The enduring futility of Intelligent Design creationism

It’s almost sad how pathetic the Discovery Institute has become. Every year they have a little roundup of their “accomplishments” of the year. This year, they got some guy named Brian Miller (sorry, I’ve lost track of the shifting roster of employees at the Fail Institute) to write up the grand summary. Let’s see if you notice what’s missing from this account.

So let’s review. In 2022, I participated in several conferences and private events in which I interacted with prominent scientists. Several acknowledged the strength of our arguments critiquing the current scientific orthodoxy and defending the evidence for design in life. At a recent conference, I spoke with one of the most recognized and admired evolutionary biologists. In a private conversation, he accepted that the arguments for design based on engineering analyses of living systems were substantive. And during a public lecture, he even tacitly conceded that the information central to life points to design. He stated that he wished to wait for future research to potentially explain the origin of biological information through natural processes. But his tone of voice suggested that he doubted whether such an explanation would ever materialize.

At another meeting, I sat on a panel with one of the leading evolutionary theorists. He stated that standard evolutionary analyses addressing nontrivial transformations typically are severely deficient in their mathematical cogency. He also thanked scholars in the ID network for addressing with rigor and nuance such questions as the rarity of functional protein sequences and the required timescales for generating coordinated mutations. At another conference, top-level biologists affirmed the strength of my arguments for the challenge of evolving new proteins that perform complex tasks. Many still wished to wait for natural explanations for the origin of novel protein structures, but they now much better appreciate the severity of the challenge.

I think he deserves a participation trophy! That’s all he did. He interacted with prominent scientists at conferences — all unnamed. He spoke to one of the most recognized and admired evolutionary biologists who tacitly conceded some ID talking points. They aren’t named, so we can’t assess the relevance of their discipline or their prominence. Then he was on a panel with a leading evolutionary theorist, again unnamed. Then he went to another conference with “TOP MEN” who affirmed ID … their names are a mystery.

Is it name-dropping if you fail to actually name any of them?

In addition to that hopelessly vague summary, they have an annual countdown of the top ten ID news stories. Shall I go through them all? No. Too boring. Too trivial. For instance, #6 is Megalodon, written by the most tediously pedantic nitwit in their stable, Günter Bechly. After a couple of paragraphs about the majestic size of Meg and it’s tremendous teeth, and noting that they are definitely entirely completely extinct, we get the dramatic exciting reason their contribution to intelligent design is being acknowledged here.

Sharks possess many remarkable biological features, of which some clearly point to intelligent design, such as their complex olfactory and electromagnetic sense organs. The latter are situated on and around their snouts and are called ampullae of Lorenzini (Bellono et al. 2017, Weiler 2017). The discovery of this electromagnetic sense by Adrianus Kalmjin is a fascinating story (Shiffman 2022). A recent study revealed further secrets, such as the fact that sharks only use these organs to find prey, while the related skates and rays also use them for electric communication (Weiler 2018). For more information on evidence for intelligent design in marine organisms like sharks and whales, I highly recommend the Illustra Media documentary Living Waters (Evolution News 2016).

That’s it! That’s all he’s got! Nothing new at all, some old news that sharks have a sophisticated sensory system, and none of the cited papers so much as mention Megalodon or discuss problems in evolutionary theory. I’m sure David Shiffman would be surprised to learn he’s being cited as a creationist authority.

So, for their great grand end of the year summary of the majestic progress of their agenda, all they have to show are vague assertions that the lurkers support them at conferences and that non-creationists have learned things that they can distort into some imaginary support for design theory. Mediocre.

Remember, they codified their plans back in 1998, in the Wedge document. Here’s what they were supposed to have done by 1993.

Five Year Goals

  • To see intelligent design theory as an accepted alternative in the sciences and scientific research being done from the perspective of design theory.
  • To see the beginning of the influence of design theory in spheres other than natural science.
  • To see major new debates in education, life issues, legal and personal responsibility pushed to the front of the national agenda.

Those all flopped. What about their goals for 2018?

Twenty Year Goals

  • To see intelligent design theory as the dominant perspective in science.
  • To see design theory application in specific fields, including molecular biology, biochemistry, paleontology, physics and cosmology in the natural sciences, psychology, ethics, politics, theology and philosophy in the humanities; to see its influence in the fine arts.
  • To see design theory permeate our religious, cultural, moral and political life.

2023 is time for their twenty five year goals, which they didn’t specify in the original document. Here, I’ll help them out:

Twenty Five Year Goals

  • To have a few anonymous scientists whisper tentative support off the record that they might support us.
  • To appropriate random discoveries by legitimate scientists as, in fact, intelligent design discoveries.
  • To employ an array of no-name wankers to write puff-pieces on our website.

Finally, mission accomplished!

The great leaps and bounds of Intelligent Design creationism! Hoorah!

I was pumped to read the Discovery Institute’s summary of their three greatest achievements in 2021. Finally, the existing paradigm will be smashed! Evolution’s on the run now, boys! Get ready for the evidence! As the author, Brian Miller, says:

The situation resembles a poorly constructed dam holding back water that is continuously rising. Streams of water are breaking through at increasing numbers of locations, and the flow at each location is hastening. The key question is not if, but when the dam will collapse.

Here, I will discuss just three of the highlights from 2021 for the Center for Science & Culture. I will also describe how these successes are hastening the erosion of the materialistic philosophical assumptions hindering scientific progress. And I will assess their implications for the future of the intelligent design movement.

All right! I’ll put on my galoshes and get ready for the challenge of the rising flood…except, sorry, all we get is a fine mist that evaporates as fast as the Discovery Institute squirts it out.

Their first triumph is that Steven Meyer published another book. They all sound the same, and I’m afraid the only good point of it is that Meyer’s continuing exercises in masturbation are unlikely to result in incest…although seeing a fellow DI maggot fellating it does come close. Score: 0.

Their second victory is that a couple of DI lackwits published a bad paper on the waiting-time non-problem. It sunk without a trace. You might appreciate this review of the paper by Mikkel Nif Rasmussen.

It’s also another example of creationist papers focused on so-called “waiting time problems” with evolution, which are typically based on the entirely imaginary – and totally dubious premise – that there are “target sequences” that evolution must find and evolve towards without any input by natural selection, by mutating incrementally from some random ancestral sequence until the correct (or almost correct) “target” sequence is produced by the chance accumulation of mutations.

To nobody’s surprise, the longer the target sequence is, the longer it will take before chance mutations happen to produce it or something very near to it.

Oops? Is it raining yet? Score: still nada.

Their third devastating discovery is that there was a conference, sponsored by the Discovery Institute, that was attended by Dembski and Behe, that will have ripple effects…for years to come. No, it won’t, and a gang of creationists pandering to the presuppositions of a few engineers isn’t going to trouble our well-engineered, strongly-reinforced dam. The DI goes 0 for 3!

I’m putting away the boots and the caulk gun, and cancelling that bid on a canoe on eBay. Those highlights were…pathetic. I guess the creationists are truly desperate.

Meanwhile, here in the rational, evidence-based world, PLoS published a roundup of the top 7 discoveries in just human evolution (the list would be far too long if they included discoveries in bacteria, or even spiders). These stories include:

  • Morphological divergence with Paranthropus robustus
  • Burial practices revealed by a child buried 78,000 years ago
  • Neandertal genetic contributions to the earliest Homo sapiens in Europe
  • Ancient art from 45,500 years ago
  • New hominid species from China, Homo longi
  • New DNA specimens from modern humans, Denisovans, and Neandertals recovered from Denisova Cave
  • More human fossil footprints discovered

I think the gang at the Discovery Institute could have just opened any issue of the journal Evolution and seen far more substance backing up the science of evolution than the feeble gleanings they managed to scrape together for a whole year of creationist apologetics.

What is Intelligent Design Creationism?

Obvs, he did it.

Obvs, he did it.

Larry Moran discusses some apologetics from Jonathan McLatchie, in which McLatchie briefly argues for intelligent design. I think the fact that it’s in the context of Christian apologetics already gives away the store, but at least he gives a succinct definition of intelligent design:

The study of patterns in nature which bear the hallmarks of an intelligent cause

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An unintelligent Intelligent Design creationism quiz

Larry Moran has been given a quiz to test our comprehension of Intelligent Design creationism. Unfortunately, it was composed by someone who doesn’t understand ID creationism but merely wants everyone to regurgitate their propaganda, so it’s a major mess, and you can also tell that the person writing it was smugly thinking they were laying some real traps to catch us out in our ignorance.

Larry has posted his answers. I’ve put mine below the fold (I sorta subtly disagree with him on #2). If you want to take a stab at it untainted by our answers, here’s the original quiz, untainted by logic or evidence, so you can view them in their pure naked ignorance.

Also, another thing: the person who composed the quiz clearly expected simple yes/no answers, yet wrote questions that demand explanation. Yet again, the idiocy of the IDiots is exposed. I’ve actually troubled to explain my answers.

[Read more…]

Behold! The Legendary Intelligent Design Creationism Research Laboratory!

The Discovery Institute released a video of one of their stars, Ann Gauger, explaining the flaws in “population genetics” (I put it in quotes because it wasn’t a description of the field of population genetics that any competent biologist would recognize). Larry Moran points out the errors.

But then, someone noticed something else: the video was fake. It was Ann Gauger, all right, talking in a “lab”. Again, the quotes are because she was actually talking in front of a green screen, and a stock photo of a lab was spliced in behind her. Oops. It adds comic absurdity on top of the egregious errors in her babbling.

But of course that’s exactly what the DI wants. They can’t answer for the stupidity of her comments, but they can wave their hands and shout, “We do too have a lab! A real lab! And it’s sciencey and everything!” Because, after all, when you’re doing cargo cult science, the props are all important, and the substance doesn’t matter.

So, yeah, the indignant DI released a real photo of their real lab, with Gauger gazing at a petri dish. And here it is:

Annlab

Errm, are we supposed to be impressed? I could give you an equivalent photo of a few shelves in one of our student labs — it would look similar, just messier. A petri dish, a few orange-top bottles, a small hood in the background—all they needed to make it really sciencey were a few bubbling bottles of colored water. D. James Kennedy did a better job in “Darwin’s Deadly Legacy”.

kennedylab

See? Now that’s a lab!

But seriously, the furniture does not make the lab — the work being done in it does. When you think it matters that you can pose with a petri dish, you really are doing cargo cult science.

Intelligent Design creationism is fundamentally wrong

Via Sandwalk, this is a clip of Paul Nelson praising Jonathan Wells and his godawful gemisch of bad scholarship and lies, Icons of Evolution. They were making a big to-do over the ten-year anniversary of publication of this ghastly hackwork, and here Nelson is piously praising the premise.

It’s infuriatingly dishonest. Notice what he repeats over and over: the textbooks “diverge from the actual evidence,” they’re “out of touch with the actual evidence,” we “need to take these standard stories back to the evidence.” This, from the Discovery Institute, a propaganda mill with no evidence for their fantasies about design at all. There is such an egregious disconnect between what Nelson says and what he and his cronies do that I half-expected his sanctimonious head to explode. If you’re an intelligent design creationists, you do not have the privilege of hectoring others about evidence.

Furthermore, he’s spewing this nonsense in praise of Icons of Evolution, a book to which honesty and evidence are words in a strange foreign language…yet Nelson claims the message of that book is that textbook authors need to be “scrupulous about accuracy” — and yet those scruples are never applied to Wells, and further, Nelson is more than a little self-serving here: he is co-author on another awful DI production, Explore Evolution, which is little more than a warmed-over edition of Icons, and which has also been panned in reviews.

And then Nelson says the “response was much more hostile than I would have guessed.” He claims the hostility was because they were airing “dirty laundry,” which is simply wrong. The hostility derived from the fact that it was an appallingly bad work of misrepresentation and misleading innuendo, all on the service of an intellectually bankrupt theology.

On top of Icons of Evolution and Explore Evolution, Wells rehashed the same lies again in The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design. It’s become obvious that the Wells has gone dry: he’s simply repeating the same errors and phony arguments over and over again. This is not a man or work that warrants praise, but only condemnation and contempt.

In the past, I’ve focused on one specific issue that Wells repeatedly brings up, the idea that Haeckel’s embryos are some kind of ongoing problem for evolution. There are a lot of articles on Pharyngula on this subject, but I’ll just point to this one omnibus summary of links to articles on Haeckel and Wells, and briefly explain the nature of this ‘controversy’. There is a 19th century observation, made by multiple scientists and easily replicated today, that embryos go through a period called the phylotypic stage (and in vertebrates, called the pharyngula stage), in which species within a phylum exhibit a remarkable degree of similarity to one another. This is simply a fact: stop by my lab and I can pull out a series of slides of birds and mammals and reptiles and fish and show you how they all exhibit a set of characters, the presence of a tailbud and pharyngeal arches and somites and so forth, that are the hallmark of this relatively well-conserved stage. Now in the 19th century, Haeckel over-interpreted them to postulate a recapitulation of evolution within the development of an embryo, an idea now known to be false; Wells strategy has always been to point to an obsolete and falsified explanation for the similarities to argue that the evolutionary relationships are untenable. It’s a sleazy sleight of hand. Recapitulation theory is not in any way endorsed any more, but the similarities at the phylotopic stage are undeniable…yet Wells condemns any textbook that even shows photos of embryonic similarities.

That’s the central problem here. We have a phenomenon, the similarities between embryos at one stage of development, for which the creationists have no explanation, so they’re reduced to frantically denying the phenomenon. This isn’t the way science should work. The phenomenon is real; that these common similarities between embryos is better explained by common descent than by design may make creationists uncomfortable, but what a scientist should do is find an answer, not try to wave the problem away (or worse, accuse everyone who has seen these similarities as guilty of fraud).

I’d go further than to argue that the creationists are trying to hide data that defies their ideology. They’re trying to bury something that is almost paradigmatic of juicy, exciting science. There are a couple of properties of significant scientific questions that I consider emblematic of exactly the kind of work that is of great value.

  1. It has to address a universal phenomenon. The problem of phylotypy isn’t representative of all of life by any means, but it seems to be a near-universal within the animal kingdom. Why do organisms as diverse as insects and mammals exhibit this morphological bottleneck in their development? It’s a great question; it doesn’t deserve to be swept under the rug as the creationists would like to do.

  2. It has to be a non-trivial problem. Trying to figure out exactly what is going on in phylotypy isn’t easy, because the current best hypotheses all involve interactions within complex gene networks, not the most tractable problem, and solving it will require both comparative and computational tools. It’s the complexity of the subject that makes it both challenging and rewarding to solve.

  3. One thing guaranteed to spur interest if the postulated mechanisms are controversial. Proposed mechanisms for phylotypy are non-Darwinian: they involve selection for intrinsic properties of networks of developmental genes that establish large scale properties of embryonic patterning. Notice that it isn’t anti-Darwinian, or the creationists would be happy with it; the mechanism fits within the context of our understanding of evolution, but extends it somewhat to include conservation of a kind of sophisticated, modular array of genes that work together to build the body plan. It’s not just the alleles that matter, but the connections between them.

  4. Maybe I should have mentioned this one first. A key quality of good science is that it is doable — we have to be able to sit down and do measurements and experiments. Truth be told, a lot of ordinary science doesn’t engage the first three principles I listed above as much as it permits the rapid and routine collection of data. The phylotypy hasn’t been quite so tractable, and to move beyond a kind of morphological phenomenology that has characterized much of the work so far, requires comparative analysis of large dataset of developmental gene expression data. Until recently, that kind of information simply hasn’t been available.

I used the past tense there: that data hasn’t been available. But that’s changing fast now with new techniques in molecular and developmental biology, and later today I’ll summarize a couple of beautiful recent articles that have revealed some of the underpinnings of the phylotypic stage. The creationists weren’t just wrong, they’re on the wrong side of history, and day by day they are bing shown to be increasingly far off base.

A brand new stupid argument for Intelligent Design creationism

Cruel, cruel readers. Everyone is sending me links to this recent episode of The View, in which four women babble inanely about something or other. In this case, it’s evolution. Do you people like to see me suffer? This was horrible.

OK, Whoopi Goldberg is wishy-washy, rather than stupid: she argues for some vague kind of deistic intervention at the big bang, then evolution is the mechanism for creating life. Elisabeth Hasselbeck, though…allow me to paraphrase. ‘Really cool handbags and shoes have, like, designers, so really cool people must have a designer, too, even greater than Gucci and Prada.’

Oh, wait…that’s not new. That’s the same old argument the ID creationists have made all along.

Here. The rest of you can suffer and despair of humanity now, too.

Another rhetorician for Intelligent Design creationism

Jason Rosenhouse has an exhaustingly exhaustive report on a lecture by Thomas Woodward, in 4 parts (here are parts 1, 2, 3, and 4). Woodward has written a book defending ID, and is going around the country giving testimonials to his faith. As is common with these folk, he also did a little prophesying.

Woodward closed by setting the date for the end of Darwinism’s reign as the dominant paradigm at …wait for it…2025. Later he suggested that it might be within ten years that evolution as we know it suffers a decisive failure. And then he predicted a severe nosedive for evolution in the next six to twelve months as Behe’s book soaks into the public consciousness.

I am reminded of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who prophesied the end of the world in 1874, 1878, 1881, 1910, 1914, 1918, 1920, 1925, and 1975. The millennial catastrophe did not arrive, but also…the Jehovah’s Witnesses did not fade away with their failures. I am not anticipating any sudden resolution of the evolution-creation pseudo-controversy in either 2017 or 2025.

Chris Rufo figured out how to erase part of his history

If nothing else, this is an accomplishment. I know Chris Rufo as a shill for the Discovery Institute — that anti-science, anti-evolution think-tank running on the fumes of rich conservatives’ money, pumping out nonsense about Intelligent Design creationism and fronted by pompous, but ignorant, pseudo-philosophers. If I had that in my background, I’d be deeply ashamed and would want to bury it as deeply as possible. I’d change my name, move to a new city, deny knowing all my old friends, etc. I’d dread someone uncovering my embarrassing past, forcing me to change my name and move again. I’d desperately desire a magic eraser to blot out that past shame.

Chris Rufo has done it! Here’s a prominent article about Chris Rufo that doesn’t even mention the Discovery Institute or creationism! How did he do it?

It is incredibly easy. All you have to do is associate with something even more repulsively stupid than creationism, and Rufo has managed to slather himself with filth so grossly disgusting that there’s no point in even mentioning his relatively minor dabblings in ignorance. He’s buddying up with a site called Aporia.

The rightwing activist Christopher Rufo has links to a self-styled “sociobiology magazine” that is focused on the supposed relationships between race, intelligence and criminality, and which experts have characterized as an outlet for scientific racism.

Now he’s all tangled up with Bo Winegard.

Winegard, a psychologist, was by his own account fired by Ohio’s Marietta College in March 2020 after a seminar he gave to a research group at the University of Alabama attracted protests and coverage in student media.

In that speech an audience member reportedly said that Winegard told his listeners that “people in colder climates, because of differences in brain size, have more propensity for cooperation”.

Winegard has continued to write in this vein on Aporia up to the present. In a 3 January article on the site titled “Yes, we should talk about race differences”, he wrote: “Thus, we must be honest about race. And that means we begin by noting that in the United States (and elsewhere in the world), different races have different average levels of intelligence as measured by IQ tests (and other measures of cognitive ability).”

As proof of this claim, Winegard cites researchers including the late Richard Lynn – a white nationalist, according to the SPLC – and the late Arthur Jensen, whom the SPLC calls “arguably the father of modern academic racism”.

Also, Noah Carl!

Another Aporia editor, Noah Carl, has also been the subject of previous academic controversy.

Carl is a sociologist who in 2018 was stripped of a postdoctoral fellowship at Cambridge University after the college that appointed him discovered that alongside his more legitimate work in sociology, he had simultaneously been publishing scientific-racist articles in outlets notorious for peddling scientific racism.

One of the outlets Carl published in, Mankind Quarterly, was founded “to make scientific racism respectable again”, according to the writer Angela Saini. It was for decades funded by the white nationalist Pioneer Fund, and the journal has been described as a “cornerstone of the scientific racism establishment”.

Now mix in Emil Kirkegaard.

Another venue, OpenPsych, is a platform established by Emil OW Kirkegaard, a self-described eugenicist who explicitly advocates “race science”, and who serves as a senior fellow at the Ulster Institute for Social Research (UISR), an organization once headed by Richard Lynn – the same researcher whose data led to Winegard’s retraction.

These are the writers and pseudo-scientists Rufo recommends to others.

Beirich, the extremism expert, said: “All of these ideas have been debunked over and over again. The danger here is that eugenics and scientific racism have been historically used to justify terrible acts including genocide.”

Other recent articles on Aporia include Winegard’s “The case for race realism”, which reasserts that “underlying race differences in measured cognitive ability and violent crime … make large outcome disparities inevitable”; an article by Gregory Conner, a retired professor of finance, which argues for innate racial differences in intelligence; and two articles arguing high IQ among Jews has a basis in their genetics.

Aporia also publishes a podcast, which featured Rufo as a guest on 4 August, during which he took the opportunity to discuss his newly published book.

Aporia is contemptible racist garbage, and Rufo is promoting it. Rufo is a nobody, a hack with no serious background in science (or anything intellectual at all, for that matter) so sure, creationism, racism, they’re both popular ideas among uneducated ideologues, so he’ll push them — he hasn’t get the education to understand how terrible they are.

On Rufo’s recommending the site to his readers, Bird said: “There’s nothing legitimate on biology or evolution or genetics that’s really been published by anyone at Aporia,” adding: “Pointing people towards that is pointing them toward unambiguous white supremacist propaganda and nonsense.

“There’s nothing of value there. There’s nothing that resembles real mainstream science. There’s nothing that resembles real discussions happening in the field. It can’t be anything other than racist propaganda.”

Beirich said of Rufo’s links that “it’s not surprising to find that a person who is playing footsie with eugenicists is also happy to attack diversity, equity and inclusion in higher education or a Black president of Harvard”.

By linking to Aporia and appearing on its podcast, she said: “Rufo is helping to bring back this despicable material and mainstreaming it.”

Keep in mind that Rufo has been elevated to high advisory positions in the Florida government, and is making decisions about the universities in that state. Nothing in his background has prepared him to make competent decisions on much of any of the institutions he now has his thumb on.

Oh, he does have one qualification that doesn’t bother me at all but might alienate him from his fans. He has a Masters Degree…in Liberal Arts. Work on erasing that from your CV, guy.

I keep missing their funerals!

I am a neglectful nemesis. I told you before that the Slymepit had died, and it took me six months to find out. Now I learn that Bill Dembski’s blog, Uncommon Descent, has expired. I’m only about 2 months late to the party, so I’m getting better.

As his blog sank, Dembski was crowing in triumph.

In closing this farewell, I want to say special thanks to Jack Cole, who was the webmaster all these years and put in so many unremunerated hours; to Denyse O’Leary, whose quick pen and sharp insights supplied a never-ending stream of fruitful content; and to Barry Arrington, whose work in administering the site and writing for it kept the trains running. And finally, thanks to all the contributors and commenters over the years who, in supporting ID, have been on the right side of truth and will ultimately be vindicated for being on the right side of history.

Nothing in any of the Intelligent Design creationism blogs were on the right side of truth. Dembski has always been fond of making grandiose proclamations that fly in the face of reality, like this one.

In the next five years, molecular Darwinism – the idea that Darwinian processes can produce complex molecular structures at the subcellular level – will be dead. When that happens, evolutionary biology will experience a crisis of confidence because evolutionary biology hinges on the evolution of the right molecules. I therefore foresee a Taliban-style collapse of Darwinism in the next ten years. Intelligent design will of course profit greatly from this. For ID to win the day, however, will require talented new researchers able to move this research program forward, showing how intelligent design provides better insights into biological systems than the dying Darwinian paradigm.

He wrote that in 2004. It’s a standard trope in creationism to announce the imminent death of Darwinism even as they are being stuffed into a grave. See also the Wedge document from 1998, where they predicted major legal and scientific victories within a few years, and instead they got the Kitzmiller trial in 2005…and we all know how that turned out for them.

(Of course, one could argue that “Darwinism” sensu stricto has been dead for over a hundred years, but that would be an admission that the creationists have been flailing ignorantly against a straw man.)