… but it hasn’t gone very far.
Brought to my attention on FB - Hat Tip to Dave Blank.
Now here’s Casey Luskin to tell us more about it.
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The Discovery Institute has renamed Evolution News, which now goes under the name Science & Culture Today. DI’s fear of user comments, and its dreadful content, will remain unchanged.
P.S. This might have seemed like an odd comment, as it merely restates the comment above. I had originally posted it as a new thread, prior to this thread being up, titled “A fetid corpse by any other name would smell as sweet.” That was, perhaps, overly kind to the DI, but I was in a friendly mood.
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I wonder if this is to allow more focus on MAGA politics. But I was never worried about the content not remaining the same; quite the opposite.
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Both the rebranding and the new layout are significant improvements, and allow for more expansive content. A shame to see such production value in the service of an enterprise which has long failed to validate a single premise it has advanced, yet drearily still exercises influence over its followers.
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It does seem to me that they are pivoting more and more into just generic right-wing politics. I suspect that’s actually a pretty bad move for them, as there are others out there who are better at it. Science denial and religious crazy-talk is their special skillset, and they should probably brand their garbage accordingly so as not to be simply out-competed.
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Although the number of people they have who can at least pretend to some level of scientific competence have severely dwindled, either thru death or dotage: Behe, Dembski, Wells, Bechly, all are gone or are at least not as productive. I don’t see anyone coming up to take their place. Anyway, why try to make a scientific evidence when, as it turns out, science can be effectively suppressed thru brute executive fiat.
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It was always about the right-wing politics. The “science”, such as it is, has never been more than a facade. They’re just being more honest about it now.
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“fetid corpse”? Ouch……
I’d hate to encounter you in a bad mood. LOL
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I would argue that Behe never was particularly productive – producing a book every decade or so (DBB 1996, EoE 2007, DD 2019) – so we aren’t due another one from him for another 4 years yet.
I see from Wikipedia that Stephen Meyer is still in his 60s – although the 20+ yo photo in his article exaggerates his youth. Has anybody seen a recent picture of him?
Really? My impression is rather that Behe writes (or wrote?) rebuttals against every native speaker who substantially criticizes his work.
I listened to a recent interview Dembski did with Fuz Rana yesterday, and his shtick hasn’t changed since the 90s. Almost word-for-word the same unquantifiable “specified complexity” stuff you could have seen him do in the 90s, same thing I saw him do in ‘06 when he did a talk at my college. Word for word.
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Yeah, sure. If an academic applying for tenure is asked about his spotty publication record, and he replies “Yes, but I wrote lots of great rebuttals on my website”, how do you think that will go for him?
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I suppose some sort of measure of the impact of the productivity is needed. Is it a new idea that revs up the followers (like IC, evolution having an “edge”, etc), or is it merely filler for the blog formerly known as ENV?
Behe actually turned a bunch of his filler/rebuttals into a book, A Mousetrap for Darwin, but I didn’t count that towards his (prominent) output.
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So they’ve swapped one misleading word (evolution) for another (science) with neither title giving any indication at all that their focus is ID.
The lie is dead, short live the lie.
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Some months back we went through Dembski’s updated math for CSI, and it is identical to what he wrote 20 years ago. He did come up with a more understandable way to write it out (no more inscrutable Phi function).
Dembski’s most recent “math” is given in the revised version of his book The Design Inference, which he co-authored with Winston Ewert. There they are using Algorithically Specified Complexity (ASC), which involves a long (improbable) message that is described by a short “description”. I have expressed in a post at Panda’s Thumb how their argument falls short and never explains why the short description is needed to explain a good adaptation, or, if so, why it cannot be put in place by natural selection.
ASC is not simply Dembski’s older CSI. So which are you talking about?
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Dembski posted on ENV a while back about his updated CSI. This made no mention of ASC.
I haven’t seen the 2ed. book yet.
Shame on me for not getting over to PT more often! I agree ASC doesn’t help their case.
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You’re right, I should look at Dembski’s most-recent explanation of CSI. However his most recent specified-information argument is in the Dembski-Ewert book. In my two 2024 posts at PT on it, I explained in detail what is in it. (You can find the first of those articles from a link in the second one, which I linked to above). You shouldn’t need to buy the book after reading them: at the end of my reading and considering, I simply found that the ASC argument was left incomplete, with no clarity as to what was to be computed, and no argument as to why a high value of ASC indicated Design Intervention.
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Kind of off topic, but ASC/CSI as currently defined are based on a sample size of n=1, which can only have terrible statistical qualities (Type II error = Type I error). So I got to thinking if it’s possible to have a larger sample.
First problem, there is no parameter to estimate, so there is no Likelihood Ratio test. Ewert’s Dependency Graph might offer a way to do this, but that leads to existing tests of Common Ancestry (Theobald, White and Penny, others). CA wins easily.
Second problem, identifying control and Design populations to sample from. Pretty much a non-starter.
ETA: So even if Dembski’s argument were complete, ASC can only be terrible.