With Friends like Dembski (again)

William Dembski calls out the dogs:

I expect Lilley will work through spokespersons on this one as long as possible. I can’t see it as being in his interest to provide Ben Stein with an interview. On the other hand, it will look bad if he refuses. The Baylor administration is in a tight spot. They can still stop the bleeding by simply doing what they should have done from the start, namely, allow Robert Marks to leave the EIL site on his space on the Baylor server. Once media outlets like the NYT and WSJ start weighing in, to say nothing of O’Reilly and Hannity & Coombs [sic], there won’t be any way to stop the bleeding. In fact, at that point I wouldn’t be surprised if the Baylor Board of Regents puts the present president out to pasture — that’s what they did with Sloan, they made him Chancellor, a well-paying nice-sounding meaningless job with no real authority.

Because it's all about the media.

For the record, I'm mildly sympathetic to Marks's position. PZ Myers put it well:

I categorically reject Marks' whole philosophy and I'd probably call him delusional, but … it is the professor's job to talk freely about wacky ideas if he wants. A web page that can be shared (and laughed at) is a reasonable part of the commitment to public communication, and I don't think Baylor should restrict it. Even if the professor is a bit of an embarrassment, and the subject is a sore spot for the university.

In fact, PZ and I seem to be more on Marks's side than Dembski. From the first, he has made things worse. From announcing the superpower of the EIL before they'd published anything ("it promises to put people like Christoph Adami and Rob Pennock out of business"), to the absolutely stupid hoax letter -- which I still think must have been a dream, it was so deliciously mismanaged -- to his focus on negative media attention now, he's got to be making Marks more and more isolated. I wonder if he cares about that, or if it's just that he's got an unfailingly tin ear.

Argumentation and Violence

From Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric (University of Notre Dame Press, 1969):

The use of argumentation implies that one has renounced resorting to force alone, that value is attached to gaining the adherence of one's interlocutor by means of reasoned persuasion, and that one is not regarding him as an object, but appealing to his free judgment. Resource to argumentation assumes the establishment of a community of minds, which, while it lasts, excludes the use of violence. (55, emphasis added)

Reasoning /= threat.

"Intelligent reasoning" = ??

In which I cry "Uncle" to Joe G

Joe G has taken to physically threatening me ominously mentioning that he can find me in person and will do whatever it takes (Edit, Sept. 9) if I do not stipulate that what he says he meant now is what he meant then. He also knows who I am, and where I work, and he lives not too far from me. He has said, "And I am being very generous by saying that on this blog as opposed to driving a few miles to say it to your face," and also "I will do whatever it takes to stop it." So, agreed Joe G. You win. What you say you meant now is what you meant then.

Someone identified your name and town on this blog, and like a decent person, I deleted it.

See how we can resolve arguments amicably?

I'm so glad you are able to convince people by way of reasoned argument.

Also, I'm fat.

Scordova Stands Up!

I am very glad that scordova has done the right thing:

My third loose end which I would like to tie up is that I would like to apologize to Ms. Smith if I have said anything that may be construed as an accusation of dishonesty on her part. Some concern has been expressed that any suggestion of dishonesty could be damaging to her career and I do not wish to damage Ms. Smith’s career as I’m in a similar boat as her. I vigorously disagree with her on various matters, but this should not imply that I am accusing her of lying or dishonesty. Perhaps I made some ill-tempered remarks, but it was not my intent to accuse her of lying or dishonesty. I simply disagree and at times was very irritated….

Good for him. Seriously. I'm not going to take anything away from that.

Challenges for Uncommon Descent

Added: Case #1 challenge met! Good for scordova.
Added: Case #2 resolved* under threat.
Edited: Fixed the link to the Cell article.

Having been banned at Uncommon Descent, I can only witness its self-destruction from afar.

Like one watching a nuclear test with sunglasses, I witnessed their humiliating hoax letter "from" Baylor's president and its attempted suppression. Nobody should be angrier about this than Robert Marks. Here's a guy who's trying to help Dembski out, and Dembski's group -- if "Botnik" is not Dembski in disguise -- responds by insulting his current employer. Dembski's final sentence in his suppression note is hilarious:

I hope Baylor and President Lilley take its removal as a gesture of goodwill on the part of UD as they reconsider what to do about Robert Marks and his Evolutionary Informatics Lab.

With friends like that, eh Robert Marks?

Anyway. The fiasco has been duly mocked by science bloggers (denialism, Afarensis) and the whole incident has been archived for future mockery at The Panda's Thumb. An inadvertent effect of this mockery is that it may raise UD's lousy numbers. (I have no readership, of course, but who am I next to the mighty Dembski?)

But that's not the point of this post. My goal is to answer a simple question: will UD writers retract anything that is shown to be wrong, and not just, as with the Baylor fiasco, stupid and juvenile?

Two cases:

Case 1: RESOLVED! Before he went underground, scordova at UD accused ERV of purposely misleading her readers, a charge that is easily disproven. He has been asked to retract this poisonous and false charge on ERV's blog, and I have asked other UD readers to disclaim it on UD. So far, no luck. So: will anybody at UD have the dignity to say that scordova was wrong, indeed scandalously so, when he wrote this?

But she knows up front that I will call her on an equivocaqtion that was in the minds of some PT’ers when she made an appeal to HIV-2 to make it seem that HIV-1 developed a new Vpu gene after it entered humans. (Emphasis added)

Later in the thread, I responded as follows:

Sal wrote that ERV "made an appeal to HIV-2 to make it seem that HIV-1 developed a new Vpu gene after it entered humans."

Absolutely, utterly wrong. In the original post, ERV wrote, "Of the five major phylogenetic groups of SIV, Vpu is only found in one group-- Chimpanzee SIV (SIVcpz) and its descendants—including HIV-1."

Can you read that? A form of Vpu is found in Chimpanzee SIV, of which HIV-1 is a descendant. Straight up. Retract and apologize.

scordova accused ERV of deliberately deceiving her readers, a charge that has been shown to be without merit. Will someone -- anyone -- at Uncommon Descent have the decency to disclaim this charge? You don't have to believe anything she wrote, but isn't anyone going to step up and say this is BS?

Case 2: RESOLVED* UD commenter Joe G wrote: "Does anyone even know what gene or genes is responsible for the vision system? No."

I refer to the following from Science Daily, 2001: Comprehensive Set Of Vision Genes Discovered: Identification Could Help In Diagnosing And Treating Blinding Diseases. This article begins, "Harvard Medical School researchers have discovered nearly all the genes responsible for vision, which could help in diagnosing and treating blinding diseases."

The full text of the original research (from November 30 2001 Cell) is available here.

Will anybody at UD say, "actually, yes." I've written to Joe G about this, so he knows. Will he correct himself? Wait and see.

Props to oldmanintheskydidntdoit for the reference in Case 2.

*Resolution reached on threat of violence.

Out Standing in his Field?

I've been asked to demonstrate that Dembksi uses terms in nonstandard and equivocating ways.

The first is easily demonstrated. Dembski's key term is "complex specified information" (CSI). This term is never used in the standard literature of information theory. He's had no influence -- none -- on information theory as such. (Just for yucks, I did a search on MathSciNet, the American Mathematical Society database, for CSI. Nothing. For Dembski's name? Just his own publications--TDI, NFL, and two articles from the early 90s, none of which has been cited a single time in the mathematical literature. And on Project Euclid. Nada. ACM digital library? Zip. IEEE Explore? Nope.)

If his usage were standard, someone else in the field would use it. Yet there is no evidence of that. In short, in mathematics, statistics, and information sciences, Dembski's work has sunk without a single ripple. He is utterly ignored in the scientific disciplines to which he claims to make a contribution, and the key term he has contributed, CSI, is used by no other person in mathematics.

The Explanatory Filter Deconstructed

In the comments on the first post, c.loach points us to a fascinating discussion of the Explanatory Filter. As loach writes:

Watch as scordova worms his way out of doing a demonstration of the The Explanatory Filter, the masterwork of ID that does not work!

Much better than the EF itself is Håkan Rosén's brilliant Imploratory Filter:

1. Does the text advocate a pro-ID stance?
2. Is it possible than someone could have written the text as a joke?
3. Does it look as if the writer is trying to hide the fact the the writing is a hoax?

Only if the answers to the first two questions are yes do we proceed to question three. This is important since we know that people do write pro-ID hoaxes. Pro-ID hoaxes just don't materialize from writings about Goethe or Homer. The third stage of the Imploratory Filter presents us with a binary choice: attribute the thing we are trying to examine to deliberate deception if it appears joke-like; otherwise, attribute it to self-deception. In the first case, the writing we are trying to examine is not only pro-ID, but also appears joke-like. In the other, it is pro-ID, but appears deluded. It is the category of joke-like writings having a pro-ID stance that reliably signals a hoax. "Non-funny" writings advocating ID, on the other hand, are properly attributed to self-deception.

The last thing we need to consider is the case of false positives and false negatives. This method can, unfortunately, yield false negatives. It is possible that some piece of writing might be labelled a non-hoax, when it in fact is a hoax. On the other hand, the method yields no false positives. I.e., when the filter claims that a writing really is a pro-ID hoax, it will will never turn out to be a non-hoax.

The Imploratory Filter faithfully represents our ordinary practice of sorting through things we alternately attribute to self-deception or hoaxes. In particular, the Filter describes:
* how Michael Egnor is still allowed to post for the DI.
* how Casey Luskin can keep repeating that ID can make predictions.
* how Dembski can claim that the explanatory filter yields no false positives even though it measures design via specified complexity of which irreducible complexity is a subclass. Irreducible complexity, in turn, allows for false positives.

Apologies for reposting this, but the IF may well shake the foundations of Dembskism.

Back at you, Dembski

Well, you guys asked for it.