Follow-up on ID at conferences

The other day, I posted about the Discovery Institute’s end of year wrap-up. One of the things that bugged me about it was that while Brian Miller said, In 2022, I participated in several conferences and private events in which I interacted with prominent scientists, he failed to mention any of these conferences or the names of these prominent scientists. That’s a striking omission! Waving vaguely in the direction of unspecified conferences and scientists is the opposite of persuasive. So I browsed through the archives of the Disco Institute to see if he mentioned any of them at the time they occurred.

This is not definitive at all — these are just the conferences he mentioned on Evolution News & Views. Maybe he was jet-setting around the world attending an international conference every week, but then it’s peculiar, given the braggadacio of his year end post, that he never brought them up before. Here is just the 2022 conferences he mentioned. There weren’t many of them.

  • In November, he attended a Catholic conference on creation.

    I’m back now from a conference this past week at Notre Dame, titled “‘And It Was Very Good’: On Creation,” hosted by the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture. The Center described the conference as follows:
    In the created world, Pope Francis writes, we are able to perceive “a grammar written by the hand of God” (Lumen Fidei). If creation is a language, what can we discern regarding the creator? The de Nicola Center’s 22nd annual Fall Conference will explore the many facets of the created world and the act of creation, including questions of cosmology, teleology, natural ends, natural law, the Imago Dei, creaturely status, ecology, stewardship, cocreation, recreation, redemption, and more.
    The organizers accepted my abstract for a talk titled “The Return of Teleology to the Natural Sciences.” I presented the talk as part of a panel with two other scholars, and it seemed well received.

  • In September, he mentioned a conference, but it’s not clear that he attended.

    As an engineering professor at Bristol University and Cambridge, Stuart Burgess has researched biomechanics for nearly thirty years. He is one of the leading engineers in the UK. Earlier this year, he presented a talk at the Westminster Conference on Science and Faith titled, “Why Human Skeletal Joints Are Masterpieces of Human Engineering: And a Rebuttal to the ‘Bad Design’ Arguments.”

  • In May, he was at a conference on science and faith.

    At the recent Dallas Conference on Science and Faith, Discovery Institute physicist Brian Miller gave a great talk on the convergence of biology and engineering. It’s up now on YouTube and eminently worthy of being shared. Miller’s theme is that “you see the same engineering principles in human engineering as you see in life.”

    (Yes, he wrote the article, and is referring to himself and the great talk in the third person. Weird.)

  • I don’t know that this one should count, but in March he was promoting a Disco Institute summer seminar. He doesn’t say, but I assume he participated in this yearly event in 2021? Maybe?

    In 2016, I attended the Center for Science & Culture’s annual Summer Seminars on Intelligent Design, and that fateful week pulled me into the epicenter of the design debate. For years, I had studied and lectured on the evidence for design in nature.

I’m being generous in noting the conferences he talked about, but note: none of these are professional conferences, and they all have a religious agenda. It’s not that religious people can’t be excellent scientists, but these are not events that would attract a diverse group of scientists — all the attendees would have had a certain bent towards favoring creationist explanations to varying degrees. It makes his implication that he was reasonably representing the views of many prominent people in the sciences a bit suspect. Talk to creationists, you tend to find they like creationism…news at 11.

He may have also attended real, secular, professional conferences as well that he didn’t tout, but I have reservations about that, too. He has a Ph.D. in physics. Not to demean physicists, but few of them have the kind of knowledge of biology to be able to appropriately assess the evidence for evolution, and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that some brilliant minds in physics are part of the crackpot fringe in biology.

I suspect that a creationist who wanted to present his theorizing on gods and design at a physics conference would get the same response Paul Nelson got at a biology conference — uninterested neglect. Lonely indifference.He sure wouldn’t have cause to brag about his reception.

It’s all hilarious until it isn’t

The central character on the internet for the last few days has been Andrew Tate, macho posturing kickboxer and sleaze merchant, previously banned on Twitter but allowed back on by Elon Musk (of course). He was recently mocked by, of all persons, Greta Thunberg, who teased his “small-dick energy”, followed by Tate making a video bragging about all his expensive cars, thereby proving her point. This was quickly followed by the Romanian police busting in and arresting Tate, purportedly tipped off by the box for a local pizza delivery site letting them know where he was (I don’t really believe this — the police knew where he was, and already had a case against him.)

Funny stuff. Bragging idiot gets his comeuppance, perfect Twitter fodder, right?

Until you read what the Romanian police charged him with.

Following the communique no. 1 of 12.04.2022 and the interest shown by media representatives, the Information and Public Relations Office within the Organized Crime and Terrorism Investigation Directorate is empowered to bring the following to public attention:

On 29.12.2022, the prosecutors of the Directorate for the Investigation of Organized Crime and Terrorism – Central Structure together with police officers from the Bucharest Organized Crime Brigade implemented 5 home search warrants in a case in which investigations under the aspect of committing the crimes of constituting an organized criminal group, human trafficking and rape.
In the case it was noted that, at the beginning of 2021, 4 suspects (two British citizens and two Romanian citizens) constituted a criminal group organized in order to commit crimes on the territory of Romania, but also of other countries, such as the United States of America and Great Britain, of the crime of human trafficking.
Victims were recruited by British citizens by misrepresenting their intention to enter into a marriage/cohabitation relationship and the existence of genuine feelings of love (the loverboy method). They were later transported and housed in buildings in Ilfov county where, by exercising acts of physical violence and mental coercion (through intimidation, constant surveillance, control and invoking alleged debts), they were sexually exploited by group members by forcing them to perform demonstrations pornographic for the purpose of producing and disseminating through social media platforms material having such a character and by submitting to the execution of a forced labor,
So far, 6 injured persons have been identified who were sexually exploited by the organized criminal group.
With regard to the crime of rape, it was noted that, in March 2022, an injured person was forced, on two different occasions, by a suspect through the exercise of physical violence and psychological pressure to have sexual relations.
At the headquarters of the Directorate for the Investigation of Organized Crime and Terrorism – Central Structure, 4 people who are reasonably suspected of being involved in criminal activity were taken for questioning. Following the hearings, the prosecutors of the Directorate for the Investigation of Organized Crime and Terrorism – Central Structure ordered the 4 persons to be detained for a period of 24 hours.
The activities were also attended by police officers from the Ilfov Organized Crime Service and the Service for Combating Human Trafficking, as well as gendarmes from the Special Intervention Brigade of the Gendarmerie.
We make it clear that during the entire criminal process, the investigated persons benefit from the procedural rights and guarantees provided by the Code of Criminal Procedure, as well as the presumption of innocence.

[translated from the original Romanian]

Jesus fucking christ. Not funny at all. Tate and his brother were luring women into their grasp, imprisoning them, using them to make internet pornography, and raping them. And people have been idolizing him? If convicted, I hope they spend many years in a Romanian prison; if not convicted, please let this be the end of Tate’s reputation as a man to emulate. He’s a cowardly abuser of women and a rapist.

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!

Wheel out the persecution complex

I mentioned before that Ken Ham and Ray Comfort were going to flood London with Bible tracts for the upcoming coronation. The Panda’s Thumb also noted the silliness of this effort. Here’s the complete text of their comment.

Ken Ham and his fellow creationist grifters plan to disrupt King Charles’s Coronation by handing out religious tracts disguised as money.

This is hilarious. They are raising money to print and distribute 3 million counterfeit “1 Million Pound” notes that will display fundamentalist/creationist tracts on the reverse side. They are shamelessly raising money to do this. I wonder if the British Secret Service will also be amused.

That’s it! That’s all they said. It was enough to fuel Ray Comfort’s outrage, though. He thinks that’s a serious threat to call the police on them, so he’s made a video in which he intercuts clips of people getting handcuffed, of gangster firing machine guns, and then delivers a po-faced explanation of all the ways their Bible tracts differ from genuine UK pound notes. Yeah, Ray, we know. You’re more likely to get arrested for littering than for seriously trying to undermine the British economy with fake money. Your greater crime will be inducing eye-strain in all the people who will be rolling their eyes.

That doesn’t trigger their persecution complex, though…gotta inflate the concerns even more.

So ridiculous. They’re trying so hard to pretend the world sees them as fierce and dangerous, rather than a joke.

Speaking of jokes, if you bother to watch the video, it starts out with breathless outraged innocence, but One-Trick-Pony Ray can’t keep it up for long, and it abruptly switches to another of his man-in-the-street interviews where he confronts a stranger with the question and accusation, “Have you ever told a lie? Then you’re a liar and are going to hell.” It’s a good thing for Ray that the Bible doesn’t condemn people for being a repetitive bore, because he’d be damned for all time. I turn off any of his videos when he starts on that tired schtick, which means I can never sit through any of them.

Boo hoo, PragerU

Dennis Prager is unhappy that some of his fans don’t get to see their grown children on Christmas. Tragic.

There are probably hundreds of thousands of men and women who, because of political differences, maintain minimal or no contact with their parents and, even more cruelly, do not allow their parents to have any contact with their children—their parents’ grandchildren.
…
I know of this firsthand. Parent after parent calls my radio show, often close to tears, sometimes actually sobbing, pouring their heart out to me about being alone on holidays despite having children and grandchildren.

In virtually every case, the parent is conservative, and the child is on the Left. I assume there are cases of grown conservative children who won’t allow a liberal/Left parent to see his or her grandchildren—but I have never heard of a single such case. It is almost impossible to imagine a conservative adult depriving his or her parents of access to their grandchildren because the parent(s) voted for Joe Biden. Moreover, if there were such a person, every conservative I know would vociferously condemn this individual.

Awww. Don’t you realize that it is a religious imperative — it’s right there in the Ten Commandments — that you are required to honor your parents, without regard for whether they honor you or not? It’s an absolute rule. Your parents can be hateful bigots, they can have neglected or abused you, they can be preaching prejudiced ideas that do great harm to others, but you must place your children in their claws for Christmas. You have no choice in the matter, nor do your kids, because choice and consent are dirty words to the Pragers of the world. Shall we consider that maybe those sobbing grandparents are deprived of contact with their grandchildren because they are poisonous vipers who want to indoctrinate the kiddies with evil ideas? No, we shall not. The problem lies entirely with those damned liberal parents.

Prager gives three reasons why evil leftists are entirely at fault for making their parents cry.

Reason #1 is basically authoritarian absolutism. Thou shalt not question the orders of the preacher Lord!

The further left you go, the less likely you are to believe that you are accountable to an absolute moral code, let alone to a Giver of an absolute moral code. On the other hand, conservatives, certainly religious conservatives—people who believe in a God-given Ten Commandments—believe that they are obligated to honor their parents regardless of their political differences.

No, we Leftists do have moral values — we just don’t accept the unquestioned authority of a holy book, especially not when it’s a self-serving commandment that panders to the authority of old people, and especially not old people who have made questionable moral decisions. Shouldn’t a universal moral code be one that even people who do not follow a narrow religious sect can accept? “Honor your parents” doesn’t work as a blind precept, because some parents don’t deserve honor.

A parent who endorses the politics of hatred, as Republicans do, should legitimately be disowned. You want to say that gays should be killed, brown people deported, atheists (and anyone who follows a different sect than yours) is evil? Then no, you don’t get to play with my kids. Perfectly fair.

Reason #2 is a strange one, and a good reason to avoid people like Prager: it’s because atheists do not have a conscience and are evil, and that’s why they make Grandma cry.

The Left proves the utter inadequacy of the conscience. To cite the present example, the adult children who deprive their conservative parents of contact with the parents’ grandchildren have a perfectly clear conscience. All those secular people—including secular conservatives—who argue that God is unnecessary because it is enough for people to answer to their conscience are spectacularly naïve. The consciences of most people who do evil are blissfully untroubled.

They don’t even care that they are making their parents unhappy! To the contrary, if I’d had to cut off my parents’ access to my kids, I’d have felt terrible about it, and would have suffered pangs of guilt (fortunately, that was never a problem in my family, and I wish my kids could have spent more time with their grandparents). The reason someone may sever communication with a parent is precisely because they have a conscience and a set of moral values that find the ideas of an older generation repugnant.

Reason #3 is even stranger and more absurd. It’s college. Conservatives really have a hate-on for education.

You almost have to be a college graduate to shun your parents and deprive them of their grandchildren because of political differences. If you had asked most of these college graduates before they enrolled in college who, because of political differences, won’t see their parents for Christmas if they could imagine never talking to their parents because of political differences, most of them would probably have deemed the question absurd. After four years of college indoctrination—essentially consisting of hatred of nonleftists—the question is no longer absurd.

No, what happens is that kids escape their parents’ control, and learn that Mommy & Daddy’s moral and religious code isn’t the only one out there — they learn to think for themselves and discover that there is a world of ideas that aren’t as blinkered and narrow and oppressive. They might just wake up to the fact that the gay-bashing and transphobia and racism and greed they were brought up with are bad ideas. They may even still love their parents, but just regret how they treat others, and not want their own children to have that kind of bias instilled in them.

It’s not that the more liberal offspring are the problem. It’s the nasty opinionated hidebound kinds of people who would call in to cry on the shoulders of a conservative wretch like Dennis Prager who are terrible role models for anyone’s kids.

Brings back childhood memories of going to church at Christmas

It was exactly like this.

I never go to church anymore, not even at Xmas. Instead, this year I’ve replaced it with the roars of a murderous freight train circling around and around my house all through the night, letting me know it would kill me if I stepped out into the blizzard. It’s still out there. There’s a weird haze outside my window caused by all the shards of ice whipping through the air.

It’s all preferable to church, though.

Do you want $100,000? (Or is it $200,000?)

I have been contacted by a loon who is offering big money to anyone who can disprove his mathematical argument that god exists. I’m not interested — it’s incredibly stupid — but hey, if you want to waste your time playing a rigged game, help yourself.

One hundred thousand dollars, $200,000.00, cold hard cash for disproving this theory by these rules.

The Jews have been doing Gematria for thousands of years. There are 20 verses in the Holy Bible telling us that God put this Gematria in the Bible. Dr. Ivan Panin bagan in 1890 to create 43,000 pages of Gematria and went around the country challenging any atheist to disprove ANY of these 43,000 pages of proof that God wrote the Holy Bible. Not one Yot or Tittle of Dr. Ivan Panins 43,000 pages of proof has been disproven in the past 130 years.

‘The Theory of Biblical Patterns’ shows the significance of God’s prime digits, ‘3’ for trinity, ‘7’ for divine perfection and God’s prime pairs, 3 and 7 side by side, ’37’, and ’73’ and ’23’ the number of chromosomes in human DNA. All probabilities are shown. The first 28 are from Dr. Ivan Panin 130 years ago and have never been disproven. A half a dozen others are from various sources such as Dr. Chuck Missler. The remainder God gave me directly.

It’s numerology. It’s utterly absurd. Here’s one of his 100 proofs.

So the number of words in Genesis 1:1 is evenly divisible by 7. Big whoop. What am I supposed to disprove? That a multiple of 7 is not divisible by 7? Or that this mathematically trivial fact is not evidence of god? I suspect he has the former as his trump card, that no one will disprove a truism, so he’ll never have to cough up his cash.

Don’t blame America! We’re not ruining the coronation!

The coronation of King Charles will take place in May. Some grifters see the teeming crowds going to the event as an opportunity, and are planning to attend. Now I have zero interest in royal shenanigans, but I think it’s fine if the people of England have a big party, and I certainly wouldn’t dream of disrupting it, so I don’t want us Americans to get the blame for a particular stupid bunch of party-crashers.

Ken Ham (Australian) and Ray Comfort (New Zealand) are teaming up to print these One Million Pound fake banknotes — they’ve printed 3 million of them — for evangelists to hand out at the coronation.

This is a tired old Ray Comfort schtick. The notes are worth nothing, less than nothing since they’re garbage, and are tedious old gospel tracts. For years, you’ve been able to buy these worthless tracts from Living Waters — here’s an American version.

Servers will be able to tell you that some Christians love to leave these as tips at their restaurant table. You can imagine how galling that would be.

Now these obnoxious twits are going to London with a gigantic pile of tracts to scatter. They are practically salivating at the opportunity — in this video, they are first excited about the size of the crowds at Queen Elizabeth’s funeral, and then cut to scenes from Elizabeth’s coronation. It’s a religious ceremony! It’s in a church! There are jewels and gold and pageantry!

Ray and Ken imagine that their cheap-ass cheesy old-timey tent-revival act will blend right in, and they’ll be welcomed by the crowds attending an Anglican ceremony, and that they’ll get hordes of converts by passing out pieces of paper with inane conservative Christian apologetics printed on them.

I think that at best what they’ll get is some deeply annoyed people offended by this foreign intrusion on their reverently observed historical tradition, and at worst they’re going to meet some hooligans who will make a strong response to their efforts. It could get ugly. I don’t think they’ll get to meet any royalty, but maybe a truncheon or Piers Morgan.

Hey, if anyone should get one of these, send it to me!