Ed Brayton writes a wonderful letter to Richard Dawkins that can be found here. I just wanted to set the record straight on the one point that concerns me. Ed writes:
The irony is that I only found out about the petition and your promotion of it in the process of defending you against the charge that you favored such coercive policies. An ID advocate accused you of that in a reply to me on another subject and I came to your defense, saying that despite your statements about parental religious instruction being child abuse, I had seen nothing at all to indicate that you would support coercive policies to end such a practice.
THE government has cleared the way for a form of creationism to be taught in Britain’s schools as part of the religious syllabus.
Lord Adonis, an education minister, is to issue guidelines within two months for the teaching of “intelligent design” (ID), a theory being promoted by the religious right in America.
Since Richard Dawkins withdrew his support for a petition to make religious upbringing illegal, many are now trying to make it look as if the petition was so out of tune with the rest of Dawkins' writings that only those with an irrational hatred of him could believe that he had truly endorsed it.
PZ Myers, for example, quotes from Dawkins' The God Delusion, where Dawkins voices his support for comparative religion, where children can learn about the "many mutually incompatible belief-systems." But that doesn't say anything about the right of parents to raise their children in a particular religion. And as I previously noted, in Dawkins' so-called retraction, he really only regrets signing the petition because it would have also made comparative religion classes illegal. He nowhere affirmed his support for the legal right of parents to give their children a religious upbringing.
In fact, anyone who has followed Dawkins' public statements on religion would have plenty of reasons to think that he would want religious upbringing made illegal. After all, this is a man that has referred to a Catholic upbringing as causing more harm than sexual abuse at the hands of a priest, and who thinks that merely talking about a "Catholic child" or a "Protestant child" is "a kind of child abuse". And in his newest book, The God Delusion, he repeats psychologist Nicholas Humphrey's demand that we should not "allow parents to teach their children to believe … in the literal truth of the Bible":
Since we have been receiving a lot of new traffic over the last week or so, and many people rely on stereotypes when thinking about Intelligent Design, I thought I would repost three blogs that better clarify my position. (Of course, the best clarification will soon be found here).
Some ID Positions
Over on the Panda’s Thumb, ID critic Steve Reuland outlines the basic positions of ID. Since none of his assertions would help someone to understand my views, I thought I would answer the various questions he poses.
I was suspicious immediately. For one thing, Mike Gene pulls a bait-and-switch that Ed fell for without question: he claims that Dawkins endorsed this petition on his website. This is not true. There is a different petition from the same group that is endorsed at richarddawkins.net, which encourages the removal of government support for faith-based schools. There is no link anywhere on that site to the controversial petition. When an ID creationist pulls something that sneaky, it's a good idea to think twice.
Of course, it is PZ Myers who got it wrong. It seems that everyone but Myers knew that there was indeed a link to the petition that asks “the Prime Minister to make it illegal to indoctrinate or define children by religion before the age of 16." In fact, at the time of this writing, it is still there; Dawkins has not removed it from his web page. Myers somewhat acknowledges he was wrong by later crossing out the sentence, “There is no link anywhere on that site to the controversial petition" and adds, "(Wait—there is a single link without comment in a list of petitions)." The single link is the link that supposedly did not exist and is found at the top of the page among a list of two petitions. But if Myers is going to lash out at me with knee-jerk accusations, it’s not a good idea to do something like this from a position of complete ignorance.
Don't let anyone tell you that Telic Thoughts has a monopoly on bringing you news about front-loading. We've gotten some competition from Intelligently Sequenced, where Nathan Munson writes:
As the articles states, "sea urchins are echinoderms, marine animals" and the purple sea urchin, "has 7,000 genes in common with humans, including genes associated with Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and Huntington's diseases and muscular dystrophy." Of great interest to intelligent design advocates of front loading is the fact that although the sea urchin has no eyes, nose or ears it does have genes that are homologous to genes found in humans that are involved in vision, hearing and the sense of smell.
Back in June I made a post here at UD that included my foreword to Ken Poppe’s book RECLAIMING SCIENCE FROM DARWINISM (see here). In the post, I did not indicate the book to which it would be a foreword since the book was not yet out and I didn’t want to jeopardize its reception. As it is, the publisher sanitized the foreword. Below the fold is the original as I had intended it.
Let me urge you to get Poppe’s book. It is available at Amazon.com here.
Carl Zimmer hears the sound of taxonomy exploding. PZ Myers, in his haste to dismiss the notion that genotype and phenotype aren’t increasingly at odds in where to place different critters in the so-called Tree of Life, inadvertently refers to an article by his comrade-in-arms Carl Zimmer which backed up the very point I was making.
“But there are times, I must confess, when I feel like I am watching a blind fistfight.” -Carl Zimmer
Why would “family values” conservatism be contrary to Darwinian conservatism? In my book, I show how Darwinian science supports family values and traditional morality as rooted in human biological nature. So where’s the conflict?
Where’s the conflict? Well, how about from the beginning to the end?
“The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” -William Shakespeare
In The Grand Canyon is How Old? PZ Myers whines like a little girl that the National Park Service includes in its bookstore The Grand Canyon: A Different View. The book attempts to explain the formation of the Grand Canyon from a young earth creationist point of view. The book isn’t in the science section of the bookstore but rather in the inspirational section.
I did sign the petition, but I hadn't thought it through when I did so, and I now regret it. I have asked the organizer to remove my name. Unfortunately, it seems that the list has already gone off to Downing Street but the organizer, Jamie Wallis, has kindly asked their web manager to remove my name. I suspect that he himself may be having second thoughts about the wording, and I respect him for that. It isn't always easy to get the exact wording right.
I signed it having read only the main petition: "We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to make it illegal to indoctrinate or define children by religion before the age of 16." I regret to say that I did not notice the supporting statement with the heading, "More details from petition creator": "In order to encourage free thinking, children should not be subjected to any regular religious teaching or be allowed to be defined as belonging to a particular religious group based on the views of their parents or guardians." If I had read that, I certainly would not have signed the petition, because, as explained in The God Delusion, I am in favour of teaching the Bible as literature, and I am in favour of teaching comparative religion. In any case, like any decent liberal, I am opposed to the element of government coercion in the wording. Furthermore, the Prime Minister, thank goodness, does not have the power to 'make' anything 'illegal'. Only parliament has the power to do that.
Richard Dawkins has regretted signing and promoting a petition to make religious upbringing illegal. Or, well, sort of. In reality, he only talks about "teaching the Bible as literature" and "teaching comparative religion", which he is in favor of. But at no point does he mention his stand on religious upbringing - where the Bible may be taught as history, and where only the beliefs of one religion is taught. Should that be legal for parents to do?
But that isn't all. In a later comment, Dawkins goes on to claim that "LABELLING children with the religion of their parents is child abuse." Oh yeah? There exists a large body of professional literature on the subject of child abuse. Where are the studies that show that being called a Catholic child or a Muslim child is child abuse? Dawkins often speaks about the importance of science and evidence. So why doesn't he use the scientific method to answer this question?
Update: The petition is still being promoted on Dawkins' website, so it's possible that we're dealing with an imposter.
Here’s an old study that I recall reading about as an undergraduate psychology major. It is about groupthink, those who adopt it and those who don’t. As you read it, ask youself who in the debate over evolution and ID is following the path of compliance and, alternatively, the path of independence (note that the distinction is not quite as neat as pro-ID and anti-ID):
Cornell geneticist John Sanford pointed out many problems confronting the theory of Darwinian evolution, particularly human evolution. (See: Genetic Entropy ) Many of his arguments were subtle. Among them was his discussion of a somewhat obscure paper: Estimate of the Mutation Rate per Nucleotide in Humans by Nachman.
Ed Brayton has replied to my blog where I offer a typology of ID critics. I should point out that I offered this typology up to readers of Telic Thoughts in an attempt to encourage more fair-mindedness about the critics of ID, recognizing a diversity of thought and attitude among them. For example, one should not use Richard Dawkins as the archetype of all ID critics and then paint someone like Ed with this particular broad brush.
I just watched Cracking the Ocean Code on the Discovery Science Channel last night. It’s on again at 3pm Eastern Time today and tomorrow. Really amazing. Venter basically circumnavigated the globe stopping every 200 miles to sample the microscopic life in the ocean which he is now shotgun sequencing back at his lab. In the shakedown cruise to the Sargasso Sea hundreds of new species and over a million unique new genes were discovered upon analysis. We’ve only catalogued about 1% of all species on the planet and have sequenced just a tiny fraction of those catalogued. As sequencing methods improve and prices plummet saying this is just the tip of the iceberg is a vast understatement.
Information theory, along with cybernetics, have significantly shaped and influenced the study of molecular biology. As a result, it should be no surprise that something like ‘intelligent design’ would eventually emerge. That is, as the models and metaphors began to generate a track record of success, sooner or later teleologists would take note and begin to question whether the success was indebted to a deeper reality.
Anyway, there is a little piece of historical trivia that helps us see how easy it would be to transition from the application of information theory to biology to something like intelligent design.
A lot more genes may separate humans from their chimp relatives than earlier studies let on. Researchers studying changes in the number of copies of genes in the two species found that their mix of genes is only 94 percent identical. The 6 percent difference is considerably larger than the commonly cited figure of 1.5 percent.
I hope to blog on Larry Arnhart wondering why family values conservatives do not embrace Darwinism tomorrow. Meanwhile, if you need a news fix, go here, here, and here, where I have been posting news and comments from the ID controversy for several days, between stabs at various jobs.
Here is a brief snippet where anthropologist Melvin Konner fisks Richard Dawkins over the notion that religion is child abuse. The clip also shows Dawkins complaining about Konner and demanding an apology. The funny thing is that it becomes clear Dawkins wasn't paying attention to Konner. He accuses Konner of accusing him of indoctrinating his daughter, yet Konner said no such thing (replay the video and check for yourself). Oops, there is a lesson in this.
Don't misrepresent someone when the camera is running.
