this guy is wrong. id pseudoscience is alive and well as evidenced by jem in this thread:
Twenty Years After Darwin on Trial, ID is Dead
Category: Anti-Creationism
Posted on: November 29, 2011 5:09 PM, by Jason Rosenhouse
I just spent the last week working out of my New Jersey office, which is to say I was visiting the family for Thanksgiving. Before that I was spending a lot of time going over the page proofs and compiling the index for the BECB (the big evolution/creationism book, for those not up on the local slang). So it's nice to see that particular project work its way down the home stretch.
It was probably sometime during 2006 when I first started thinking seriously about writing a book about my experiences at creationist conferences. When I first started mentally outlining the book I honestly thought ID would be the focus. That's not how things worked out. Among the five major sections of the book only one is devoted exclusively to ID. Once I started writing, it simply became clear that ID just isn't that isn't that interesting anymore.
When I first became aware of ID in the late nineties, I worried that evolution might have met its match. Not because of ID's scientific merits, of course. Even as a novice creationism-fighter first learning the relevant science it was clear to me that the ID arguments didn't hold up at all. Behe's arguments about irreducible complexity were logically fallacious, something that is clear even before you peruse the professional literature and discover that Behe's summaries of it were inaccurate. Dembski's probabilistic arguments were an even bigger disaster, since your average freshman math major could tell you there is no reasonable way of calculating the probability of evolving a flagellum or whatnot.
No, I worried because ID seemed to be providing something that a lot of people wanted. You see, many folks just flat don't like evolution. They have some vague notion that it's hostile to religion, and it does seem to lower the status of humanity within The Big Picture. But for many of those same people, YEC is just a bridge too far. They're not going to take their Bible literally or dismiss out of hand huge swaths of modern science.
Then here comes ID to provide what seems like a scientifically plausible form of anti-evolutionism. You could apparently oppose evolution without descending into outright religious obscurantism. I worried that people would find that sufficiently appealing to avoid looking too carefully at the details, rather like it's easier to just enjoy a chocolate covered Oreo than it is to think about what it's doing to your innards.
But that's not what happened. Even leaving aside the blow of Dover v. Kitzmiller, ID has simply collapsed under the weight of its own vacuity. In the nineties and early 2000s, ID seemed to be producing one novel argument after another. They were variations on familiar themes, of course, but books like Darwin on Trial, Darwin's Black Box, No Free Lunch and even Icons of Evolution, written by people with serious credentials and written with far more skill than the YEC's could muster, seemed to advance the discussion in original ways. These books attracted enormous interest among scientists, if only in the sense that they were promoting bad ideas that needed be countered. Many books were written to counter the ID's pretensions, and major science periodicals took notice of them.
Not so today. Consider the two biggest ID books of recent years. Michael Behe's follow-up book, The Edge of Evolution, dropped like a stone. It got a few perfunctory reviews written by scientists who perked up just long enough to note its many errors, and then everyone ignored it. Frankly, even the ID folks don't seem to talk about it very much. Stephen Meyer's book Signature in the Cell was likewise met with crickets. It briefly seemed like a big deal, a big book released by a mainstream publisher, but scientists gave it a scan, saw nothing remotely new, and yawned.
The ID blogs are hardly in any better shape. It's mostly just post after post whining and kvetching about how mean old scientists don't take them seriously. Consider this sad little post from David Klinghoffer, writing at the Discovery Institute's blog. Referring to people like P. Z. Myers and Richard Dawkins he writes:
These people are bullies and cowards. Really, it's pathetic and anyone with a critical capacity and any interest in the Darwin question should have asked himself by now why the main Darwin defenders refuse to wrestle with the most serious Darwin critics -- even if seriousness were measured simply in relative terms -- when they've got no shortage of time to plow through self-published Internet texts by the Hamza Andreas Tzortzises of this world.
The occasion for this pouty little rant was this post by P. Z. Myers, which was responding to the claims of an Islamic creationist who was arguing that the Quran anticipated modern science. Klinghoffer does not approve of Myers's choice of blog topics, it seems. (Incidentally, P. Z. Myers has already responded to Klinghoffer.)
But to anyone outside the ID bubble the claim that evolutionists have simply ignored the most serious (ahem) Darwin critics is plainly absurd. There have been numerous books and countless magazine and internet postings addressing and refuting all of the major arguments ID has to offer. Quite a few scientists have taken time out from their real jobs to take ID seriously, ponder its arguments, and formulate counter-arguments that they then patiently explain to anyone who is interested. Klinghoffer obviously does not agree that the counter-arguments have been successful, but that's a far different charge from saying that ID has been ignored.
What would Kilnghoffer have Myers do? Write another post explaining why irreducible complexity is nonsense? Another post explaining why complex specified information is crap, or why Dembski's use of the No Free Lunch Theorems is silly, or how Jonathan Wells was wrong about everything in Icons of Evolution? There's only so many times you can refute the Darwin/Hitler connection, or the urban legends about creationists being fired from their jobs just because of their beliefs, or the endless wolf-crying claims that the latest bits of esoterica from the back pages of Nature somehow refute evolution, before you move on to other things.
The situation hardly improves if you move over to Uncommon Descent. At one time UD aspired to be the outpost for serious ID thinking. Those days are long past. To see what it has become makes even a hardcore anti-ID guy like me a little sad. For one recent example, here's Granville Sewell making his thermodynamics argument one more time.
Evolution is a movie running backward, that is what makes it so different from other phenomena in our universe, and why it demands a very different sort of explanation.
In a postscript he writes:
The âcompensationâ argument, used by a fictional character above to argue that because the Earth is an open system, tornados constructing houses and cars out of rubble here would not violate the second law, and widely used by very real characters to argue that the most spectacular increase in order ever seen anywhere does not violate it, was the target of my Applied Mathematics Letters article âA Second Look at the Second Lawâ. In that article, I showed that the very equations of entropy change upon which this compensation argument is based do not support this viewpoint, they instead illustrate the tautology that âif an increase in order is extremely improbable when a system is isolated, it is still extremely improbable when the system is open, unless something is entering which makes it not extremely improbable.â
See what I mean about ID having nothing new to offer? Sewell has been peddling this nonsense since 2001, when he got The Mathematical Intelligencer to publish an opinion piece by him on this subject. Do we really have to explain, again, that the notion that local decreases in entropy can be offset by global increases is just a straightforward consequence of what the second law says? That the second law does nothing more than put a lower bound on the magnitude of the entropy change that results from some thermodynamical process, and that a claim that evolution contradicts the second law must be backed up with a plausible calculation showing that the bound did not hold in the case of evolution? That every serious attempt to estimate the entropy change in the course of evolution shows that Darwin is safe by many, many orders of magnitude. Must we once more point out that declaring a sequence of events to be consistent with the second law in no way implies that that sequence is probable?
(contd)
Twenty Years After Darwin on Trial, ID is Dead
Category: Anti-Creationism
Posted on: November 29, 2011 5:09 PM, by Jason Rosenhouse
I just spent the last week working out of my New Jersey office, which is to say I was visiting the family for Thanksgiving. Before that I was spending a lot of time going over the page proofs and compiling the index for the BECB (the big evolution/creationism book, for those not up on the local slang). So it's nice to see that particular project work its way down the home stretch.
It was probably sometime during 2006 when I first started thinking seriously about writing a book about my experiences at creationist conferences. When I first started mentally outlining the book I honestly thought ID would be the focus. That's not how things worked out. Among the five major sections of the book only one is devoted exclusively to ID. Once I started writing, it simply became clear that ID just isn't that isn't that interesting anymore.
When I first became aware of ID in the late nineties, I worried that evolution might have met its match. Not because of ID's scientific merits, of course. Even as a novice creationism-fighter first learning the relevant science it was clear to me that the ID arguments didn't hold up at all. Behe's arguments about irreducible complexity were logically fallacious, something that is clear even before you peruse the professional literature and discover that Behe's summaries of it were inaccurate. Dembski's probabilistic arguments were an even bigger disaster, since your average freshman math major could tell you there is no reasonable way of calculating the probability of evolving a flagellum or whatnot.
No, I worried because ID seemed to be providing something that a lot of people wanted. You see, many folks just flat don't like evolution. They have some vague notion that it's hostile to religion, and it does seem to lower the status of humanity within The Big Picture. But for many of those same people, YEC is just a bridge too far. They're not going to take their Bible literally or dismiss out of hand huge swaths of modern science.
Then here comes ID to provide what seems like a scientifically plausible form of anti-evolutionism. You could apparently oppose evolution without descending into outright religious obscurantism. I worried that people would find that sufficiently appealing to avoid looking too carefully at the details, rather like it's easier to just enjoy a chocolate covered Oreo than it is to think about what it's doing to your innards.
But that's not what happened. Even leaving aside the blow of Dover v. Kitzmiller, ID has simply collapsed under the weight of its own vacuity. In the nineties and early 2000s, ID seemed to be producing one novel argument after another. They were variations on familiar themes, of course, but books like Darwin on Trial, Darwin's Black Box, No Free Lunch and even Icons of Evolution, written by people with serious credentials and written with far more skill than the YEC's could muster, seemed to advance the discussion in original ways. These books attracted enormous interest among scientists, if only in the sense that they were promoting bad ideas that needed be countered. Many books were written to counter the ID's pretensions, and major science periodicals took notice of them.
Not so today. Consider the two biggest ID books of recent years. Michael Behe's follow-up book, The Edge of Evolution, dropped like a stone. It got a few perfunctory reviews written by scientists who perked up just long enough to note its many errors, and then everyone ignored it. Frankly, even the ID folks don't seem to talk about it very much. Stephen Meyer's book Signature in the Cell was likewise met with crickets. It briefly seemed like a big deal, a big book released by a mainstream publisher, but scientists gave it a scan, saw nothing remotely new, and yawned.
The ID blogs are hardly in any better shape. It's mostly just post after post whining and kvetching about how mean old scientists don't take them seriously. Consider this sad little post from David Klinghoffer, writing at the Discovery Institute's blog. Referring to people like P. Z. Myers and Richard Dawkins he writes:
These people are bullies and cowards. Really, it's pathetic and anyone with a critical capacity and any interest in the Darwin question should have asked himself by now why the main Darwin defenders refuse to wrestle with the most serious Darwin critics -- even if seriousness were measured simply in relative terms -- when they've got no shortage of time to plow through self-published Internet texts by the Hamza Andreas Tzortzises of this world.
The occasion for this pouty little rant was this post by P. Z. Myers, which was responding to the claims of an Islamic creationist who was arguing that the Quran anticipated modern science. Klinghoffer does not approve of Myers's choice of blog topics, it seems. (Incidentally, P. Z. Myers has already responded to Klinghoffer.)
But to anyone outside the ID bubble the claim that evolutionists have simply ignored the most serious (ahem) Darwin critics is plainly absurd. There have been numerous books and countless magazine and internet postings addressing and refuting all of the major arguments ID has to offer. Quite a few scientists have taken time out from their real jobs to take ID seriously, ponder its arguments, and formulate counter-arguments that they then patiently explain to anyone who is interested. Klinghoffer obviously does not agree that the counter-arguments have been successful, but that's a far different charge from saying that ID has been ignored.
What would Kilnghoffer have Myers do? Write another post explaining why irreducible complexity is nonsense? Another post explaining why complex specified information is crap, or why Dembski's use of the No Free Lunch Theorems is silly, or how Jonathan Wells was wrong about everything in Icons of Evolution? There's only so many times you can refute the Darwin/Hitler connection, or the urban legends about creationists being fired from their jobs just because of their beliefs, or the endless wolf-crying claims that the latest bits of esoterica from the back pages of Nature somehow refute evolution, before you move on to other things.
The situation hardly improves if you move over to Uncommon Descent. At one time UD aspired to be the outpost for serious ID thinking. Those days are long past. To see what it has become makes even a hardcore anti-ID guy like me a little sad. For one recent example, here's Granville Sewell making his thermodynamics argument one more time.
Evolution is a movie running backward, that is what makes it so different from other phenomena in our universe, and why it demands a very different sort of explanation.
In a postscript he writes:
The âcompensationâ argument, used by a fictional character above to argue that because the Earth is an open system, tornados constructing houses and cars out of rubble here would not violate the second law, and widely used by very real characters to argue that the most spectacular increase in order ever seen anywhere does not violate it, was the target of my Applied Mathematics Letters article âA Second Look at the Second Lawâ. In that article, I showed that the very equations of entropy change upon which this compensation argument is based do not support this viewpoint, they instead illustrate the tautology that âif an increase in order is extremely improbable when a system is isolated, it is still extremely improbable when the system is open, unless something is entering which makes it not extremely improbable.â
See what I mean about ID having nothing new to offer? Sewell has been peddling this nonsense since 2001, when he got The Mathematical Intelligencer to publish an opinion piece by him on this subject. Do we really have to explain, again, that the notion that local decreases in entropy can be offset by global increases is just a straightforward consequence of what the second law says? That the second law does nothing more than put a lower bound on the magnitude of the entropy change that results from some thermodynamical process, and that a claim that evolution contradicts the second law must be backed up with a plausible calculation showing that the bound did not hold in the case of evolution? That every serious attempt to estimate the entropy change in the course of evolution shows that Darwin is safe by many, many orders of magnitude. Must we once more point out that declaring a sequence of events to be consistent with the second law in no way implies that that sequence is probable?
(contd)
That's too funny.