Posted on 01/10/2002 8:12:15 AM PST by Exnihilo
January 9, 2002: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
FOLLOW-UP STATEMENT BY WILLIAM A. DEMBSKI ON THE PUBLICATION OF ROBERT PENNOCK'S NEW BOOK WITH MIT PRESS
How STILL Not to Debate Intelligent Design By William A. Dembski
Robert Pennock has just published _Intelligent Design Creationists and Their Critics_ with MIT Press. It includes two essays by me. In a press release dated yesterday, I claimed that Pennock never contacted me about their inclusion. Pennock now claims that he did. He said. She said. Who's right?
Consider the facts. Pennock published two essays of mine in his new book: "Who's Got the Magic?" and "Intelligent Design as a Theory of Information." With regard to the second essay, did he ever in any way refer to that essay, whether directly or indirectly, in any of our correspondence prior to the release of his book? No. He never even hinted at it, and there's no way it could be said that he contacted me about its inclusion in his volume. Pennock therefore never laid out which essays of mine he intended to include.
What about the other essay, "Who's Got the Magic?" Did Pennock ever advert to that essay in any of our correspondence? In April 2001, Pennock sent an email to my colleague Paul Nelson asking him to forward it to me. Nelson did forward Pennock's message to me. I had received no email from Pennock before that date and nothing after until the publication of his book. I read Pennock's email with only two pieces of relevant background knowledge: (1) that he was putting together an anthology for MIT Press titled _Intelligent Design Creationists and Their Critics_ and (2) that my colleague Paul Nelson was a contributor to the volume and that he had been explicitly informed that he would be a contributor. My working assumption before receiving Pennock's email was that I would not be a contributor since I had not been similarly informed.
Pennock's forwarded message contained two items relevant here: (1) a short biosketch of me with a request that I correct it for inclusion in "my anthology" (no description of the anthology beyond this was mentioned -- Pennock simply assumed I knew what he was referring to) and (2) an engimatic reference to being able to "add our Meta exchange when I sent in the ms [sic]."
Regarding the biosketch, Pennock did not state that this was a contributor biosketch. With a title like _Intelligent Design Creationists and Their Critics_, I took it that Pennock was compiling a "rogues gallery" of ID proponents and simply listing me as one of the rogues. He never used the word "contributor" or anything like it to refer to me in connection with his anthology.
Regarding Pennock's reference to "our Meta exchange," he never referred to my actual essay by title. The Meta exchange comprised my piece on www.metanexus.net titled "Who's Got the Magic?" and his response there titled "The Wizards of ID." I had never signed over the copyright for "Who's Got the Magic?" to Pennock or anyone else for that matter. Was it therefore our entire exchange that he was planning to add, with copyright permissions requests (that never came) still down the road ? Or was it just his portion of the exchange and a summary of mine that he was planning to add to "the ms"? Was his mention of adding it to "the ms" a reference to the MIT anthology or to some other work? Finally, the one other ID proponent whom I knew to be a contributor to Pennock's anthology (i.e., Paul Nelson) had been explicitly contacted about being a contributor. I hadn't.
Pennock's forwarded message was ambiguous at best. Indeed, it came as a complete surprise when I learned last week that my essays were included in his volume. My surprise was not unjustified. I therefore continue to maintain that Pennock never contacted me about the inclusion of my essays in his volume. Indeed, the very fact that Pennock's one piece of communication with me was a forwarded message should give one pause. Pennock, who casts himself as the defender of scientific correctness against ID reactionaries, has been remarkable for being able to uncover obscure work of mine (cf. his previous book with MIT Press titled _Tower of Babel_).
Pennock has been following the ID movement intently for at least ten years. I'm one of the most prominent people in the ID camp. My association with Baylor University and Discovery Institute is common knowledge. Pennock could easily have contacted me directly and informed me explicitly that I was to be a contributor to the volume. Instead, he sent a letter through an intermediary. There was a hint in that forwarded letter that one paper of mine might be appearing in some mansucript, which after the fact proved to be more than a hint. But I saw no reason to give it a second thought without further clarification from Pennock -- clarification he never offered. And what about the other paper, about which there was no hint?
So much for he-said-she-said, my-word-versus-your-word. Such clarifications are needed to clear the air. But they really sidestep the central issue. By not contacting me about the inclusion of my essays in his volume, Pennock merely added insult to injury. The central issue, however, is not the insult but the injury. The injury is that Pennock situated my essays in a book that from its inception cast me and my colleagues as villains and demonized our work.
I'm still a junior scholar, early in my academic career. I don't have tenure. When my contract runs out at Baylor University, I'll have to hustle for another academic job. Under normal circumstances, I would love to have articles of mine (popular or technical) appear with prestigious academic presses like MIT Press. But the inclusion of my essays in _Intelligent Design Creationists and Their Critics_ do not constitute normal circumstances.
To fair-minded individuals in the middle with no significant stake in the controversy over Darwinism and intelligent design, I ask: Would you like your work subjected to the same treatment that Pennock and MIT Press gave to my work and that of my colleagues? If you were a feminist scholar, would you want your work to appear in a book titled _Misguided Liberationist Women and Their Critics_? If you were a Muslim scholar, would you want your work to appear in a book titled _Fanatical Believers in Allah and Their Critics_? If you were a Marxist scholar, would you want your work to appear in a book titled _Marx's Theory of Surplus Value and Other Nonsense_?
"Creationism" is a dirty word in contemporary academic culture and Pennock knows it. What's more, as a trained philosopher, Pennock knows that intelligent design is not creationism. Intelligent design refers to intelligent processes operating in nature that arrange pre-existing matter into information-rich structures. Creation refers to an agent that gives being to the material world. One can have intelligent design without creation and creation without intelligent design.
The central issue is not that Pennock and MIT Press wanted to publish my essays but that they wanted to situate them in such a way as to discredit me, my work, and that of my colleagues. When I debated Darwinist Massimo Pigliucci at the New York Academy of Sciences last November, he stated: "Any debate between creationists and evolutionists is caused by the failure of scientists to explain how science works and should in no way be construed as a genuine academic dispute whose outcome is still reasonably doubtful." Pennock would agree, though he would add that the failure is also on the part of philosophers and not just scientists.
According to Pigliucci and Pennock, intelligent design proponents are not scholars to be engaged on the intellectual merits of their case. Rather, they are charlatans to be discredited, silenced, and stopped. That's the whole point of _Intelligent Design Creationists and Their Critics_. It's not a work of scholars trying to come to terms with their differences. It's not a work attempting to bring clarity to a "genuine academic dispute." It's a work of damage control to keep unwanted ideas at bay. It's what dogmatists do when outright censorship has failed.
--30--
File Date: 01.09.02
This is something of an urban legend. No one knows what capacity of our brain we use, I have seen estimates of 70% or more, with the remaining 30% being redundant but still usefull. The 10% figure is something somebody once through out, and it has stuck like fact. I'll let the rest of your post stand though.. I just like to stomp on these little "factiods" though..
Ok, take a field trip to your local museum and use your eyes and your mind when looking at the fossils of past life forms that are hundreds of millions of years old proving how life has progressed over time. If that doesn't work for you, go to your local library and check out some books on evolution. You might be pleasantly surprised as to how well documented evolution really is! If that doesn't work for you, check out Junior's links on evolution on FR.
Aside from the he said/he said aspect of this tiff, I'd like to hear from you published scholars out there: What is standard procedure when an editor is compiling a book of academic essays like this? I'm sure that, at the least, Pennock's publisher contacted Dembski's publisher, if only to find out where to send the royalty check? (Or do authors who got their essays included in a book normally get royalty checks?)
Who else should we ping who would know about this sort of thing?
Mr. Bach's conclusion is not based upon matter, it is based upon his father's teaching and his own life experience. His application of this understanding produced a life which I would certainly judge to be successful: Best selling author, pilot extraordinare and owner of all manner of exotic aircraft, cover of Time, married to a former movie star, successful children, etc. An early foundational flying adventure is the subject of his book.
I do not dispute your understanding of quantum mechanics and its relevance to present day science; but I will point out that science is always changing with the accumulation of information, and throughout history what was taken for absolute fact later proved to be illusionary. Which brings us to Richard Bach's best and favorite book, "Illusions". A small book but a great consciousness expanding experience.
How do you know that we use 10% of our brain capacity, especially since the mind cannot ultimately be reduced to matter?
It is impossible to know the limit of thought. But since the mind (an aspect of the spiritual soul) has the power to apprehend all things presented to it, it is in a sense all things, as Aristotle said.
My college degrees are in math; I have about 70 semester hours of math courses. You will find that one of the biggest contingents of anti-evolutionists consists of mathematicians who view evolution as I do for the same basic reasons.
The Wistar Symposia which you read about amounted to a confrontation between a number of the world's best mathematicians and a gaggle of evos. The mathematicians told the evos they were FUBAR and the evos to this day are in denial.
Bob Bass is one of America's best mathematicians. Bob is a former Rhodes scholar and a student of Aurel Wintner's and Soloman Lefschetz's. Bob is credited with a dynamical derivation of the familiar Titus/Bode law in celestial mechanics, amongst other things. Read some of what he has to say about evolution:
Why cannot we agree to call what Darwin documented mere "micro-evolution," and stipulate that literally NO ONE doubts the reality of micro-evolution? As Michael Denton proves in his book "Evolution, a Theory in Crisis," micro-evolution was a "Partial Discovery," Adaptive resistance by bacteria to various drugs and adaptation to different amounts of soot on trees by peppered moths (Kettlewell) does not suggest that bacteria can ever become anything other than bacteria nor that moths can ever become anything not recognizably moths.
What the debate is about is whether or not any known or even conceivable chance-mutation based plus natural-selection based mechanism can lead to a radical increase in (or radical transformation of) the information content of the genome of the species in question. (This can be quantified via rigorous mathematics, as in "Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution," published by the famed Wistar Institute of the U of PA after a bunch of the world's greatest mathematicians [including Ulam, the co-inventor of the H-bomb] debated a group of neo-Darwinian biologists.)
Further, the infinite unlikelihood of stochastic increase in the information content of a genome can be proved rigorously as a mathematical theorem in Information Theory (as published by Yockey, who wilfully avoids the theistic implications), which is almost the same as the Law of Increasing Entropy in Thermodynamics (and the hand-waving high-school-level efforts of neo-Darwinian efforts to discredit this creatonist argument are truly pathetic).
The great palaeontologist Schindewolf let the cat out of the bag once and for all when in hiis monumental "Grundfragen der Paleontologie" he demonstrated painstakingly that the Fossil Record, objectively viewed (without preconceptions) is _precisely the opposite_ of what one would expect if all living creatures had a common ancestry.
After this, honest palaeontologists had no choice but to admit what Gould & Eldridge confessed in their Punctuated Equilibrium model in the early 1970s: the fossil record, far from looking like a bush with branches joining everything and proceeding backwards in time to a central trunk, looks like a bunch of unrelated parallel straight lines! That is, genera appear abruptly, persist _almost_ unchanged over allegedly (uniformitarian-clocked) "vast" periods of time, and then suddenly become extinct. [They would still be telling us with straight faces that the Coelecanth became extinct "65 million years ago" if living specimens had not been found recently, off of Madagascar, by the dozens.]
G&E faked the punk-eek diagram to look something like a bush by postulating that there are hidden horizontal jumps [shown in dotted lines] which connect the vertical straight lines! In other words, the creature goes off stage to some unseen anteroom where a Goldschmidt-Schindewolf ("hopeful monster") macro-mutation takes place. (G&S admitted that an intellectually honest student of the fossil record can only postulate that "one day a reptile egg cracked open and a bird walked out.") But the number of _simultaneous_ point-codon misreplications (or other random accidents to points of the genome) which would have to take place in order to introduce a step toward a new organ or a new body plan, while at the same time providing the hopeful-monster with a _differential reproductive advantage_ (the essence of stochastic neo-Darwinism) is so unlikely that it is a better hypothesis (if one shaves regularly with Occam's Razor) to postulate a sort of "miracle" (e.g. Divine Intervention or else deliberate genetic engineering by intelligent Space Aliens) than to hope that stochastic neo-Darwinism can cut it [in view of the now plainly apparent existence in Molecular Biology of "irreducible complexity" as documented in their books by Denton, Behe, ReMine and others].
I had been studying the evidence from the historical chronometer provided by Amino Acid Racemization, according to which the entire alleged "geological column's" life-forms-history cannot be longer than 100,000 years, when I chanced upon the Gould-Eldridge paper right after they published the "punk-eek" doctrine, and since I saw that the vertical lines would have to be collapsed from "millions" of years to a much shorter time-scale, I decided that their theory was "Collapsed Equilibrium" and laughed out loud.
Many intellectually honest students of the history of life have exclaimed, "if you are going to postulate Macro-Mutations you might as well go back to Special Creation and have done with it!"
Of course, vitalists like Cambridge biochemist Rupert Sheldrake can claim that the collective unconscious of the genus in question can prompt a macro-mutation, which Ev Cochrane's favorite neo-Lamarkians would call "Lamarkian evolution," but once you allow invisible spiritual forces (such as Sheldrake's _resonances_ in "biomorphic fields" [pretty much equivalent to E.H. Walker's thesis that consciousness is "real but non-physical" and constitutes the mysterious "hidden variables" in quantum mechanics, which via the resolution of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox via Bell's Inequalities has "proved" the "NON-LOCALITY OF REALITY[!]"]) then you have admitted the existence of both Satan and the Holy Spirit! In fact, if you take 3 accepted propositions of 3 great psychiatrists (Freud, Jung, Rhine), namely that the _unconscious_ mind has an "id" which is in tension between "eros" and "thanatos," then you can point out that "Holy Spirit" = "telepathic collective unconscious eros" and "Satan" = "telepathic collective unconscious thanatos," but the National Academy of Science will then blow the whistle and certify to the Supreme Court that you are an "unscientific" & contemptible "fundamentalist" who should not be allowed to speak, much less deserve equal time to expose to the children of the taxpayers that the government is brainwashing them with an explicitly atheistic doctrine [see the NAS position paper submitted to the Supreme Court during the "Scopes II" trial's appeal] and thus using tax dollars to create an Established Religion in violation of our Constitution.
This is why the rulers of publicly permitted speech will not admit Rhine into the same pantheon with Freud & Jung, and why the "Skeptical Inquirer" crowd so desperately wants to disparage Walker, and why "Nature" pronounced Sheldrake's book "fit for burning." Once the biologists can be forced to admit what Berkeley nuclear physicist Stapp calls "the greatest discovery of modern science" (EPR non-locality of reality), or what Einstein disparaged as 'spooky instantaneous action-at-a-distance,' then it is all over for the Reductionist-Materialists and the most perceptive of them will perceive what Sheldrake has already noted, namely that the proposition "if two particles ever interact then they are forever linked [instantaneously] through space & time" leads one via impeccable Aristotelion syllogisms to the realization that it is _unavoidable_ to admit the validity of and to endorse the Catholic doctrine of the "Real Presence" in the Sacrament of the Mass [visualize a chain of Bishops with each having his hand on the shoulder of his predecessor in an unbroken chain of Apostolic Succession back to Jesus].
I spoke yesterday with a Catholic Priest who used to be a District Attorney and knows how to present a case to a jury, and he told me that "nuclear physicists who work daily with sub-atomic 'transubstantation' [transmutation] have no difficulty with the Real Presence, it is the ignorant biologists whose world-view is frozen into a 19th-century view of billiard-ball mechanics, who insist that only Reductionist Materialism is 'scientific'."
In the 1930's, Richard Goldschmidt, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Insititute for Genetics, was considered a world-class expert, but Hitler pasted on the wall a genealogical chart showing that Goldschmidt's ancestry included many famous medieval Rabbis, and so he was chased out of Germany. His book "The Material Basis of Evolution" (Yale U Press) opens with a list of challenges to neo-Darwinism which, without postulation of macro-mutations, Goldschmidt prophesies cannot and never will be answered. His list includes the hollow tooth of a snake, and the correlated poison glands. Where is the differental reproductive advantage in a hollow tooth absent poison? How will the poison be injected absent a hollow tooth?
Most of you are too young to remember the Luftwaffe's Me-163B rocket-plane which literally flew circles around Allied bombers toward the end of the War, but its powerful liquid fuels consisted of a hypergolic [self-igniting] combination of Hydrogen Peroxide (the oxidant) and Hydrazine (the fuel). Now the Bombardier Beetle (as presented in detail in both secular & creationist literature) happens to have two parallel tanks toward its rear, together with a Combustion Chamber into which the H2O2 & carbonate are inserted and produce a fiery steam-blast that incapacitates the predatory frog's tongue for several hours. This miracle of hypergolic biochemistry actually includes two additional miraculous enzymes, one of which renders the H2O2 non-explosive until it is injected into the Combustion Chamber, and the other of which reactivates the H2O2 and allows it to explosively oxidize the fuel _after_ they have both been injected into the beetle's rear-directed Combustion Chamber (complete with Venturi-shaped Exhaust Nozzle). To believe in the intellectually bankrupt dogmas of the Church of Neo-Darwinism, one has to believe that each of these 5 miraculous elements of the beetle's rocket-flame defense system came into existence as a random accident of point-mutation of a SINGLE codon [i.e. one letter of a 4-letter alphabet whose words & sentences define the Genetic Code] which just happened to have a _differential-reproductive advantage_(!) and so spread throughout the entire population's genome _separately_, just waiting for the day when all 5 elements would be operably in place (_and_ functionally wired to its nervous system in order to be switched on when needed) so that Mr. Beetle can suddenly escape death by singeing Mr. Frog for the first time!
Honestly, is it not more plausible to admit that YHWH said "let there be Bombardier Beetles"?
Bob Bass
This would imply you are good at math, no?
Quote:"Evoloution is the scientific evidence of God's handiwork!"
I believe you're wrong.
For picky people, I'd likely need to qualify that. You won't (necessarily) be better off financially and your love life won't necessarily be in better shape, but you will be better off in terms of not being guilty of believing in flagrantly stupid things.
I don't know, I'm not a biologist. Just using reason, however, it would seem logical that an "information-rich structure" would have evolved from an "information-poor structure". In other words, in an infinite process of change, each iteration of a particular life form would contribute to the informational progress of the next iteration of that life form, appropriate to the developing environment.
I'd like to know precisely so I know who to ridicule for which whopper of a claim.
It is not his feelings that I have cited. It is his experience, his life accomplishment and his ideas which are the focus.
I'd like to know precisely so I know who to ridicule for which whopper of a claim.
As I see it, God put people like yourself on this planet to shine shoes and do menial chores for people like Bob Bass. I suspect most people reading your attempts at thought would agree.
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