Of course, a “true skeptic” denies that Jesus ever existed. If not, why not?
Merry Christmas!
The Birth of the Messiah
29
The Twilight of Intelligent Design (Open thread)
It just dawned on me that ID is dead.
Dembski is off all radar. He doesn’t even show up in the search box at South Carolina bible college or whatever. The last post on the Design Inference is a year old.
Meyer’s book went up like a firework and came down with the stick.
Most of the static websites are moribund. UD has banned virtually all dissenters. The few brave enough to wander over to TSZ bail out after a couple of rounds. The biologic institute inflates its “selected publications” with publications that have nothing to do with the biologic institute and seems to be doing no more than pretending to produce output.
Bio-Complexity is moribund.
Behe doesn’t seem to have much to say.
The big guys won’t come out to debate. The small ones mostly won’t leave heavily censored sites. Even the UD newsdesk peddles 6 year old stories as “news”.
And all the threads are about religion. Or tossing coins.
I don’t know why I hadn’t seen it before.
It’s dead.
Posted at “After the Bar Closes on Jan. 05 2014,16:37 by Febble (Elizabeth Liddle) Continue reading
For matters of dispute between Walto and KeithS
A dedicated home to spare other threads.
I’m going to start with Walto’s claim that Keith called him an anti-semite. I looked through and couldn’t find any evidence of this.
Stephen Meyer, Darwin’s Doubt and the Cambrian Explosion
Ask, and ye shall receive!
During recent discussions, it was suggested that Darwin’s Doubt raised unanswerable questions for the theory of evolution. Discuss.
The Steven Salaita Case
Curious what people here (including phoodoo!) think about this case involving academic freedom and, I guess, rudeness. (though I probably can guess). Here are some relevant links:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/08/08/tweeting-without-tenure/
http://forward.com/articles/205543/de-hired-professor-steven-salaita-is-a-universitys/?p=all
http://op-talk.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/02/steven-salaita-and-the-quagmire-of-academic-freedom/
Thanks for your comments!
IDBOTS
H/T Patrick at AtbC:
Memories pass between generations
We’ll be hearing about this from UD. Might as well play with it here.
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-25156510
In the smell-aversion study, is it thought that either some of the odour ends up in the bloodstream which affected sperm production or that a signal from the brain was sent to the sperm to alter DNA.
Circularity of using CSI to conclude Design?
At Uncommon Descent, William Dembski’s and Robert Marks’s coauthor Winston Ewert has made a post conceding that using Complex Specified Information to conclude that evolution of an adaptation is improbable is in fact circular. This was argued at UD by “Keith S.” (our own “keiths”) in recent weeks. It was long asserted by various people here, and was argued in posts here by Elizabeth Liddle in her “Belling the Cat” and “EleP(T|H)ant in the room” series of posts (here, here, and here). I had posted at Panda’s Thumb on the same issue.
Here is a bit of what Ewert posted at UD:
CSI and Specified complexity do not help in any way to establish that the evolution of the bacterial flagellum is improbable. Rather, the only way to establish that the bacterial flagellum exhibits CSI is to first show that it was improbable. Any attempt to use CSI to establish the improbability of evolution is deeply fallacious.
I have put up this post so that keiths and others can discuss what Ewert conceded. I urge people to read his post carefully. There are still aspects of it that I am not sure I understand. What for example is the practical distinction between showing that evolution is very improbable and showing that it is impossible? Ewert seems to think that CSI has a role to play there.
Having this concession from Ewert may surprise Denyse O’Leary (“News” at UD) and UD’s head honcho Barry Arrington. Both of them have declared that a big problem for evolution is the observation of CSI. Here is Barry in 2011 (here):
All it would take is even one instance of CSI or IC being observed to arise through chance or mechanical necessity or a combination of the two. Such an observation would blow the ID project out of the water.
Ewert is conceding that one does not first find CSI and then conclude from this that evolution is improbable. Barry and Denyse O’Leary said the opposite — that having observed CSI, one could conclude that evolution was improbable.
The discussion of Ewert’s post at UD is interesting, but maybe we can have some useful discussion here too.
Angry at God?
A commenter at Uncommon Descent wrote
Keith, I am not convinced that you are an atheist. I believe that you are angry at God and suffer from cognitive dissonance. And to say that the evidence supports your materialist belief system is completely absurd!
I’ve seen versions of this “angry at God” accusation levelled at non-believers quite often and I wonder why those that use it think it makes sense. Continue reading
Observations from my visit to Uncommon Descent
Executive Summary:
Barry Arrington doesn’t understand ID. KF talks about math and design detection but never does it. ID exists as an amorphous miasmic anti-evolutionary argument. It is the North Korea of the internet
Barry Arrington doesn’t understand ID.
in now epic thread Barry told us what would convince him ID was wrong:
The science bomb that will destroy my belief in ID: A single example of natural forces observed to have create Orgel’s CSI.
Now as IDists can’t actually measure CSI (they don’t appear to understand it at UD) this was troublesome, but a close examination of Dembski’s CSI contains the term P(T|H), which is described by him as
Moreover, H, here, is the relevant chance hypothesis that takes into account Darwinian and other material mechanisms.
So Barry wanted a demonstration of CSI being made by natural forces, whilst Dembski defines CSI as only to be ‘counted’ in the absence of them. Barry doesn’t understand CSI. I asked him if he thought that “CSI=FSC=FSCO/I”. He never responded.
KF talks about math and design detection but never does it
KF’s behavior is perhaps the most odious of the moderators there. Rather than have an actual discussion, he creates multiple one-off posts with closed comments, which means that associated critique is never attached to the post itself. This effectively allows him to perpetually reboot once destroyed arguments as if they are new and unassailable. This just shows us the strong connection between creationism and ID – creationists are still rolling out “2LoT” and “If we came from Monkeys” today.
All of KF’s posts are basically reformations of Hoyle’s tornado in a junkyard arguments: Complex things cannot spontaneously generate. Of course this has *nothing* to do with life and does not consider P(T|H). KF has yet to do any credible math pertaining to an evolutionary narrative. Sadly telling.
ID exists as an amorphous miasmic anti-evolutionary argument
The general trend at UD is for the IDists to tell us what they think evolution can’t do rather than what ID can do. It is gapism in its purest form. The target moves from PCD to abiogenesis to the first cell and they want a complete history of the evolution of life with pictures and an index of all the mutations as they happened. Given the ‘Jesus this’ and ‘God that’ that happens at UD, I wonder if they have the same high bar for other ‘historical’ events.
It is the North Korea of the internet
They silently ban, delete accounts, place in moderation, mark up others posts and post themselves with comments disabled. This degree of message control is a symptom of their arguments being completely noncompetitive when there is a free and fair exchange of ideas.
Selection/Drift
Natural selection is a simple theory because it can be understood by anybody; to misunderstand it requires special training.
Graham Bell, The Masterpiece of Nature
Interest has been expressed in a thread on selection and drift, so I thought I’d start one, and offer my own 2-cent summary of the concepts.
Uncommon Descent: Back to Banning?
Couldn’t resist the tribute to Denyse?
The new open policy at Uncommon Descent appears to have stalled somewhat. In trying to post a comment this morning I find it disappears. I tried on a couple of threads to no avail. Going on past behaviour, I suspect Barry Arrington has found having an open venue even less appealing than a blog dying from lack of traffic. Of course I could be wrong and will be ready to eat my hat if it turns out to be a glitch. Continue reading
KN’s new book — a discussion thread
Someone suggested a discussion thread for KN’s new book:
So I’m starting such a thread. My Kindle copy arrived shortly after the turn of the month to November. According to Kindle, I have read 5%. The readability is pretty good (but I already have disagreements).
Open for comments.
Is StoneHenge Designed?
I think that popular consensus is that it *is* designed. Let’s look at the design detection tools on offer (both ID and conventional) and see which were used in this particular design inference.
Open for comments for a while before I add my two penneth.
Andre: “PCD stops unguided evolution in its tracks”
UD commenter Andre has a bad case of PCD OCD.
PCD stands for “programmed cell death”. Andre is convinced that it is the death knell not only of cells, but of modern evolutionary theory. He has been spamming the “bomb” thread at UD in an unsuccessful attempt to persuade us of this. (112 mentions of PCD in that thread, but no intelligible argument from Andre.)
Rich suggested that we set up a thread for him here, which I think is a great idea.
Here you go, Andre. Tell us why PCD is an unguided evolution killer, and be prepared to learn why it is not.
Amie Thomasson on nonreductive physicalism
Let’s discuss Amie Thomasson’s paper A Nonreductivist Solution to Mental Causation. I’ll save my thoughts for the comment thread.
Compressed Sensing / Sampling
I’m still trying to push ID forward as science. I previously suggest Bendford’s Law might be a fruitful avenue for ID research, but there were no takers I know of. Recently I came across Compressed Sensing, and I think this might also be a concept IDist want to explore. Here is the Wikipedia page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_sensing
See also:
http://authors.library.caltech.edu/10092/1/CANieeespm08.pdf
It seems to be able to recreate structured datasets with surprisingly high fidelity from very low samples. Could it be used to find a hallmark of design?
So, Barry@UD – time to stop the apologetics wagon and do some science. Unfortunately you’ve banned the brightest minds at UD but a couple of the regulars might want to have a crack at this?
Is biology reducible to physics?
We have folks on both sides of this question, so it should make for an interesting discussion.
(I’m a ‘yes’, by the way.)
Michael Graziano: Are We Really Conscious?
He raises the question in the New York Times Sunday Review:
I believe a major change in our perspective on consciousness may be necessary, a shift from a credulous and egocentric viewpoint to a skeptical and slightly disconcerting one: namely, that we don’t actually have inner feelings in the way most of us think we do…
How does the brain go beyond processing information to become subjectively aware of information? The answer is: It doesn’t. The brain has arrived at a conclusion that is not correct. When we introspect and seem to find that ghostly thing — awareness, consciousness, the way green looks or pain feels — our cognitive machinery is accessing internal models and those models are providing information that is wrong…
Expunge the Mung
The assertion has been put forth that I said I would never post here at TSZ again.
Alan Fox:
Welcome back, mung. Didn’t you say that you would never darken our door again? By your moral compass, don’t you have to call yourself a liar, now?
I’ve been searching for the post in which I made a statement that I would never post here again. I do recall being excessively miffed about something that petrushka wrote about me that I thought was egregiously false. Something about animals being meat puppets. But I haven’t yet been able to locate my response to that post.
What post is Alan is referring to?