Science and Culture Today | Page 1288 | Discovering Design in Nature

[Note: For a more comprehensive defense of Ben Stein’s documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, please see: NCSE Exposed at NCSEExposed.org] Over at alivingdog.com, blogger Gord Wilson has just posted a lengthy interview with the lead writer of Expelled, Kevin Miller. The interview is enlightening on several levels, and covers a wide range of topics from media suppression, to the lawsuits against the film, to Richard Dawkins appearance. Well worth reading. G: I would say what his argument doesn’t explain is Richard Dawkins. It doesn’t explain why he’s so passionate, why he’s so smart, why he writes so well. And if he’s right, the game’s over.K: Why does it matter to him? I came to that question over and over. Why Read More ›

Dr. Steven Novella has post entitled “More Neuroscience Denial,” and of course it’s about me.

Dr. Michael Egnor has written two more posts reiterating his neuroscience denial over at the Discovery institute. This reinforces the impression that neuroscience denial is the “new creationism” – the new battleground against materialism as a basis for modern science.

Earlier this month, the peer-reviewed science journal PloS Genetics published its latest earth-shaking contribution to the field of genetics: a personal interview with none other than Judge John Jones of Kitzmiller v. Dover fame. The interview was conducted by Jane Gitschier of the Institute for Human Genetics at the University of California San Francisco, who gushes over the Judge like a school-girl with a crush on her teacher. The non-scientist might be forgiven for thinking that a journal bearing a name like PLoS Genetics would restrict its articles to, well, genetics… or at least, to biology… or at the very least, to science. Not to worry! If the article extols Judge Jones, a lack of scientific content apparently is no Read More ›

Today marks the third anniversary of Judge John Jones’ attempt to ban science classroom discussions of intelligent design in the Kitzmiller v. Dover case. In the three years since Jones’ decision was announced, it has not worn well. Judge Jones’ supposedly devastating critique of intelligent design turned out to be cut and pasted (factual errors and all) from a document written by lawyers working with the ACLU. Law professors (including some who oppose intelligent design) have skewered Jones’ embarrassing judicial opinion as poorly argued and unpersuasive. And many of the alleged factual claims on which Judge Jones based his opinion have been refuted. In the meantime, public interest in intelligent design has continued to grow, as has support for academic Read More ›

Mike Dunford and I have disagreed several times over the past couple of years about issues in the ID-Darwinism debate. Mr. Dunford was very upset recently that I had made a minor error in quoting him in a recent blog post. Of course, he offered no answer to my scientific critique of his earlier post, and one has the suspicion that his pique may be related to his difficulty in formulating a credible scientific answer.

He fired off an e-mail to the Discovery Institute. Here’s his closing paragraph:

…I would not dream of taking a position on whether or not you should continue to provide a platform for someone who is apparently incapable of meeting the basic standards of academic discourse, but I would like to see a public retraction and apology appear on your site. [emphasis mine]

I’m the “someone” he’s referring to. I have of course corrected the error, and have set out to review Mr. Dunford’s “basic standards of academic discourse.”

Here are examples of Mr. Dunford’s own “standards of academic discourse,” culled from his blog posts from the last couple of years. Keep in mind that Mr. Dunford is a trained scientist:

From Mr. Dunford’s post on 12/9/08:

Dr. Michael Egnor: Neurosurgeon, Stony Brook Faculty, and all around Dishonest Twit…based on the level of intellectual integrity that he just demonstrated, he’s not someone I would trust to train a dog, much less a doctor. ….I’m simply going to highlight the most egregious case of flat-out, nose-growing, pants-on-fire lying…I don’t know if Dr. Egnor’s dishonesty is substantial enough that I would have gotten him expelled from school, but I do know that any student I caught pulling a stunt like that would flunk.

When I was a resident in neurosurgery I had a professor who had the annoying habit of claiming credit for quite a few advances in neurosurgery to which, by the record, he had made no contribution. He would frequently confide to me, in the operating room, “Mike, ya know that operation that we just did. I really developed it, back in the 50’s.” Invariably, the actual record of the development of the operation had nothing to do with my narcissistic professor.

Claiming credit for advances that to the uninitiated seems credible is common in medicine and science. Darwinists have an annoying habit of attributing all sorts of advances in medicine and biology to Darwin’s theory. Darwinists have asserted that genetics, molecular genetics, taxonomy, microbiology, population genetics, and many other fields of medicine and biology would have been impossible had it not been for Darwin’s insight (‘survivors survive’). Even a cursory look at many of these fields (e.g. molecular genetics) reveals that Darwinism obviously had nothing to do them; the elucidation of the structure and function of DNA didn’t have a damn thing to do with ‘natural selection’ (except that Watson and Crick practiced ‘survival of the fittest’ in their competition with Linus Pauling and their treatment of Rosalind Franklin). The discovery of the genetic code had everything to do with biochemistry, biophysics, and molecular biology. Nineteenth century fairy tales about the origin of species may have provided some comic relief. It had nothing to do with the science.

In a recent post I observed that Darwinism, while essential to eugenics, contributes nothing of value to medicine.

Darwinist blogger Elf M. Sternberg took the bait. Elf started with the usual sneers, calling me a “creationist,” accusing me of of “rejecting the germ theory of disease” and of attributing disease to “demonic influences,” and then he points out my “absolutely insane ‘graf'”from my essay:
I had written:

Fairy tales about the origin of illnesses and adaptations are worthless to medicine. The materialistic philosophical basis for Darwinism and the inference that humans evolved by natural selection have been catastrophic to medicine. Any genuine insight claimed by Darwinists, such as the dynamics of antibiotic resistance or of heterozygote advantage in such diseases as sickle cell anemia and malaria, is really gained by the relevant basic sciences.

Elf sees my fatal stumble. He replies:

There’s a special podcast at ID the Future today: https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/intelligentdesign/episodes/2008-12-17T09_37_30-08_00 This episode of ID the Future tells the story of Jesse Kilgore, a college student whose loss of faith and subsequent suicide has been linked to his biology class and Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. After his professor challenged him to read the anti-theistic book and rule out the possibility of God’s existence in light of the evidence for evolution, Jesse experienced a crisis of faith. Now his father is arguing for academic freedom for intelligent design and critiques of Darwin’s theory. Listen in as he and others explain how Jesse was affected by reading this book. The tragedy of Jesse Kilgore’s death affects all of us. Our thoughts and Read More ›

Steven Novella recently replied to my post in which I pointed out six properties of the mind that were not properties of matter. Strict materialistic theories of the mind restrict themselves to purely materialistic explanations. The difficulty is that the salient properties of the mind — intentionality, qualia, continuity of self through time, restricted access of thoughts, incorrigibility of mental states, and free will — are not known to be properties of matter, including brain matter. The important things that characterize the mind are not material. How then can the mind be explained completely by materialism?

I’ll review the first property (intentionality) here, and the other five in subsequent posts. I’ll first give my original observation about it, then Dr. Novella’s reply, then my reply to Dr. Novella.
My original observation:

Intentionality is the “aboutness” or meaning of a mental state, the ability of a mental state to refer to something outside of itself. Ink on paper has no meaning unless it is conferred by a mind, which wrote it or read it. Matter may have intentionality only secondarily (“derived intentionality”). The problem of intentionality is believed by many philosophers of the mind to be the most serious challenge to materialism. “Meaning” is imparted to matter by a mind; matter isn’t the source of meaning. Therefore matter (brain tissue) can’t be the entire cause of the mind.

Dr. Novella’s reply:

A news article at ScienceCentric.com reports that single-celled protists have left tracks and grooves in the ocean-bottom that resemble fossil grooves or “trail” fossils that are found in some pre-Cambrian strata. Darwinists have asserted that such pre-Cambrian track or trail fossils must have been produced by complex, multicellular, worm-like animals, thus implying that the Cambrian explosion was not really as explosive as the fossil record makes it appear. Actual fossils of the alleged pre-Cambrian worms that supposedly made the trails are yet to be found, but Darwinists have claimed that the track fossils are smoking gun evidence that they existed. The Darwinists’ story is challenged by this new find: if tracks can be produced by single-celled protists, then pre-Cambrian track Read More ›

In his recent post on Pharyngula, P.Z. Myers comments on the “breakthrough” in our understanding of human evolution that has emerged from an analysis of the genes in humans and apes that code for salivary amylase, an enzyme in spit that helps digest carbohydrates. For unfathomable reasons, this research, led by Nathaniel Dominy and George Perry, has captured quite a bit of attention in the scientific community and even in the press.

Concurrent with publication of their paper in Nature Genetics last year, Dominy and colleagues put out a press release entitled: “Extra gene copies were enough to make early humans’ mouths water.” Dominy bizarrely credits mutations in salivary amylase with the evolution of the human brain: