Sometimes very active discussions about peripheral issues overwhelm a thread, so this is a permanent home for those conversations.
The Skeptical Zone
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
Sometimes very active discussions about peripheral issues overwhelm a thread, so this is a permanent home for those conversations.
And let’s not forget their attempt to associate with the Smithsonian.
I’m starting to see why intelligent design creationists are worried about immorality following from their religious beliefs being overturned by science. Look how unethical they are even though they believe in eternal punishment!
Or with the borrowed “imprimatur” of a respected academic institution
And didn’t I see somewhere that they’re using the term “peer-edited” for further ersatz respectability?
With no less than two YEC authors included in the volume, who are their peers?
Hey Lizzie,
Curious why you haven’t jumped on the chance to reply to Winston Ewert? He wrote a post at ENV a week ago called “Design detection in the dark” in reply to your “A CSI challenge’ post on 5/15.
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2013/06/design_detectio072931.html
Let me know if you’ve run out of round tuits. I may be able to scrounge one up.
Steve,
Ewert unwittingly points out why CSI is useless for demonstrating that something could not have evolved:
In explaining examples of biological complexity, one of the “chance hypotheses” is, of course, evolution. To determine that some biological feature exhibits CSI, you first have to know that it has an extremely low probability of having evolved. But that is the very question that CSI was supposed to help us answer!
To state that CSI cannot be produced by evolution is therefore a mere tautology.
Perhaps Dembski has finally realized this. It would explain why he seems to have lost interest in CSI and the explanatory filter.
But that is why Axe et al spend so much time arguing isolated islands.
The basic ID argument hasn’t evolved since Darwin.
Hey, Steve, I’ve got an idea. How ’bout you skip the snark about “round tuits” and get yourself over to whazzisname’s place and tell him to post his “Design detection” reply here?
It’s not like every IDist deserves a personal answer, but the way to get one is definitely to comment here, not out in the ban-happy creationist spaces.
Now scoot. Go tell whazzisname that he’s supposed to jump on the chance to reply here. Don’t forget to come back and tell us how he answered you.
Steve,
We are supposed to monitor the anti-evolutionary Web for responses to points made here? And if we miss one, it’s a Snarking Matter?
Heh. Especially as it turns out that Steve’s oh-so-important whazzisname is Winston Ewert, one of Dembski and Marks’ poppets at Baylor. It appears they brought Ewert on board by providing him with their previously published work to plagiarize so that Ewert could paste together some sort of masters thesis.
Given that Ewert continues to work for that old fraud, Marks, Ewert can’t possibly have anything to say that is both interesting and true. And, yes, that is a genuine ad hominem.
I only discovered it a couple of days ago, and I’ve been busy. Nonetheless I have drafted a response, and hope to post it later this week. It was a thoughtful piece by Winston, and deserves a thoughtful response.
It would have been helpful if Winston Ewart had contacted me to tell me it was there, but I appreciate that he also has probably been busy.
I think he says a couple of things that are both interesting and true.
And I’m wondering whether he was asked to respond as a result of my email to Dembski (who did not otherwise reply).
If so, I appreciate his effort.
Looks to me like old whine in old bottles. I don’t think anyone questions Dembski’s arithmetic. Just the application. Ewart writes a lot of words and then trails off without saying anything
Actually he does say something. He says if you don’t know what the object is or what the image represents, you can’t detect design.
That’s pretty much an admission that you have to have an independent history of the object. So CSI adds nothing. You are back to Darwin’s original dictum regarding small steps.
No comments allowed, what a surprise. It’s almost as if the intelligent design creationists fear open discussion of their claims.
Speaking of their claims, Ewert attempts a new evasion of one of Dembski’s bolder assertions:
That’s a semi-interesting rhetorical ploy, but it doesn’t help Dembski’s case. The full context of that excerpt is:
The first important point to note is that the second paragraph does not support the first. Archaeologists do not infer design by an abstract, disembodied intelligence. They infer design due to knowledge of the capabilities of tool using hominins.
The second important point has been raised repeatedly here and in other criticisms of Dembski’s pseudo metric: If CSI cannot be identified without knowledge of the provenance of the artifact under consideration, it is useless for identifying design. It is nothing more than highly questionable mathematical notation used to conceal the designer of the gaps argument.
Please do invite Winston Ewert to join us here, Steve.
Response now here.
Finding a round tuit was tricky this week, as I had a lot of other stuff to do, but fortunately I managed to dig enough of one out yesterday to finish the piece I started at the weekend.
Trouble is, now I’m short of round tuits again, and the pile of dishes in the sink is going to have to wait.
Oh, boy, I just got Darwin’s Doubt on my Kindle. So Meyer is a little richer thanks to me.
I’ve counted at least 10 errors or fallacies in the prologue alone.
Doesn’t bode well.
Steve, you’ve gone awfully quiet?
Thornton et al are at it again:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/06/130624152617.htm
He must have an Axe to grind.
petrushka,
Interesting.
I like this part:
Well done!
Not related to anything going on here, but I (not a scientist, but an accepter of mainstream science) responded to a post about Darwin’s Doubt on thinkingchristian.net with the following, (slightly edited here), having to do with information and the arising of new phyla. No one has responded there, and I’m wondering, have I accurately characterized the mainstream view about how new phyla start? What do you all think?
Quote begins here:
A nutshell version of meyer’s argument says there was some new information infused at some point. And JAD thinks there was a vast infusion of information needed during that era.
If information can’t be mathematically specified, how can we determine that the amount needed was vast? I suppose because there were a lot of phyla that appeared? Is that why the amount needed was vast?
If so, we must know that it takes a lot of information to create a new phylum, right? So how do you calculate the amount of information required to create a new phylum?
, under the mainstream view, each new phylum starts when a single species becomes two separate species. The amount of information needed immediately is no more than the amount of information needed for a new species. (It is not obvious that it is the start of a new phylum at that time, and given the state of the fossil record we probably could not identify the first species of a new phylum if we had a fossil of it.)
Can that amount of information be created without design? If not, that would suggest that design is required for the creation of every species.
If the descendants of one of those two diverging species split further into other species that are nevertheless clumped together, and the descendants of the other do the same, but the two clumps diverge from each other, they may eventually be classified as separate phyla.
When the clumps are different enough to be classified as separate phyla, then at that time it would take a vast change in the genome to make any species of one from a species of the other, because the two original species and their most immediate descendant species are all extinct. If those old species weren’t extinct, the groups would not be separate enough to be called separate phyla.
Would that vast change in the genome be a vast infusion of information? If so, then would a small change in the genome be a small infusion of information?
Each time those diverging species split, is more information needed? The “infusion” of information required at any particular time is not large, in my opinion. The amount of information to create a new phylum accumulates in small amounts from the time the first species in the phylum arises until the time millions of years later that it is clear from the fossil and molecular record that the descendants of “this” group of more complex worms is significantly and consistently different from the descendants of “that” group of worms that are more complex in slightly different ways.
Is that your understanding of the mainstream view as well? I might not be right. If that is the mainstream view, where is the need for the vast infusion that could not have happened naturally?
How do you calculate or estimate the amount of Meyer information needed to create a new phylum?
Quote ends here.
Any reactions? Thanks.
I can’t really speak for the mainstream, but I think I would concur with your view of it.The only taxonomic rank with any real biological traction is the biological species, a collection delimited (among sexual forms only) by interbreeding and mechanisms that lead to its cessation – population fission. The rest relate to groupings that strike us, as inveterate classifiers of the natural world, but with only minimal underpinning from biological mechanism. Groups that persist long enough for us to notice them do tend to collect into distinct ‘buckets’, rather than the infinitesimal gradations that might occur, largely due to a mixture of contingency and the differential success of certain forms over others.
The ‘information’ involved in forming a new species is simply, at the lowest level, the divergent mutational and fixational processing between two populations that were formerly one. In this dripwise manner, you can end up with a huge amount of ‘informational difference’ over time.
What’s the episode after the one where the shark gets jumped over?
Kairosfocus is quoting from Sewell’s “paper” over at UD.
Sewell still thinks entropy is disorder.
With all the discussions that have taken place here at TSZ about Sewell’s novice errors, I’m surprised that Elizabeth and keiths haven’t picked up on the fact that carbon concentration and energy don’t have the same units.
Sewell doesn’t even get units correct, let alone get the concept of entropy correct. High school chemistry and physics students are taught to check units.
I remember you bringing that up in the previous discussion of Sewell’s paper here. Simple dimensional analysis alone destroys his argument. Has no one rubbed his nose in this elementary error yet?
Mike,
We’ve already uncovered enough errors to bury his paper for eternity. I stopped looking for new ones.
I’m rubbing his nose in a different elementary error — the fact that in denying compensation, he is denying the second law itself:
I’d say that you and Elizabeth have provoked them to lay it all out there. They have posted just about every ID/creationist misconception several times; and they did it with stern assertions of authority. It can’t get much clearer than that; and all in one place too. What a mess!
It is clear that none of them has read, let alone understood, either Styer’s or Bunn’s papers. Both Styer and Bunn are very clear in the first few paragraphs of their papers about the misconceptions of ID/creationists. They even give the ID/creationists their misconceptions and still demonstrate that entropy increase is far more than entropy decrease.
None of those characters over at UD seem to know what “compensation” actually means when it is used by someone who knows thermodynamics and is using it colloquially. Instead, they think it means that a specified entropy decrease somewhere is “compensated” by and increase in entropy anywhere else.
And, of course, we are seeing all the typical ID/creationist misconceptions involving “ideal gases” of inert objects being used as representations for the behaviors of atoms and molecules.
There is another point I recall discussing somewhere, either here or on Panda’s Thumb.
Sewell is supposed to be a PhD mathematician. One would think that he could look at all the mathematical expressions for computing entropy and note that they are integrals, sums, or a logarithm of the number of states.
Integrating, summing, and taking logarithms don’t measure order of any type. Sums and integrals of finite sets of numbers don’t require that they be summed in a given order. Both addition and multiplication of numbers are commutative. You can sum in any order; we are not dealing with infinite sets here. And taking a logarithm is, well, taking a logarithm; it says nothing about order or disorder.
One would think that Sewell – the PhD mathematician who claims he has spent over 11 years arguing with experts and getting nowhere – would look at the mathematical formulas and ask himself how those formulas calculate disorder.
This stuff is still as weird as it was back in the 1970s.
I’ve been following the C/E debate for some time, and I’ve never seen so many thermo errors in one thread.
What is worse, if we accept all of Sewell’s conclusions we find that we have “proven” that plants can’t grow — that a seed cannot turn into a plant that has multiple seeds. I’ve made fun of Sewell on this score over at PT.
Sewell and his admirers resolutely ignore that point — one which shows that they must have slept through middle-school science when chlorophyll was mentioned. They seem to think that explaining plant growth by noting that sunlight hits plants and provides them with energy is some sort of illogical “compensation” argument.
That is hilarious stupidity.
I pointed that out in the first thread:
Granville’s indignant reply:
My response:
I propose the term Sewellage be adopted to denote the results of willfull mangling of scientific reasoning by a trained academic. Numerous examples on request.
What is amazing is that Sewell, who obviously knows what he is doing when discussing solving differential equations, does not understand that has just ruled out plant growth (and lots of other phenomena as well).
I spoke too soon. Now there is a post at UD by “niwrad” which starts off by trying to explain the Second Law, then says that
(something Sewell does not say in so many words, though he wants people to draw that conclusion).
To make the point, niwrad has changed the argument to be about something called “organization”. Niwrad also brings up a strawman, that evolutionists are saying that decrease in entropy is “all biological organisms represent”.
Lizzie and keiths are on the job ably refuting niwrad, who wants to assert that the Second Law refutes evolution, but doesn’t want to discuss how it refutes evolution.
The most common mode of argument in ID is reification of metaphor. It takes the following form:
A raven is like a writing desk.
Writing desks cannot fly.
Therefore ravens cannot fly.
Recently we have seen this form of argument embodied in the metaphor of information, the metaphor of computation, of semiosis, of matter.
The basic fallacy is to skip from “like” to “is”.
SLoT as order or organization is just the current instance.
Niwrad discovers a new law of physics:
” The 2nd law states how systems work when no intelligence is involved.”
That’s an interesting point. And it does sound about right.
Let’s remember that their arguments are not intended to persuade us. The arguments are for rubes in pews.
An example of that reification that I find particularly stupid is KF’s “There can be no tree without a root”, re the tree of life and OOL research. Of course, there must have been an origin of life, and even if life had been divinely conjured, evolution would still be true.
Can anyone distinguish between nirwad’s “hole of the SLoT” post and gibberish? For a metaphor to be useful, there has to be a correspondence of some properties. I don’t see any.
I chose my example with that in mind.
petrushka,
Many of us in the physics and chemistry communities would like to see the concept of “order/disorder” not associated with entropy in any way. It only applies to unbound or extremely loosely bound systems, such as gases or liquids, in which the constituents are able to change their spatial locations.
There are plenty of routine examples in which order has absolutely nothing to do with entropy. That two-state system we discussed a while ago is just one example. Entropy can decrease with an increase in the total energy content of the system.
In fact, any tightly bound system can have an increase in entropy without any change in “order” or “organization.” Just let a rock sit out on a beach and get warm in the sun.
It appears that the “argument” over at UD has been diverted into mud wrestling over the distinctions between “order” and “organization.”
Nobody over at UD appears to recognize that substituting ideal gases of inert objects for the behaviors of atoms and molecules is inappropriate. Petrushka’s example of the raven and the writing desk is a very nice description of the problem.
Not even Sal has been able to do that high school chemistry calculation that scales up the charge-to-mass ratios of protons and electrons to kilogram-sized masses separated by distances on the order of a meter and then calculate the energies of interaction in units of joules and in megatons of TNT. Sal has admitted that he doesn’t even understand the question. And he also doesn’t understand the implications of that little exercise for ID/creationists who use tornados ripping through junkyards producing 747s.
I would admit that I am not hoping that ID/creationists will ever get it; I hope they never do. As long as their “science” remains as bad as it is, their attempts at getting around the law to inject sectarian dogma into the science curriculum will simply be a nuisance issue. ID/creationists to a person flunk science at the most elementary levels; and that reason is sufficient to continue to “expel” them.
CS3 over at UD has back-to-back posts of some of the poorer textbooks explanations of entropy.
This trick has been going on since the 1970s. If there is a textbook out there that uses this bad metaphor, ID/creationists will find it and hold it up as “proof” that they are right.
A more circumspect student will actually try to understand how to do the calculations for various kinds of systems and then conclude that the metaphor is not very good.
No ID/creationist can do such calculations.
For the assertion that they have neatly shown that plants can’t grow (or as other people have pointed out, that snowflakes can’t form, or salt crystals form, or my refrigerator make ice cubes), the UD commenters have been expressing shock that anyone could think that they are arguing that.
But they are arguing that. They just don’t understand the implications of their own argument.
petrushka,
A tip of the hat to you!
That’s a fair point, and I certainly don’t think it’s beyond any intelligent design creationist to knowingly use a refuted argument to reinforce the faithful, but there seems to be more to it. The IDC proponents come from a background that values hermeneutics over evidence.[*] They are so used to manipulating words to reach their (foregone) conclusions that they don’t realize that skeptics and scientists use words consistently, to describe concepts with real world referents.
Another symptom of this is the resistance by most UD denizens to agreeing on unambiguous operational definitions when discussing topics like information theory. The ability to equivocate is essential to their argument style.
[*] A close friend who is both Jewish and a lawyer explained to me that the reason for the stereotype is that his culture encourages children to study the Torah in exactly the same way he was taught to study law in law school. That does not fill me with confidence in our legal system.
I’ve long since come to the conclusion that it’s useless arguing with creationists of any stripe – unless you enjoy it, or unless you simply want to lay a marker “for record!” as to the consensus scientific view of the subject under discussion.
And the most hidebound of them – e.g.the more prolific posters at UD – will never, ever, admit that they are wrong about anything, as the current frolicking in the Sewellage (a happy coinage, that) pit amply demonstrates
Conversions are very rare amongst closed minds.
I argue for my own benefit. Framing an argument clarifies the issues in my mind. Occasionally being wrong is an incentive to learn more.
Elizabeth and keiths have done a fine job of drawing out not only the fundamental ID/creationist misconceptions in this “thermodynamic argument against evolution;” they have also elicited the typical word-gaming tactics of the ID/creationist movement.
The ID/creationist penchant for exegesis, hermeneutics, etymology, and general word-gaming comes from their immersion in their sectarian religion. They have spent a lot of time attempting to “prove” the correctness of their dogma above all other dogmas; and these habits carry over to their “interpretations” of scientific concepts.
So we see not only these fundamental misconceptions about scientific concepts and the word-gaming to preserve these misconceptions – misconceptions that were developed by bending and breaking science to fit dogma – but we also see their attempts to jump immediately into advanced topics in order to try to overwhelm their enemies.
But the fact remains that ID/creationists – the PhDs as well as their followers – are woefully ignorant of even the most basic concepts taught in middle school and high school science.
I remember my own surprise at this when I got drawn into giving talks to the public about ID/creationist misconceptions and misrepresentations back in the late 1970s and early 1980s. My initial impressions of the creationists were that they had actually studied advanced ideas and had come to their conclusions honestly, however wrong they were.
But the more I listened to their arguments, the more I realized that they were simply giving the illusion of being able to “stay in the game” against all scientists. Their responses, upon closer inspection, were simply babbling in what sounded like an erudite manner. Duane Gish and other creationist debaters would throw out so much crap in a debate that nobody could answer all of it in weeks of explanation. An almost standard reply by a creationist at the end of a debate was, “Well, you weren’t able to answer 99% of my arguments.”
I then came upon some material that the creationists apparently didn’t expect to get out into general circulation that gave instructions on “How to Debate and Evolutionist;” and I realized that it is all about winning debates. That is why they practice these games so intently; to hone their technique. Most, if not all, of these ID/creationists don’t give a damn about the science; secular science is already in the camp of “The Evil One.” For ID/creationists, it’s about winning souls and beating the Devil, and drumming secular ideas out of public education.
Of all the pseudoscience that is out there in circulation, ID/creationism is unique in its characteristic misconceptions, misrepresentations, and in this word-gaming style in which it is argued.
Other pseudoscientists – we in physics encounter them fairly often at conferences and colloquia – will seek endorsements from scientists, and will try to link their kooky ideas to someone or something in real, legitimate science. They usually try to portray themselves as having “gone beyond” the science community in what they have discovered.
But ID/creationists “know in their hearts” that secular, materialist, atheistic science is wrong because it “rules out God.” They portray themselves as exposing the ugly truths about secular science and are being punished and persecuted for their “sincere” efforts.
At bottom, ID/creationism is an attempt at a socio/political power grab to “restore” secular society to The One True Religion.
There’s an entire thread at UD on why we argue ID on the Internet.
My reasons, taken from that thread:
And:
Too many links in my comment, so it’s stuck in the moderation queue.
Could somebody please fish it out for me?
Thanks.