Re: [asa] Doug Groothuis v. William Dembski

On Jan 2, 2009, at 11:04 PM, PvM wrote:

> If you like Wesley Elsberry on EF, you must love how Kenneth Miller
> pwns Casey Luskin's arguments regarding Behe, IC and the
> bloodclotting cascade in a guest posting at Carl Zimmer's Loom
>
> http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2009/01/02/smoke-and-mirrors-whales-and-lampreys-a-guest-post-by-ken-miller/
>
> Well worth reading

Pym, you are misinterpreting my motives and I believe I can say the
motives of most of our membership. Yes, ID really irritates me but I
take no pleasure in watching Ken Miller shooting fish in a barrel.
What's particularly distressing is both the arguments over EF and IC
are so very, very old and yet ID has remained static. The arguments
over the EF were made well over five years ago. The argument over the
blood clotting cascade was made by Russell Doolittle in 1997. Ken
Miller adds the case of the blood clotting of the lamprey but that
came from last Summer.

There are two things that have changed between the publishing of the
Design Inference and Darwin's Black Box and now:

1. Many of the details of the alleged "gaps" have been filled. All of
the research have been done by ID's opponents and even three years
after Dover where Behe was forced to admit under oath that ID had no
research program, ID still has no research program. For example:
     a. most of the homologies of bacterial flagella have been
identified
     b. the identification of the fusion of the chimpanzee chromosome
into our chromosome 2
     c. details of the evolution of the blood clotting cascade has
been found as was documented in Miller's blog post
     d. the direct observation of evolution such as in Richard
Lenski's long term evolution experiment (LTEE) of E Coli
     e. The genetic sequencing of many species including extinct
species, e.g. Neanderthals. From this we are beginning to see the
evolutionary history through comparative genomics.

2. The Intelligent Design Movement has backpedalled:
     a. Dembski admits that the EF is bogus
     b. Behe admits both common descent and natural selection
     c. Luskin admits that only (an ever-shrinking) part of the blood
clotting cascade is IC. The set of what is considered IC is rapidly
approaching the null set. Even though Pandas claims all of the blood
clotting cascade is IC this should be OK because Luskin (wrongly)
claims that DBB doesn't do this. Yet, both were written by Behe so at
best Behe is suffering from educational negligence.

Pretty much everybody on this list are bored to tears as this has been
repeated here over and over and over. But you wouldn't know any of
this if you were an evangelical layman. Behe visited Colorado State
when Expelled was in theatres. He just rehashed DBB and the
evangelical lay people in the audience ate it up. They have no clue
how moribund ID is. I am not happy that it is so easy, objectively
speaking, to argue against ID. Subjectively, it's a different story as
the ID folk who haven't been successful with scientific research have
been successful in poisoning the well. I am sad over the scam
perpetrated on my brothers and sisters and angry over those who
perpetrate it.

Rich Blinne
Member ASA

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Received on Sat Jan 3 12:22:51 2009