Discovery Institute

[golob]

Full bias disclosure right at the top: I am a liberal, agnostic, jewish, pro-homo, pro-union, secularist human embryonic stem cell researcher. This is my fifth year in a combined MD/PhD program at UW. Eventually, it is my goal to become a professor with really bad hair. Before this, I worked for four years in labs at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.

If you don't know about the Discovery Institute (http://www.discovery.org), you should. The short short story: The Discovery Institute is a pro-creationist ("Intelligent Design") thinktank heavily supported by ultra-right wing funds, cheerfully located at Union and 4th downtown. They dish out the same rewarmed, widely discredited creationist bullshit that the right wing christians have tried to cram into schoolchildren for decades now. They've been all too successful as of late.

The New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/22/national/22design.html) has had series of articles on it the past few days.

So far as I can tell, the Discovery Institute is based in Seattle to give is some sort of "fair and balanced" street cred. I.e. "If they're creationists based in Seattle, that den of godless sodomy and liberalism, they must be onto something." As a *real* life scientist in Seattle, (as opposed to a philosopher playing life scientist (http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=11&isFellow=true) ) this just pisses me off.

As a community well respected for its rationality, scientific prowess and intelligence, we have responsibility to not have drivel such as this distributed in our name. Consider this a call to arms.

With some of my other graduate student friends, we're starting a homegrown response to the Discovery Institute. Any help would be appreciated, but in particular:
* Illustrators and Graphic artists.
* Web site administrators (who might be willing to donate hosting...)

I'll be glad to do my best here in these forums to answer any questions about evolution, creationism and what this fight is all about.

- Jonathan Golob

[Sweet Jane]

I know a graphic designer who is pretty pissed at the Discovery Institute. He might be interested. How to contact?

[golob]

Contact information:

jgolob-com@comcast.net

[kjmiller]

the P-I recently ran a column from this idiot at the discovery institute. i replied both with an editorial of my own and a brief letter. The bastards didn't even contact me.
this was my letter to the editor,
----------------------------
Dear Seattle PI Editor,
I am submitting this letter in response to Tuesday's article by John
West titled "Intelligent design is sorely misunderstood," it is
exactly 200 words in length.

link to your article:

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/235729_idesign09.html

My name is Kai J. Miller, and I am a graduate student in Physics and
Medicine at the University of Washington.

If reply letters have titles, I would like to title mine
"Intelligent design not so intelligent"
---------------------------------------------------------
A recent column by John West, a politics professor at a Christian
University, illustrated a large problem with intelligent design (ID):
Its proponents often do not understand what constitutes scientific
discourse, yet boldly disperse claims about science. West claims that
ID is based upon scientific, nonreligious, precepts. ID has not
produced any sound hypothesis to be tested by empirical evidence, so
the empirical evidence he speaks of is nonexistent. Furthermore, his
appeal to the 1% of scientists who believe in design is, literally, a
dark age type of argument. West claims ID proponents are not
crusading to infiltrate public schools, but every push for teaching ID
is, by definition, led by ID proponents. If West doesn't understand
basic scientific reason, how can he purport to educate the public
about science?
People appeal to authorities, religious or otherwise, which are
unobservable to others, and fundamentally unknowable. This is the
antithesis of scientific reason. I propose that intelligent design is
such an appeal. It is superstition which its proponents, like
Professor West, try to pass off as a replacement for or addendum to
one of the most sound tenets of human understanding, evolution.
-----------------------------------

[kjmiller]

Intelligent design is not so intelligent
by Kai J. Miller
(kjmiller@gmail.com)

In response to John G. West's column "Intelligent design is sorely misunderstood."

Professor West is sorely misguided and fundamentally unscientific throughout his guest column about intelligent design. To begin with, he does not disclose his own bias at the outset of the article: He is a professor of Political Science (not Natural Science) at a Christian University. This suggests that he starts from a biased position - he has a personal stake in the outcome of the argument he is making. This is okay, as internal bias one way or another is more or less universal, but it should be qualified at the outset of the discussion.

He then goes on to make several claims, among which are three supposed misunderstandings about intelligent design. A fourth claim, although it is not listed as such, is made at the end of his article.

The first of these claims is that intelligent design is based upon scientific, rather than religious, faith-based precepts. He supports this with two arguments: that it is based upon empirical evidence and that it is supported by "a number of scientists." Both of these arguments are themselves scientifically unsound. The first because he discusses results (i.e. "empirical evidence") that he does not present. I myself have never heard a single piece of evidence, empirical or otherwise, for intelligent design, so to presuppose it without presenting at least one instance of it is dubious. The second argument, that "a number of scientists" support it, is an appeal to authority argument. This is a classic blunder in any discourse, scientific or otherwise. All kinds of people, however accomplished, believe all kinds of things. That does not make them valid. Opinion does not determine reality, reality determines itself.

His second claim is that proponents of intelligent design theory are not "crusading to have it required in public schools" and that they are, in reality, doing the opposite. Every single person who is trying to have intelligent design required in public schools is, by definition, a proponent of intelligent design. This means that some proponents are in fact crusading to have it in public schools. The concepts of sets and subsets is one of the earliest things we learn, in preschool, by performing legitimate scientific experiment. Say we have a square red block and a circular red block, and a round hole that the circular block fits through and the square one doesn't. We can't say that red blocks won't fit through the round hole. This article has missed this basic idea, and when someone misses this, as an adult, perhaps he should not be educating us about what is science and what is not science.

Professor West's third stated claim is that the efforts to mandate teaching of intelligent design are not widespread. This claim is fundamentally misleading because it takes advantage of context in two ways. The first is relative rather than absolute use of the word 'mandate.' For example, after winning the 2004 election by 2%, President Bush said that he had been given a 'mandate' to enact certain policies. While Bush is no cunning linguist, his use of the relative sense of the word in that context was conventionally acceptable. In this context, overturning mandated (absolute sense) teaching of darwinian evolution is tantamount to mandating (relative sense) the teaching of intelligent design. The second is that he claims this practice is not widespread. He mentions six such states in this article, the smallest of which has 1.7 million people, the largest of which has 11.2 million people. For the individuals in these states, the effect is certainly widespread, as they would have to move to a different state to avoid it. 'Widespread,' like 'mandate,' is ill-defined as used in this article, because it is completely context specific.

Professor West then makes a fourth claim, that proponents of evolution within the scientific community are stifling fair and open discourse about intelligent design. Intelligent design has not (to the best of my knowledge) produced anything resembling a testable hypothesis. In its present form (again, to the best of my knowledge), I don't believe that intelligent design can or will produce such a hypothesis, and as such it fundamentally does not qualify as a scientific undertaking. Professor West has written an article about how his belief's are misunderstood and really scientific, but the article itself is completely unscientific.

Professor West states in his article that he believes intelligent design's validity should be decided through fair and open debate. I would like to challenge him or anyone he can produce to such a debate in any open, neutral forum.

Perhaps, in light of such a challenge, it is only fair that I describe my own perspective. I am a graduate student in Physics and Medicine at the University of Washington. As such, assert that evolution takes place in the form of selection of specific genetic sequences by virtue of the specific abilities and sensitivities these sequences bestow upon an organism. In order for the things that I study and the work that I do to make any sense, I must assume that they rely on principles which are themselves reproducible and dispassionate. If they are due to the will of something that I cannot measure, but acts according to its own whim, then both the scope of my profession and my ability to carry out this profession is somewhat diminished. That is my bias.

As a scientist, I must assume some precepts, but these are well defined, reproducible, and subject to both scrutiny and revision. If there were some intelligent designer, my job would be to model its internal state as I attempt to model the state of reality as we know it. I would, in fact, have come to the assertion that such a designer were either unintelligent or uncreative, designing reality in statistically reproducible ways, because this is how the measurements we make about the world behave. Among the designs of such a designer would be a mechanism we would measure that is exactly like darwinian evolution, where genetic traits are selected by observable (not divine) environmental pressure. We would observe that such traits (as we do), and the abilities they engender, are passed on to offspring and themselves subject to mutation and further selection. We would make these observations because in every experiment we can perform from viral adaptation and mutagenesis to the color of the butterflies that live in our cities to the level of Miniature Schnauzers that live in our homes, heritable selection occurs. Put succinctly, the idea of intelligent design is at best useless, and at worst a politically motivation fabrication.

As an individual in society, I observe that often people appeal to authorities, religious or otherwise, which are unobservable and often unknowable. Based upon such appeal, they undertake many actions which affect other people. Such actions are sometimes harmful, and often exacted upon people who do not appeal to the same such unobservable authority. This can be harmful and I propose that intelligent design is of this nature, and, as such, is fundamentally harmful. It is superstition which its proponents, like Professor West, try to pass off as a replacement for or addendum to one of the most sound tenets in human understanding, evolution. The more that the youth of our nation grow up learning this, the more they will grow up to work for people educated elsewhere.

And to reiterate my previous comment: I would gladly meet Professor West or anyone else he can produce, to debate this.

[kjmiller]

simply awesome:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Monster

[kjmiller]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_Pink_Unicorn

[thor]

It seems counterintuitive to be promoting work widely known as anti-science. I read the Times story. The Gates Foundation is helping to pay Bruce Chapman's salary and more. All Chapman seems to do is PR promoting ID. I realize the Gates money is supposed to be for transportation - which could certainly use the help, but how is anyone supposed to figure out when Chapman is doing anything but making himself a poster boy for this oddball ID movement to insert unscientific constructs of God into the way we teach biology in public schools. What a waste.