Please explain why PZ Myers’s opinion would lead me to disallow or explain away anything.
Please cite 5 specific ones that you have personally determined are relevant to ID claims.
What happened to ID theories or ID hypotheses?
Please post a list of the DI published papers you say have positive evidence for the intelligent design of biological life and summarize what that positive evidence is. What the DI calls “relevant” to ID is worthless rhetoric.
ETA: I have read some of the more controversial papers on the DI’s list - the Meyer retracted stinker Sternberg sneaked into publication for example. I freely admit I have not read all of them for the same reason I don’t read papers on a flat earth. Let the DI demonstrate it has more than empty blustering propaganda first and I’ll spend time on them.
That would be like saying, “We don’t know whether or not life could have originated without leprechauns”.
You will suspect prejudice no matter what. That’s the problem. That is poisoning the well.
It isn’t understandable. What do you even mean by “Darwinian”? What would be a non-Darwinian mechanism within evolution?
All of them are “relevant to” ID claims. Not all of them are direct arguments for intelligent design in nature, but they are all relevant to the subject. So there is no need for me to select any particular number.
I think you do not know the general background to this sort of discussion. Since I’ve been involved in these discussions for years, perhaps I can help fill in that background.
Originally, foes of ID complained that ID people had not a single peer-reviewed paper; this was used to show that ID did not count as science, or was bad science, or whatever.
Then, Stephen Meyer published a paper justifying ID in methodological terms, in a journal connected with the Smithsonian. Immediately there were attempts to discount the paper, since its existence falsified the previous claim about ID’s failure to crack into the peer-reviewed area. The two main lines of argument used were:
(a) The journal was a minor journal, not a major one;
(b) The acceptance of the article is suspicious, so we had better investigate the personal religious beliefs of that editor Sternberg – he might be a creationist with religious prejudice in favor of design.
Of course, approach (a) was moving the goalposts. Nothing had originally been said about major vs. minor journals, and the changing of goalposts was therefore a dishonest form of argument.
As for approach (b), it utterly failed, and embarrassed those who took it. The NCSE was firing e-mails and letters around, trying to “dig up religious dirt” on Sternberg and otherwise agitate against him behind the scenes. (Dissenters from Darwinism – or even editors who publish an article by a dissenter from Darwinism – must be professionally punished.) But Sternberg came up clean – he was a Catholic, and not a creationist at all. In the end, a congressional committee actually investigated the retaliations against him, and issued some censures for those responsible. The case is well-publicized, and you can read about it on Sternberg’s website, among other places.
This pattern of arguing “that one doesn’t count” has continued ever since, with a number of variations.
The usual argument against the books and articles on Discovery’s list is: “OK, OK, we grant that some people who are ID proponents have published peer-reviewed stuff, but that stuff is merely arguments against Darwinian evolution, not arguments for intelligent design.” So again, the goalpost is subtly moved.
Yes, it’s true that many of the arguments are more focused on what’s wrong with current evolutionary theory than with arguing directly for design, but not all of them are; and in any case, Darwin himself explicitly set forth his theory as an alternative to design; the contrast runs all through The Origin of Species. So refuting Darwin’s own refutations of design is surely “relevant to” the question of intelligent design in nature, even if no direct arguments are made.
There’s the background. But the specific argument is here is much narrower. Tim Horton here has made the claim that the ID papers, while peer-reviewed, “aren’t relevant to” ID claims. I asked him how he knew that. I asked him if he had read any of them. He replied that he didn’t need to read any of them, but could infer that there was nothing in them relevant to ID claims, based on the general response of other scientists, not even to those papers specifically, but to ID in general. I pointed out to him that this was not a reliable way of determining what was in the papers. He remained adamant that he didn’t need to read any of them to draw his conclusion. So the dispute here between myself and Tim is over whether it is proper to characterize the content of papers one has not read.
That is all my dispute with Tim is about. It’s not about whether ID is a good theory. It’s not about whether other scientists find ID convincing. It’s not about whether the papers listed on Discovery argue directly for design in nature, as opposed to being merely relevant to the question of design in nature. The argument is about whether it’s right for a scientist (or anyone) to claim to know what is in a paper that he hasn’t read. I say that it’s not right, and further that it’s shoddy, unacceptable academic practice. Maybe Tim Horton isn’t an academic, so maybe he doesn’t know this. But real academics know it.
At least, all academics on the Arts side of campus know it. But I’m constantly told I don’t understand how Science works at the university, so maybe it’s different there. Maybe in science it’s academically acceptable to bluff about papers you haven’t read. If so, so much the worse for science. But somehow I don’t think so. I think the problem is not with academic science, but with the behavior of some scientists, particularly those who post on the internet about origins issues. They seem prone to bluffing, to talking about papers and books they haven’t read, to dismissing authors and views based on hearsay and rumor. I challenge these scientists whenever they do that, and they don’t like me for doing so. Well, too bad. I intend to keep doing it. I’ll try always to do it politely, but I won’t stop doing it.
If you want to reply further on this topic, please limit you remarks to the question whether it is right to characterize the contents of writings that one has not read. I won’t respond to attempts to get me to justify or defend ID, because that is not what the dispute is about. The dispute is about intellectual and academic procedure, about legitimate and illegitimate methods of debating.
And you’ll deny prejudice no matter what. You won’t even admit to the empirical facts I pointed out from the Gonzalez case. You close your eyes to them, pretend they don’t exist. Daniel, on the other hand, admits there was some prejudice operating on the Iowa State campus. Again, I never asked to you to concede that the prejudice determined the outcome. I only asked you to concede that the prejudice was there. Since you won’t do that, you clearly don’t respect empirical evidence, and there is no point in continuing the discussion with you. But you have the same disrespect for empirical evidence in your science as you do in discussing the Gonzalez case, I would not bet any money on any of your scientific conclusions.
Yet you can’t show or explain how any of them are relevant, just regurgitate the usual DI empty propaganda. Not very impressive to say the least.
Have you read every paper and web article claiming evidence for a flat Earth? No? Then how do you know the flat Earth position has no evidence? You wouldn’t be a big hypocrite now would you?
Just curious - are you being paid by the DI to defend their pretend attempts to do ID supporting science?
This is either a lie, or a repetition of the lies of others, based on hearsay. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and say it’s the latter. Sternberg did not sneak the article into publication. He put it out to peer-reviewers in the normal fashion. They responded with criticisms, indicating that the article was publishable if the criticisms were met. Meyer rewrote parts of the paper to meet the criticisms. Sternberg then published the article. This is normal procedure. I know because I’ve peer-reviewed articles myself.
You should check your facts before you make accusations about people’s motives or behavior. But given that you have already indicated that you are willing to guess what’s in a paper without reading it, it’s not at all surprising that you would make an accusation about the Sternberg case without doing research, and listening to all the sides of the story to make sure to get a balanced account.
No it’s not a lie. Biological Society of Washington retracted the paper because of irregularities in the peer review process and never should have been published in the first place i.e Sternberg snuck the paper in. You can repeat the DI’s lies all you want but the paper is still retracted garbage.
I already answered that question when someone else asked it. The answer is no. I’m just someone who doesn’t like it when people level unfair accusations, or fake knowledge they don’t have, or literature-bluff about articles they haven’t read. Are you being paid by the NCSE to attack ID?
Then you’re not conceding my points about the tenure process at all, are you?
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I’m still waiting for your list of DI papers providing positive evidence for the intelligent design of biological life. Seems just like the DI, empty rhetoric is all you have. 
This question shows that you haven’t grasped my point at all. My point is about the personal attitudes of scientists, not about their external conformity to formal rules. Of course all justifications for the way people argue and vote in tenure decisions will be phrased in terms of objective criteria. No one will directly suggest altering the standards in individual cases, which would obviously indicate bias. But there is always an element of subjective judgment even within the normal procedures. Yes, the articles published are enough in number, but are they good enough in quality? That’s a subjective judgment. And professors vote partly on such subjective judgments. I’ve sat in departmental meetings and on departmental committees; I know this. You are pretending that scientists never under any circumstance let their personal biases come into any of their professional activity, whether hiring decisions, tenure decisions, etc. You are pretending that they are such paragons of virtue that they would never succumb to the normal political motives that people succumb to in every other walk of life. If you really believe that, you have an incredibly naive view of human nature, and zero knowledge of real-life academics.
Citing of possible prejudice is exactly what is being used by organizations like the Discovery Institute to avoid discussions of the empirical evidence.
Do scientists accept all of the beliefs held by their other fellow scientists? Of course not. Does this mean that scientists can’t judge the scientific merit of the work done by other scientists? Of course not. Unless you can show that prejudice does play a part, why bring it up?
Does this apply to unfair accusations made by the Discovery Institute?
It’s the same sour grapes excuse used by virtually all ID-Creationist groups. Those mean old scientists will just unfairly reject our results anyway so we won’t bother to publish them. Still the ID-Creationists wonder why they get laughed at then ignored.
It applies to all unfair accusations. But since there is no danger on this site of people failing to point out any fault with the Discovery Institute, I concentrate on the unfair accusations coming from others. You are welcome to point out any unfairness coming from Discovery.
You main, the way you have avoided discussion of the empirical evidence of prejudice against Gonzalez at Iowa State?
You must have missed this part:
“Do scientists accept all of the beliefs held by their other fellow scientists? Of course not.”
I never said they couldn’t. I just stressed a well-known fact of human nature, i.e., that when put in the position of being able to hire one’s own peers, one tends to choose a peer whose views and attitudes are more congenial to one’s own, over one whose views and attitudes rub one the wrong way.
Let’s take a simpler case than that of tenure, a case of initial hiring. Two candidates apply to your department for tenure-track job. Both have equal academic merit, by all the normal criteria, as far as you can tell. They both have pleasant personalities, as far as you can tell from the interview. You’d be happy to have either one as a lifelong colleague, and you’d hate to disappoint either of these meritorious candidates. You can’t decide which one you should vote for. Then you find out that one of them endorses intelligent design. You couldn’t tell this from any of his peer-reviewed work, it wasn’t discussed in the interview by anyone, and you are surprised by the news. Are you saying that this would not lower your estimation of this person’s scientific competence, not even a little bit? Are you saying you wouldn’t feel an inclination not to vote for this person? Please confine your answer to this hypothetical case, and don’t try to connect it with the Gonzalez case, because I am not trying to vindicate Gonzalez with the example, but merely trying to establish a point of principle. Will you answer without evasion?
Do you have any sort of point? Your logic seems to be “because some people can sometimes be unfairly biased that means all people at all times are unfairly biased”. Again not very impressive reasoning.