The reference below to "our book" is Into the Cool, U. Chicago  
Press...just out.

Tim,
     ID is a political PR movement.

I was just emailed this "note" and thought it might be of interest to  
some of you.


http://www.intothecool.com/blog/


If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them
with bullshit. This junior high school motto seems to
be the secret motto and modus operandi of the
'intelligent design' movement, which used to be the
"creation science" movement, and was before that
simply "creationism."  Author and ID advocate William
Dembski has kindly given us permission to post on his
website, which we have been pleased to do, in the
hopes of promoting a more considered view of the
second law's role in life and evolution. Obviously
this was naive. Ironically we have been
criticized--apparently by those who have not read our
book--for promoting "pseudoscientific bunkum." Apart
from ad hominem attacks to the effect that we are just
a "geologist and Carl's son" and that our book would
better have been named "Into the Baloney," the
criticism has been leveled that the second law's role
in life's complexity cannot be crucial because natural
phenomena such as tidal waves and fires produce much
more entropy. The point, however, is not that life
outstrips other natural processes in entropy
production but that it measurably (as shown by
outgoing long-wave radiation satellites, to take just
one example) produces more entropy than would be the
case without it. Indeed, if a person were to
spontaneously combust, more entropy would be
produced--in the short-term anyway--than if she were
to continue metabolizing normally. Yet a living thing
produces  more entropy than a mere random collection
of matter--and, over the long run, more than someone
spontaneously combusting. As Eddington writes. "If
someone points out to you that your pet theory of the
universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's
equations--then so much the worse for Maxwell's
equations. If it is found to be contradicted by
observation--well, these experimentalists do bungle
things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be
against the second law of thermodynamics I can give
you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse
in deepest humiliation."  Some of the more
scientifically savvy creationists have gleaned this
fact and, speculating quite wildly, attempted to make
an end run around  the second law. Perhaps the most
surprising of them is Frank Tipler, author of The
Physics of Immortality, who has devised an elaborate
means in which the future of evolution, encompassing
human technology, will preserve each human soul in a
futuristic heaven. This is interesting science
fiction, and cannot be ruled out; but it is not
science. We enjoy the works of Philip K. Dick, which
includes stories of God as an alien ("The Divine
Invasion"), aliens sending a vampiric (to them a
devouring God is more natural than one that you eat)
Jesus simulation onboard a faltering spacecraft, and
a lowly future worker beta testing a time travel
device that turns out to write the Bible by accident
("A Prominent Author"). By contrast the intelligent
design ur-plot that Jesus is somehow--but of course
they are reluctant to say how on the record as it
sounds, well, a tad unscientific--behind it all seems
rather trite and boring. The Christian
proto-existentialist Soren Kierkegaard remarked that
the more preposterous a belief is the greater the
faith necessary to believe it. Precisely. We were
surprised to see Tipler--co-author with Templeton
winner John Barrow of a massive tome on the Anthropic
Principle--included in a Dembski anthology on
intelligent design. What was worse was Tipler's claim
that Lynn Margulis supported intelligent design in
Aquiring Genomes because she mentioned Behe while
criticizing Darwinism--and was joined in such
criticism by doyenne of evolutionary biology Ernst
Mayr. Unfortunately, this showed a solid lack of
scholarship if not disingenuousness on Tipler's part.
Margulis was criticizing neoDarwinism's claims that
mutations were the sole source of variation, not
Darwinism of which her endosymbiotic theory of the
origin of eukaryotic cells is a shining--and
genetically proven--example. (The Behe "mention" was
perjorative.) The amount of money coming in to support
creationism is astounding. One of us (Dorion) even
thought fit to apply for a John Templeton Grant as
they were advertising in Nature that they were
seriously looking for scientific treatments of what
they called the "great debate" concerning purpose in
life. To their credit, the Templeton committee now
summarily reject the creationist conceit that
evolution is a theory.

But the anthropic principle notion that the universe
is somehow created with man in mind or as its end
point, is too often a smokescreen for wholly
speculative creationism. Book after book is written
highlighting the supposedly inconceivable
concatenation of finely tuned constants that
supposedly (if unstatedly) reveal the miracle of
creation. And yet if the chances, based on information
theory (or whatever other scientific disciplines can
be pounded into shape to suit creationist purposes),
of us being here are so remote as to suggest an
all-powerful Creator, then simple calculation suggests
that the chances that You exist are even more remote.
More remote still is the startling unlikelihood that
You will be reading this Precise Peevish Note on the
cryptic political machinations of scientific
underlings. The Intelligent Designer is apparently a
many-faceted monster with an exceedingly devious plan
that includes the meta-miracle of anonymous posters
spewing incomprehensible theories on our website and
creationists who have not read our book criticizing it
on theirs. In engaging the creationists we were hoping
to generate more light than heat but apparently the
Intelligent Designer's mysterious ways include
cavalier dismissals of evidence in favor of worldviews
that place mammalian bipeds at the center of the
universe. Will wonders never cease.

>

=========================================================
Important Subscriber Information:

The Museum-L FAQ file is located at http://www.finalchapter.com/museum-l-faq/ . You may obtain detailed information about the listserv commands by sending a one line e-mail message to [log in to unmask] . The body of the message should read "help" (without the quotes).

If you decide to leave Museum-L, please send a one line e-mail message to [log in to unmask] . The body of the message should read "Signoff Museum-L" (without the quotes).