Toto

So I went to the CSICOP conference and heard the debate on intelligent design between Dembski, backed up by Paul Nelson, for the ID side, and Kenneth Miller and Wesley Elsberry for the evolution side. I had worried beforehand that I had not boned up on Dembski's arcane mathematical proofs, but that turned out to be irrelevant, since Demski made no (that's none, zip, nada) statements of any substance about any aspect of ID.

Massimo Pigliucci gave a brief, witty history of creationism and then just acted as moderator.

Elsberry was very good on substance, although not an accomplished public speaker. The theme of the conference was "Skepticism: the next 25 years", so he started out with scientific problems for the next 25 years - global warming, overpopulation, etc., and asked why we were talking about Intelligent Design. He said it had to do with science education, and science education was the key to solving the real problems. He went through the politics of the Wedge document, and said that the ID'ers had not developed any scientific credibility before they started their political push.

Paul Nelson is a University of Chicago graduate in philosophy (?) and a YEC creationist (Elsberry and Miller forced him to admit this, although he kept saying that YEC was irrelevant to design, and they were just trying to put him in a bad light.) He spent his opening talk trying to show that ID was a testable proposition, but never came up with any evidence in support of it.

Dembski's opening speech was just a taunt. He took the theme of the conference and asked how skeptics were going to deal with the success of ID in the next 25 years, since it was already politically successful and the polls showed most Americans supported teaching it. He said that ID was the insurgent force against the Darwinian establishment, and since young people like to side with the insurgents, ID would become very popular with young people. He tried to use skepticism against evolution - he said he had offered Michael Shermer to be the resident skeptic about evolution for the Skeptics Society, (but somehow Shermer never got back to him.) He made a few other comments in the same nose-thumbing vein, and was booed several times by the audience.

Kenneth Brown was very impressive as a speaker and a scientist. He said that he had analyzed the Krebs cycle. By Dembski's standards, the Krebs cycle was irreducibly complex, and should be proof of ID - except that there was a lot of literature showing in detail exactly how the Krebs cycle had evolved.

In the give and take period after the initial statements, Dembski and Nelson challenged Miller about the Krebs cycle - they said they had searched the literature, and there was one "missing enzyme" in the description of the evolution of the cycle. Miller took a few minutes to search through the documents on his computer and came back and said 1) the enzyme wasn't missing 2) even if it were, Dembski's own statistics showed that a single enzyme is not so complex that it could not have developed by chance. (He had those figures at his finger tips - the number of atoms in the enzyme and the probability of that protein developing by random chance.) That was the only substantive exchange on the evidence for ID, and it left the ID side flat on its face.

Most of the discussion was about politics. Dembski and Nelson whined a lot about the Darwinian establishment discriminating against ID work. Miller and Elsberry made a big deal about a statement from one ID'er that the movement had been hijacked by people with a political agenda before it was ready for prime time, which allowed Dembski to whine even more about his Center at Baylor being shut down, which is where he was going to do all the research to prove ID.

Miller made a point of mentioning that he is a Catholic, and a methodological naturalist but not a philosophical naturalist.

You can buy a video of the debate for $20 plus $5 shipping and handling from CSICOP next week.

RufusAtticus

ZEIG HAIL!

beoba

I'm interested, but thats kinda.. pricey. VHS or DVD or do you know?

hezekiah jones

That is just so pathetic. Thanks for the report, Toto.

tgamble

I wonder if majority rules matters to these people on such issues as, oh let's say, abortion?

Toto

VHS. I expected them to produce an audio tape - perhaps there will be one.

lpetrich

Or to astrology or ESP or UFO's or a whole lot of other things they undoubtedly consider crackpottery.

lpetrich

However, I think that the ID guys are likely to react like critics of Martin Gardner's classic Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, who would indignantly object to one chapter and one chapter only of that book, while thinking the rest of it excellent.

I wonder if the ID guys think that astronomers ought to investigate the mechanisms behind astrological predictions. Or that biomedical researchers ought to investigate exorcism of demons. Or...

beoba

This is what I've been thinking lately:

ID:biology::astrology:astronomy

hezekiah jones

Dembski has posted a .pdf file of the talk he delivered:

<a href="http://www.iscid.org/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=10;t=000025" target="_blank">www.iscidiocy.org</a>

Skeptics are now required to "unseat" intelligent design.