Synthese

Evolution activist and marine biologist Wesley Elsberry hypocritically charges mathematician and ID advocate Granville Sewell with “self-plagiarism” and “deliberate gaming of the [academic publication] system.” What’s hypocritical about the charge? Well, recently in the journal Synthese, Elsberry himself self-plagiarized his own prior work. I don’t care if Wesley Elsberry “plagiarizes” himself, if that’s even the right the word for reworking or repurposing your own writing for different audiences. But as I argued earlier here, it is hypocritical for Elsberry to attack Sewell for doing exactly the same thing that Elsberry himself has done. Now, in his own defense, Elsberry has replied to me. In the context of the Darwin debate, when someone closes a rebuttal by calling your arguments “an Read More ›

We’ve discussed how articles critiquing intelligent design (ID) in the latest issue of Synthese could not rebut the theory without blatantly misrepresenting what ID says. There are a couple of papers in the issue, however, that discuss scientific matters. In fact, I’d like to start on a positive note and say that the one article in this issue which I found to be highly civil in tone and thoughtful was Bruce Weber’s. He provides a thorough and educational history of arguments involving design and teleology, and he attempts to distinguish between “design” and “teleology” as follows: Although both teleology and design are explanans of the explananda of natural phenomena that exhibit organized, functional complexity, they can be distinguished in the Read More ›

The most recent issue of Synthese contains a variety of condescending articles against intelligent design (ID). But a few articles do attempt to make actual critiques of ID. The problem is that they don’t accurately represent the actual arguments of ID proponents. Can’t these top-rate philosophers rebut ID without misrepresenting the arguments? The article by Niall Shanks and Keith Green repeatedly misrepresent intelligent design as appealing to “divine agency.” It’s all based on a commonly used misquote of Bill Dembski’s that many ID critics, especially Barbara Forrest, love to use. Speaking of Barbara Forrest, she has a condescendingly titled paper in the issue called, “The non-epistemology of intelligent design: its implications for public policy.” From the very first sentence, her Read More ›

As I wrote about recently, in mid-2010 the philosophy journal Synthese published an excellent critique of neo-Darwinian evolution and self-organization by Richard Johns. Johns’ article did not argue for intelligent design (ID), but it was critical of the sacred cow of biology. It seems that somebody may have asked the Synthese to offer penance that sin: The latest issue of Synthese is devoted to covering intelligent design, but they strangely they published not a single article by a proponent of intelligent design. Instead they published an issue where many (though not all) of the articles are full of demeaning and condescending sneers against ID, as well as many outright misrepresentations of ID. It feels like it was scripted by the Read More ›