A Year In Intelligent Design

Here's the flagship journal of the wonderful new science of intelligent design. When it was launched in 2010 the Discovery Institute described it as "set to accelerate the pace and heighten the tone of the debate over intelligent design". In 2017 they've managed to produce two articles. Hooray! What a dizzyingly accelerated pace!2018 will mark the twentieth anniversary of the Wedge Document. Here are their twenty-year goals: Good luck with that, boys.

Thread copied here from the A Year In Intelligent Design thread in the Proposed New Topics forum.

Seems puzzling why they care so much that intelligent design should be the dominant perspective in science. Unless...they have an agenda!

I don't think they understand their own agenda. Achieving it would put us back to the Stone Age.

That is their ideal scenario, everyone as dumb as rocks and a few smartasses running the show because magic men in the sky told them they should.

For a long time now we have been told by ID/creationists how they have been persecuted and prevented from publishing their research in scientific journals.Now they have a journal that will publish damn near anything they want to, and millions of dollars at the Discovery Institute to fund research. What do we get? Bupkus.On the best of days, all they are capable of doing is falsely criticizing the scientific work done by others.

Indeed. They have their own journals and publish nill.
However, I'd like to point out that Dembskis thesis was approved through the normal route, and that's probably the best they've done. Dembski's work, as far as I can tell from the peer review has been torn apart from every angle, and largely criticised by his own peers as obfuscatory.

Welcome home. Pull up a stump and set a spell.

Indeed I shall. I've been lurking for a little bit now, I like what I see. It's a definite improvement from the conversation I see elsewhere.

I have read that there may have been some shenanigans behind the publication of The Design Inference. I have read it and on that ground alone I think there is some plausibility to the allegation.Certainly it fails to elucidate how we actually recognise design, focussing instead on a method that is impractical - and, as Dembski has since admitted, flawed.

Welcome to the fray A Certain Cyborg, Things are a little slow these days, not much competition. What I like about this site is the opportunity to learn new things.Where else have you been posting?Enjoy If you use the message reply buttons (there's one at the bottom right of each message):

Shenanigans? Interesting. I think I'll have to leave my interest in that on the back burner for now; the sudden shift from 'creation science' to 'intelligent design' rings a bell; especially in regards to the textbook subpoena in Kitzmiller v. Dover.

Prepended: this next bit is a sort of position statement. Sorry.
I haven't read The Design Inference, but I have printed out several pages of his seminal thesis (upon which the book and his subsequent writing about Complex, Specified Information is based) for reference. When I first started reading the arguments from the Intelligent Design community I was immediately interested in their claim (based on Dembskis claim) that it is being used in Forensic Science and Archaeology.
It was a short order for me to cook up an argument probing my interlocutors as to exactly how the Design Inference would differentiate between four scenarios. Needless to say, they merely told me I should read the Design Inference (a seeming tacit admission that they haven't read it, or at least haven't understood it).
Taking their bait, that's how I came to accessing Dembskis thesis (my library didn't have a copy of The Design Inference, but did have a copy of The Design Revolution which I was unimpressed by, to say the least). I've tried my best to comprehend it, but as I mentioned even Dembskis academic peers have criticized his writing for being misleading or hard to comprehend (and not because it's a difficult topic).
Suffice it to say, those actually involved in Forensics and Archaeology aren't impressed. See: Chapter 8, written by Gary S. Hurd in 'Why Intelligent Design Fails'.

quote:

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...focussing instead on a method that is impractical - and, as Dembski has since admitted, flawed.

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I'm being tangential, pardon me.
How do you mean impractical? I've been reading the peer review and it's quite negative, but are you alluding to how the Design Inference (the Explanatory Filter) doesn't positively indicate design, but negates the (purportedly) only other explanations?
I'm also interested to read Dembskis admission, if you could find it. I have noticed though that he shifts his explanations from the Design Inference in earlier work to the Explanatory Filter in later work, and uses different diagrams, flow-charts, etc. each of which are slightly different iterations of the same concept.Addendum Sorry for the roundabout, merry-go-round of a reply. I do intend to collate my ideas and criticisms of Intelligent Design in the future. This is a late-night reply so it's off the cuff.

Facebook; I lurk and comment in several 'debate' groups. There are some quality commentators (on both sides) that I enjoy reading and replying to. If it's a little slow, I might be able to convince some of them to at least happen by here if not participate.
Indeed, I see a lot of quality content here. The reference library, and platform itself are more conducive to learning from each other, especially compared to Facebook. I've learned a lot in my discussions there, but there's a need not met by the platform itself; formatting is a godsend.

To quickly explain, Dembski’s method is impractical because eliminating the alternative explanations is usually not feasible. It will work in trivial cases where the explanations are easily listed and the probabilities can be calculated without too much work. But really, is there any non-trivial case where that actually applies ?That’s why pretty much nobody bothers to use Dembski’s method. To the best of my knowledge even Dembski hasn’t managed to apply it to biology. At one point, I recall, he was using the dodge that if the probabilities couldn’t be calculated the explanation should be discarded anyway. Hardly rigorous mathematics!

Thanks. When I was reading Ch. 8; Forensics & Archaeology the argument was that most of the actual work was being done with side knowledge, and not the actual issue. In biology this is particularly important. How do we know there is a specified pattern in the genome, or the epigenome (as ID proponents seem to be fixating on now)? Any pattern we see we are more than likely applying ourselves, after the fact. So much for not painting the bull's-eyes where the arrows land, right?Edited by A Certain Cyborg, : Autocorrect error.