Oh, oh. Someone famous must have gotten me mixed up with another Mike. And boy, does he look mad:

From: xxxxxx
Sent: Tuesday, February 21, 2006 8:00 AM
To: xxxxxxx
Cc: xxxxxxx
Subject: Go To Hell

Sir,

I now understand why your name is ruse. It is now impossible for you to extricate yourself from the forces of darkness since you have aligned yourself with Satan himself. According to the evolutionary community that I am in touch with (the only ones that matter), the ground has finally given way under your feet and you have fallen straight into the Pits of Hell. I am no longer interested in what you have to say. You have betrayed the Cause and fallen under the spell. Or might it be that you have been a closet Darwin dreader all along? Those in touch have been wondering.

Enjoy your new demonic friends, as there is no longer any room for you in Our Kingdom. We'll be watching.

Signed,
xxxxxxxx

A little more than a year ago, one of the writers at the anti-ID blog The Panda's Thumb attacked Michael Ruse for having "collaborated with evolution deniers". Ruse is an agnostic philosopher who describes himself as a "hard-line Darwinian", but had made the mistake of co-editing a book on intelligent design with William Dembski, a known ID supporter. The critic, a physicist named Matt Young, compared ID supporters with Holocaust deniers, and thought that Ruse the collaborator had added legitimacy to their arguments.

Now, Ruse is catching some flak again, this time from fellow philosopher Daniel Dennett. Dennett doesn't specify his cause of concern, but one could guess that it's Ruse's recent book, The Evolution-Creation Struggle, in which he claims that some (including Dennett) are using the scientific theory of evolution as a cover for an atheistic theology. In an e-mail to Ruse, Dennett writes:

I'm afraid you are being enlisted on the side of the forces of darkness. You may want to try to extricate yourself, since you are certainly losing ground fast in the evolutionary community that I am in touch with. As you will see, I do lump your coinage in with "˜reductionism" and "scientism" etc. and think you are doing a disservice to the cause of taking science seriously.

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That's the claim. It's news to me though. I've stated before that I don't really like the analogy between machines and biological creatures (for philosophical reasons), so what I'm about to write really has nothing to do with whether the analogy is good or not. All I'm wondering is how anybody could say that machines don't "adapt to variability in their environment." He's obviously never used a thermostat.

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Categorization seems to be an important cognitive mechanism. It enables us to deal with the complexities of life by putting things in buckets that represent what Wittgenstein called "family resemblances". Family resemblances have properties (albeit blurry) that provide a ready made way to relate to new cognitive input. Wittgenstein's family resemblances were, however, not isolationist. He recognized that they can overlap and interact with each other. [This has been confirmed by neuroscience explorations of neural networks] On the other hand, there also seems to be a human inclination to go beyond a family resemblance type of categorization to a more stark form, demarcation. Demarcation(from the dictionary): 1. The setting or marking of boundaries or limits. 2. A separation; a distinction: a line of demarcation between two rock strata. It's not hard to find examples of this: mind/body, science/non-science, science/religion, objective/subjective, synthetic/analytic, fact/value, theory/implications, etc.

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The Venerable Bede notes, "an ideology that seeks to prevent scientists from doing their work is a bad thing. If that ideology backs up its claims with violence and intimidation, it is a very bad thing. In fact, here in the UK it is the biggest threat to science. Is it creationism? Of course not. Who has ever heard of creationists engaging in arson, grave robbery and assault. Most of them wouldn't say boo to a goose. Which is odd, because if you listen to the rhetoric of Dawkins, Grayling and their ilk, you might think that creationists are a serious obstacle to science."

It is instructive to watch this growing threat emerge at Richard Dawkins' University.

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I know, I know; I've previously suggested that the ancestors of slime molds were front-loaded for multicellular life. But this was nothing like what I had in mind. A group of scientists from the UK and Japan have made the rather spidery-looking robot on the left and connected it to a slime mold, letting the single-celled organism control the movements of the robot. The slime mold isn't placed in the robot itself, which means there's no danger that the cyborg will escape and wreck havoc on nearby villages. Slime molds avoid light, and a number of sensors on top of the robot corresponds to lamps directed at the organism. When the slime mold moves to avoid the light, its movements trigger the legs of the robot to move, thus making machine and cell move in sync.

Originally, this caught my attention because of my aforementioned interest in slime molds. But after reading it, I realized that it was also a good example of biology meeting engineering. Making a robot that can move around a varied terrain is harder than most people realize - the next time you walk up the stairs, try noticing the number of muscles you have to use; lift leg, bend knee, flex foot, shift weight, etc. and imagine that you had to tell a robot all of those things you take for granted. But organisms manage to move around easily, and scientists hope that by transferring the movements of lifeforms to robots, they can one day teach the robot to move its legs without an organism to holds its hand.

(HT: Fresh Wallaby Juice)

In his article, The God Genome, Leon Wieseltier takes Daniel Dennett to task for preferring therapy to rational analysis. The following quote applies equally well to ID critics like Barbara Forrest who have decided to replace rational discussion with the genetic fallacy:

You cannot disprove a belief unless you disprove its content. If you believe that you can disprove it any other way, by describing its origins or by describing its consequences, then you do not believe in reason.

This Friday, ID supporter Paul Nelson quoted some snippets from a recent article by developmental biologist Eric Davidson and paleontologist Douglas Erwin about the origin of body plans. On his blog, Deinonychus antirrhopus, Steve Verdon was quick to accuse him of quote-mining, concluding, "Bottom line, you can't trust these guys to give you an accurate picture of whatever they are talking about."

In this regards, he seems to have borrowed a leaf from Wesley's Wedge, according to which you should "make the audience understand that if the ID advocate claims that the sky is blue, their next step had better be to look out the window to see for themselves." But let's leave that for the moment and instead look at some of Steve Verdon's charges:

Only a dishonest or superficial reading the paper would lead one to believe that ID played any role in the process. Further, the claim that neo-Darwinism doesn't work for the pre-Cambrian is also suspect. Maybe it is correct, but that wasn't the focus of Davidson and Erwin's article. Further, while the process that Davidson and Erwin had in mind for the development of the kernels and other biological components may not be neo-Darwinian it certainly isn't some supernatural designer.

I have yet to read Davidson and Erwin's article, so I can't speak to Steve Verdon's characterization of what their focus was. But notice this charge: "[W]hile the process that Davidson and Erwin had in mind for the development of the kernels and other biological components may not be neo-Darwinian it certainly isn't some supernatural designer."

Here's a little challenge for the reader: Use your browser's search function to search for the phrase "supernatural designer" in Paul Nelson's post. You'll probably find, as I did, that the phrase is nowhere to be found: Nelson did not claim that Davidson and Eric were proposing a supernatural designer to account for the origin of body plans.

So, considering that Steve Verdon has just been caught misrepresenting someone else's words, does that mean that he shouldn't be trusted to give an accurate picture of whatever else he is talking about?

Update: Paul Nelson has responded himself here.

We are living in the post-wedge world, in which concerns about the Coming Theocracy can no longer be used as a reason to oppose intelligent design. A recent report in the journal Science may illustrate another ID critic slogan crumble. Elizabeth Culotta asks the question, "Is ID on the Way Out?" (registration required), mentioning the "philosophy of design" course that Frazier Mountain High School wisely decided to cancel. Next, she quotes some predictions about the future of intelligent design:

For some observers, the board's swift capitulation was further proof that the ID movement has crested. Although the specifics of the cases were different, "the very decisive win in Dover meant [the California board] knew they had no chance of winning this," says philosopher of science Robert Pennock of Michigan State University, East Lansing, an expert witness in Dover. "ID is on its way out," agrees evolutionary biologist Joel Cracraft of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, who has been active in defending evolution. "[Creationists] will be avoiding that term." [My emphases]

We can consider this as a prediction of the belief, held by many ID critics, that intelligent design is nothing but a Trojan horse to get creationism into classrooms. If this thesis is correct, we should expect proponents of intelligent design to abandon the term, as the horse has been denied access at the town gate.

However, here's a radical thought: Maybe those who are interested in intelligent design are a diverse bunch, and although some probably did see it as a way to get creationism into classrooms, others find the concept itself intriguing, trying to divorce it from religious and socio-political issues. Fortunately, this thesis also leads to a prediction: Those who are genuinely interested in intelligent design will continue to use the term when spouting off on blogs or pursuing the ideas in private.

Thanks to the post-wedge world, we will soon see how those predictions pan out.

Given that Darwin Day has its origin in an Atheist Movement that is engaged in a "culture war," would that mean anyone who participated in the celebration was likewise an Atheist with an agenda? Of course not. Since Darwin Day is presented as a time to celebrate science and humanity, it stands to reason that many may come to this event in just that spirit. That is, even though some people may be working behind the closed doors to use Darwin Day as an evangelistic tool for atheism doesn't mean that everyone who participates knows of the agenda or agrees with the agenda.

But what if we were to adopt the rhetorical posture that the critics of ID have been using for many years?

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