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

To refer back to my post a little while ago about the DI's leaked Wedge document that highlights their goals and intentions 


These people aren't pushing ID as a legitimate scientific alternative to traditional and modern forms of evolution for the pure scientific merit. Their goals are reinforcement of traditional conservative Christian values and ID is a tool to be used in that regard. In another one of their documents, their is quite literally a spelling error where instead of "Intelligent Design" they put "Creationism". There has been court cases where they've tried to have ID taught in schools alongside evolutionary theory and they have found in them that the type of ID that the Discovery Institute puts forward is just secularised creationism to get around the separation of church and state. If the Discovery Institute is the group who is doing the most work on ID then it is of no suprise to me that the general scientific community is so hostile to the idea, there is no good faith scientists here only proponents with an agendas who do science on the side. 

It's certainly not a wrong point to make that the truth of ID doesn't depend on the quality of it's proponents. But if the best arguments are being put forward by these people, people with agendas who as per the very first video in the series have been proven to lie in order to manipulate the evidence in their favour, it instantly makes it so anything they say must be taken with the largest grain of salt ever as to whether or not the arguments are sound compared to the alternatives.

A lot of science began as magic - think particularly of chemistry. Some famous scientists - such as Newton - also explored alchemy.

If you dig into the historic roots of many subjects, you often find other forces, and other motives.

As for the modern DI, it has basically split into two parts. One part deals with science, the other with Fundamentalist Christianity.

One of the arguments against ID was/is that useful proteins were common within 'protein space' (the space of all possible proteins).

It was the DI that sponsored research to check this idea. Needless to say, useful protein structures are sparsely
scattered in a vast combinatorial space. Do you want to not know this fact because it came from the DI?

Here is one of their senior fellows - David Berlinski, who describes himself as a secular Jew:

https://www.discovery.org/p/berlinski/

I think they made this split because they realised that the science of ID can stand on its own two feet.

Note again that ID really means evolution by non-Darwinian means. The problem is that it is very hard to propose another theory of evolution that does not include consciousness to filter through the combinatorially vast space of possible structures.

Also realise that non scientific motives abound on both sides of this debate. Otherwise the professor would be bashed down by conventional evolutionists who know he is talking BS.

David

Here is one of their senior fellows - David Berlinski, who describes himself as a secular Jew:

https://www.discovery.org/p/berlinski/

Berlinski is quite the intelligent fellow. He interests me more than his Christian fellows, in part because while he agrees with Intelligent Design, he draws different conclusions about the nature of the intelligence. And better yet ~ he is respected among his peers, despite their differing views on the intelligence, because they are doing science and philosophy, not religion. They all understand the religious aspect to be their personal conclusions, and that's great.

To refer back to my post a little while ago about the DI's leaked Wedge document that highlights their goals and intentions 

These people aren't pushing ID as a legitimate scientific alternative to traditional and modern forms of evolution for the pure scientific merit. Their goals are reinforcement of traditional conservative Christian values and ID is a tool to be used in that regard. In another one of their documents, their is quite literally a spelling error where instead of "Intelligent Design" they put "Creationism". There has been court cases where they've tried to have ID taught in schools alongside evolutionary theory and they have found in them that the type of ID that the Discovery Institute puts forward is just secularised creationism to get around the separation of church and state. If the Discovery Institute is the group who is doing the most work on ID then it is of no suprise to me that the general scientific community is so hostile to the idea, there is no good faith scientists here only proponents with an agendas who do science on the side. 

It's certainly not a wrong point to make that the truth of ID doesn't depend on the quality of it's proponents. But if the best arguments are being put forward by these people, people with agendas who as per the very first video in the series have been proven to lie in order to manipulate the evidence in their favour, it instantly makes it so anything they say must be taken with the largest grain of salt ever as to whether or not the arguments are sound compared to the alternatives.

These claims don't stand up to examination. 

I agree with David001 and Valmar in their last two posts. I invite you to peruse the last few issues of the DI's online magazine, Evolution News. An example of one issue is at https://evolutionnews.org/category/science/ . It contains many articles, most of them on the science of Intelligent Design - no proselitizing for traditional Christianity, which activity you seem to be claiming is the main purpose of the DI. The facts of the matter don't show that at all. This shows that most all the DI is doing is trying to publicize and make the public aware of their work in developing and establishing the truth of the science of Intelligent Design.

It could certainly be done, but I know I certainly don't care enough about the whole thing to do it. I think I've definitely seen enough to know that the DI has the wrong intentions when they put forward the arguments they do and now it might be better to find some ID advocates outside of the organization. 

But then...is there any? Cause if the large majority of proponents are all held up in this group well THAT'S not good.

I’m not convinced personally that the DI folks are completely wrong. There does seem to be open questions about evolution even outside of DI, and some proposals are “paranormal” in some sense even if the idea is Platonic Forms narrow the “search space” mutations/selection account for.

I guess to me Farina seems just as worthy of suspicion as DI, perhaps more so. But it does feel like this would be an incredible chore to go through all this stuff, OTOH it might be nice to get some limited sense of closure on this topic…

These claims don't stand up to examination. 

I agree with David001 and Valmar in their last two posts. I invite you to peruse the last few issues of the DI's online magazine, Evolution News. An example of one issue is at https://evolutionnews.org/category/science/ . It contains many articles, most of them on the science of Intelligent Design - no proselitizing for traditional Christianity, which activity you seem to be claiming is the main purpose of the DI. The facts of the matter don't show that at all. This shows that most all the DI is doing is trying to publicize and make the public aware of their work in developing and establishing the truth of the science of Intelligent Design.

Even if they were, at every turn, pushing Christianity…would it really be different than the Materialist evangelism we see across STEM? I actually feel DI has been more honest about where one takes a leap of faith beyond the data, whereas the dishonesty of the Materialist faith has been claiming the data is by default supporting their beliefs in something outside of all experience, only known by experience, yet also generating the experiencer.

As Dembski said:

ID’s metaphysical openness about the nature of nature entails a parallel openness about the nature of the designer. Is the designer an intelligent alien, a computional [sic] simulator (a la THE MATRIX), a Platonic demiurge, a Stoic seminal reason, an impersonal telic process, …, or the infinite personal transcendent creator God of Christianity? The empirical data of nature simply can’t decide. But that’s not to say the designer is anonymous. I’m a Christian, so the designer’s identity is clear, at least to me. But even to identify the designer with the Christian God is not to say that any particular instance of design in nature is directly the work of his hands.

I think Dembski's leap to the designer's idenity is not rationally warranted even if the evidence was clearly in favor of ID....but the question IMO is not whatever their political agenda is or leaps they make, but whether they are correct that intervention occurred at key points of our planet’s evolutionary development. Though given Dembski leaves "impersonal telic process" as an option maybe it isn't correct to say intervention.

Even if they flat out stated they want to start with ID but ultimately get textbooks teaching Young Earth Creationism, it would still be an open question if [the] evidence they accumulated about the deficiencies of RM + NS were valid. 

While I am not the go-to guy for biology or chemistry, my historical weak points sadly, I'll go through one of the videos as a starting point and we can see how things measure up when we get down into the data...

These claims don't stand up to examination. 

I agree with David001 and Valmar in their last two posts. I invite you to peruse the last few issues of the DI's online magazine, Evolution News. An example of one issue is at https://evolutionnews.org/category/science/ . It contains many articles, most of them on the science of Intelligent Design - no proselitizing for traditional Christianity, which activity you seem to be claiming is the main purpose of the DI. The facts of the matter don't show that at all. This shows that most all the DI is doing is trying to publicize and make the public aware of their work in developing and establishing the truth of the science of Intelligent Design.

I was happy to see that the Weinstiens were supportive of the way the DI is approaching their research. Bret mentioned that he didn't think that Meyer would give up his faith if a darwinian approach was found to explain the gaps that ID professes to explain. On the other hand I doubt that the opposite would be true (Weinstiens convert to christainity) given they are the mirror opposites being fundementalist materialists imho.  On another note, I doubt if the Weinstiens support of the DI is going to help move the needle much in the mainstream given their recent battles over covid and various forms of wokism.  Oops was that to political for this forum

@Laird Gonna make a separate thread for every video in the playlist, as I think this thread now is more about meta-commentary.

Maybe we can merge them all after all the discussion, but I also understand if you and @Ninshub decide to merge them beforehand.

@Laird Gonna make a separate thread for every video in the playlist, as I think this thread now is more about meta-commentary.

I would argue that we have trashed enough of the professor's arguments already! I mean if he is producing these videos and squaring off against James Tour, then he damn well should be right about everything he says!

Furthermore, I would argue his list of alternatives to Darwinism was intentionally deceptive (rather like his name). He knows that genetic processes like genetic drift are not the same as the Darwinian mechanism!

If you want to push this further, I suggest you or maybe Laird pick one or two interesting examples for us to try to trash!

I think it is more interesting to understand the fundamental reason why the Darwinian mechanism cannot be generalised to large scale evolution.

This is because it would be necessary to explain how whole new proteins, or extensively modified proteins could appear. The problem is that if you step by step modify the gene for protein A until you reach protein B, most of the changes cannot benefit from natural selection. A half-formed protein is of no selective advantage to the organism. This, incidentally implies that the designer is probably still at work!

David

I would argue that we have trashed enough of the professor's arguments already! I mean if he is producing these videos and squaring off against James Tour, then he damn well should be right about everything he says!

Furthermore, I would argue his list of alternatives to Darwinism was intentionally deceptive (rather like his name). He knows that genetic processes like genetic drift are not the same as the Darwinian mechanism!

If you want to push this further, I suggest you or maybe Laird pick one or two interesting examples for us to try to trash!

David

Having just watched Part I of Farina's expose, I'm actually not convinced Farina is 100% wrong in his claims about the DI...

I think some of what he says has merit, in that it does feel DI was at best sloppy in how they presented their challenge to the theory that humans evolve from apes. That said I'm reading the rebuttal of Farina's Luskin video from DI right now.

As I said earlier, to me it seems DI overemphasizes current issues with our knowledge about evolution *and* Farina de-emphasizes how much of a problem those issues might be for a materialist view of reality. Also keep in mind alternatives do exist to ID's claim of intervention at particular points on the evolutionary timeline as well as the RM + NS standard view of that timeline.

[Laird]

This video starts with the trivial complaint that almost none of the papers published by the DI are in legitimate peer reviewed journals, while ignoring the fact that due to the strong bias of mainstream consensus science no such pro-ID findings and papers are allowed in their pages.

Didn't Douglas Axe get a paper or papers published in a legitimate peer-reviewed journal?

Then there is the claim that there are many other mechanisms of gene altering in nature besides mutations, such as gene duplications. This is a true claim but it ignores the facts that all of these are random with respect to reproductive capability and that therefore being effectively really random all of them have the same very low probability of being somehow advantageous. The vast majority of random genetic variations are by their very nature random with respect to reproducibility, and more importantly, detrimental or fatal to the organism.

This does seem intuitively plausible, but empirical science is often counter-intuitive - witness quantum mechanics. In the very video you're critiquing, if I recall correctly - but it might be another one - Dave claims based on peer-reviewed research that advantageous mutations are much more common than ID proponents claim.

Farina also cleverly leaves out any attempt to debunk another major evidence of the operation of Intelligent Design in the history of life. [That being the fossil record --Laird]

It's not a clever avoidance; he deals with it in detail in other videos, especially the one on Stephen Meyer.

Another example of his invalid debunkings concerns Farina's claim that ID completely ignores the supposed high likelihood that something called "cooption" can occur in the Darwinistic RM + NS process, where random genetic changes can come about having very different biological functions, and which later might by chance be available to cobble up the actual complex adaptation that he is trying to explain.

What in your view makes this an invalid debunking?

Finally in this summary overview, Farina conveniently leaves out in his debunking attemps the fact that the "wait time" for three or more coordinated mutations to randomly appear is much longer than allowed in the time actually observed from sudden jumps in the fossil record like the Cambrian Explosion. Most of the Darwinist-required multi-coordinated random mutation occurences are where the change requires more than two coordinated simultaneous mutations.

He provides evidence, in the form of a study, that after knocking out the genes for a bacterial flagellum, the bacteria rapidly redeveloped flagella under selection pressure for motility. Doesn't this suggest that this so-called wait time is not such a problem? (I haven't read the paper he references, so it might not prove the point he says it does).

Of course, ID proponents can claim that merely observing beneficial change, even in a laboratory, doesn't prove that those changes were solely due to random mutations, but how would one go about testing that?