Still they’re 100% true and accurate. Granted they’re not helpful to the DI charlatans pushing their pseudoscience but that’s the DI’s problem.
I don’t have to. All that Puck needs to do is keep track of those who never retract or modify any position they take on any subject. He’ll find out for himself, and rather quickly.
And avoid the evidence. 
Yes, you really do need to.
1 Like
Make me!!!
Appeals to one’s own authority are just silly when one is hiding behind a pseudonym.
1 Like
Seems to be the only arrow in his quiver. 
2 Likes
I’m not appealing to my own authority. You can confirm what I’ve said by reading any good book about deconstructionism. But I’ve seen little evidence that you read books before forming your opinions.
So Johnson himself didn’t know what he was talking about?
Right, which is why obstinacy is meritorious in proportion to the claim it defends.
No, I’m not. Not all dishonest people are ID proponents. But when you are watching the equivalent of an intellectual pigeon-drop scam, it really doesn’t help to suggest that the cops who caught the con artist are not always right about everything.
And – balance? If one wants to know what shape the earth is, it is not a “balanced” presentation to present one flat-earther and one round-earther. Balance, in the real world, depends upon weights. What weight does ID deserve? If the answer is “none,” that is unbalanced only if it deserves some.
One need not look to motive, except by way of explaining WHY the ID position is taken despite its manifest lack of meaningful evidence. But when ID advocates are dishonest, it absolutely IS needed and helpful to say so. Jonathan Wells IS profoundly dishonest. Stephen Meyer DOES continue to print false claims even after the truth has been pointed out to him. These are not shades of gray. These are rather flat, unambiguous, straightforward matters. There is no genuine controversy about them. You would have me be dishonest; you would like me to hem and haw and say, well, when Meyer misstates Erwin that’s just Meyer’s opinion, and another way of looking at it, don’cha know, when you and I both know that it is not. I refuse to be dishonest.
What you are demanding here is that I help you set up what I call the “level tones” problem in litigation. In litigation, you really hate, as a defendant, to wind up somehow bound to a jury trial in a matter where the plaintiff’s case is completely absurd. This happens, mostly in places where judges are overworked and are elected by the voters. The most absurd case becomes immediately more plausible when a bunch of men in suits pronounce about it in level tones and treat it with seriousness – but in litigation, at trial, there is no way to avoid doing that, and pretty soon the jury thinks that up is down. I will not “level-tone” it when Stephen Meyer considers that he can cite papers for things they don’t actually say.
I think I have been clear that I don’t think ID has an “argument” problem. Arguments, and nothing but arguments, are what ID has. ID has an evidence problem, as in lack-of. Show us that the processes by which ID operates do in fact operate in the world. Who cares about arguments? As I have said, evidence is the grist for argument’s mill. Who cares what the ancient Greeks speculated about, when we live in a world packed with data and tools for its analysis? ID is one long argument in evolution negation: even if accepted it would not support the ID conclusion. Let’s see somebody do some empirical work; let’s see something that can earn the respect of people who know things and who do real work in the real world.
6 Likes
How we handle errors is a big deal in science. It is a key way of assessing and demonstrating our reputations.
2 Likes
In general, I’d hold back from claims of dishonesty. A clear presentation of the record can make it obvious what is going on. It makes it less believable if you come out and say it, and you might even be wrong. They might genuinely believe what you think is a lie.
1 Like
You know, I did spend a lot of time dealing with controversies of fact back in my former life, and I have always been extremely careful about accusing people of dishonesty. But let’s take Meyer’s work as an example. Two passages have been mentioned, but I’ll deal with the one I am most familiar with. In Darwin’s Doubt he says:
“In a more recent paper using a slightly different dating scheme, Douglas Erwin and colleagues similarly show that thirteen new phyla appear in a roughly 6-million year window.”
The paper cited simply says no such thing. The citation is to the November 25, 2011 paper in Science. This has been pointed out to Meyer repeatedly, and early – it was pointed out to him before the second printing of DD came along. His whole thesis is the abruptness of the Cambrian explosion – this is central and material to his entire argument. He will not correct it.
Now, it is possible that he made an honest mistake in printing this false statement. It is NOT possible that he made an honest mistake in refusing to withdraw it. And this isn’t some single isolated occurrence. He quite clearly chose to omit whole classes of fossils from the work, e.g., the small shellies, because they were inconvenient to his argument. And when the book is viewed by people familiar with the Cambrian fauna, more, and more, and more of these things come up – the book was not intended for a scientific audience and could not bear up under any scrutiny at all, but for its intended audience of people who are frightened of evolution, it was not important whether well-known evidence was omitted: that evidence isn’t well known to that audience.
I’m perfectly willing to extend the courtesy of assuming that an embarrassing error is merely an embarrassing error. And indeed there are times when it really isn’t clear. Shedinger almost certainly is demonstrating incompetence more than dishonesty, in most of his misstatements. But Jonathan Wells? Does anybody actually believe that Jonathan Wells believes that the things he says are true? Behe seems to exhibit a lot of the signs of self-deception – his willful failure to consider, for example, the differences between the vast adaptive radiations of the Cambrian explosion or the post-KPg rise of the mammals, on the one hand, and the Lenski E. coli experiments and Darwin’s finches on the other may just be a case of his not really wanting to consider things too carefully, or perhaps a case of a man who works in “micro” phenomena not being able to understand issues in relation to large-animal evolution.
I am reminded of the problems faced by investigators into paranormal phenomena. James Randi used to complain that scientists were often incredibly naïve when studying paranormal phenomena – that they frequently did not consider the possibility that they were being intentionally misled by subjects, and that, not having experience with the techniques of such things as stage magic, they frequently would think they had excluded cheating when they had not.
Is it really so very extraordinary, when a man publishes a book like Darwin’s Doubt, to suppose that his refusal to correct manifest errors is the product of his dishonesty? It prejudices the whole discussion NOT to consider it! It is surely all well and good to understand that others may interpret facts differently and that their contrary interpretations are not dishonest. But these sorts of things go far beyond interpretation. Not to point out dishonesty when it is as plain as day is to distort the whole picture of ID and to play right into the hands of the DI: make this sound as though it’s merely some sort of professional disagreement, with meritorious views on both sides.
I’m willing to grant the non-experts a lot of leeway. Tom Bethell probably never really did figure out what Colin Patterson was trying to teach him about pattern cladism, and so if he muddled it up hideously, as he did, this could simply be a failure to get the point. Some of these fellows, like Marcos Eberlin, don’t really work in areas that would bring them relevant knowledge, and are liable to hold some really bizarre views. And Shedinger’s book just makes a person want to despair at the dishonesty of the people who would lead a man so far down the garden path, but it leaves one with little to say about the man other than that he has made himself an object of pity.
I have always been careful about attributing statements to dishonesty, when other interpretations are possible. But the fact that ID is so poorly supported that it requires the case to be made dishonestly is an important part of the landscape here, and other interpretations, in the case of such people as Wells and Meyer, generally are implausible.
3 Likes
See, for example, Wells’ use of a paper by Durrett and Schmidt on mutational rates to argue that it would take a few million years to fix two mutations in a population of whales, contained in his latest book “Zombie Science.” The only way to avoid his being utterly dishonest is to assume that he is wholly illiterate. If he’d prefer the latter, I’m willing to go with it, but it isn’t the likeliest explanation for a guy who, whatever else may be said, DID complete a Ph.D at Berkeley.
1 Like
Go with that. Rather than calling it dishonesty, call it what it is: failure to retract a mistake.
You might be right, but it’s better to be effective.
1 Like
It is actually most likely basic ignorance of population genetics. He is wrong and he should correct this, but why assume dishonesty? That isn’t effective.
I think that if it is ignorance of population genetics, it is ignorance of the results of population genetics described in the very paper he is citing. That’s a bit implausible, is it not?
True. But a fully corrected edition of Zombie Science would be three times as long as the original book and would leave none of his theses surviving.
I would never assume dishonesty. But I would infer it, and here the inference is very strong. It simply isn’t plausible that Wells understood the paper so poorly.
Now, understand: these people never correct anything. If Jon Wells wants to fix the mistake and then complain bitterly that I have slandered him by my vicious assumption that he knew how to read a scientific paper when it was really his inability to do just that which led to his mistake, then I may owe him an apology. But we all know these people. They never will. It is not in their nature to care whether the things they say are true.
As to whether it is “effective,” that again does depend upon just what the rhetorical goal is. If the goal is to convince Jonathan Wells, the goal is a fool’s errand. His whole livelihood, and indeed his whole afterlife, is bound up in his not being convinced. But nobody really thinks Wells believes what he says. To be clear, I think he may well believe the “ultimate” implications of what he says: that Reverend Sun Myung Moon sits at the right hand of a God who designed every living thing, and from that seat judges the living and the dead. But he cannot believe that the specific arguments about biology that he makes, when they are of this character, are actually true.
Now, when a man says absurd things that he cannot believe are true, I believe that we do our audiences a disservice if we pronounce in level tones, “hm, well, I believe I do disagree with Jonathan Wells on his interpretation of these things.” I think we still do the audience a disservice if we use the same level tones and say “Jonathan Wells is mistaken about these things.” I think that we are not honest if we do that; I think we have to give an honest assessment, whether it is deemed to be nice to do so or not.
So, you know, much of what you say is what I would agree with, if we were talking about Michael Behe. I do not accuse Behe of dishonesty. I think there are good grounds to suppose that some of the things he says MAY be dishonest, but I refrain from accusing him of such things because there are other causes that may be at play and I do agree that it is good to refrain from accusations of dishonesty as a general rule. At the same time, dishonesty is a very large part of the story of ID and the story cannot be told correctly without it.
1 Like
Why would an ID proponent stress that early scientists were devout religious believers? Creationists do constantly stress that (e.g. here, here, here), but IDers have no obvious reason to - unless ID is also a religious movement. Then it would make perfect sense that IDers and creationists alike stress the religious views of early scientists.
Thanks, Eddie! You’ve provided another piece of evidence that ID is creationism in disguise.
4 Likes
I just looked at the empty set of Eddie’s publications, which doesn’t show any work in any area at all, let alone postmodernism, so I have no confidence that anything he says on postmodernism or indeed any other subject would be based on any acquaintance with anything.
If you wish to retain your anonymity, Eddie, please remember that everyone has a publication record that’s at least as good as yours.
Oh, and Pennock’s acquaintance with postmodernism would come from what he’s read, not what he’s written. You can’t judge the former based on the latter.
3 Likes
Yes you are.
2 Likes
Amen to that. Don’t claim that some-one is dishonest, show that they are dishonest. It’s a little more work, but a lot more convincing.
4 Likes