Thanks for your gracious concession, but I’m still puzzled.
Why just concede after writing pages of argument? It still doesn’t explain your lack of interest in controls.
I think that it is all but certain that your hypothetical will never exist. I also explained that writing ANY book would be suicidal for ANY tenure-track assistant professor in the hard sciences unless she was getting multiple offers for tenured positions already.
It’s a fact that the contacts occurred. It’s also a legal determination that the school board’s purpose was entirely religious.
I don’t see that there’s anything to prove. The DI’s behavior was consistent with the Wedge Document.
Besides, wouldn’t some of their many writings about the decision have noted that they were advising the school board against what they did, if that was the advice?
(Italics mine)
I’m puzzled. Why did you answer a question about ID research with a reference to ID people?
Because the objections I have to the criteria employed for tenure in the Gonzalez case and other cases were incidental to my main argument. It was an indulgence on my part to allow myself to even comment on them. We all have to choose how much time to put into these discussions, and I can’t argue every possible angle on these topics at fullest length, or I would never get any of my real work done. I think that some of the criteria set forth for tenure here are bad criteria, and could defend that view, but I choose not to invest the time, so I conceded to your objections for the sake of argument. So you win on those points, so why complain?
As a philosopher I’m fully aware of the difference between a rigorous argument and a casual one. My point about Sagan was meant as a casual one. I make no claim that my argument about Sagan is any kind of proof of anything.
Nonetheless, I’m quite confident that what I said about Sagan is true, i.e., that in a hypothetical world, where both Sagan and Gonzalez were applying to the same department for tenure, where both had exactly the same qualifications (publications, telescope time, whatever you like), and both easily met all the normal tenure requirements for an astronomy/astrophysics position, Sagan’s popular book Cosmos would not be held against him by any of the faculty, whereas Gonzalez’s Privileged Planet would be held against him by at least some of the faculty. And the reason for the differential attitude would be the difference in the conclusions of the two books, Sagan’s conclusions being personally amenable to the predominantly atheist/agnostic/materialist faculty, and Gonzalez’s conclusions being repellent to them. Further, I believe that in such a hypothetical case, if Sagan got tenure and Gonzalez didn’t, the internet atheists would be active on blog sites, pointing out how Gonzalez let his personal religious biases affect his science, and therefore was rightly denied tenure, while remaining silent about how Sagan’s personal religious biases might affect his science. That’s the way all these debates have gone on the internet, for as long as there has been an internet. If you don’t agree with me that this is what would happen in my hypothetical case, that’s fine – I won’t invest time arguing with you about it. But I’m very confident that this is exactly what would happen.
There is no reason at all why the mere existence of a book should be held against a scientist if the scientist had handily met all normal criteria for tenure. If writing the book caused the scientist to run out of time to produce enough papers, supervise grad students, or do other things needed to meet the tenure criteria, that is one thing; but if the tenure criteria were met, then the writing of a book should be irrelevant.
What is the difference between a scientist spending 500 hours of his spare time over three years producing a book, and spending those 500 hours of his spare time participating in the life of a political party, or serving on the board of a charitable organization, or watching movies, or drinking beer, or playing war games at war games conventions? None of those uses of personal, private time would be held against the scientist, if the scientist otherwise met tenure requirements. So why should the use of personal, private time to produce a book, be objectionable? There is no good reason at all.
Don’t they teach you in science to avoid the basic logical fallacies? Post hoc, ergo propter hoc is a fallacy. You’ve not established any causality between the visit and the Dover action to mandate ID. You need to know what the DI lawyers advised Dover at the meeting. If you don’t have a transcript or tape of the meeting, you have no hard evidence for the connection you’re alleging.
Which no one contests. But it doesn’t follow that the DI advised Dover to mandate ID.
They noted this many times. I gather you have not spent much time reading material put out by the DI regarding the trial. You should spend some time on the Discovery site, using the search engine to find the various documents. You could also consult the book, Traipsing into Evolution, which discusses the Dover trial and its aftermath. It’s published by Discovery. Page 8 contains an absolutely clear dissociation of Discovery from the Dover Policy – dating back to before the trial was held.
Are you telling us that you have read every one of those 100 to 200 books and articles all the way through? If not, how can you make that blanket statement?
evograd:
Fair enough – I’ll take responsibility for introducing the term “conspiracy” into this discussion. But if you have followed these discussions for many years, you will understand why the term suggested itself to me. I’m far from the first one to use the term to describe the Discovery agenda. Another term used to characterize the DI agenda is “theocracy” – the DI has been alleged by some to be plotting a theocracy. Presumably people who make such charges think that the DI wants to force prayers back into the schools, reform criminal law and marriage law to conform to Christian beliefs, etc. It’s this background of paranoia regarding the DI that I had in mind. I don’t know how long you’ve been following these debates (“Graduate Student” suggests you could be as young as 22), but those of us who have been in them a long time have heard such allegations many times.
So we agree on one of the main points.
And I’m open to such a criticism of the DI or of school authorities, as long as specifics are included. For example, Daniel pointed out that the term “irreducible complexity” is found in the Kansas document. I agree that the use of this phrase blurs the distinction between teaching criticisms of Darwinism and teaching ID. However, I would still need to see how that phrase works out into actual course contents, before I could be sure what side of the border it fell onto.
I can make that statement with confidence because if any research actually did provide positive evidence for the Intelligent Design of biological life it would be one of the most important scientific discoveries in the history of human civilization. Since none of those papers even rated a ripple with any news sources or mainstream scientific journals I know it was just more smoke from the DI. Sadly the DI is well known for making ridiculous unsupported claims regarding scientific research. Anything even remotely connected with biology is fair game for the DI to claim it as ID evidence. If you told them “the sky is blue” they’d claim it supports ID.
– it would be disallowed, or explained away, by any of the usual tactics employed by the usual suspects: Coyne, Dawkins, P.Z. Myers, the NCSE, all the commenters on Panda’s Thumb, etc.
In any case, the list of publications I mentioned was not offered to convince you of ID conclusions. It was to convince you that ID people are producing peer-reviewed articles relevant to ID claims. Whether or not those articles are adequate to convince the majority if scientists is another matter entirely, and not one that I commented on.
LOL! Ah, the Evil Atheist Science Conspiracy created solely to deny ID its rightful place in the sun. 
You ID guys are so funny!
But no one has demonstrated their relevance. That’s the point. The DI claims anything and everything as “relevant” to ID when virtually none of the papers even mention ID. BTW the DI’s incestuous in-house publication “Bio-Complexity” is not considered a legitimate peer-reviewed scientific journal by the scientific community.
I have not been alleging any of those things. I just want the DI to keep out of the science curriculum. And this means that they should not be pushing “teach the controversy”.
If they want ID to be taught in schools, then the proper way is for ID people to do such fantastic science that they cannot be ignored.
Well that’s some bias right there. And I think bias is the topic for this thread.
Given that you have above tacitly admitted that you haven’t read them, how do you know this? Going on hearsay?
I didn’t say anything about the status of the journal. I was merely answering your question about the existence of ID research. That’s one of the places you can find it. And I mentioned other places.
Oh, no. The people I mentioned would have the same attitude toward anything that didn’t fit in with their materialist world view and their reductionist notion of scientific explanation, even if ID had never existed. ID is just the latest whipping boy for them. If they get bored with bashing ID, they will turn to bashing Scott Turner or anyone else who doesn’t hold to their narrow, constrictive vision of science, of life, and of reality.
What bias? My statement is based on 13 years or so of reading these guys’ book and articles, watching them debate on the internet, on the stage, etc. I’m characterizing their typical behavior quite accurately. My statement is soundly empirically based.
I already answered that above. Go back and read the answer again.
You claimed ID evidence was published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Bio-Complexity is not a legitimate peer-reviewed scientific journal.
Amazing. Not only are you skilled at repeating fact-free ID propaganda you’re also a mind reader. 
I know you haven’t. But if you follow these debates, you know that many have.
I would not push “teach the controversy”, either. I would push for the evolutionary unit to be moved up to a higher grade, so that evolution could be taught at a more sophisticated level, by students who have not only basic biology but more math, physics and chemistry under their belts. (This action would also have the social benefit of ending the pointless and wasteful debate over evolution in the schools, for reasons I’ve explained to Daniel elsewhere here.)
I would agree with this, in a world where epistemological fairness reigned, but given that some people in the debate (both atheist and TE/EC) have defined science so that it cannot in principle allow design inferences, to those people, the quality or amount of ID research wouldn’t matter at all. Every bit of ID research, when it came to clinching the argument, would draw inferences about life which such people would say aren’t “scientific” but “philosophical” and therefore could never be admitted into the science curriculum.
You spread you net very wide – too wide for the conclusion you drew.
I didn’t say it was. I used the word “peer-reviewed” only in connection with the list published on Discovery before BioComplexity even existed.
And your answer was inadequate even then, and even more inadequate in the light of the narrowed context of my new statement, where I am clearly asking you to justify your claim about the contents of the papers, and not about how far the scientific world is persuaded by them. The fact is, you are making content-judgments about papers and books you haven’t read. You don’t know whether or not the research in them is pertinent to ID, and can’t know, until you’ve read them.
It takes very little skill to read the minds of blatant atheist ideologues. Every thought and every motive shows through, like the bones in the body of someone emaciated by hunger.
OK – change it to many people at the NCSE, many commenters on Panda’s Thumb. The others I mentioned, were mentioned with complete justice, based on their past performance.
No, you didn’t . Anyone interested can read what you actually wrote above.
It is perfectly adequate for the scientific community. There is zero published scientific work with positive evidence for the intelligent design of biological life.
Not only a mind-reader, an angry and judgmental mind-reader.
Here is the first part of what I wrote:
You are unaware that the DI funds a research institute, which publishes its results in the journal BioComplexity ?
I say this in answer to your question whether any ID research is being done. Whether you like or agree with the conclusions of the research published in BioComplexity is immaterial to answering your question.
In addition, if you look on the Discovery website, you can find a list of peer-reviewed publications by ID people.
You can see from this that I separated the “BioComplexity” reference to the “list of peer-reviewed publication by ID people” reference. That was deliberate, lest we get into a wrangle about whether BioComplexity counts as peer-reviewed (which wrangle you started anyway).
However, I see now what confused you, because in the continuation of my remarks, I wrote:
In addition, if you look on the Discovery website, you can find a list of peer-reviewed publications by ID people. Not all of them are published in BioComplexity. Some of them are published in journals of biology, engineering, etc.
This blurred the distinction I had earlier made, since “not all of them” could be read to imply that the BioComplexity articles were peer-reviewed. What I should have written was:
In addition, if you look on the Discovery website, you can find a list of peer-reviewed publications by ID people. Discovery counts BioComplexity as a peer-reviewed journal, but even if you object to that classification, the list is still useful, since not all of the journal articles are published in BioComplexity. Some of them are published in journals of biology, engineering, etc.
I apologize for the lack of clarity. But you should see now that I wasn’t trying to slip anything by you.
Of course, BioComplexity is peer-reviewed in the sense that all the articles are reviewed by people with Ph.D.s in the relevant sciences. But some choose not to count it as peer-reviewed, because they think the peer review comes wholly from ID partisans. I’m not sure that’s wholly true – I think they do fly the articles by some external critics who can’t be presumed to agree with ID – but because there is doubt, I don’t make a fight over the issue.
It’s not perfectly adequate to show that you’ve read the articles you’re characterizing. And you have now twice tacitly admitted that you haven’t read them. Your guess about their contents is of no value in advancing anyone’s knowledge of them. Why not have the courage to say openly, “I have not read any of the articles or books on Discovery’s list, but I conjecture that they don’t really offer any research relevant to ID”? That would be an honest statement of your level of knowledge of the texts you are talking about.