"Exposing Discovery Institute": video series by "Professor" Dave Farina

In a couple of places he references a typo in a document associated - I think - with the DI in which it's clear that "Creationism" has been replaced by - copy and pasted over - "Intelligent Design", but I haven't been able to remember where. If I find it, I'll post an update.

Can attest to that being a thing since I've also been just slowly going through the videos. Which is just, hilariously DAMNING evidence as to what the priorities of these people are.

[Smaw was replying here to the post of David's which I've moved to the other thread. --Laird]

Laird might have something more interesting in the way of a reply to the question you're asking, but to me it's less about defending ID here and more about highlighting how it very much seems like the majority of DI's heavy hitters are in fact actual charlatans who manipulate data, spread misinformation, ignore valid criticsm and are in fact more focused on spreading archaic creationist myths (which are proven by leaked documents about the organization that say that's exactly what they're doing) than any kind of good scientific research. 

Is there good defenses of ID to be had? Maybe. But it's pretty painfully aparent that it's not to be had from anyone in that crew.

James Tour is a real professor, as opposed to Farina who presumably chose his pseudonym to confuse some people that he really was a professor - not that such discussions are best done by appeals to such titles.

David

Yeah Farina seems to be manipulative by referring to himself as a Professor.

I’ve long been critical of biological ID, as can be seen by my posts on this site, but I have gained some degree of sympathy for ID given the shift we’re seeing in terms of scientists accepting views of biology beyond the Physicalist faith.

I’d still pick Levin and Wagner’s tentatively proposed Platonism over ID, but I can’t help but feel Farina is trying to cash in on pseudoskeptical need to hold their Physicalist religion.

Come on, there is no point in throwing around accusations like that - can't you come up with something specific - which data has been manipulated? Once we know that, I guess we will also know whether the misinformation in question lived up to its name.

I don't have time to extensively go through each video just cause they're god awful long and I've kind only been watching them in the background while doing other things. I can say however that in the first episode they specifically omit parts of a documentary to make it seem like the people in it are manipulating fossils because they don't 'fit the narrative' and in order to discredit ID.

I can also point to the leaked Wedge Document from 1998 which highlights the whole point of the Discovery Institute and their stated goals 

https://ncse.ngo/wedge-document

Such highlights include:

The proposition that human beings are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built. Its influence can be detected in most, if not all, of the West's greatest achievements, including representative democracy, human rights, free enterprise, and progress in the arts and sciences. 
---
Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies. Bringing together leading scholars from the natural sciences and those from the humanities and social sciences, the Center explores how new developments in biology, physics and cognitive science raise serious doubts about scientific materialism and have re-opened the case for a broadly theistic understanding of nature.
----
Governing Goals

To defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies.
To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.
-----
5. Spiritual & cultural renewal:

Mainline renewal movements begin to appropriate insights from design theory, and to repudiate theologies influenced by materialism
Major Christian denomination(s) defend(s) traditional doctrine of creation & repudiate(s)
Darwinism Seminaries increasingly recognize & repudiate naturalistic presuppositions
Positive uptake in public opinion polls on issues such as sexuality, abortion and belief in God

I don't have time to extensively go through each video just cause they're god awful long and I've kind only been watching them in the background while doing other things. I can say however that in the first episode they specifically omit parts of a documentary to make it seem like the people in it are manipulating fossils because they don't 'fit the narrative' and in order to discredit ID.

I can also point to the leaked Wedge Document from 1998 which highlights the whole point of the Discovery Institute and their stated goals 

https://ncse.ngo/wedge-document

Such highlights include:

I think everyone could infer the goals in the document just by visiting their site(s).

The question is whether the research + arguments have validity or not. 

For myself I think it is entirely possible that biological ID is false, but I also think it could very well be true. Sadly there seems to be a push to make people think it is false even if it is true, OTOH the DI also seems willing to push ID even if it's false.

I don't think there's any easy way for a layperson to come to a definitive conclusion, at least not yet. I do think the original conception of NR+RM seems to be in trouble though even if ID - in the sense of pointed interventions in evolutionary history - is false.

I think the challenge here is terms like "slow semi-random-walk".

That already puts things beyond a layperson, or even a STEM educated person. I did an undergraduate degree in Maths but it has been some time since I looked at random walks.

There seem to be strong motivational reasons to accept OR deny ID, though there are also Christians who don't seem to find much value in ID. OTOH we do have a few scientists who aren't involved with ID either accepting certain aspects of the research/concepts. We also have non-ID scientists who suggest non-materialist views of biology like the Platonism Levin and Wagner have proposed.

So I would tentatively accept that some of ID could be true, but keep in mind there is a lot of debate on just the validity of the work. This contrasts with Cosmic Fine Tuning which involves a debate around constants that everyone accepts are within a narrow range to allow for life as we know it.

I think I would be interested in finding out specifically which of my 5 examples outlining my own understanding of the topic after several years of study, that you disagree with and why, or ones which you may not fully understand, so that I could possibly better answer your objections or explain them. These 5 examples were some of the major flaws of undirected RM + NS Darwinism. 

I thought it might be instructive to excerpt some of the informative to the layperson articles published by the Discovery Institute, in order to demonstrate the I think high caliber of this work.

The following is just a small  sampling of some of the biological scientific expertise employed by the Discovery Institute in order to support ID by doing research furthering ID, and debunking Darwinism.

These are some example articles by professional highly credentialed evolutionary biologist Gunter Bechly in DI's periodic news digest magazine Evolution News, cumulatively explaining in admittedly somewhat technical terms specific examples of most of the serious flaws in undirected RM + NS Darwinism.  Though somewhat technical, these articles are still aimed at the nonexpert layperson and therefore aren't too hard to understand. He cites and uses in  his articles numerous professional papers by mostly orthodox evolutionary biology researchers in peer reviewed journals.

Günter Bechly is Senior Fellow, Center for Science and Culture. He is a German paleo-entomologist who specializes in the fossil history and systematics of insects (esp. dragonflies), the most diverse group of animals. He served as curator for amber and fossil insects in the department of paleontology at the State Museum of Natural History (SMNS) in Stuttgart, Germany. He is also a Senior Fellow with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. Dr. Bechly earned his Ph.D. in geosciences from Eberhard-Karls-University in Tübingen, Germany.  

It should be noted that like a number of other professionals who adopted ID as their guiding paradigm, he was ousted from his position by the orthodox authorities as a punishment for his heretical views.

https://evolutionnews.org/2024/11/fossil...n-beetles/

https://evolutionnews.org/2024/11/fossil...ly-modern/

https://evolutionnews.org/2024/11/fossil...preserved/

https://evolutionnews.org/2024/11/fossil...evolution/

https://evolutionnews.org/2024/10/fossil...explosion/

https://evolutionnews.org/2024/10/fossil...ozoic-era/

https://evolutionnews.org/2024/10/fossil...-of-maybe/

https://evolutionnews.org/2024/09/fossil...abonionta/

Many more have been published in Evolution News.

I think the challenge here is terms like "slow semi-random-walk".

That already puts things beyond a layperson, or even a STEM educated person. I did an undergraduate degree in Maths but it has been some time since I looked at random walks.

There seem to be strong motivational reasons to accept OR deny ID, though there are also Christians who don't seem to find much value in ID. OTOH we do have a few scientists who aren't involved with ID either accepting certain aspects of the research/concepts. We also have non-ID scientists who suggest non-materialist views of biology like the Platonism Levin and Wagner have proposed.

So I would tentatively accept that some of ID could be true, but keep in mind there is a lot of debate on just the validity of the work. This contrasts with Cosmic Fine Tuning which involves a debate around constants that everyone accepts are within a narrow range to allow for life as we know it.

I think I would be interested in finding out specifically which of my 5 examples outlining my own understanding of the topic after several years of occasional study, that you disagree with and why, or ones which you may not fully understand, so that I could possibly better answer your objections or explain them. These 5 examples were some of the major flaws of undirected RM + NS Darwinism. 

I thought it might be instructive to excerpt some of the informative to the layperson articles published by the Discovery Institute, in order to demonstrate the I think high caliber of this work.

The following is just a small  sampling of some of the biological scientific expertise employed by the Discovery Institute in order to support ID by doing research furthering ID, and debunking Darwinism.

These are some example articles by professional highly credentialed evolutionary biologist Gunter Bechly in DI's periodic news digest magazine Evolution News, cumulatively explaining in admittedly somewhat technical terms specific examples of most of the serious flaws in undirected RM + NS Darwinism.  Though somewhat technical, these articles are still aimed at the nonexpert layperson and therefore aren't too hard to understand. He cites and uses in  his articles numerous professional papers by mostly orthodox evolutionary biology researchers in peer reviewed journals.

Günter Bechly is Senior Fellow, Center for Science and Culture. He is a German paleo-entomologist who specializes in the fossil history and systematics of insects (esp. dragonflies), the most diverse group of animals. He served as curator for amber and fossil insects in the department of paleontology at the State Museum of Natural History (SMNS) in Stuttgart, Germany. He is now a Senior Fellow with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. Dr. Bechly earned his Ph.D. in geosciences from Eberhard-Karls-University in Tübingen, Germany.  

It should be noted that like a number of other professionals who adopted ID as their guiding paradigm, he was ousted from his position by the orthodox authorities as a punishment for his heretical views.

https://evolutionnews.org/2024/11/fossil...n-beetles/

https://evolutionnews.org/2024/11/fossil...ly-modern/

https://evolutionnews.org/2024/11/fossil...preserved/

https://evolutionnews.org/2024/11/fossil...evolution/

https://evolutionnews.org/2024/10/fossil...explosion/

https://evolutionnews.org/2024/10/fossil...ozoic-era/

https://evolutionnews.org/2024/10/fossil...-of-maybe/

https://evolutionnews.org/2024/09/fossil...abonionta/

Many more have been published in Evolution News.

OTOH the DI also seems willing to push ID even if it's false.

At one time I spent a fair bit of time reading their scientific books (as opposed to their religious stuff) and I didn't come across places where they seemed to be over-egging their pudding.

@Smaw, I'm not really interested in how the DI began or what may or may not have happened in the 1990's, or what the motives of their founders were.

The core of the DI's scientific message is that life could not evolve by natural selection, and that the first life could not have evolved from a soup of chemicals that no doubt existed on the pre-biotic era.

Darwin had a rather vague idea of what genes might be, and he could observe genuine examples of evolution by natural selection in for example the shape and size of the beaks of finches.

Very small scale evolution by natural selection is a real thing, it is just that it can't possibly generalise to the large scale.

The problem is that once DNA was understood, the genes turned out to be long strings of (effectively) symbols. Darwin himself admitted that if it turned out that evolution could not operate in small steps his idea was toast.

You should read this:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Darwin-Devolves...B079L6RTNT

Forget that Behe works for the DI - his scientific arguments stand on their own.

The crucial thing is that if species A is going to evolve into species B by NS, then that change will involve one or more genes changing step by step, or one or more genes being created by natural selection. However incomplete genes can't contribute to an organism's fitness. Until the last 1 or two nucleotides are in place anything the gene codes for will be useless.

Lets say the gene that B uses to excel over A is 500 codons long. that means that 498 codons have to be randomly selected - a process that has a 1 in 4^498 or 6.696 x 10^299!

The only coherent answer to that (when really pushed) is to suggest that useful genes are very common. That sounds unlikely, and studies done by the DI confirm that to be the case.

A good way to gauge the issue is to watch debates between orthodox biologists and ID proponents. These are very rare because conventional scientists don't want to play ball. Here is one fascinating example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-KPfFPIaVU

One of the orthodox 'scientists' was Scherma, but I guess he will have to do!

David

At one time I spent a fair bit of time reading their scientific books (as opposed to their religious stuff) and I didn't come across places where they seemed to be over-egging their pudding.

Yeah I didn’t want to make a hard accusation, why I just said “seems”.

I guess I am wary of the obvious goals the Discovery Institute has that go beyond mere scientific truth. I think this can easily bias someone just as much as the other side of the fence, the Materialists, are biased.

Another concern is Meyer seems pretty against the paranormal? But this is rather odd if we are inclined to just look at evidence, which also makes me wonder if the goal here is not truth but some agenda that requires people to not believe they have any power as individuals but should defer to a controlling religious power…

Another concern is Meyer seems pretty against the paranormal? But this is rather odd if we are inclined to just look at evidence, which also makes me wonder if the goal here is not truth but some agenda that requires people to not believe they have any power as individuals but should defer to a controlling religious power

Meyer was interviewed by Joe Rogan a while back. JR pulled him up on that and referred to NDE's and some other paranormal phenomena. SM seemed interested in these and didn't try to argue back. I got the impression that maybe he had lived in a bubble of orthodox Christianity that he hadn't realised what there was outside that sphere!

SM seemed generally pretty happy to be stretched by JR - I guess that was more rewarding than battling against die-hard sceptics.

I just wish JR's podcasts were not so damned long!

Of course the DI findings relate to most non-materialist worldviews - certainly not just Christianity or even religions as such.

David