Re: [asa] Doug Groothuis v. William Dembski

Hi Rich,

"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."

But you are conflating ID with the DI. Just because the letters can be reversed is no reason to treat them as the same thing. For example, it is not easy to argue against my ID positions. :)

Mike

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Rich Blinne
  To: PvM PvM ; Randy Isaac
  Cc: asa
  Sent: Saturday, January 03, 2009 12:22 PM
  Subject: 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 Mon Jan 5 14:14:01 2009