Johnson on Intelligent Design: 'Flunked'

Actually, Johnson is only half-right...
There is no "theory" of Intelligent Design.

One explanation may be that Johnson finally got the message that people at PT and elsewhere have been saying, that ID explains nothing, not the who, where, when, why, and how. Note the 'full worked out scheme'. Maybe he is going to encourage ID'ers to come out of the creationist closet.

I remain speechless. The real question now becomes, if there is no real competing ‘theory of ID’ then how can ID have been ‘expelled’. It seems to have been flunked.

— PvM

no, Johnson has been saying this for years now.

he just likes to play it down when he does.

seriously, I recall having this exact discussion over 2 years ago on this very board.

it's not like consistency is anything we should expect from the purveyors of IDiocy.

Wait a minute! A lawyer being honest? Isn't that one of the signs of the end times?

Maybe he is going to encourage ID’ers to come out of the creationist closet.

— Frank B

Johnson came out with the admission after Dover in the Spring 2006 edition of the Berkeley review.

http://sciencereview.berkeley.edu/articles.php?issue=10&article=evolution

pdf version:
http://sciencereview.berkeley.edu/articles/issue10/evolution.pdf

The source of Johnson's comment is an interview at Berkeley, quoted in Michelangelo d’Agostino, “In the Matter of Berkeley v. Berkeley,” in Berkeley Science Review, Spring 2006, p. 31 (at 33). So it's a recent view, not something out of the distant past.

A similar statement is George Gilder's “Intelligent design itself does not have any content." This is reported in Joseph P. Kahn, “The Evolution of George Gilder,” The Boston Globe, July 27, 2005.

(To forestall any allegations of quote-mining, here is the context:

"I'm not pushing to have [ID] taught as an 'alternative' to Darwin, and neither are they," he says in response to one question about Discovery's agenda. "What's being pushed is to have Darwinism critiqued, to teach there's a controversy. Intelligent design itself does not have any content.")

gary: Wait a minute! A lawyer being honest? Isn't that one of the signs of the end times?

Bill G. got it slightly wrong: "If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither, pound the table."

/\/\ike /\nglin,
Registered patent attorney

Just to complete the reference that Olorin gave to the interview with George Gilder:

http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2005/07/27/the_evolution_of_george_gilder/

The quotation is on page 3, paragraph 4 from the end of the interview.

“I’m not pushing to have [ID] taught as an ‘alternative’ to Darwin, and neither are they,” he says in response to one question about Discovery’s agenda. “What’s being pushed is to have Darwinism critiqued, to teach there’s a controversy. Intelligent design itself does not have any content.”)

DI IDism claims that empirical reality reflects intelligence and intelligent causation.

Historic Paleyan design (Watchmaker thesis) says the observation of design and organized complexity in nature and organisms corresponds directly to the work of invisible Designer.

The upper is an identification process.

The lower a observation.

Neither claim to be "a theory" in the same sense of how the phrase "theory of evolution" is understood.

I also think that the Johnson quote looks like a quote-mine.

DI IDism claims that empirical reality reflects intelligence and intelligent causation.

I also think that the Johnson quote looks like a quote-mine.

I read Ray's post as follows:

"Whaaa? Say it's not so, uncle Phil!"

sorry, but it's true.

don't yell at us, Ray, go yell at Phil.

...he wouldn’t mind being related to gorillas

Johnson: Well, the alternative is not well developed, so I would prefer to say that, as far as I'm concerned, the alternative is we don't really know what happened. But if non-intelligence couldn't do the whole job, then intelligence had to be involved in some way. Then it's a big research job to figure out the consequences of that starting point.

The reason why that premise of natural causes has to be so inviolate and so ferociously defended is that what if something other than purely natural causes was involved? What would it be? Well, the most obvious answer to that question is it would be God.

DI IDism claims that empirical reality reflects intelligence and intelligent causation. Historic Paleyan design (Watchmaker thesis) says the observation of design and organized complexity in nature and organisms corresponds directly to the work of invisible Designer. The upper is an identification process. The lower a observation.

Well like Ichthyic noted, this is rather old news, even if it's worth bringing up again. But there's no question that he's spun the issue since those fairly candid remarks (with gratuitous aspersions cast on MET, of course, "whatever errors it might contain" (indeed, there are no doubt errors, but he doesn't know of them)).

It is, of course, all our fault in fact:

www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=3914&program=CSC%20-%20Scientific%20Research%20and%20Scholarship%20-%20History%20and%20Philosophy%20of%20Science

We're just not willing to consider the issue, according to the above less than candid attack. This despite the fact that he himself allows that he doesn't know that "ID theory" is doable in the Berkeley Science Review, and of course his science "experts" don't know that it's doable either (the way they avoid inherent predictions strongly suggests that they know it is not doable).

The fact is that sometimes he ends up not lying--so much. The rest of the time he's back to tip-top IDist form, lying that we're not willing to consider ID (the IDists have made certain that there's not really anything to consider, other than the way they bypass all of the requirements of science), and blaming everyone except the unproductive IDists for ID's unending failures.

Does it never occur to them that Darwin almost single-handedly made evolution into a science (though he was hardly the first with NS)? They have rather more than a single Victorian scientist to come up with an honest ID theory, and of course they're doing nothing but dithering over words and the meanings used in science.

Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7

Q: How would you go about testing for the existence of a designer? What is the research program? Johnson: I'd like to start with the first question. It is sometimes said that the hypothesis that there is a designer is untestable. This is false. It is testable, and the test is Darwinian evolution. The claim of the evolutionary biologists is that unintelligent causes did the whole job. If they can prove it, then the counter-hypothesis that you need intelligence has been tested, and it has been shown to be false. But what I concluded after reading the literature was that the claim that unintelligent processes have been shown to be capable of doing all the work of creation, from the simplest creatures to the more complex ones, is unsupported. The evidence for it lies somewhere between very weak and nonexistent. When you try to get proof, you get stories about microevolution.

Johnson says:

"The claim of the evolutionary biologists is that unintelligent causes did the whole job [of, presumably, evolution.]"

This got me trashed on another thread, but I'll try again. Actually, we know that evolution is often driven by intelligent "designers", especially in the animals and plants most people care about. By this I mean, when evolution appears to be progressive, it is often driven by co-evolution. A big factor in the species's environment is that some creatures with brains are making consistent choices that drive natural selection for that species. This selection could be the result of an evolutionary arms race, symbiosis, or sexual selection.

Of course, to take a typical evolutionary arms race, cheetahs aren't deliberately 'designing' faster gazelles to make life difficult for their descendants. But they are consistently choosing the slower animals as prey. The selection pressure for fleet gazelles is driven by the choices in the cheetah's brain.

It's the same process that goes on in artificial selection. In the case of peacocks, the peahens' choices of mates have even created a bird that looks like a product of artificial selection.

It might be argued that mutation is all "unintelligent causes," but a lot of natural selection is driven by creatures with brains making choices. Without too much exaggeration, one can say there are "intelligent designers" out there-- not supernatural ones, but living creatures whose behavior has, in some cases, already been intensively studied. So the sense that the average person has that evolution can't all just be random chance is perfectly correct.

Since there really are creatures with brains out there acting as a driving force in evolution, why isn't the Disco Institute, whose denizens are sure there has to be a designer, studying cheetahs and peahens instead of assuming some supernatural being is driving evolution?

To Hoary Puccoon:

The short answer, in terms of the current intelligent design scam, is because it doesn't matter to their argument. Why do you think that Behe had to admit under oath that the designer might be dead? The flagellum evolved around 2 billion years ago. The blood clotting system mostly evolved before multicellular animals had what anyone would call a brain, and the immune system not long after that. The Cambrian explosion happened over half a billion years ago. They can't figure out an excuse to call anything designed that evolved within the last 300 million years.

They aren't interested in the types of design that we can observe happening. The reason for this is simple. They would be able to test their notions, and we know that they are unwilling to do this. Behe even claimed that he didn't have to test his notions in trying to defend his court admission that no IDiot that he knew of had attempted any scientific testing of ID. Every single one of the IDiots with enough neurons to rub together know that the 100% failure rate of ID, throughout the history of science, will likely bite them if they are able to test their assertions. Testing just isn't an option for them with that likelihood of success.

In terms of the real science. Other lifeforms are part of the environment that any lifeform finds itself in. Even if it was the only type of lifeform the other members of the population would influence the environment, and influence any selection pressure on that population. The selection is likely not conscious and premeditated even if the organisms have brains. Ants have domesticated fungi and aphids for crops and livestock, and the affected species have evolved into the domesticated niche, just like cattle or wheat, so we know nature can do these things, and it doesn't take a lot of intellect, but that isn't the type of intelligent design that the ID creationist scam artists are hawking. In fact they have to ignore that kind of intelligent design because it makes it more difficult to claim that they can "know it when they see it" for their own type of intelligent design.

Ron Okimoto--

I'm totally with you in believing the ID movement is a deliberate scam. I really think the reason Behe and his followers focused on cell chemistry is because most of their target audience doesn't know anything about cell chemistry.

It's ironic to me that before X-ray analysis of proteins and DNA, many legitimate scientists (e.g., Max Delbruck) thought that the workings of the cell were so different from anything else in the universe that they must operate by unknown laws of physics. X-ray analysis revealed ordinary-- although extremely large-- molecules that obeyed all the known physical laws.

Of course, in one way, real cell chemistry is a lot more complicated than some amorphous goo called protoplasm, in that there are more moving parts. But it's simpler to study, because it doesn't need new laws to explain it.

So Behe's claim that the unexpectedly complex nature of cell chemistry has baffled scientists and led them to believe something more than ordinary physical laws must be responsible is not merely off-base; it is precisely the opposite of the historical facts. (Standard operating procedure for the Disco Institute, right?)

In pointing out that creatures with working brains making choices drive evolution, I was more focused on the ordinary citizen who hears Johnson's distortion of evolutionary theory, that "unintelligent causes did the whole job" and thinks, 'That can't be right. How could something as beautifully designed as a gazelle just come about randomly?' The answer is, of course, that the gazelle didn't come about randomly. It's the result of thousands of generations of consistent culling-- not by some supernatural force, but by cheetahs and lions trying to feed their families. I think that's a concept the ordinary person without scientific training can easily grasp. And it stands in sharp contrast to the fog of technical jargon that creationists always use when they pretend to present the views of legitimate scientists.

And it stands in sharp contrast to the fog of technical jargon that creationists always use when they pretend to present the views of legitimate scientists.