I’m happy to discuss it further. Especially your distinction between small and big ID, I think is an important distinction and you raise an important question, worthy of further consideration. You are a good thinker, in my opinion, and have pointed out an important facet of ID that the Discovery Institute does not explain well enough.
From the 2002 Biology GCSE textbook:
https://www.truthinscience.org.uk/content.cfm?id=3163
I took my biology GCSE exam in 1999, and this is what I was taught.
Context of this discussion is that ID does point out valid flaws and holes in evolutionary explanations. ID is not solely about this negative approach to evolution, but it is a facet of ID, a valuable and uncontroversial facet since they point out well established flaws. And these flaws are not explained to us in school, e.g. with the Haeckel diagrams. And these are not just minor flaws, like the fact electrons are not tiny little balls, which are allowable to avoid confusing students with minor details. These are really major flaws that undermine lines of evidence held up as supporting the theory of evolution.
I mostly learned about evolution in GCSE biology taught in the UK. Based on the page I linked to, the hypotheses is moths changed color through natural selection of birds feeding on the moths that stood out on tree trunks blackened by soot. However, moths don’t actually sit on these tree trunks in great enough number for natural selection to act on the moths. So, the experiment was fabricated to test the hypothesis by gluing moths to the trees and determining which moths were eaten by birds. Now, if this matched the actual behavior of moths, this would be a good experiment. But it did not, so did not tell us about the actual selection factor influencing moth evolution, and thus we do not know from that particular experiment what is actually responsible for moth changing color. This is just bad science. You do not start with a conclusion and concoct an experiment unfaithful to reality to substantiate said conclusion. Not only are students misinformed about evolution, but they are taught that bad science is alright if it establishes the status quo. Very unscientific.
Neutral drift is the same thing. ‘random mutation’ means mutation happens without anticipation of future fitness benefits. Neutral drift is exactly this sort of mutation. The difference is these random mutations are not selected because they do not impact fitness.
Neutral drift adds nothing to the explanatory power of mutation to show us where genes come from.
Bottom line for me, if we restrict ID to only teaching their negative line of evidence in school, it would be invaluable from a critical thinking perspective, and just plain good methodology perspective. Fine, ban the positive argument side due to misinformed fears about science and religion, but at the very least, teach this negative argument side if for nothing else the purity of scientific pedagogy.
The theory of aether made testable predictions.
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Implied by whom? That’s what I asked.
I haven’t looked at your research, but Ewert’s paper didn’t do anything of the sort.
That’s not the only mechanism and that mechanism does generate new genes. That’s why we have multiple members of gene families and why we have to distinguish orthologous genes from paralogous ones.
And the connection of those with specified complexity is what? Indeed, who has showed that they have any application to evolution at all?
Take this one. Explain how it precludes evolution by natural processes.
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This would be more persuasive if you’d pointed out any valid flaws in evolutionary explanations. And you do agree that at least part of the program of ID is to attack evolution, which is refreshing.
Still waiting to hear any major flaws.
So you were complaining about not being taught the later, more rigorous work that was published after you were taught about evolution, correct?
You have stated the hypothesis correctly. Everything else you stated is false – that’s why I asked which studies you’ve read. If you really want to criticize this work, you have to know what it consisted of. You really have to learn what Kettlewell and Majerus actually did and found. Some actual facts: 36% of moths were found resting on trunks, which is plenty for natural selection to operate. But another 52% were found resting on branches, where the camouflage situation is the same, so there’s actually no issue here at all. Kettlewell’s experiment did not involve gluing moths to trees – it was a capture and release experiment. Dead moths were glued in place to take illustrative photos, not as part of the experiment. Kettlewell’s original experiment was quite good science, and I’m sick to death of people maligning him.
In short, in this case what you learned about evolution from ID was a lie.
ETA: release and capture, not capture and release. Capture and release is for fishing.
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No, neutral drift is not the same thing. Neutral drift accumulates multiple random mutations. Speaking with a lay understanding (others please correct me), cumulative individual mutations not affecting fitness will build and then eventually can produce complexity and functional change. Think of a long nonsensical string of letters and randomly change several ‘each generation’. Eventually a meaningful word will ‘fall out’. Also remember (secularists can ignore this 
) that I believe in God’s providential control and lowercase ‘id’. That will not be detectable scientifically.
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For me personally I was in 8th grade that year and our school, in south Alabama, taught us that the chart was not correct at all.
If I am going to read fantasy I prefer those where the author(s) know that it is fantasy. Those books are better written.
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I hate to break it to you here, but GCSE only gives you a very cursory snapshot of biology (or any of the other sciences for that matter). At that level, you are mostly being spoon fed individual results (of which you are only taught a tiny fraction that barely scratches the surface), and you learn relatively little about the actual methods involved. In particular, you don’t drill down into the underlying principles in anywhere near enough detail to be able to tell the difference between good science and bad science.
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I don’t think you get to change the definition of evolution to “creation of functional information” and then complain that what you were taught doesn’t fit with your own definition. The standard definition of evolution is changes in allele frequencies in a population over time, which the moths and finch beaks demonstrate just fine.
I have watched biologists explain the mechanisms for creating new genes to you here. Just because it was missing from your education does not mean it is missing from evolutionary theory.
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Why not take some online courses in biology and evolution?
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Read some more. The mechanisms are more than sufficient. The human-specific gene ARHGAP11B was created by partial duplication of the ancient primate gene ARHGAP11A and a single mutation that substituted C→G. The resulting new gene caused the human neocortex to begin expanding. (This also gives the lie to the idea that all mutations are deleterious.)
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/12/e1601941
https://www.mpi-cbg.de/news-events/latest-news/article/news/evolutionary-key-for-a-bigger-brain/
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6503/546?rss=1
Playing off the above, sapiens have only ARHGAP11B, primates have only ARHGAP11A, and Neanderthal/Denisovan carry both paralogs. From the first article I referenced:
"The crucial C→G base substitution was also found in Neanderthal and Denisova ARHGAP11B (fig. S3). Moreover, all present-day humans analyzed carry the C→G substitution. Together, these observations indicate that the C→G base substitution, which presumably occurred in the ~5 million years since the ARHGAP11 gene duplication event, took place before the archaic hominins diverged from the modern human lineage >500,000 years ago.
Exactly.
The dictum “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” is not strictly true, but it is unquestionably true that many “ancient” structures appear and disappear during fetal development, whether they are “gills” in human embryos or “legs” in whales.
Do you mean to say that computer science and engineering aren’t the same as evolutionary biology? Heresy!
Me too. It’s a specious claim.
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That wasn’t my question. You were comparing human designers to the evolutionary process. So I wanted to know if the Intelligent Designer is human.
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When people pay attention to ID, it’s onto something. When people ignore ID, it’s onto something, because people are too scared to address their arguments…
Y’all have got to get on the same page. Which is it?
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One of the problems with calling God an intelligent designer is that the Bible never calls God a designer. He is usually called the Father, and a father doesn’t design his children. (Or so said one of John Polkinghorne’s former students. He stopped by this forum and left rather hastily.)
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I’m very familiar with the details of the cases involving Gonzalez and Crocker, but hadn’t heard about Axe. I will comment on the former two.
Crocker was an adjunct faculty member, not a tenure-track faculty member, so her case doesn’t really belong with that of Gonzalez. I don’t doubt that her approach to ID/evolution led to her not being given another contract, but (again) it’s not the same cup of tea. Adjuncts have no job security and no expectation of “academic freedom” in the roles they fill. If a chair isn’t happy with the performance of a given adjunct, for any reason, the adjunct won’t continue in that role. So, I don’t think her story should even have been part of “Expelled.” It’s too minor.
Gonzalez, however, IMO was subjected to very inappropriate harassment at Iowa State. After he published his pro-ID book, The Privileged Planet, an atheist professor in the religion department, Hector Avalos, circulated a petition among faculty that urged the university publicly to distance itself from the book’s conclusions. I would be very surprised, if that deed did not help poison the atmosphere for tenure deliberations about Gonzalez. I was so angry about this, in fact, that I wrote a letter to the university president expressing disdain about Avalos’ outrageous behavior.
Whatever one thinks of ID, or Gonzalez’ approach to it, he is hardly the only scientist to write books or narrate films for the general public, giving religious interpretations of science. It is not an appropriate response for a faculty member to organize a petition against Dr. Gonzalez, simply for adding his own religious opinion to those of many others. For example, when Carl Sagan presented his popular television series, Cosmos, he began the first program with what can only be called a religious credo: “The universe is all that is or ever was or ever will be.” This is a religious credo, pure and simple (and many of his other statements are consistent with it), despite its incorporation into a series of programs that was used for many years in public high school and college science classes. Yet none of his colleagues at Cornell petitioned to dissociate the university from Sagan’s openly religious (I would say pantheistic) interpretation of cosmology.
Nor has anyone at Oxford, Texas, Harvard, or Brown petitioned against the views of Richard Dawkins, Steven Weinberg, Edward Wilson, or Kenneth Miller, who have all given religious interpretations to aspects of modern science in popular books. Is there something about Gonzalez’ design interpretation that makes it any less acceptable than Dawkins’ atheism, Wilson’s materialist reductionism, or Miller’s Roman Catholic interpretation of evolution? It is not hard to understand why Avalos (who advised a campus atheist group) would find Gonzalez’ book less acceptable than those of Dawkins or Weinberg; but that type of viewpoint discrimination should not be acceptable at Iowa State or any other major research university.
Yet, it was.
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“Especially your distinction between small and big ID, I think is an important distinction and you raise an important question”
It turns out this isn’t my original idea or question. Thus, I do not wish to take credit from others for it.
In 2006, Owen Gingerich noted: "I believe in intelligent design, lower case i and lower case d. / “But I have a problem with Intelligent Design, capital I and capital D. It is being sold increasingly as a political movement, as if somehow it is an alternative to Darwinian evolution.” (God’s Universe. Belknap Press, 2006: 68-69) Edward Davis cited this also in First Things in 2007. It may be that I had heard it before then, as I first came into contact with ID theory in roughly 2002, but I don’t recall where I initially got it from.
The distinction likely came up on the ASA list between 2006 and 2010, where I picked it up and haven’t put it down since. Former IDist VJ Torley responded to me in 2012 at Uncommon Descent:
"Hi Gregory, You make a good point about the distinction between (capitalized) Intelligent Design, and (lower case) intelligent design. The latter belief does not require that the Designer left any visible, discernible traces of His activity.” To his credit, when Torley was still an IDist (he’s not anymore, at least partly connected with “following the implications where they lead” wrt this distinction), he always took care to capitalize “Intelligent Design” and “Designer” because he realized it made an important difference in the conversation and was closer to the actual meaning intended, which was easily conflated in spoken form. In written form, however, using the Shift-key to capitalize, wasn’t too much to ask for, since it helped with communicative clarity, even though the leading “ID theorists” made it a point to always write both “intelligent design” and “designer” without capital letters.
Similar to Torley, IDist “Timaeus” said this at Uncommon Descent in 2012:
“I was already a believer in “intelligent design” (small id) before I ever heard of Behe or Intelligent Design (big ID)".
Others have since made the same distinction, such as Howard Ahmanson (2014), Deb Haarsma (2014), and WL Craig (2015). Craig Rusbult made the distinction on the ASA education pages, though it does not indicate in which year he started doing this (one page is copyright 2002) - this may have been the first place I saw it. There are surely a significant # of others who both make it and have patiently asked for IDists to make the distinction too for the sake of clearer communication. It is now widely accepted as a key distinction to make among people critical of “ID theory”.
Even the arch-IDist with the internet nickname “Eddie,” recently wrote:
“Many people have said that they believe in “intelligent design” (i.e., that the universe or life is intelligently designed by some mind), but do not believe in Intelligent Design (i.e., a particular attempt to prove design by scientific means that arose in the 1990s).”
In short, please in the future refer not to my distinction or my question, but rather to “our” distinction and “our question”, as “we” who see the value and importance in this distinction, and thus ask it of IDists for clarity’s sake. The Discovery Institute’s leadership has yet to honour our request to them to make this distinction openly and clearly in their writings (just do a quick recent search of Evolution News and Views to check). Are you aware of why that is, EricMH?
The phraseology of distinguishing “Divine Design” (ID theory) from “human design” (design theory, design thinking, design studies, design history, etc.) came to me more recently, as it seems to clarify further the distinction, rather than just arguing about capitalization or lack thereof. The different meanings of “Intelligent Design/intelligent design” also came up recently in the contrast between Michael Egnor and Michael Behe about whether covid-19 is “intelligently designed” (Egnor says “No” re: human engineers - “intelligent design of the COVID-19 virus seems unlikely”) or “Intelligently Designed” (Behe says “Yes” - Evolution, Design, and COVID-19 | Evolution News), though neither used capital letters. Nevertheless, the anonymous Moderator at the Center for Science and Culture group on FB acknowledged the distinction in their words that there are indeed “two different kinds of intelligent design”. That’s the closest I’ve yet seen in a decade to the DI admitting it needs to clarify it’s language, albeit in a private, member-only FB group.
If you wanted to take a step forward in helping to lower the perceived “persecution” you see around you among your fellow IDists, Eric, specifically when discussing ID theory not with atheists or agnostics, but rather with fellow religious theists, then there is something practical you could do. Why not ask Stephen Meyer or John West at the Discovery Institute, why they haven’t addressed this directly, after all these years? You say this is “an important facet of ID that the Discovery Institute does not explain well enough”. Ok, then why not do your part to figure that explanation out, and if you’re able, report back here what you find? Surely they would be more likely to answer to you, who is currently working for/with them, rather than “us” who oppose “ID theory”.
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In case it helps, @EricMH, here’s what I wrote and asked in response to the Admin for the Center for Science and Culture on FB, after they acknowledged that there are “two different kinds of intelligent design” (the rest of the answer remains in that private member group):
So, this means that COVID-19 is both “intelligently designed” and “not intelligently designed” at the same time, depending on which of the “two different kinds of intelligent design” one is using? Thus, if I understood correctly, according to ID theory, “everything is designed” with an “overall design” or “original design”, which signifies “Divine Design” (cf. “God created the heavens and the earth”). In short, everything is “designed” and nothing can (or should) be spoken of that is “not designed”. Is that correct? So, even if, as per Egnor, “intelligent design of the COVID-19 virus seems unlikely”, referring to what is “specifically engineered by a human scientist” (“human design”), it can still be said to be “designed” (“Divine Design”) at another level. Does that accurately represent what you wrote in distinguishing these “two different kinds of intelligent design”? Thank you for helping to clarify the possible uses of ID theory in its proper fields.
It was not responded to (but I wasn’t kicked out of the group for asking it, so that’s perhaps a sign of progress). If you can do better and receive a direct answer, EricMH, please feel invited and encouraged to do so. Stephen Meyer (Program Director) and John West (Associate Director) are the leads at the Center for Science and Culture. Those are the men whose answer(s) matters most on behalf of the Discovery Institute. And if they won’t answer even you, at least it would be helpful to understand better why not.
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I am familiar with the Gonzalez case, and I would agree that one could say he faced some blow back from his book. However, the decision to deny him tenure was completely justified on a professional level. He wasn’t able to secure research grants, his research projects weren’t progressing, he had only graduated one student, and his publications were based on work he did before arriving at Iowa State. What Iowa State was looking for is someone who was being productive, and Gonzalez clearly did not meet those standards. It’s also worth mentioning that Gonzalez was not the only person denied tenure at that time so it’s not as if he was singled out.
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There’s no simple answer to this scenario. To use a different example, would an astronomy or geology department be justified in letting a professor go if they were a vocal and prominent leader of the Flat Earth movement? Obviously, there are limits to how far down the pseudoscience rabbit hole you can go before it affects your scientific career.
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