could arise about 10^14 times a year, or something like 100 trillion times a year.

The Discovery Institute misleads the New York Times

That they are primarily involved in a PR effort is made clear by the way they declare victories where they've lost, as they did with regard to science standards in New Mexico. This time, they suckered the NYT into repeating the falsehood.

"Teach the Controversy"

The Intelligent Design movement recently hired a PR firm to promote its views. A critic using the name "vax" commented on this at William Dembski's (the "Isaac Newton" of ID) blog:

Why would ID need to be ‘promoted’? If it is science (as claimed) then the arguments and facts and should speak for themselves.

If it’s just a public relations exercise combining religion, politics and deceptive scientific-sounding jargon, however…

This led to a response from "Dan":

It is obvious why it needs to be promoted…because it is being shut out by radical left wing atheists that control the science ciriculum at the University level who control the peer reviewed journals. Also, ID is young and it has the right to have time to germinate or die-with a fair hearing.

To which "vax" replied:

Sounds a bit paranoid to me - not all scientists are “radical left wing atheists”! In fact there are scientists across the globe of every political hue and holding every creed who understand that all living beings on this planet share common ancestry. How do they know? Because the hypothesis has stood up to intense scrutiny over the past 150 years. ID is not science because there is no hypothesis; nothing that could be falsified.

“ID is young and it has the right to have time to germinate or die-with a fair hearing.”

Yes, that’s true, but ID proponents don’t want a fair hearing. They want to bypass the hypothesis, the data collection, the analysis, the peer reviewing etc, and have their ideas placed straight into school science classes! To be taken seriously by the scientific community (radically left wing or otherwise) perhaps the discovery institute would be better off using their money to fund actual research rather than for hiring a top public relations firm (Creative Response Concepts).

The result of this exchange? William Dembski bans "vax":

Vax, you are repeating the party line. I have no patience for it here. You are out of here. –WmAD

More commentary may be found at The Panda's Thumb blog.