Intelligent Designer Spotting

 https://barryhisblog.blogspot.com/p/intelligent-designer-spotting.html

I liken "Intelligent Design" enthusiasts to UFO spotters and to nerdy train spotters. Don't get me wrong. I love trains, and if I had nothing better to do I would spend my time building model railway layouts and landscapes.

But I do have better things to do - defending science and attacking the forces that are intent on damaging it - antiscience creationism and the "intelligent design" or ID "movement".

For those unfamiliar with creationism and ID, these ideas are opposed to mainstream science, particularly evolution. Young earth creationists (YECs) agree with the ramblings of the Bishop of Ussher, who, in the 17th century, based his ideas about the age of the world, not on any direct observations of nature, but on a bunch of assertions written down in the biblical Old Testament. For some somewhat difficult to understand reasons, creationists in America wanted it taught as science in American public schools. With the constitutional separation principle separating religiously inspired ideas from the affairs and matters that are the province of of state, including education, attempts to insert "creation science" in schools was repeatedly defeated in courts of law and is now only supported by eccentric fringe groups. But the motivation to attack science is still tenacious. Defeats of creationism induced a duck and dive response in the form of the "intelligent design" movement, a movement that is still a cause of misinformation, inconvenience and irritation.

ID originally tried to distance itself from religious notions. The "Designer", 'even though, suspiciously, normally capitalised), was not a god. Oh no. It was an unidentified entity (hence my analogy with UFO spotting), that just happened to do all the stuff a god would do, but wasn't called "God". This was to try to subvert the separation principle, as noted above, and have their ideas taught as an alternative and rival version of science. The pretence was shattered at the "Dover" trial, which determined that ID was but religion in a thin and tawdry disguise (as if this was not always transparently obvious). Since this rout, stragglers still within the ID camp no longer try to keep up the pretence that they are not religiously motivated. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitzmiller_v._Dover_Area_School_District

Among the ideas touted by the ID crowd, we have had

Complex Specified information (CSI)
Irreducible Complexity (IC)
No Free Lunch (NFL)


Complex Specified information (CSI)

Complex information is abundant in the world. The periodic table - chemistry -astronomy - the weather even. But what does it mean to call it "specified"? They may be specific to their domains, but that is a different thing to calling them "specified". To be sure that something is specified, you need a specification, independent of the phenomenon under study. ID has never come up with a specification for anything they call specified. Thus it is nothing more than an unsupported assertion that there was an (unidentified, of course) specifier doing the specifying. This is nothing more than a stupid (but misleading to many) word play.


Irreducible Complexity (IC)

Michael Behe came across the work of Hermann Joseph Muller, who received the Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine 1946. Muller, an evolutionary scientist described, earlier in the 20th century, how evolutionary processes could give rise to what he termed "interlocking complexity", where features and functions that were dependent on one another could arise, to the superficial puzzlement of someone trying to understand how evolution could have brought them about. The solution is very simple, but seems to have gone over the head of Behe and his ID fans. This is explained in the TalkOrigins article, "The Mullerian Two-Step: Add a part, make it necessary" @ http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/ICsilly.html

No Free Lunch (NFL)

Thankfully, we no longer hear much from William Dembski, a qualified but under-productive mathematician who specialised in bamboozling the gullible with mathematical notation and making a crust on the backs of two more respectable academics, David Wolpert and William Macready, by bastardising their work and flogging a book called, "No Free Lunch". Wolpert and Macready's No Free Lunch theorems proved that in a generalised, random search space, an evolutionary hill-climbing algorithm would do no better at finding fitness peaks than a random search. Big surprise. You can't climb hills where there are no hills to climb. That did not prevent Dembski from misrepresenting the theorems to peddle the lie that evolutionary algorithms in the real world are completely ineffective, and cannot work. It made him a good sum of money though, from the gullible who did not understand the mathematics and only wanted their biases confirmed.

The most prominent organ of the ID crowd is under the banner of the "Discovery Institute", an 'institute' that has discovered precisely nothing whatsoever since it's inception in 1991 since the leak of it's anti-science manifesto, the "Wedge Strategy". 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedge_strategy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_Institute

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biologic_Institute

I once had a message exchange with Ann Gauger, a leading light of the Discovery Institute, which I dearly wish I had preserved. We were talking about endogenous retroviruses (ERVs), and whether they were the products of an intelligent designer, or the products of retroviruses. (They are slam-dunk proof of evolution. See the 'ERV FAQ' link at the  top of my pages.) She asked me to cite the relevant peer-reviewed scientific literature, which I did. (https://web.archive.org/web/20230531193743/http://www.evolutionarymodel.com/ervs.htm#References) Her response? She promptly blocked me from further discussion!