Wow! I agree with Roy twice in one day? Surely the Second Coming is near.
Whoops! Three times now!
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I’m fairly certain that this is not how it works for expert witnesses (having worked for one in a couple of court cases).
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How would they even know Minnich’s or Dembski’s name except through the DI (unlike Behe they weren’t involved in Pandas)?
I did produce one such text, above, which Tim has now acknowledged, and, it seems, maybe Puck as well. If the system here would automatically number the posts, I could direct you to it more easily, but it’s now about 20 posts up.
It may have started out independent, but it became more and more closely associated with the DI over time. At some point it would not be unreasonable to call it the DI’s de facto publishing arm.
Indeed not. To offer expert testimony you’ve got to retain the expert, and the potential expert can always decline. You can’t circumvent this by subpoenaing them like fact witnesses, because your opponent is entitled to an expert report prior to trial as part of discovery.
That is what was said on the public record, but experience teaches us that any advocacy group tends to move the goal posts. Social and political influence is timing and the art of the possible. The best strategy to achieve long term objectives is to publicly foreswear what is immediately unobtainable, and prepare the climate for a more receptive moment. Do we choose to be naïve or cynical with regard to such pronouncements- who knows? That might depend on whether the Discovery Institute is best characterized as a research group or as an advocacy group, and I lean to the latter.
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Whatever the case, DI didn’t own the witnesses. They went straight to Behe, and did not have to consult DI about the request to him.
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No, but DI was on board, enthusiastically supporting the Dover Area School Board’s desire to force creationism down children’s throats. And it wasn’t just the isolated acts of various DI fellows. The affidavit of Leonard Brown, filed in the court as an exhibit to a motion to intervene, states that he was “retained by the Discovery Institute to serve as its counsel” with regard to the litigation and that DI and a number of DI fellows had requested his firm’s representation at depositions.
By the way, I had thought there was another DI fellow expert, and there was: John Campbell. FIVE fellows, all signed on as experts. That’s an extraordinary level of commitment to the cause of damaging the science education of children. The notion that they didn’t think forcing these beliefs on children was advisable is just historically inaccurate: they were gung-ho.
Now, it will always be a bit of a mystery why they backed out. The reason given – refusal to allow them to have their own counsel at depositions – is so bizarre, and so out of accord with ordinary practice, that it smells pretextual. Did they smell defeat coming? Did they want plausible (albeit not terribly plausible) deniability over having been on board? Had they just blundered into this position without really thinking about what they were doing? It’s hard to work out, and the fact that their own statements aren’t particularly consistent and don’t make a great deal of sense doesn’t help. For some reason, the signal was given to abandon ship, and Behe, perhaps out of a stronger sense of honor and duty, went down with the ship instead.
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Please don’t expect the average participant here at Peaceful Science to think this NEW Discovery program changes anything in terms of what is being proposed for the public schools:
“But in the last decade a new approach to teaching about evolution has been developed to meet the test of good science and satisfy the courts’ standards of constitutionality. This new approach uses the phrase “teach the controversy.” The idea is to use scientific disagreements over evolution to help students learn more about evolution, and about how science deals with controversy. According to this approach, students should learn the scientific case for evolution, but in doing so they should study the scientific criticisms of various aspects of evolutionary theory.” [June 20, 2006]
“Teaching the controversy” is pretty much “word magic” for:
"Don’t say you are teaching Intelligent Design … say you are teaching why Christians criticize evolutionary theory!"
Here’s the Wiki article on the topic:
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I haven’t advocated such an approach. I wasn’t talking about such an approach. I merely reported that ID’s position before the Dover trial was that ID should not be mandated in the schools. This has been confirmed by things I posted today. Even Tim now grants it. And even Roy, who is normally hostile to anything I write, grants it. That should settle the point of fact. Whether everything about Discovery’s approach to education is good – that is not a question I here answered or even addressed.
As for what Wikipedia has to say about it, in your boxed quotation, pretty much everything on Wikipedia related to the origins conflict, ID, etc., is intellectual excrement, filled with lies and distortions written by hardened partisans. It’s not a reliable source on the subject. Even the founder of Wikipedia has explicitly criticized its handling of these issues. I haven’t looked at anything it says about these questions in years. I recommend you do the same, unless you enjoy being intellectually manipulated by people with an agenda.
I guess you don’t intend to provide us with explicit statements from the DI, praising Dover for instituting its ID policy, to justify this claim?
I say nothing against the motives of the others, but Behe is definitely an honorable and decent man. He has endured personal abuse, quite often from his moral and scientific inferiors, that no one should have to endure. I think it must be at least in part his Christian faith that restrains him from lashing back as most people would, in similar situations.
Then why does he write trashy pseudo-science books aimed at the lay public instead of producing actual scientific research supporting his ID-Creationism claims? To most observers it looks like he’ll keep milking the Fundamentalist True Believer cash cow until the teats run dry.
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[A few points of clarification for Eddie’s response to @Cootsona]
‘Creationism’ has always been an explicitly anti-evolution movement:
As late as the 1920s antievolutionists chose to dedicate their organizations to "Christian Fundamentals," "Anti-Evolution," and "Anti-False Science," not to creationism. It was not until 1929 that one of George McCready Price’s former students, the Seventh-day Adventist biologist Harold W. Clark, explicitly packaged Price’s new catastrophism as "creationism." In a brief self-published book titled Back to Creationism Clark urged readers to quit simply opposing evolution and to adopt the new "science of creationism," by which he meant Price’s flood geology. For decades to come various Christian groups, from flood geologists to theistic evolutionists, squabbled over which camp most deserved to use the creationist label. However, by the 1980s the flood geologists/scientific creationists had clearly co-opted the term for their distinctive interpretation of earth history.
Ronald L. Numbers, History Topic: Antievolutionists and Creationists
I would further point out that the Creation Science Movement, which lays claim to the title “the oldest creationist movement in the world”, started life (in 1932) as the “Evolution Protest Movement”.
I think many would consider Behe’s acceptance of Common Descent to be partial or incomplete. He appears to believe that Common Descent ‘stalls’ without frequent interventions by ‘an Intelligent Designer he believes is God’, to install Irreducible Complexity, take Evolution past its purported ‘Edge’, or to forstall “Darwin[ism” from “Devolv[ing]”. This position would appear to be indistinguishable from Progressive Creationism ( Progressive creationism - Wikipedia ).
Yes, as I pointed out years ago, in a detailed word-study reproduced later on this site–
– but in the present discussion, I was saying to Greg that one of the virtues of ID theory is that it does not assume that creation and evolution are in opposition. Some leading ID proponents have affirmed universal common descent – which no creationist on the planet does.
People can interpret his version of common descent as they choose. I merely point out that he affirms it, and explicitly distinguishes himself from those whose religious views don’t permit common descent. There’s a nice section on this in the middle of Darwin Devolves.
The reason you had to settle the “point of fact” was because the allegations against Discovery prior to the court decision was pretty consistent with the continued allegations against Discovery for what they consider to be a completely objective position regarding teaching origins in the public schools.
While I may agree that you have SETTLED the “point of fact” - - Discovery still has some real problems with the official program that they say is completely objective. So, it seems inevitable that you will have to address that question sometime in the future.
If memory serves, they wanted to submit signed affidavits to avoid cross examination. When it became obvious they would have to testify in court and be cross examined they quickly backed out. I at least give Behe the credit he deserves for having the spine to face cross examination.
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I seem to recall Dembski’s change of heart about testifying coincided with Jeffrey Shallitt’s deposition regarding Dembski’s lack of science credentials.
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No, indeed, I don’t. Because the policy which DI pursued is much more indicative of its agenda than its mealy-mouthed statements.
Note, too, that the DI has never opposed ramming creationism down students’ throats. Its stated policy (but not its “as-acted-out” policy) is pure litigation strategy: don’t “mandate” creationism at the school board level, but permit it at the instructor level. This way, you have a policy which is hard to mount a First Amendment lawsuit against because you must attack it “as applied” rather than facially. But the policy of encouraging ramming creationism into the kids is the whole point.
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Maybe, but I sort of doubt it. If they thought the case was going to be won by the District on summary judgment, then that would make sense. But the problem there is that if expert opinion testimony were in the mix for the decision, the District couldn’t win on summary judgment – you’d have to have a trial. If they understood what expert testimony, and discovery thereof, involved, they would have known from the get-go that they would first have to render a written report, then undergo a deposition, and then testify at trial.
Their 180-degree turn remains the central mystery to me. I can understand why they got in, but I cannot understand why they got out. If they really thought that this new brand of Creation Science was going to work, they’d been writing horrid books about it for a decade and they certainly must have thought that they were as ready as they’d ever be. Their excuse – not being allowed separate counsel at their depositions – is bizarre and it’s hard to imagine why they thought that this would be tolerated by anyone. And they weren’t going to have separate counsel at the trial in any event, so what’s the difference? I think the reason given was a pretext.
Litigation-wise, they would have been wise to stay away from federal courts – far better to have these fights in state courts, where the quality of the judiciary is lower and the likelihood of political influence of religious extremism over the judges is higher.
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I thought this would be your answer. It’s consistent with your generally data-free, rhetoric-heavy, approach to discussing ID and the DI. But at least I manage to establish your error about the publisher of Pandas, and I established that the DI statements about not mandating ID predated the Dover trial proceedings. Perhaps those are two points on which we will not have to have the same arguments here, again and again.