Further Dembski dishonesty about Shallit

William Dembski continues to dig himself a deeper hole with respect to his false claim that Jeff Shallit did not testify in the Dover case because his deposition went badly and was an embarassment to the plaintiffs. In fact, Shallit did not testify because he was a rebuttal witness to Dembski, who withdrew from the case, and because the defense filed a motion to prevent it.

Dembski also continues to claim that the Shallit deposition is somehow being concealed, when in fact it was filed in the case and is a public document. (More at Dispatches from the Culture Wars.)

Darwinian Trilemma

William Dembski has posted (from Ian Bibby) the following "Darwinian Trilemma":

1. Science cannot test the proposition that biological features are designed.
2. Darwinism explains the appearance of design in biology not as actual design but as the product of natural selection and random variation.
3. Darwinism is science.

Commentators have offered a number of responses, such as rejecting an apparent equivocation on "design" between premises 1 (an objective feature of nature) and 2 (a psychological appearance).

While I think there's something to this objection, I would also reject premise 1 as stated. Surely there are scientific mechanisms for distinguishing natural features from artifacts of the sorts we are aware of (e.g., forensic science can distinguish at least some murders from deaths by natural causes). What science cannot distinguish is a hypothesis that biological features are the product of evolution from the hypothesis that a divinity created biological features that look just like the product of evolution. Similarly, science cannot distinguish automobiles that are created by people from automobiles that are created by a divine being to look just like automobiles built in a human-built factory, nor can it distinguish human beings who were born of a man and a woman from human beings who are directly created to look exactly as though they were born of a man and a woman (Omphalos included). (In other words, God could choose to work directly, simulating evolution, or indirectly, using evolutionary mechanisms or setting up the initial conditions and letting evolution run its course, and those hypotheses are empirically indistinguishable. Some religious believers advocate a view where events have natural causes, yet are also caused by supernatural beings such as Satan. In such an anti-Ockhamite, unparsimonious view, there is no scientific way to distinguish an event with both natural and supernatural causes from one which didn't have the latter.)

If a God-based hypothesis can be formulated in such a way as to have empirically testable consequences which are distinguishable from evolution, I don't see why it couldn't be science. This means there *could be* an "intelligent design" that qualifies as scientific--but what's been promoted in Dover is simply a renamed creationism, rather than a new field with any scientific content.

The real problem for such God-based hypotheses is that there really are no limits or definitions around what God does or would do--no empirical evidence is ever considered to be evidence against God by the advocates. I think there actually is empirical evidence against many specific gods which have been endorsed through the millenia, including commonly held views of contemporary monotheism. If you say that humans are psychologically similar to God (being created in his image), that God is perfectly rational and desires particular outcomes, then actions (or inaction) inconsistent with those desires, intentions, and facts of the world are evidence against such a God's existence. This gives evidential weight to atheistic arguments such as the argument from evil, the argument from (reasonable) non-belief, arguments based on the dependency of consciousness on physical brains, the facts of evolution, religious disagreement, and on the distribution of religious beliefs (indicative of cultural transmission rather than supernatural intervention).

Dover School Board Swept Out of Office

In yesterday's election, the entire Dover School Board was voted out of office. Four of the new board members were Republicans running as Democrats; the incumbents were all Republicans. Four of the new board members are part of an organization called Dover CARES, which supports the teaching of intelligent design in a context such as an elective comparative religions course but not in the science classroom. The new board will take office on December 5 and have indicated that they will not change policy for a month, which presumably will be after the judge makes a decision in the lawsuit. This will likely mean that the decision (which I fully expect to go against the Dover school board) will not be appealed. More at the Panda's Thumb, Questionable Authority, Pharyngula, and Dispatches from the Culture Wars.

Update: Pat Robertson warns the people of Dover that now that they've forsaken God, God will not be there to help them in time of need:

I’d like to say to the good citizens of Dover. If there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city. And don’t wonder why He hasn’t helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I’m not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that’s the case, don’t ask for His help because he might not be there.

Nothing like argumentum ad baculum...

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.

William Dembski's Obsessive Complaints of Obsession

Ed Brayton comments on the "Isaac Newton of Intelligent Design"'s crazy accusations of obsession against his critics. Dembski's latest is to accuse mathematician Jeff Shallit of being removed as a witness in the Dover trial because "his obsessiveness against me and ID made him a liability to the ACLU." Actually, Shallit did not testify because he was a rebuttal witness to Dembski, Dembski withdrew from the trial, and the defense did not use Dembski's ideas in their case.

Dembski then dug the hole deeper, stating that this couldn't be the reason. Why not? Because he withdrew before Shallit's deposition was taken. He went on to challenge the ACLU and Shallit to release a transcript of the deposition. Unfortunately for Dembski, it was the defense that took the deposition, to make sure they would be prepared in case Shallit would be used as a witness--and the deposition (at least in the preliminary, uncorrected transcript) is already a public record.

Perhaps Dembski should work on responding to his critics, rather than accusing them of stalking him.

Deception by Dover School Board President Alan Bonsell

This trial just keeps getting more and more ridiculous. The board members who said they had no idea who bought the copies of Of Pandas and People have been shown to be liars on this and other issues. William Buckingham went in front of his church and solicited donations for the books, collected them personally, wrote a personal check (with a memo saying "for Pandas and People books") and gave it to board president Alan Bonsell, who gave it to his father to purchase the books and make the donation. Bonsell ended up receiving some angry questioning directly from the judge. Mike Argento of the York Daily Record has a funny column on this examination.

Deception by Dover Defendant William Buckingham

Dover Area School Board member William Buckingham gave testimony in the trial, contradicting his sworn depositions on a number of points. First, he had been quoted numerous times as calling for creationism to be taught in schools to balance out evolution, then denied it in deposition. On the stand, he admitted it, and that his statement in his sworn deposition was false. Second, he had claimed in deposition that he had no idea who purchased the 60 copies of Of Pandas and People which were donated to the school. On the stand, he admitted that he was the one who asked for donations in church and wrote the check to Donald Bonsall have the books purchased.

This is the same guy who stood up at a school board meeting and said, "Two thousand years ago, someone died on a cross. Can't someone take a stand for him?"

Way to be a model of moral behavior, Bill!

Looks like Dover Area School Board member Heather Geesey has also contradicted her deposition statements. (More on Geesey at Dispatches from the Culture Wars.)

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.

Intelligent Design and Rigorous Peer Review

In the Dover intelligent design trial, expert witness for the defense Michael Behe, author of Darwin's Black Box, testified that his book received rigorous peer review--more rigorous than a paper in a scientific journal:

At the same time, Behe agreed, when asked by plaintiff's counsel Eric Rothschild if the "peer review for Darwin's Black Box was analogous to peer review in the [scientific] literature." It was, according to Behe, even more rigorous. There were more than twice standard the number of reviewers and "they read [the book] more carefully... because this was a controversial topic."

It turns out that the deciding factor in the book's being published came from the rigorous peer review of Dr. Michael Atchison of the University of Pennsylvania, who has described his involvement:

...I received a phone call from the publisher in New York. We spent approximately 10 minutes on the phone. After hearing a description of the work, I suggested that the editor should seriously consider publishing the manuscript. I told him that the origin of life issue was still up in the air. It sounded like this Behe fellow might have some good ideas, although I could not be certain since I had never seen the manuscript. We hung up and I never thought about it again. At least until two years later. [...]

In November 1998, I finally met Michael Behe when he visited Penn for a Faculty Outreach talk. He told me that yes, indeed, it was his book that the publisher called me about. In fact, he said my comments were the deciding factor in convincing the publisher to go ahead with the book.

The key reviewer, whose comments were the determining factor in the publication of the book, spent ten minutes on the telephone with the publisher, whose wife was a student in one of his classes, and he never saw the book itself until after it was published.

Ed Brayton and John Lynch give more detail and comment.

There were four other reviewers: Robert Shapiro (prof. of chemistry, NYU, author of Origins: A Skeptic's Guide to the Creation of Life on Earth), K. John Morrow (formerly at Texas Tech University Health Sciences, published critic of Dembski and Behe), a forgotten Washington University biochemist, and another whom Behe has completely forgotten. Perhaps they gave it a more rigorous review than Atchison, who didn't actually review it at all.

More evidence that intelligent design evolved from young-earth creationism

Panda's Thumb has some more evidence showing that the book Of Pandas and People, the subject of the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial, was originally explicitly creationist. Parts of the book by Nancy Pearcey were originally published in the Bible-Science Newsletter, which was one of the worst young-earth creationist publications in terms of poor quality of arguments and evidence. For example, it published Tom Willis' "Lucy Goes to College," which originated the bogus creationist claim that Lucy's knee joint was found 2 km from the rest of the skeleton. This is a bogus claim I've been trying to get creationists to stop making for the last ten years, with few successes.

Intelligent Design and Genetically Engineered Bioterror

Blogger Tacitus makes a weak argument that Intelligent Design may be good for science. What caught my attention is a comment under the heading "Andromeda Strain" by user Irving, who writes:

Certainly normal statistical models "do not work for such things." That's the point of the research...to find new models and frameworks.

...and we may not need to rely on merely statistical models either.

Let me put this another way in a story perhaps more attuned to the Tacitus readership...

In a period of 24 hours 3,000 people contract an illness in Omaha and die mysteriously. The country is alarmed. Medical teams have recovered bodies and isolated the causing organism. In the White House Situation Room the President ask the CDC...Is this the result of a chance mutation, or is this organism evidence of a specifically, genetically-engineered biological warfare attack? What does this organism tell us?

Perhaps an important question...one with critical, far reaching impacts to National Security.

Now some are saying that it will forever be impossible for science to know...perhaps to prove. That development of such an analytical framework is impossible (and a waste of even any effort). That such an analytical process must forever remain a mystery of the universe and that if you can't prove it, there is zero value in any effort to even try to develop a framework that might establish design as--likely. And others are saying that any effort to do so is not even science at all.

I suggest that that is dogmatic fundamentalism from the Evolution camp which is willing to trash the foundational elements of science in a "means justifies the end" battle in the Culture Wars. I contend, that while it may turn out to be impossible, or at least beyond our current technology...that the efforts to distinguish design from nature can have positive impacts in society, and at the least, is legitamite scientific research.

Irving has created a straw man--I don't think any opponent of ID would argue against the possibility of methods (forensic or otherwise) for determining whether human beings--entities whose behavior we can study--are responsible for observed effects. What is questioned is whether it is possible to have methods which determine whether a deity--an entity whose behavior we cannot study, and who is capable of bringing about any possible state of affairs--is responsible for observed effects. (Now, certainly if such an entity existed it could bring forth evidence conclusive of its own existence, or at least fully persuasive of its own existence, but in the absence of its desire and action to make itself known, such evidence is not forthcoming.)

Irving also fails to notice that ID theorists are arguing for a position which amounts to the elimination of the distinction he argues science should be able to discover. According to ID theorists, biological organisms are produced by the interventions of an intelligent designer, not chance. (Presumably most ID theorists also maintain that even nonbiological things are the product of the interventions of an intelligent designer, so the distinction between natural and artifact disappears, leaving only the distinction between divinely created artifact and non-divinely created artifact.)

Opponents of ID oppose teaching ID in science classes (as do the major advocates of ID, now that the Dover, PA case looks like it's going to go against them) because ID has yet to put forth any theories or methods which have been shown to work. If ID can put forth methods that can distinguish between design and non-design--or between human interventions and natural occurrences--then they will have something that's scientifically useful. But it doesn't look like the advocates of ID are even working on such methods.