Darwinism’s great appeal: Empowering the ignorant

I read a lot about the conflict between science and pseudoscience, which is to say, I read a great deal about the conflict between biology and so-called “intelligent design”. Intelligent Design The Future is a blog where many of the Discovery Institute “luminaries” post their well thought out criticisms of evolutionary thought.

Or so they seem to think.

No less a celebrity than William Dembski apparently was scanning the reviews of Jonathan Wells’ book Icons of Evolution and had this to say about the author of an unfavorable review:

Isn’t Darwinism wonderful? It empowers someone who has not yet earned a bachelor’s degree to call himself a “medical researcher” and tell Jonathan Wells — with a Ph.D. in biology and twenty years of experience in medical laboratories — that he has “little or no understanding of the subject matter.”

Of course, Dembski doesn’t actually address any of the criticisms actually raised by Peters, notably:

I am pleased to say though that this work is rejected by virtually all of the scientific community. There is a reason for that. If you go to http://www.ncseweb.org/icons/ you can see the full response to this poorly researched work. And it seems like the Discovery Reviewer below has given this book high praise. Well, it only takes a simple google search to see that the Discovery Institute are a group of ideologues who pushed for intelligent design in the infamous Dover School District case in PA.

Much of what Wells says about evolution is wrong. It doesn’t take a PhD to know that.

[tags]Intelligent Design,Pseudoscience[/tags]

2 thoughts on “Darwinism’s great appeal: Empowering the ignorant”

  1. David

    Hi,

    Question for you Sir…
    If you were to detect a signal from outer space that showed signs of intelligence (that would lead us to assume there was an alien intelligence sending said message), how “simple” could that message be for us to really believe it is real?
    Curious for your perspective…

    Best, David

    Editor’s note: Interesting hypothetical. Of course, if we receive a signal, chances are that it is “real”. The question is whether it was emitted by intelligent beings. It’s actually a remarkably deep and subtle question. One of the consequences of Shannon’s work in information theory is we know that the best possible encoding for a given message results in waveforms which are indistinguishable from white noise: they appear entirely random. If we received such a signal from an intelligent civilization, it might be virtually impossible to distinguish it from white noise. On the other hand, we already know of natural sources which emit relatively low bandwidth, repetitive signals (pulsars), so very simple signals can also be the result of natural processes. It’s hard to say what would really be convincing: traditional SETI researchers are looking for narrow band “beacons” in a region of the EM spectrum over which propagation is particularly favoriable. They don’t have any mechanism to determine what any received messages might actually mean. In some sense this means that their search is somewhat misnamed: they have no real protocol for determining if a given source represents intelligent communication.

    I suspect that if we received Morse code, or an AM voice signal, or a TV signal, I’d conclude that it was the result of intelligence. But the communication could be vastly more subtle, and for engineering reasons (Shannon’s coding theory) it is beneficial if they are.

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