The Austringer

There’s an essay by Randal Rauser at “Christian Post” offering what’s termed a rebuttal to a criticism of an earlier essay. Rauser seems to be a run-of-the-mill “intelligent design” creationism (IDC) cheerleader.

Rauser defends Dembski’s ideas early on.

Joseph H. Axell posted a long rebuttal in the comment section of my article “Unintelligent arguments against intelligent design: A Primer”. There are a number of claims I’d like to challenge in the response. For instance Axell writes: “Dembski’s ‘explanatory filter’ for detecting design has been shown to be inadequate (false positives being but one problem)….” That’s like saying that an umbrella is inadequate because it is ineffectual in a windy rainstorm. Dembski’s explanatory filter, like an umbrella, can still be a useful tool even if it is not perfect. Is Newtonian physics tossed out as illegitimate because it doesn’t work at the quantum level?

Joseph Axell is right. Rauser, not so much. Newtonian physics is useful somewhere, which distinguishes it from Dembski’s “design inference” that has never had a fully-worked out example applied to any non-trivial problem. So much of Rauser’s original essay is based upon the conflation of ordinary and rarefied design inferences that it seems that he must not have read The advantages of theft over toil yet. The deficiencies of Dembski’s CSI are detailed in this essay. In the appendix, we introduced the concept of Specified Anti-Information and demonstrated that it formed an upper bound on Dembski’s CSI and disproved Dembski’s proposed “law of conservation of information”. A concerned reader wondered why we would bother repairing “specification”, and I replied:

The existence of a minimal program/input pair that results in a certain output indicates that there exists an effective method for production of the output. Since effective methods are something that are in common between intelligent agents and instances of natural computation, one cannot distinguish which of the two sorts of causation might have resulted in the output, but one can reject chance causation for the output. We haven’t so much repaired specification as we have pointed out a better alternative to it.

This leads me to a claim about Dembski’s design inference: Everything which is supposedly explained by a design inference is better and more simply explained by Specified Anti-Information.

SAI identifies an effective method for the production of the output of interest. The result of a design inference is less specific, being simply the negation of currently known (and considered) regularity and chance. The further arguments Dembski gives to go from a design inference to intelligent agency are flawed. On both practical and theoretical grounds, SAI is a superior methodology to that of the design inference.

Back to Rauser:

Second, Axell writes: “So you concede that ID proponents have so far failed to achieve even the preliminary goal of establishing that a causal intelligence has been engaged in creating features of the natural world.”

First of all, whether they have or haven’t suceeded in establishing any particular instance of intelligent design is completely irrelevant to the claim that such a project is, in principle, viable. That’s the point! (And philosopher of science / atheist Bradley Monton makes it much better than I ever could.)

I need to reiterate that ordinary design is not the same as rarefied design, and here we have Rauser explicitly trying to ignore that point.

Now for the relation to the title. Here’s Rauser moving in for the rhetorical kill, at least apparently in his mind:

Finally I turn to the main point. Is it true that a person is obliged to provide “a detailed account of the nature of that intelligent cause and of the time, manner and place in which it has engaged with the natural world” if that intelligent cause is one with which we are not “familiar”?

Axell just invented that stipulation but provided no reasoning for it. He just asserts it. But not only is there no reason to accept it. There is also a good reason not to accept it. Consider the following illustration:

Axell’s friend tells him: “Joseph, I fear that there is some kind of intelligence in my house that doesn’t want me here.”

Axell, being a scientifically enlightened denizen of the twenty-first century is skeptical. “What evidence do you have?” he asks.

Axell’s friend then pulls out a ouija board and sets it on the coffee table. Immediately the planchette begins moving across the board and it spells “Get out of here.” Axell can clearly see that nobody is touching the planchette and immediately he picks it up, inspects it closely. There are no magnets: it is only a piece of wood. There are no wires. There is no draft. He puts it back down. Immediately the planchette begins to move again as it spells out “I said get out of here.”

Highlighting added.

Good reason? Excuse me, but all I see here is a pathetic fantasy, one in which Rauser ludicrously inserts his critic. There is no reason, and further, no reasoning, going on in Rauser’s response. It is, rather literally, the demon-haunted world being given as a basis for the legitimacy of IDC. We all knew that already, Randal.

The main petition regarding the Synthese disclaimer published in the January, 2011 issue was signed by 470 academics. It asked for a retraction of the disclaimer and additional information about the circumstances that led the Editors-in-Chief (EiC) to include it.

The EiC have now provided a response to the main petition. I received no direct notice of this response; I ran across a post about it on the “New Apps” blog. Prof. Matthen, author of that blog post, noted:

As far as I can tell, this is a website with one item only. This is clearly a tactic to make the response as obscure and invisible as it can be.

To give some more detail on the apparent desire for obscurity, let me note that the web page as provided has only one piece of content, an image that shows the text of a response letter. Posting an image means that the text of the response is not made easily accessible and it is not indexed by search engines as text. (Interestingly, the page was generated out of Microsoft Word and includes metadata identifying Prof. Hendricks as the author of the piece signed by all three EiC.)

As for the text not being out there recorded for search engines and posterity, that is easy enough to fix. Here it is. I’ve transcribed it from the image at the link above. Any misspellings are likely mine.

In response to the petition sent to Synthese:

We have considered the demands contained in this petition very seriously. We have implemented a moratorium on new special issues and we have begun planning appropriate changes to the editorial procedures of Synthese.

The petition asks for full disclosure of all legal threats. There have not been any communications received from Christian philosophers that constituted legal threats. There was a single email from a member of the public expressing the view that the entire special issue was ‘scurrilous and libelous’. We did not consider this email to be a legal threat. It is important to note that this email was received after our initial contacts with Professor Beckwith.

As far as meaningful legal action is concerned, we have received messages that we take seriously as legal threats but these have not come from Christian philosophers. Our ability to provide detailed responses in the blogs is constrained by these challenges.

Professor Beckwith requested an opportunity to respond to Professor Forrest’s paper. We agreed that this was a fair course of action. As regards the inclusion of our editorial statement and the email correspondence with Professor Forrest, it is true that there was considerable discussion between the editors of all aspects of the special issue. We took these matters very seriously and as is often the case with serious deliberation there were some oscillations prior to our reaching a conclusion. Eventually the editors arrived at a shared position, in consultation with the publisher, based on what we judged to be the offending language in two papers.

With respect to the claim that the guest editors were given assurances that no editorial statement would appear, it is true that the guest editors were privy to internal discussions between the editors-in-chief at earlier stages. We were unable to properly communicate later stages of our decision-making process to the guest editors.

We are ultimately responsible for what appears in the journal and we decided to publish the special issue without amendment to any of its papers. We wish to emphasize that our editorial statement should in no way be interpreted as an endorsement of ‘intelligent design’.

At this point, we have a duty to help create procedures to prevent situations of the sort we saw here from recurring. Thus, in consultation with the publisher, we have begun planning a transition to improved editorial procedures and improved oversight which will be in place in 2012. We will work closely with our board or area editors and our advisory board to make this happen.

Johan van Benthem

Vincent Hendricks

John Symons

Yes, this is yet another bit related to the Synthese flap. One of the issues still outstanding is whether the list of things the Editors-in-Chief have as misconduct includes notifying third-party complainers that the disclaimer was going into the print edition long before the print edition was available. They certainly failed to inform either the guest editors or the authors that any such thing was happening; those people (I’m one of them) had to wait for print copies to appear on their doorstep to find out.

One piece of hard data is that Francis Beckwith, one of the third-party complainers, submitted his “response” to Barbara Forrest on February 7th, 2011, and the response includes in it explicit reference to the disclaimer in the print edition of Synthese 178:2. This sets the latest date at which Francis Beckwith could have been apprised of the disclaimer’s print status. I didn’t hear about it until Glenn Branch emailed me on March 9th, 2011, to say that a disclaimer had been printed. But I’d like to know exactly how much lead time Beckwith had. The Synthese Editors-in-Chief haven’t been very forthcoming when asked questions about this affair, so that leaves Beckwith to be asked about the situation.

So I asked. This is my email to Beckwith’s published Baylor University email address, sent on April 25th, 2011:

I first received notice of the disclaimer in the Synthese special issue printed edition on 2011/03/09. Would you please tell me the date when the Editors-in-Chief informed you that the disclaimer would be printed in the special issue? I know that this had to be prior to 2011/02/07 given the date of submission of your response that refers to the disclaimer, but I would like to be more precise about this matter.

Thanks,
Wesley

That seems pretty straightforward. It isn’t like it is even going against Beckwith’s interests to be forthcoming about answering it. Now, why would I expect an answer, given the context that I’m a known critic of “intelligent design” creationism and its current — and past — advocates? We got on OK at the 2006 Greer-Heard Forum event, for one. Well, and maybe because Beckwith himself has implied as much. Consider his posts over a previous interaction with Barbara Forrest:

[...] Here’s the problem folks: Barbara Forrest is not concerned about truth or justice. For if she were, she would have, at some point in her “unmasking of me,” contacted me to verify or check certain facts. She also would have given a complete account of certain events that when presented in that way do not “prove” anything odd. [...]

[...] Forrest correctly notes that I am no longer a DI fellow. Does she tell you why? No. How come? She never asked me. Why didn’t she ask me? You’ll have to ask her that. But I suspect that if she can’t find by using Google, she doesn’t bother checking.

[...] But did she ask me for the letter? [...]

[...] But she would have known that if….and here’s the clincher…she had asked me. [...]

[...] But Barb would have known this, if…and here’s the clincher… she had just asked.

It sure makes it sound like Francis Beckwith is a open and forthright kind of guy, even when corresponding with trenchant critics.

Which makes it rather puzzling why I don’t have an answer in hand yet, not even one of the “mind your own business” sort.

Maybe Beckwith is snowed under in emails and the first one simply got lost in the shuffle. So I sent a second one on May 4th, 2011:

On 4/25/2011 4:02 AM, Wesley R. Elsberry wrote:
> I first received notice of the disclaimer in the Synthese special issue printed edition on 2011/03/09. Would you please tell me the date when the Editors-in-Chief informed you that the disclaimer would be printed in the special issue? I know that this had to be prior to 2011/02/07 given the date of submission of your response that refers to the disclaimer, but I would like to be more precise about this matter.
>
> Thanks,
> Wesley

In the comments at

http://www.whatswrongwiththeworld.net/2009/05/stove_award_competition_heats.html

you note multiple times that Barbara Forrest could have asked you to clarify particular points, with the implication being that she would have received an answer to her question, had she but posed it.

Let me remind you that the question I asked above is still pending an answer. I would appreciate a response.

Thanks,
Wesley

I thought about other possible excuses, like being on vacation. If so, Beckwith has kept up with his blogging while not checking his email, which doesn’t seem exceedingly likely.

Given the continued lack of response, I am having to re-assess the likelihood that Francis Beckwith doesn’t get asked questions by critics because such questions simply go unanswered.

Just in case there’s any academics who haven’t gotten the word yet, there’s a petition going requesting four things of the Synthese Editors-in-Chief, including the retraction of the vague disclaimer that tarnishes the whole special issue on “Evolution and its rvials”. If you aren’t on board with one or more of the items, that can be noted in a comment when you sign up.

There’s a separate petition requesting that Synthese give Barbara Forrest a chance to respond to Francis Beckwith.

Professor Paul Giem, M.D., of Loma Linda University has a batch of video lectures online. One of them has him discussing the Synthese special issue on “Evolution and its rivals”, with special attention given to Prof. Barbara Forrest’s paper and Prof. Francis Beckwith’s response. Giem really, really doesn’t like Forrest’s article. At 28:49 into the video, Giem delivers a truly stunning bit of incivility:

This lady [referring to Prof. Forrest] needs some Haldol or something. She’s paranoid.

One of the possible defenses against a defamation of character claim concerns the credibility of the defamer. You can’t win a defamation case if the defaming party is not considered credible when stating the defamatory speech. The fact that Giem is an M.D. would work against him in any case concerning the figurative prescription of psychoactive pharmaceuticals. Giem would be held to a higher, not lower, standard in any such instance.

Civility for religious antievolutionists is a one-way street: they can dish out incivility, but they aren’t going to put up with taking any.

I’ve added this instance to the Invidious Comparisons thread, noting that it isn’t an invidious comparison per se.

Update: It’s been noted that I left out a bit of context. Loma Linda U. is a Seventh-Day Adventist institution, and the SDA is committed to a literal Fall of Adam. Giem expresses his young-earth creationist views online here.

Update 2: Following Tom English’s comment, I’ve added the next words from the video where Giem refers to Forrest as paranoid.

Over at New APPS, the comments continue. Jeff Shallit, my co-author on the paper in Synthese, weighed in with a brief comment:

Apparently Prof. Laudan thinks it is justified, if editors have a problem with a single paper or two in a special issue, to issue a general disclaimer that potentially impugns the integrity of every single author in the issue under question.

As a co-author of one of the papers in the special issue, I am shocked by both the behavior of the editors and the endorsement of that behavior by Prof. Laudan.

Jon Cogburn took issue with Jeff, expanding at length on his opinion that the EiC disclaimer in no way impugned the integrity of authors in the special issue.

And I replied to a part of Cogburn’s comment:

“I mean the editors did not say that some of the authors abused students or committed plagiarism or that some of the papers were unsound or not deserving of inclusion. They just said they thought some of the papers were too impolite and further clarified that this was an editorial oversight, one that clearly could have been addressed in the revising period of the papers.”

It seems ironic that tender sensitivities must be protected of everyone *except* the authors, who are apparently supposed to simply overlook anything other than outright accusations of high crimes and misdemeanors.

The distinction you make about editorial oversight might arguably be part of the just-released online response from the EiC (though I think it isn’t nearly clear enough to be described in just that way), but it isn’t part of the original disclaimer. I think arguing that it might be implicit in the original disclaimer would not be satisfactory.

We may need to agree to disagree about the scope of effect of the disclaimer on the authors.

Maybe you can touch upon another aspect of this. Given that the EiC felt it necessary to attach a disclaimer that might be applied severally to each and every paper in the volume (and the response in the IDC community shows that this is exactly what is happening, whether justifiable in each case or not), was it appropriate for the EiC to omit notice of their intended action and to deny each of the contributors the opportunity to withdraw their work? As Jeffrey’s co-author, I am in agreement that we would have withdrawn our paper if we had been informed of the nature of the disclaimer that would be published with our work. Maybe that would not have been your choice in the same situation, but I would hope that you would allow that opinions vary, especially with respect to protecting one’s own reputation. We were not notified of any of these concerns and intentions prior to the appearance of the printed issue. I, at least, see that as an irresponsible and unprofessional lapse on the part of the EiC at Synthese.

Mark Lance makes an excellent point over at “New APPS” concerning the Synthese disclaimer flap. I think it deserves more notice than simply being part of a longish stream of comments.

So, all in all, I’m still looking for anything that is remotely a candidate for exclusion on the grounds of unprofessional rudeness. Again, if the issue is that the arguments are bad, then the paper should have been rejected on those grounds. But if editors start saying that it is unprofessional to draw negative conclusions about people who are engaged in debates with obvious and dire political consequences, then we need to be aware that they are taking a stand in favor of philosophical irrelevancy.

The Synthese Editors-in-Chief issued a joint statement today about the disclaimer in the special issue. The closest approach to an apology was the following:

Of course, there are lessons to be learnt from what happened regarding our internal procedures, and Synthese will do that.

It’s a ‘Nothing to see here, move along’ sort of thing they have there, at least at first sight. On re-reading that, it can be taken not as an indication of a glimmer of recognition that their response might have gotten it wrong, but rather as an implication that they’ll be tightening down on guest editors.

I did my part to set them straight in the comments:

The EiCs also had a responsibility not to tarnish the reputations of contributors whose work did not have “unacceptable content”. Failure to provide authors with the opportunity to revise or withdraw before being smeared with such a disclaimer as employed by the EiCs is irresponsible and unprofessional, in my opinion. As a contributor to the issue in question, I can attest that at no time did the EiCs contact me with respect to that failed “internal resolution”. We would have opted for withdrawal rather than publish under the conditions that actually took place. At a minimum, the EiCs should have specifically identified the papers they believed to be problematic and not turn the issue into a philosophical “Where’s Waldo?” panel. That would have at least not tainted the rest by the vagueness that obtained in the actual disclaimer. I find the vague disclaimer to be itself highly discourteous, let alone the lack of notice provided to affected contributors whether guilty or innocent of the claimed lapses.

Chris Pincock at “Honest Toil” has a different take on the Synthese disclaimer issue. Pincock makes the argument that since the Editors-in-Chief have responsibility for the reputation of the journal, of course they would have to put a disclaimer on a special issue if they saw a problem. There’s nothing to do because the Editors-in-Chief have a compelling motivation for the action they took.

My response in the comments there was this:

As an author in the special issue in contention, I am less sanguine than you about the events. You see, the broad-brush vagueness of the Editors-in-Chief statement casts aspersions upon my academic integrity. Do the Editors-in-Chief have the right, in your estimation, to tar my reputation without notice or recourse? If I had been informed ahead of time of the intention to run that disclaimer with my paper, I would have retracted it on the spot. I was given *no* prior notice that any such criticism would be part of publishing in the special issue. I was given *no* opportunity to either revise or retract to escape the criticism leveled at the papers of the special issue. Is that also just their unquestioned right as Editors-in-Chief?

In my estimation, it is not simply business as usual for an academic publication to treat its authors as the Synthese Editors-in-Chief have done in this case. I don’t know that a boycott is absolutely the right response, but I disagree with the idea that no response is justified.

Wesley R. Elsberry

I had a co-authored paper published in the philosophy journal, Synthese. It appeared online back in 2009 and then in print in the January issue this year. But something else appeared in the January issue with my paper. It was a disclaimer from the chief editors saying that unspecified papers published in that special issue failed to meet the journal’s usual standards for civility in discourse.

This was news to me. It turns out that there was discussion between the special issue editors, James Fetzer and Glenn Branch, and the Editors-in-Chief of Synthese concerning one of the papers, the one by Barbara Forrest that took up the case of Francis Beckwith and his support of “intelligent design” creationism. After the online publication of the articles, the IDC community apparently lobbied the Editors-in-Chief for revisions in Forrest’s paper and giving Beckwith the opportunity to respond in the journal. Two of the Editors-in-Chief asked Forrest to make revisions, or they would add a disclaimer to the special issue. With a batch of correspondence between the various editorial parties, the special issue editors came away with the idea that things had been resolved: Beckwith would get his chance to respond in print, but there would be no after-the-fact revisions and no disclaimer. It wasn’t until the print issue arrived that they discovered that that was not the case, as the threatened disclaimer was discovered as a pretty ghastly reality. Worse, the disclaimer was vague about its disapproval, making it appear to the casual reader that there could be many, if not all, of the articles that caused the high editorial reaction.

Brian Leiter has called for a professional boycott of Synthese until and unless the Editors-in-Chief retract the disclaimer and issue an apology over the matter. Organization of the boycott is being handled by John Wilkins.

For myself, I think boycotting Synthese doesn’t make much sense, as I don’t publish often enough in the philosophical literature for them to notice my absence. Others with more production in philosophy will have more influence via a boycott. If I had been apprised of the disclaimer ahead of time, I would have opted to retract the paper rather than publish it as implicitly tainted by the Editors-in-Chief actions. I would hope that professionalism re-asserts itself in the editorial leadership at Synthese and we see a quick and decisive correction of the deplorable actions so far taken by them.

The Synthese special issue on “Evolution and Its Rivals” allows downloads of the full PDFs for all the articles, but only through 12/31, so you have just a day left to download them for free. After that, they go back to being $35 each or something of the sort.

Jeff Shallit and I have an article in it about Dembski’s “complex specified information”.

I jumped into discussion of a comment by Greg Laden on Facebook that touched on the Turing test.

There was a comment by Dan Fincke that got me interested:

indeed, at this point I’m generally more impressed when I’m convinced a girl talking to me online is NOT a robot

My reply:

Dan,

Ironically enough, the Turing test as presented by Turing in his famous paper is not as generic as most people think. A male observer compares the conversation coming from a female correspondent and a program, and is supposed to pick out which is the female. So your comment fits right into Turing’s original test conditions.

One can speculate that Turing’s own gender identity issues had something to do with him casting it in that way. The difference between the somewhat-mysterious other gender and a program trying to imitate a female may have been considered by Turing as a more difficult for a male observer, and thus a slightly lower bar as a sufficient criterion for intelligence in a computer program. Or it could be that he just forgot to clarify that the imitation game with the computer involved could be gender-neutral if we wanted to do so.

Greg Laden jumped back into the discussion:

Dan, given a recent conversation on facebook, I’m impressed when a girl talking to me on line is NOT some guy who is pretending to be a girl but really looks like ZZ Top.

Wesley, interesting. I think but I could be wrong, that most of the first order (or should I say first generation) descriptions of the Turin test do not say that. I’m not sure if I’ve ever read the original (I think the first place I saw it was in something written by Gardner).

And my response:

Greg, you are right that most descriptions of the Turing test after Turing are phrased more generically. In the original paper, Turing says:

The new form of the problem can be described’ in terms of a game which we call the ‘imitation game’. It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart from the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y, and at the end of the game he says either ‘X is A and Y is B’ or ‘X is B and Y is A’. The interrogator is allowed to put questions to A and B thus:

C: Will X please tell me the length of his or her hair?

Now suppose X is actually A, then A must answer. It is A’s {p.434}object in the game to try and cause C to make the wrong identification. His answer might therefore be

‘My hair is shingled, and the longest strands, are about nine inches long.’

In order that tones of voice may not help the interrogator the answers should be written, or better still, typewritten. The ideal arrangement is to have a teleprinter communicating between the two rooms. Alternatively the question and answers can be repeated by an intermediary. The object of the game for the third player (B) is to help the interrogator. The best strategy for her is probably to give truthful answers. She can add such things as ‘I am the woman, don’t listen to him!’ to her answers, but it will avail nothing as the man can make similar remarks.

We now ask the question, ‘What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?’ Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman? These questions replace our original, ‘Can machines think?’

Turing does himself later refer to the conditions of the game he introduced more generically, which probably licenses everybody else to treat the test as gender-neutral.

It might be urged that when playing the ‘imitation game’ the best strategy for the machine may possibly be something other than imitation of the behaviour of a man. This may be, but I think it is unlikely that there is any great effect of this kind. In any case there is no intention to investigate here the theory of the game, and it will be assumed that the best strategy is to try to provide answers that would naturally be given by a man.

But I still find it interesting that Turing’s explicit description of the “imitation game” is a *gender-discrimination* test, even with the computer in play.

(I’ll note here that my recall of the original did not include the note that the observer could be either male or female, and that vitiates part of my speculation from the first comment I made above.)

A perfectly reasonable letter to the editor from Walter Kania elicited a response from Andrew Ricks with all the hallmarks of the concern troll.

I was moved to enter a comment there that I’ll share here. There was a 1000 character limit on online comments.

I read the previous letter by Walter Kania. The response from Ricks is overwrought and misguided.

There is open discourse in science, conducted in the scientific literature. The “intelligent design” creationists (IDC) mostly skip that, and have established a track record for premature promotion of their claims as something worthy of inclusion in the public K-12 science curriculum. The IDC advocates have not done the hard work of convincing the scientific community that they have something that works as science.

Efforts to undermine the effectiveness and rigor of science instruction anywhere are fully worthy of disparagement, denigration, and contumely. The religious antievolution movement, IDC included, has been engaged in precisely that for decades. It is precisely because we seek to curtail inappropriate indoctrination that IDC is opposed. If they want respectful discourse, they need to stop being charlatans pushing a sham.

Wesley R. Elsberry, Ph.D.

A philosophical look at evolution and creation by a newly-minted history Ph.D., Leslie Tomory, is titled The Shock and Awe of Creation. Tomory is in the theistic evolution camp, and argues on philosophical grounds that antievolution is a bad thing, while affirming that faith and science can co-exist.

That’s fine by me. But here is one of the issues that diminished my enjoyment of the piece.

Young earth creationists are the first and crudest variant of this reaction, but they are by no means the only one. The Intelligent Design (ID) movement accepts common descent to varying degrees, but rejects the established mechanisms of evolutionary change. The arguments of ID proponents are structured in the way I have outlined. Reacting to evolutionism, they have chosen to go on the attack against natural selection and genetic drift. They recognize that common descent is evident and they accept it.

Uh, no. There is one major “intelligent design” advocate, Michael Behe, who is on record saying that he has no particular reason to disagree with common descent, which is a rather different proposition from saying that he accepts common descent, much less that he feels that it is evident. Within the “intelligent design” movement, acceptance of common descent ranges from a (quite common) nil of the young-earth creationists in the movement to the grudging acquiescence of Mike Behe. Wherever one finds “intelligent design” material that addresses common descent, it uniformly seeks to make common descent seem less “evident” to the reader. Common descent is still quite plainly a target of “intelligent design” advocates, but it is also clear that they recognize they have a fine line to walk if they want to appear to be at all reasonable to the rest of the world. Have a look at “Of Pandas and People” and “Explore Evolution” sometime. When they talk to a “safe” audience, though, the stops often come off.

Another issue in the essay:

The final concept contained within the notion of evolution is the pace of evolutionary change. Although gradualism was dominant in Darwin’s thinking, the second half of the 19th century witnessed the rise of other opinions regarding the pace of evolutionary change, the most important of which was mutation theory’s large jumps. The rediscovery of genetics, with its emphasis on clearly distinct expression of genes, gave further impetus to mutation theory’s jumps. This changed, however, with the forging by Theodosius Dobzhansky among many others, of the modern or neo-Darwinian synthesis in the 1930s. This united Darwinian mechanisms with Medelian genetics and the study of population dynamics. Gradualism was once again the dominant opinion, although it was somewhat modified in the 1970s.

It was at this point when Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould put forward their theory of punctuated equilibrium, which argued that evolution proceeds by bursts, followed by long periods of stasis. Their arguments were based on observations of the fossil record which seems to indicate that on the whole, evolution proceeds in this uneven way. The bursts should not, however, be understood as occurring in a few generations. Rather, these bursts are only rapid when considered on geological time scales spanning millions of years, and speciation events occur over thousands of generations, making punctuated equilibrium a form of gradualism.

While Tomory eventually finishes by saying that punctuated equilibrium turns out to be a form of gradualism, he fails to elucidate the terminological problem at basis here. Gradualism of the sort that Darwin espoused wasn’t about constancy of rate, but rather the rather banal fact that it is populations that evolve, and its antithesis is saltationism, where new species are instantiated and founded by single organisms. Gould and Eldredge did rail against “gradualism”, but if you read the original papers carefully every such instance is best understood as shorthand for their slightly longer novel phrase of “phyletic gradualism”, a very specific and delimited concept of anagenetic speciation with constant rates of change in traits associated with the speciation event. I’m not sure that it is at all accurate to say that “gradualism” was modified in the 1970s. Gould and Eldredge elicited a lot of reactions that assumed that they were advocating saltationism, and they had, it seems, quite a bit of fun in tweaking people’s noses over the fact that they were doing no such thing. All in all, most of the brouhaha over punctuated equilibria appears, in retrospect, to have the form of an extended academic practical joke, as the rhetoric and phrasing of the original proposal appears to be gauged to elicit exactly the sort of mistakes in response as did follow. This does nothing to lessen the positive aspects of punctuated equilibria in making clear the importance of allopatric speciation on the patterns seen in the fossil record, but it does illustrate that there is more happening in the scientific literature than just straightforward explication of research findings.

This is a reply to a comment by David Opderbeck in this thread. Since David has consistently accused me of misunderstanding, I’m going to pull in a number of sources to demonstrate that such is not the case. So I’ll tag quotes as follows: [DO S&S 1] for David’s first “Science and the Sacred” post on the topic, [DO S&S 2] for his second post, [DO Aus 1] for David’s first comment here, [DO Aus 2] for his second comment here, [DO Aus 3] for his third, and [DO Aus 4] for his most recent comment here.

[DO Aus 4]Wesley, you are again contradicting yourself, and again missing the point of my first two pieces on Science & Sacred.

David,

You seem to be getting desperate to find some way to be dismissive of my commentary. Not only was I consistent before, and explained why, but I have given you no reason to claim logical error on my part this time, either. In fact, I have pointed out logical flaw after logical flaw on your part, and you seem to take no notice of that.

Let’s review those first two pieces that you erroneously claim I’m misunderstanding.

Paragraph 1 from the first piece goes like this:

[DO S&S 1]On December, 2005, Judge John E. Jones, III (left) issued his opinion in the now-infamous Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District intelligent design case. Like many thoughtful evangelical Christians at the time, I was impressed with intelligent design theory. I had read many of the ID movement’s foundational texts, and felt confident that ID offered an intellectually and theological satisfying alternative to the extremes of young earth creationism and atheistic Darwinism. Shortly after the Kitzmiller decision was issued, I blogged and wrote publicly about Judge Jones’ opinion, which I thought was largely mistaken.

I still think Judge Jones’ opinion in Kitzmiller missed the mark in some important ways, even though I think (and have always thought) the end result was correct. Moreover, I remain impressed with the energy and intelligence of the ID movement’s thought leaders. Scholars such as Bill Dembski and Mike Behe have made some interesting arguments about epistemology, divine action, and causation. However, when I dove into the broader ID discussion after the Kitzmiller case, I came to believe that many aspects of the ID movement are not as helpful as I had first thought – and, indeed, that ID rhetoric is often used to hinder positive interaction between the truths of the Christian faith and truths learned through the natural sciences.

This says that your opinion of Jones’ decision was negative. Paragraph 2 explains how your opinion changed somewhat as you examined the “broader” discussion, but that your opinion was that the Kitzmiller decision still was flawed. You reviewed some of the legal history of the antievolution movement, and gave your opinion that “intelligent design” has been misused by “the Church”. Piece 1, though, never got around to an argument about any of these things. And it still says that the Scopes trial occurred in 1926, when I provided the actual year of 1925 for you back on the 1st of December. There’s some pretty questionable stuff in there besides that (Behe and Dembski???), but given that it was all cast as opinion, it doesn’t seem worth a digression.

Now let’s turn to the second piece.

[DO S&S 2]Supporters of Judge Jones’ approach in the Kitzmiller case suggest that a similar gatekeeping function is important with respect to public education. Without some demarcation of what can be taught as “science” in the public schools, aren’t we opening the floodgates to the teaching of all sorts of pseudo-science, such as astrology and young earth creationism? I think this is a valid concern. For this and other reasons, I personally don’t agree with the “teach the controversy” approach promoted by many ID advocates. If I were to serve on my local school board, I would not vote in favor of introducing ID materials into the science curriculum, primarily because I don’t believe the ID program has generated sufficient results to reach the public schools. Like the courts, the public schools lack the time and resources to address views that fall far outside the scientific mainstream.

I’ve said before that Jones’ approach is not about gatekeeping the science curriculum. You just keep re-asserting that it is without effective support. This is an error on your part, and is a part of your mistaken claims made against my arguments. It is an error that drives the remainder of your piece as well.

I understand your S&S pieces just fine. I continue to think that they do you no credit; quite the contrary.

Now back to your most recent comment.

[DO Aus 4]You can’t have it both ways. If you think the demarcation of “science” was “key” in the “sense” of being necessary to evaluate the “secular purpose” of the School Board’s policy, then it was “key.” Key is key. It seems pointless for us to continue arguing about whether the demarcation question was “key” or “central” to the opinion. Obviously, it was, at least for the “sense” that you advance here.

There is a point, though. It has to do with you producing some support for your claim:

[DO S&S 2]In my view, however, there is a significant qualitative and quantitative difference between giving an issue some consideration and making it the central issue in the case.

My sense of “key” is any argument that could have caused a higher court to overturn the decision, which means that a great many “key” arguments may exist in a decision. This is quite readily distinguishable from your sense of “the central”, of which there can be only one such issue in the decision. I think I’ve done a good job of arguing that what you asserted was the single most important argument in the decision is, instead, but one of many comparably important considerations. And, of course, that you have mistaken the nature of that argument.

And, as I described at great length last time and have consistently said, I do not agree that creating a “demarcation” criterion was the intent of decision. Please stop ascribing that view to me. Judge Jones applied a definition of science from a source stipulated as authoritative by both the defense and the plaintiffs, which is far, far different from seeking to establish a general demarcation criterion. I note that you do not even attempt to support your claim, even though I told you what to look for if Jones had actually been doing something toward finding a demarcation criterion.

Next…

[DO Aus 4]In this regard, the “appeal proofing” argument really doesn’t work, for three reasons.

First, as you admit above, the “science” demarcation part of the opinion does some “key” work under the Judge’s construction of the establishment clause issue. This is clearly more than appeal proofing.

Is that your final answer?

That’s absurd.

Remember my connotation of “key” being an argument that if mishandled or unaddressed by the judge could result in overturning the case on appeal? Do you really want to argue that refusing to drop out explication of an argument because its absence could cause a higher court to overturn a decision is not part of appeal-proofing?

[DO Aus 4]Second, federal judges in particular have significant control over what issues get tried. The Judge could have excised much of the material relating to the “science” demarcation issue at various stages of the pretrial proceedings, but didn’t … because he apparently believed it was key to the proceedings. You seem to think that a Judge must passively hear and decide everything the parties throw at him or her, but that simply is not the case.

First, you shouldn’t have used “second” to introduce this paragraph, since you are no longer discussing appeal-proofing.

Second, you have strayed into inconsistency with this objection. It goes counter with what you told us previously:

[DO S&S 2]The looming presence of this question is one of the key reasons I don’t believe Judge Jones played the role of “activist judge” in Kitzmiller, even though I am critical of the opinion. The question whether ID, like “creation science,” is inherently religiously motivated, is a live concern, and was extensively briefed and argued to the court by both sides. In order to address the question of religious motivation, the court could not have avoided some consideration of the essential nature of ID theory.

You can’t have it both ways, David. Either the court could have avoided “some consideration” of the issue, or not, but you don’t get to pick which one happens to be convenient to your argument moment-by-moment.

Third, I’m quite aware of what latitude a trial judge has in determining what becomes admissible. I was involved in the plaintiffs’ pre-trial strategy formation concerning exactly that point in the case in question. That consideration, though, is conspicuous by its absence in your two S&S pieces, where you couch your opinion in terms of asserted but unsubstantiated faults in the decision, and not in procedural concerns previous to the decision. Did you overlook that before, or are you just flailing? My opinion leans to the latter.

Next…

[DO Aus 4]Third, even when a trial court allows evidence at trial on an issue, the court is not compelled to deal with it at length in a written opinion. It is not reversible error in itself to do this. Many, many, many times I’ve seen courts slap down with the back of a hand arguments made at length by the parties, without any negative repercussions on appeal. The briefer statement I offered in my Science & Sacred post, in fact, would have served this purpose (and the appeal proofing purpose) well.

Again, you have mislabeled your introductory word, since you once again are dismissing and not addressing the appeal-proofing argument. Argument by anecdote is widely considered to be weak. I can’t speak to the numbers of terse dismissive or spotty decisions that get a pass from higher courts relative to the ones that get overturned or remanded by those higher courts (e.g., Selman v. Cobb County), and I don’t think that you are in a position to make a statistical argument, either. Given the raw page number fiasco earlier in our discussion, I’d say I’m well justified in that. Nor does a personal opinion of how well your offered alternative might have held up to hypothetical review do much for anyone looking for an objective reason to prefer your opinion. You have to argue that the mere existence of airy dismissal in some decision means that airy dismissal should be what judges use generally or exclusively to even come close to having a point. I just have to point out that completeness of argumentation is not a fault to completely invalidate your stance that an error lurks in the Kitzmiller decision because of length of consideration, and I have. The thing that you should be looking for is a reason within the practice of law for a trial judge to high-handedly dismiss an argument that comprised a significant proportion of the testimony and evidence heard in a case. Given that the arguments were admitted, what reason in law would a judge have to prefer an uninformative dismissal of the argument to a full explication of why the judge decided on those arguments the way he did? I’m still waiting to hear one.

What I and I think others would want to see is that you show clearly that airy dismissal would have been better legal practice for a judge to engage in than completely addressing the arguments before the court. I haven’t seen anything from you that comes close to that.

Of course, I’ve said about the same thing before without an indication that you are taking my point.

Next…

[DO Aus 4]Now, as to the central point of my Science & Sacred piece: my primary concern is about which institutions in our society should make demarcation decisions, and for which purposes. Courts have to make demarcation decisions about “science” for evidentiary purposes (the Daubert standard), but that it is a narrow purpose tailored specifically to the unique role courts play. Broader demarcation decisions should be left to other institutions and to broader public debate.

Assuming that the second S&S piece is referenced, let’s have another look at that:

[DO S&S 2]This leads to my primary criticism of the Kitzmiller decision. I don’t believe Judge Jones should have ventured a broad definition of “science” in the Kitzmiller case, as though such an exercise necessarily ends the discussion of constitutionality. Under the applicable standards for establishment clause cases, the proper inquiry is into purposes and effects: was the government’s purpose “secular” and was the primary effect of the government’s decision to advance or inhibit religion or to produce an excessive entanglement of government and religion? Whether an idea is labeled “religion” or “science,” in itself, is irrelevant to the constitutional question. “Religion” is a constitutionally proper subject of study in the public schools, provided that the purpose and effect of that study is not sectarian.

You specifically note that figuring out whether a secular purpose exists is a proper avenue of inquiry for the courts. You and I disagree, and have done so throughout, over your unconvincing assertion that the Kitzmiller decision is an example of an improper and extensive exploration of “demarcation” generally rather than secular purpose claims in particular. You continue to appear to be confused over what “demarcation” means for this discussion despite my having gone on at considerable length to fill that in for you. I am consistent in part because I have always said that assertion of yours was wrong. Acting as if I had stipulated it at any point is poor form.

Next…

[DO Aus 4]On this last point, I’d suggest you check out some of the resources on science and the law that I list in my Science & Sacred post, none of which have anything specifically to do with ID. The literature on this is legion, there are numerous areas of public policy that it intersects, and it is by no means confined to reactionary claims of “judicial activism.” It seems to me that a narrow focus on the ID question is crabbing your understanding of the broader policy issues at play.

I’ll note that Cranor’s book seems to indicate that the Daubert criterion is mostly a bar to plaintiffs being allowed to make their case, something that obviously is not applicable to your chosen example.

It seems to me that you have a poor track record of trying to say what I do or don’t understand, as poor as being skunked over and over on that score can get. We agree that Judge Jone is not guilty of “judicial activism” and we have not argued that point. The “broader policy issue” in your S&S 2 piece is merely that courts should limit their inquiry into figuring out intent and purpose, and not offer to get involved in curriculum content decisions generally. But you chose to base your opinion on a particular example, and it was obvious to me that your chosen example failed to support your statement of general concern. Maybe there is a judicial example of somebody overstepping the line and seeking to establish a “demarcation” criterion in general; I’m pointing out, once again, that the Kitzmiller v. DASD decision written by Judge John E. Jones III is not it. Try again.

As I pointed out before, you are urging jurists to take extra-legal considerations into account and to alter their decisions on that basis. (Or, if we credit your turnabout, urging them to change what they consider admissible to a trial on that extra-legal basis.) You fault in particular the 2005 decision in Kitzmiller v. DASD by Judge Jones. If your assertion had merit, it should be robust enough to charitably consider the procedures that may legitimately be used by competent judges, including that of rendering a decision that pretty completely lays out the grounds for that decision. However, it is plainly obvious that charity is fatal to your claims; if we grant that a judge may reasonably respond at goodly length to arguments that occupied a significant proportion of a trial, there is nothing left to support your assertion because of the length of the section that causes you offense. When we examine the content of it, as I’ve gone over in previous responses, there is but one sentence you’ve noted as possibly problematic, and if we note that it directly addresses a possible way that secular purpose could be claimed, it, too, fails to support your assertions because there was a good legal reason that you yourself have stipulated that it should be addressed. Given that neither length nor content provide you a basis for continuing in citing the Kitzmiller decision as supporting your fears, I would hope that you would issue an apology to Judge Jones and look for something that actually provides the example you are questing for.

Now, there is another issue that you could take up, which would be whether the “is ID science” section was mistaken given the evidence and testimony taken in the case. So far, your argument has stopped short of trying to do such a thing, and merely asserted without effective substantiation that it was somehow wrong for Judge Jones to do anything but in the most cursory way possible assert that he found the defense had no secular purpose for their actions. I don’t blame you for not trying that; the defense experts turned out to make the plaintiffs’ case quite convincingly. “Intelligent design” is not science, nor is it going to turn into science someday. It is just yet another label slapped on a subset of the same moldy old religious antievolution argumentation that got recognized as such in previous court cases. ID’s purpose is simply to evade those legal precedents, nothing more.

I’m going to respond to a comment left by David Opderbeck to my previous post.

[David Opderbeck:] Wesley, I have one more post coming, more on theological issues. On the Kitzmiller opinion itself, if you don’t think the “demarcation” question was central to the opinion, you’re just misreading it.

David,

We seem to be at an impasse, then, as it seems to me that we each believe the other is the one having difficulty with reading for comprehension on this point. But I will go you one better and explain why I think so.

I’ve made a living for more than twenty years reading judicial opinions.

That might be relevant if we were at loggerheads over points of law. We aren’t. We are discussing philosophy of science and public policy as it intersects with the practice of law. You are advocating that the judiciary take cognizance of extra-legal considerations in how they formulate decisions. I’m advocating that the judiciary do the complete job that is in front of them and not be bullied for responsibly doing that job. I think that you are mistaken concerning the relevant philosophy of science and that this has led you to advocate erroneous things.

That certainly doesn’t mean I always get it right, but counting the “parts” of the opinion as you’re trying to do here surely isn’t helpful.

Helpful? Please, strive for a bit of objectivity here. You introduced a raw page count as evidence for your argument without even an indication of the total length of the decision to guide the reader as to the proportion of the decision that comprised. The general concept of raw number reporting gets a fair amount of attention in Darrell Huff’s fine book, How to Lie with Statistics.

You have completely failed to address the reasons that one might legitimately expect a lengthy and detailed consideration of those arguments that were put before the court by the defense and the plaintiffs. You have completely failed to address why we should consider an unsupported denial of the defense’s claims to having a secular purpose in “intelligent design” being scientific as responsible behavior in a judge putting together a decision that would perhaps be reviewed at the appellate level. You are making an argument founded on the belief that Jones could have completely excised from the decision his response to the defense’s extensive argumentation that they had a “secular purpose” because they asserted that “intelligent design” was science and the extensive rebuttal of those arguments mounted by the plaintiffs. You have justified none of that belief other than with a false appeal to consequences.

I think that looking at the logical structure of the decision is a better approach to understanding what may reasonably be called “central” to it. Let me explain what I am taking as connotations for “key” and “central” just so we can make sure that we are on the same page in the discussion. A “key” element of the decision would be one that if not addressed appropriately could result in overturning the decision at an appellate level. There are lots of components of the Kitzmiller decision that can be called “key” in that context. A “central” element, though, would be the one that was the primary finding in the decision. The primary finding, though, was that concerning the “endorsement test”, and it rested on four separate considerations of which the “is ID science?” consideration was just one. I think that is far more helpful to the reader looking for orientation than a raw page count.

Moreover, if you’re correct, and the “demarcation” portion of the opinion wasn’t central to the opinion, then it seems to me that you should agree with my ultimate conclusion. After all, central my point is that a relatively lengthy and involved effort to define “science” wasn’t necessary to the establishment clause analysis. When you argue that the “demarcation” portion wasn’t central, and then argue at length about how good and important that part of the opinion was, you contradict yourself.

You are basing your argument upon false premises, that the section of the decision on “Is ID science?” was about demarcation criteria and “effort to define science”. I’ll try once again to explain why this is so. This involves philosophy of science, which is not the primary field of expertise for either of us, but I do have some relevant experience. A demarcation criterion provides a way to tell both if a concept is not science, and also if it is science. That is, a proper demarcation criterion provides both the necessary (ways to tell if something is not science) and the sufficient (ways to tell if something is science) properties that make the difference between science and non-science. The primary problem with all proposed demarcation criteria thus far is that there is no general agreement concerning what might constitute the sufficient properties of scientific concepts. However, one will find that there is general agreement about at least some of the necessary properties of scientific concepts. That puts us in the position of being able to say with good certainty that various and sundry concepts don’t have those necessary properties and thus aren’t candidates to be considered scientific, but not being able to definitively say that any particular concept which may have all the necessary attributes also has the sufficient attributes that would positively make the case for considering it scientific. Because necessary attributes are conjunctive, we don’t have to collect the whole set before we can make use of any of them: failure to meet any of them rules out the concept in question. However, striving to establish a demarcation criterion would require that the Kitzmiller decision took up the problem of what the sufficient attributes might be, and this is conspicuous by its absence from the decision. If such were the case, you could prove me wrong easily enough by quoting a section from the decision that shows such a search for the sufficient attributes. (I’m not going to hold my breath.)

Nor was Judge Jones seeking to create a definition of science, as “effort to define science” seems to imply. Instead, we see him carefully seeking to find and use an existing definition of science that could be argued to already be agreed to by both parties. He noted that the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) was stipulated by both parties as the foremost scientific body in the country and relied upon the definition that the NAS provided. Further, accusing Jones of drafting a new definition of science is ironic given what Jones showed in the decision about the IDC predilection to do that themselves:

[From the decision:] It is notable that defense experts’ own mission, which mirrors that of the IDM itself, is to change the ground rules of science to allow supernatural causation of the natural world, which the Supreme Court in Edwards and the court in McLean correctly recognized as an inherently religious concept. Edwards, 482 U.S. at 591-92; McLean, 529 F. Supp. at 1267. First, defense expert Professor Fuller agreed that ID aspires to “change the ground rules” of science and lead defense expert Professor Behe admitted that his broadened definition of science, which encompasses ID, would also embrace astrology. (28:26 (Fuller); 21:37-42 (Behe)). Moreover, defense expert Professor Minnich acknowledged that for ID to be considered science, the ground rules of science have to be broadened to allow consideration of supernatural forces. (38:97 (Minnich)).

Nor is it even true that Jones engaged in ‘a relatively lengthy and involved effort to define “science”’, even if we ignore the implication that he was creating such a thing. The 25 pages of “Whether ID is Science” is further subdivided. Jones takes up three issues there, in only the first of which does a definition of science play a major role. Jones begins that three lines from the end of page 64 and has found and related the definition he applies by the middle of page 66. Jones finishes with application of the NAS definition to his first issue by five lines into page 71. Until one gets to the conclusions starting on the last line of page 88, the rest of the section discusses the other two issues about contrived dualism and repudiated negative argumentation against evolution, with the exception of a seven line paragraph on page 82 that references definitions of science. One does have to give some leeway for perceptions, but mine seems diametrically opposite to yours, that Jones’ approach to the first issue, the one involving a definition of science, was concise, efficient, and economical.

I am being completely consistent: Judge Jones had to address the arguments made about “secular purpose” by both parties, and in order to accomplish that, he had to make a determination on the issue placed before the court and argued as a point of law, which was whether “intelligent design” qualified as a scientific concept and therefore provided a secular purpose for the defendants. This analysis was “key” in the sense I gave, that without doing so Jones would have committed an error that could cause an appellate court to overturn the decision. In order to argue that the defense failed in its claim to having a secular purpose, Jones had to rely upon existing agreement upon what necessary attributes of science “intelligent design” did not encompass. This neither is an effort to define science himself nor to resolve the demarcation problem in the philosophy of science. You are simply mistaken in your fixation on this, and I have spent considerable effort to explain why that is the case.

I’m sorry, I see no reason that I should sign on to a conclusion founded on false premises and substantiated only by a logical fallacy.

[David Opderbeck:] In any event, I suspect that when you read my third post in the series (I think it will come up later this week), you’ll agree substantially with it. Our areas of agreement on this, I think, are larger than our areas of disagreement. I think you’re mistaking me for an ID advocate, which I’m not (though I was at one point). Nevertheless, I have some overriding concerns about which governmental institutions should be involved in demarcation questions, as well as concerns about freedom of speech and religious liberty, that give me significant pause about the Kitzimiller opinion and about the nature of the public debate on this issue.

I can certainly get on board with us agreeing on many things… democracy, mom, apple pie, etc. But that doesn’t mean that I should give a pass to plain error being promulgated and disseminated, which is what I still think — and argue — your “primary criticism” of the Kitzmiller decision amounts to.

We may disagree on how those questions factor into the equation, but I hope that provides a basis for conversation, rather than for attack (particularly the sort of ad hominem with which you opened this conversation…).

Argumentum ad hominem does have an actual definition as a logical fallacy. It is where one notes some personal failing on the part of one’s interlocutor and concludes that his argument must fail because of that. Just to be clear, that is not what I finished up my previous post with. Instead, I went from the basis that a number of the arguments made were unfounded, therefore that made for a negative impression of the author. That is no logical fallacy, nor is it even what is casually construed as an ad hominem. You can call me snarky, rude, or impolite, and I’ll shrug and say, “Mea culpa.” But I won’t accept a false accusation of ad hominem argumentation aimed my way.

I admit to being a bit of a prickly fellow myself, and having been perhaps unduly swayed by Ernst Mayr’s approach to argumentation, which tended to the blunt and direct sort of thing. Mayr himself noted this and explained himself as looking to move quickly through thesis, antithesis, and then hopefully to find synthesis somewhere in the outcome. We seem to be stuck at thesis and antithesis at the moment.

Philip Clayton at “Religion Dispatches” has a post up about evolution/creationism issues and the yin/yang of the classes of antievolutionists and new atheists who agree that one must choose between religion and science, but just disagree on which way to jump.

There’s a brief mention of “non-overlapping magisteria” (NOMA) (with a disclaimer that it isn’t necessarily adequate) and a further discussion of how the participants need to set aside “hegemonic” claims.

When evolutionary and religious explanations are construed as fighting for the same territory, they will unleash their weapons upon each other—as today’s religion wars show. When we recognize and acknowledge their different strengths, a far more interesting discussion emerges.

This new debate is challenging because it requires both sides to give up certain hegemonic claims: scientists, the claim that science provides the answer to all metaphysical questions; and religionists, the claim that they know better than science how nature works.

I think Clayton does all right in entering certain arguments concerning metaphysics. But I think that he has overlooked the public policy aspect concerning K-12 public school education. Since 1968, religious antievolutionists have been illegitimately claiming scientific status for their conjectures, and attempting to inject those conjectures into the public school curriculum at every opportunity at every level, individual, school, district, state, and federal. “Interesting discussion” is hindered when it is consistently one side that demonstrates such intellectually bankrupt and immoral behavior. Until religious antievolutionists ‘fess up that what they are pushing is religion, not science, there can be no rapprochement on this. Of course, that also means that they have to abandon the long-term project of diluting or contaminating K-12 public school science education. I see no moves in that direction. Until that happens, the flames will continue, and will be contributed to by theistic evolutionists like me, who see religious antievolution as a threat to the integrity of both faith and science. It is way too soon to talk about ashes.

There’s a lot of philosophical discussion about what, precisely, constitutes a law or a theory in scientific practice. There’s also a lot of usage of the terms that has come to us over several centuries of not-quite-consistent application of terms.

What I’d like to offer here is not a scheme to try to make past usage fall out consistently; I think that is a task doomed to failure. Instead, I’d like to express a view of the various terms that makes sense to me and is how I have used the terms myself. Hopefully, others will also find it useful, even if only as a spur to discussion.

First, I’ll present a Venn diagram of how I broadly see things, and then add some comments.

I see a qualitative difference between facts and explanations. So the broad non-intersecting categories here are “Facts” on the left, and “Testable Explanations” on the right. I don’t want to go into the qualifier too much at this point, but essentially I see an explanation as delivering knowledge only if it can be tested and applies broadly, that is, inter-subjectively. That’s why I start with “Testable Explanations” rather than an unadorned “Explanations”. You can imagine a further inclusive superset of “Explanations” on the right if you wish, but I won’t spend any more time on that.

Within the realm of facts, one can notice consistent, persistent patterns or interrelationships that occur between facts or classes of facts. These are our “Laws”. One can test a law in the sense that one confirms that the proposed relationship is consistent and persistent. What one does not get from a law is an understanding of why the relationship occurs. Historically, people have received accolades for scientific work in discovering and publishing such patterns, though modern practice seems not to hold such work in good esteem.

When one turns to explanations, things quickly get more complex. “Hypothesis” as shorthand for “scientific hypothesis” is straightforward enough: it is a testable explanation of phenomena, whether or not the tests have occurred yet. But “Theory” is the difficult term to deal with, given that past usage has been so highly variable, confusing and conflating the term not only with hypothesis and the lay connotation of a “guess”, but also where “theory” has been applied to laws or law-like constructions.

It seems to me that when it comes to “theory” it makes more sense to try to make future usage better than to try to reformulate what has gone by in the past. We’d like the usage we settle upon to be broadly applicable to past usage. But we should not be afraid to simply abandon usage that cannot be made to fit a rational view of “theory”, though.

Part of what many people use to distinguish “theory” from “hypothesis” is the status of testing. For hypothesis, testing may not have happened yet. But for “theory” to apply, people generally want testing to have happened already. This seems clear enough to apply as a property of “theory”.

A more problematic property is extent. By that I mean that people will refer to a small-scale explanation as a hypothesis rather than as a theory. One runs into the heap paradox with this, since there is no bright-line rule for where explanations stop being “small” in extent, and thus should be referred to as hypotheses, and where they are “large”, and should be referred to as theories.

It seems to me that a better property to reserve for “theory” is that a theory should be productive, and by that I mean that by application of the theory, one should be able to generate further testable hypotheses.

So for myself, I use theory as a referent for a testable explanation that has been tested and is capable of generating further hypotheses (or has generated further hypotheses). That generally takes care of the problem of “extent” as well, since an explanation that is small in extent is less likely to be productive.

I think this sort of scheme is internally consistent and could be used in teaching, where it should minimize confusion for students. It explains why theories do not become laws (they are in separate categories of concepts) and why laws are more of a starting point for scientific inquiry than an end in themselves, since understanding why the relationships seen in laws happen requires explanation.

It is also why I’m not on board with the move to simply shift terminology around and refer to theories as laws. It seems to me that this is confusing and doesn’t help communication with the public. If we need to deploy different terminology, then make it really different. Where this whole issue of clarifying terms comes to application is in what to call evolutionary biology. At the level of some science organizations, there is a move afoot to simply refer to this as “evolutionary law” as a replacement for “evolutionary theory”, on the grounds (as I understand it) that the reality is closer to the public connotation for law than for the public connotation of theory (the “just a guess” thing). But it seems to me that this essentially is abandoning our responsibility to keep to accuracy if we simply capitulate to lay usage. Another possibility would be to use the insight that what distinguishes theory is that theories provide mechanisms by which things happen, and refer to things as “evolutionary mechanisms”. It at least doesn’t come laden with the baggage of past usage. But evolutionary biology incorporates knowledge that falls into the “facts” category and the “testable explanations” category (as noted by S.J. Gould), so I think a better alternative is simply to make it a broad term and refer to it as “evolutionary science”. This doesn’t permit the easy dismissal of “just a guess” and takes a step away from the whole law versus theory morass.

William Dembski’s No Free Lunch contains the following passage:

The presumption here is that if a subject S can figure out an independently given pattern to which E conforms (i.e., a detachable rejection region of probability less than alpha that includes E), then so could someone else. Indeed, the presumption is that someone else used that very same item of background knowledge — the one used by S to eliminate H — to bring about E in the first place.

[No Free Lunch, p. 75]

Because Dembski’s framework is based upon the elimination of alternative explanations, what we end up with here is the situation that Dembski is attributing the complement of the probability that can be assigned to chance hypotheses to an implicit design conjecture, the one that underlies a particular “specification”. When the “saturated” probability of the alternative is less than 1/2, Dembski says that we should prefer “design” as our causal explanation, and because we have this relationship between the specification and the putative causal story, we thus are adopting that particular causal conjecture.

Some might object that if one considers Dembski’s “Generic Chance Elimination Argument” (GCEA) to simply be in the class of statistical hypothesis tests where one may reject the null hypothesis, in this case Dembski’s definition of a “chance” hypothesis, that there is no indication that any other conjecture becomes accepted as a consequence. But Dembski’s body of argumentation excludes this interpretation, as he at every opportunity insists that having rejected “chance” hypotheses, one must thereby accept that “design” is the causal explanation for the event at issue. If we accept Dembski’s argument, it follows that we are accepting not just “design” in the abstract as a result of a successful design inference (should a non-trivial, non-fictional one ever be instantiated using the GCEA), but also the particular implicit design conjecture that underlies the “specification” used in application of Dembski’s GCEA to that event.

(Original at AntiEvolution.org)

John Lynch has a post critical of the Discovery Institute’s self-serving obfuscation over the phrase “intelligent design” and its history. Lynch makes a great number of cogent criticisms, but it seems to me that the manner in which the conversation goes may still work to the DI’s benefit. I left the following comment there:

The issue isn’t whether the design argument is ancient or even whether the phrase “intelligent design” had been used somewhere, sometime prior to 1987. The issue is that “intelligent design” was first offered as referring to a field of science suitable for instruction in public schools in drafts of the supplemental textbook “Of Pandas and People”. The use of “intelligent design” to mean an alleged field of scientific inquiry was definitely seen in the draft following the SCOTUS decision in Edwards v. Aguillard.

No IDC advocate has ever provided any earlier usage that showed the phrase “intelligent design” as meaning an alleged field of scientific inquiry. End of story.

Why does it matter what meaning is attached to “intelligent design”? Because the courts had already noted that science could not be excluded from classrooms to privilege sectarian religious views. The antievolution movement seized upon that as their ticket to inject their narrow sectarian views into public school classrooms by the strategem of re-labeling the ensemble of arguments as being science, the category of content already noted as approved by the courts. The first tests came when the label of “creation science” was scrutinized, and failed. The switch in label from “creation science” to “intelligent design” occurred in association with the failure of the earlier phrase. The overall strategy remained the same; all that changed was the label to be floated as if it constituted a scientific endeavor that students in public schools should be informed of.

Arguing about prior deployment of “intelligent design” as a descriptive phrase seems to me to be not pointed enough. The IDC advocates aim to sow confusion over this, and allowing them to get people arguing over descriptive uses allows them to make some progress in obfuscation. Every time they trot out the same old BS they should get a uniform reponse that they aren’t dealing with the real issue, that what “intelligent design” was supposed to mean changed significantly in 1987, and did so with the clear intent of permitting the antievolutionists to evade yet another inconvenient outcome in the courts.