I found this description on the Discovery Institute website:
A public policy think tank advancing a culture of purpose, creativity, and innovation.
(I’m resisting the urge to critique that claim.)
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It goes off the rails at “think.” And sillier still after that.
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It’s quite true, they have a (negative) purpose, for which see the Wedge Document, and it takes creativity and innovation to come up with mistaken arguments that superficially appear valid.
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A public policy think tank advancing a culture of purpose, creativity, and innovation.
Viewed cynically, this does not seem an inaccurate description.
Most “think tanks” seem to be institutions dedicated more to finding new rationalisations for old prejudices, rather than thinking up new ideas, let alone challenging their own thinking.
“Purpose, creativity, and innovation” would seem to be more useful means to achieving an end, rather than ends in themselves. It is not difficult to find historical examples of groups employing “purpose, creativity, and innovation” to achieve some quite appalling ends.
Cynic, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are not as they ought to be.
– Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
(Incidentally, “Biercian Cynic” would a tolerable byline/subtitle for me, if anybody is so inclined.)
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Just one more thing to point out here: Behe doesn’t have a model. He has something that some would call a hypothesis, but he refuses to test it, which makes him an ex-scientist.
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What do you call this?
https://doi.org/10.1110/ps.04802904
Do you think Einstein is an ex scientist?
As a geneticist, I call it an attempt to fool the conceptually simple:
In this paper, we report the results of the stochastic simulation of the time to fixation of new MR features by what we consider to be the conceptually simplest route: point mutation in the absence of recombination…
Calling it a model doesn’t make it one.
Now, explain why any competent biologist would omit recombination in any legitimate model and why you falsely claimed:
This is word salad, because models cannot acknowledge anything; people do.
No, his hypotheses made empirical predictions. Do Behe’s?
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That paper does contain a model of evolution, though it’s a bad model.
Definitely. Bereft of life, he rests in peace. He has shuffled off this mortal coil and joined the choir invisible.
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The Lenski experiment supported the model Behe generated.
Bad model. Based on what?
This has been discussed at great length. Presumably you have forgotten.
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There is no bacterial experiment I am aware of that has invalided Behe’s model.
Operative phrase: “I am aware of”. And what do bacterial experiments have to do with it anyway?
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If the Lenski experiment produced several di sulphide bonds or unique binding substrates that would validate that the Behe/Snoke model is inaccurate.
Asserting it is a bad model without demonstrating it empirically is meaningless.
There’s a lot of meaningless to go around here.
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Entailing accurate predictions is not the same as not entailing ones already demonstrated to be inaccurate, as the nature of a prediction is to speak about data yet to be unearthed, rather than data well secured long ago. Nor is it the same as entailing predictions about the outcomes in a simulation. And even then, a good model needs to accomplish more than merely entail accurate predictions, anyhow. Throwing wild prophesies into the aether might be considered a scientific practice otherwise. As, if one does enough of it, surely some will be at least consistent with new data.
No. A scientific model is one that is consistent with already gathered data first, whence then predictions about new data are logically derived. A model, thus, wherein a large class of undoubtedly relevant data is overtly ignored, is a bad model, long before any data conflictng with its predictions are obtained, and irrespective of whether its implications are matched by simulations (which would at best only reveal whether the simulation correctly portrays the model, not whether the model correctly portrays nature).
So Platon, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, William Paley, CS Lewis, Anthony Flew, Danton etc… are not thinkers? Good to know.
Einstein is an ex-scientist, because he’s dead. Behe has managed to be an ex-scientist while still alive.
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Since when were Aristotle et al members of the discovery institute?
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Well, that’s a puzzling remark, to be sure. I think that it’s rather offensive of you to suggest that Aristotle, et al., were that dim. Surely it’s more reasonable to suppose that someone like that, if living today, would inform himself on the subject and would not associate himself with the crass religious propagandists at the DI. Calling dead people stupid like this is a low blow.
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Do you think Einstein is a dead parrot? 
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