Since Nick Matzke has been back with his "ID=Creationism" talking point, I thought I would offer some one-stop shopping for those interested in this ID = Creationism meme. So bookmark this blog for future reference. After all, it's free.

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While discussing Intelligent Design in the peer-reviewed literature, Elliott Sober offers the following analysis:

Young Earth Creationism denied that human beings share common ancestors with other species while affirming that God was the designer of organisms and that life on earth is at most 10,000 years old. ID, at least when stated in a minimalistic form, is officially neutral on these three claims (Behe 1996, 2005). The single thesis of what I will call mini-ID is that the complex adaptations that organisms display (e.g., the vertebrate eye) were crafted by an intelligent designer"¦"¦ they often affirm that the intelligent designer they have in mind is supernatural ( Johnson 1991; Dembski 2002),and most deny common ancestry (Davis and Kenyon 1993; Dembski 1999). Why, then, do proponents of ID think that mini-ID is so important? After all, it leaves out so much. One reason is that versions of creationism that mention a supernatural being have a Constitutional problem"”U.S. courts have deemed them religious, and so they are not permitted in public school science curricula. ID proponents hope that mini-ID can avoid this objection. In addition, mini-ID has the advantage of expressing an idea to which all creationists subscribe; it thus presents a united front, allowing the factions to stop squabbling and to face their common enemy.

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This new book, Biological Emergences: Evolution by Natural Experiment, looks interesting:

Natural selection is commonly interpreted as the fundamental mechanism of evolution. Questions about how selection theory can claim to be the all-sufficient explanation of evolution often go unanswered by today's neo-Darwinists, perhaps for fear that any criticism of the evolutionary paradigm will encourage creationists and proponents of intelligent design.

In Biological Emergences, Robert Reid argues that natural selection is not the cause of evolution. He writes that the causes of variations, which he refers to as natural experiments, are independent of natural selection; indeed, he suggests, natural selection may get in the way of evolution. Reid proposes an alternative theory to explain how emergent novelties are generated and under what conditions they can overcome the resistance of natural selection. He suggests that what causes innovative variation causes evolution, and that these phenomena are environmental as well as organismal.

After an extended critique of selectionism, Reid constructs an emergence theory of evolution, first examining the evidence in three causal arenas of emergent evolution: symbiosis/association, evolutionary physiology/behavior, and developmental evolution. Based on this evidence of causation, he proposes some working hypotheses, examining mechanisms and processes common to all three arenas, and arrives at a theoretical framework that accounts for generative mechanisms and emergent qualities. Without selectionism, Reid argues, evolutionary innovation can more easily be integrated into a general thesis. Finally, Reid proposes a biological synthesis of rapid emergent evolutionary phases and the prolonged, dynamically stable, non-evolutionary phases imposed by natural selection.

Robert G. B. Reid is Emeritus Professor of Biology at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. He is the author of Evolutionary Theory: The Unfinished Synthesis.

Two standard criticisms of Intelligent Design are a) that ID is untestable and unfalsifiable and b) that various imperfections in nature argue against ID. What is interesting is how the two criticisms oppose each other, where ID is both unfalsifiable and falsified.

In the recent issue of The Quarterly Review of Biology, Elliott Sober, a philosopher from the University of Wisconsin, points out the problems with these criticisms of ID and seeks to replace them with a new and improved version of ID criticism:

This leads Sober to jettison the concept of falsifiability and to provide a different account of testability. "If ID is to be tested," he says, "it must be tested against one or more competing hypotheses." If the ID claim about the vertebrate eye is to be tested against the hypothesis that the vertebrate eye evolved by Darwinian processes, the question is whether there is an observation that can discriminate between the two. The observation that vertebrates have eyes cannot do this.

Sober also points out that criticism of a competing theory, such as evolution, is not in-and-of-itself a test of ID. Proponents of ID must construct a theory that makes its own predictions in order for the theory to be testable. To contend that evolutionary processes cannot produce "irreducibly complex" adaptations merely changes the subject, Sober argues.

Sober comes close to the target.

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Evidence of clever birds just keep popping up. A report in the journal Nature shows that scrub-jays can plan for the future, storing food types in places where they know it will not be available the next day. From news@nature:

The birds were put in cages that were divided into three parts. In the evening they were kept in the middle section, and fed powdered pine nuts that they couldn't store. In the morning, they were kept either in the 'breakfast room', where they were given food, or went hungry in the 'no-breakfast room'.

After getting used to this set-up, the jays were given whole pine nuts in the evening, which they could bury in trays of sand. The jays put three times as many in the no-breakfast room than in the breakfast room, so that they wouldn't go hungry in the morning.

In another experiment, the jays got breakfast in both rooms. However, their breakfast comprised whole peanuts in one room, and dried dog food in the other. When given both foods in the evening, the birds stored each food in the room where it would be lacking the next morning.

These results have great implications for the way we see the intelligence of birds:

No other animals outside humans have been shown able to plan actions based on how they will feel in the future, says [researcher Nicola] Clayton. "The jays constantly surprise me," she says. "They keep doing all these clever things." …

Others agree that the cognitive abilities of birds may be under-rated. "It's not a surprise to me," says Thomas Zentall of the University of Kentucky in Lexington, who studies cognition in animals. "There's been a bias against birds because they have small brains."

The bias is misplaced, he argues. Many birds lead intellectually demanding lives - finding and processing different types of food, remembering where they hid food and keeping track of their neighbours. And, Clayton points out, scrub-jays actually have relatively large brains: "Their brains are bigger than chimps, relative to their body size."

In the comments section of a previous blog, Bilbo begins fleshing out his classification of ID proponents. The NCSE's Nick Matzke then replies. In his reply, Nick floats several propagandistic memes that deserve closer attention.

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Night Tornado Sedalia Missouri Mar4

Coming up with the title for The Design Matrix was not easy. Several other titles almost made it, but ultimately didn't make the cut:

A MILLION IDIOTS CAN'T BE WRONG

What is science today may not be science tomorrow, and vice versa. The boundries of what can be considered science change, as this account C.F. von Weizsäcker gave of a conversation he had in 1938 with Nobel-prize-winning physical chemist Walther Nernst about calculating the age of the universe:

[Nernst] said, the view that there might be an age of the universe was not science. At first I did not understand him. He explained that the infinite duration of time was a basic element of all scientific thought, and to deny this would mean to betray the very foundations of science. I was quite surprised by this idea and I ventured the objection that it was scientific to form hypotheses according to the hints given by experience, and that the idea of an age of the universe was such a hypothesis. He retorted that we could not form a scientific hypothesis which contradicted the very foundations of science. He was just angry, and thus the discussion, which was continued in his private library, could not lead to any result.
From Neil A. Manson, "Introduction to God and Design" (PDF)