There’s no official declaration of the Pope’s recent consult on evolution, but news is leaking out…and the good news is that Intelligent Design is not going to have a place at the table, and didn’t figure in the discussions at all. Catholic News has one source:

A participant at the Pope’s closed door symposium on creation and evolution, Jesuit Fr Joseph Fessio, has denied speculation about a change in the Church’s teaching on evolution, saying nothing presented at the meeting broke new ground and that American debates on Intelligent Design did not feature in discussions.

Declan Butler, in this week’s Nature, also reports on the impression of the only biologist at the meeting (isn’t that peculiar in itself, that they’d have a conference on the status of evolution in the church, and only have one informed attendee?):

Schönborn was one of four invited speakers at the meeting, which also included Robert Spaemann, a conservative German philosopher, and Paul Erbrich, a Jesuit priest who questions the random nature of evolution. The fourth speaker, the only working scientist present, was Peter Schuster, a molecular biologist and president of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

In a break with tradition, the proceedings of the meeting will be published later this year, says Schuster, with a preface written by the Pope. The message will be to promote dialogue between faith and reason, Schuster says. Given the power struggles within the Church, however, the precise outcome of the overall debate is impossible to predict, he says: “We have to wait.”

But discussions at the meeting suggest that the Church will probably affirm a form of theistic evolution, which posits the general principle that biological evolution is valid, although set in motion by God. At the same time, it seems likely to reject the fundamental intelligent-design principle that God was a watchmaker, intervening in the details. “Intelligent design as an intervention of God during evolution will not be an outcome,” predicts Schuster. “I got the impression that there was general agreement that evolutionary biology is a undeniable science and not a hypothesis.”

A few thoughts on the decision:

• It is good news that ID is not going to get any official endorsement from the Catholic church. The Discovery Institute has taken a beating lately, and this is not the time to slacken the pressure or give them any succor; we need to throttle that toxic weed until it is dead.
• Backing a form of theistic evolution, while still insupportable nonsense, is the best we could hope for from the Pope, I suppose. My dream that Ratzi would go into a conclave and emerge to announce that it was all a mistake, the papacy was dissolved, and good Catholics should all embrace an enlightened materialistic naturalism hasn’t come true just yet.
• While we can be pleased that the Vatican hasn’t found common cause with another institutional enemy of good science, ultimately their decision is irrelevant. “Eppur si muove,” and all that—the world keeps spinning, the alleles keep changing, biological history has happened, and all the dogma of old men in funny hats won’t change that.

Butler, D (2006) When science and theology meet. Nature 443:10-11.

Poor Francis Collins: now his book has been panned in New Scientist…by Steve Fuller. That Steve Fuller, the pompous pseudo-post-modernist who testified for Intelligent Design creationism in Dover. His criticism has an interesting angle, though. Collins is just like Richard Dawkins. Who knew?

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William Dembski sadly reports that Answers in Genesis is handing out a “$50,000” prize^* for a creationist essay…for which no Intelligent Design advocates need reply. He moans that ID doesn’t have anywhere near the resources of the traditional creationists (which is true—AiG is bigger, but the DI has just gotten more press), and then uses this to make the argument that he really wishes they could have made at Dover:

This contest demonstrates that creationism and ID are charting separate paths.

No, not exactly. Separate strategies, maybe, but the same goals. There are substantial differences in dogma between different creationist groups, but they’re all anti-evolution and anti-science and belong to the same general category of science kooks. Answers in Genesis is a Young Earth Creationist organization led by Ken Ham, and they don’t get along with Old Earth Creationist Hugh Ross’s Reasons to Believe; a follower of Hugh Ross would not qualify for the “$50,000” prize, either, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t a creationist. William “intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John’s Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory” Dembski is just a leader in one sectarian branch of the rotten creationist tree, as is Hugh “Starting about 2 to 4 million years ago, God began creating man-like mammals or ‘hominids’…Then, about 10 to 25 thousand years ago, God replaced them with Adam and Eve” Ross and Ken “Genesis is true” Ham—or Harun “The carbon atom, like everything else, has been created by Allah” Yahya. Same difference. It doesn’t matter what little, transient cult they belong to, they hold ignorance in common.

^*Not really. It’s a scholarship for $50,000 to Liberty University. Yeah, being shackled to stupid people and forced to memorize dogma is a real prize. Since the cost of housing someone in a prison is about $20K/year, maybe I should get a gun and rob a gas station for a chance at winning a $200,000 prize!

David Berlinski, that Prince of Pomposity and Lackey of the Discovery Institute, is trying to get a letter published in Science, complaining about the study that showed America’s poor showing in understanding evolution. It’s more of an opaque, cranky whine, something Berlinski specializes in, so I rather doubt it will ever get in—the editors there are going to be as respectful of creationist nonsense as I am. Of course, one thing I can do that the editors wouldn’t is rip into his letter and tear it to pieces in public…

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John A. Davison has started a new blog. You may recall his previous blog, or the one before that. His technique is to post one article, invite comments, and when he gets tired of them, move on…not to a new article, a new blog. His first got 881 comments (many of them consisting of Davis wondering where everyone was, or arguing with DaveScot); this is the only article there.

I have my own blog now, only because I have been banned from just about all the others. Since I am computer illiterate, don’t expect very much from me. I welcome any comments about my published papers including my unpublished “An Evolutionary Manifesto: A New Hypothesis For Organic Change.” I will tend to ignore any denigrations either of myself or my distinguished sources. I will also not take seriously comments from anonymous posters although I will respond provided they are civil.

That’s it, demonstrating that at least he was honest in saying he was computer illiterate. The second got 651 comments, again more of the same, and here’s all the content on it:

The original Prescribed Evolution blog got pretty cluttered so I am starting a new one. Hopefully I will be able to better manage this one than the original.

Whoops, no, he wasn’t any better at it. So now he has moved on, and the current one has 7 comments, on an article that says just this:

I have abandoned both of my earlier blogs, leaving their contents as living testimony to the nature and tactics of my adversaries. Since I am now convinced that creative evolution is no longer in progress I have chosen the above title. I quite busy right now posting at other forums, chiefly Uncommon Descent and ISCID’s ” brainstorms” so I will spend little time here but I welcome any constructive criticism of my several papers and my evolutionary views in general.

A testimony to the tactics of his adversaries? Be still, O My Precious Irony Meter. Let’s let this new blog die a sad, lonely death, OK?

I will say that Davison is certainly the parfait creationist—completely vacuous and so damn righteous in his ignorance.

(via Ooblog)

The ongoing dissection of Wells’ The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design continues, with two new disembowelments on display.

Andrea Bottaro rips up Chapter 9, “The Secret of Life”. In this one, Wells makes the tired old argument that only intelligent agents can create information, therefore informational macromolecules must have been created by intelligent agent(s). It’s also got a sharp, succinct critique of the Sternberg affair, in which Stephen Meyer smuggled an ID paper into Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. (Don’t ask what those two subjects were doing together in this chapter. Wells is not big on logical organization.)

Mark Perakh takes on Chapter 16, “American Lysenkoism”. You can guess the subject from the title: the Darwinists are persecuting the proponents of heterodoxy, confining them to the gulags of right-wing think tanks, like the Discovery Institute, and not allowing them to be represented in the universities. Yeah, right. We also don’t let flat-earthers get professorships in geology.

Expect more in the near future. We divvied up the chapters a few weeks ago, and everyone is working through them at their own pace (for the record, mine was ready to go a week and a half ago, and I held off to give a few people a chance to catch up—doesn’t everyone whip out a few thousand words in a few hours?), and they’re getting released as they’re done. When they’re all organized, it’s going to represent a very substantial rebuttal of some extraordinarily shoddy scholarship.

One of the things all of us are noting that may not get communicated well in the rebuttals is how much is wrong in each of Wells’ chapters. We’d have to write a whole book for each chapter just to explain all of his foolish errors and dishonest cheats, and what we’ve all been electing to do (by necessity!) is to focus on just a few examples and shred those. This is a book that would be slashed to bits by competent reviewers—I have a growing sense of amazement that it got published at all. But then, all I need to do is note that it was put out by Regnery, where incompetence and lies are a prerequisite for publication.

By request, I’m bringing over this old post on the outcome of the Dover trial. What it reveals to an astonishing degree is how delusional and disconnected from reality the Discovery Institute gang are.

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Michael Behe has previously commented on his testimony in the Kitzmiller trial. He felt good about it; in fact, he thought it was exhilarating and fun.

I haven’t the foggiest idea how the Judge will rule, but I think we got to show a lot of people that ID is a very serious idea.

Hmmmm…I wonder, what did the judge think of his testimony? Do you think there might be a way to, you know, find out?

Let’s look in his decision for references to Behe! As it turns out, we owe a debt of gratitude to the good doctor of ID for the invaluable assistance of his testimony.

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