The Design Paradigm

Memo to friends, enemies, and anyone who wants to find out about us: You can just ask, really. We haven’t any secrets, and you don’t need to play spy games.

Of all the reporters we’ve spoken to during the past year and a half the IDEA Club has been in existence, none has been quite as interesting as last week’s exchange with Celeste Biever of the New Scientist. An exchange which we didn’t know had happened till it was over.

It began with an innocent-looking email through our contact form.

"Maria wrote:
Hi, I am a student at Cornell and am interested in coming to an IDEA meeting.
When will the next one be? Thanks, Maria"

Here on campus we don’t usually introduce ourselves as "Cornell students"; that is generally considered to be a given. But, well, if she felt the need to clarify that, who were we to object? We emailed her the time, and she replied back in a request for more information, which we also provided.

But there was something odd about that email. It was from the same address that had been submitted with the contact form, and the email was still signed Maria, but the name that went with the address was one we didn’t recognize. Was "the student Maria" using a friend’s email address? Oh well, people do odd things sometimes.

From: Cel Biever <xxxxx@gmail.com>	Signed-By: gmail.com

Subject: Re: IDEA Club

Second memo: if you want to play spy games, do it properly.  For instance, changing the name your email provider uses before sending out emails pretending to be someone else might be rule one in the book.

Maria didn’t come to a meeting, and we almost forgot about the incident, till Biever’s name was brought up in an unrelated conversation. She was described as a New Scientist reporter interviewing a host of people for a story on ID, and then things fell together in a way strangely reminiscent of the games we used to play in third grade ("Go spy on the enemy, and steal their secret map!") 

Now that we’re past third grade, though, surely we save those kind of expedients for crucial, perhaps life-and-death situations? Finding out publicly available information about a little IDEA club on a college campus…well, does it really qualify as a justification for outright lies?

Especially since it so ridiculously unneccessary; there is no secret map.

Our letter to the editor of New Scientist can be found here. And just so no-one makes the same mistake– if you ever want to come to a meeting or find out about what we do you don’t need to pretend to be someone else; we’ll let you in under your own name. There are plenty of Cornellians who can witness the fact that even people who come with the avowed intention of "shutting us down" are made welcome at our discussions and on our private listserves. We’re simply a forum for civil, informed discussion, and we like having various points of view. If you think you’ve got a strong argument supporting either side, we’d love to hear it. And if you just want to come and listen to the arguments you’re welcome too.

We do prefer, though, if you don’t lie to us.

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Update 10/6:   The New Scientist has responded to our letter, characterizing the event as unique in Biever’s history and unrepresentative of New Scientist reporting.

Update 10/19: The reply from the New Scientist is now posted on our website. 

 

Midterm papers and problem sets take precedence, so I’m officially giving up on writing those two long posts– on our summer and on our upcoming semester. Suffice it to say we had a wonderful time in the Evolution & Design class. We managed to cover a great deal of ground and consider many issues; and I think demonstrated unequivocally that a course on intelligent design is fully in line with what the University– and Cornell in particular– is about, and need not equal indoctrination from one side or other.

Things are busy now as we go into round one of prelims, but we’re stealing little bits of time to think and read about intelligent design, and every so often to talk about it. We meet every week for discussions– 7 pm Wednesdays, at the Music Room in Willard Straight Hall– and so far have looked at irreducible complexity and specified complexity. This Wednesday we’re going to be discussing testability again, especially as it applies to this debate.

There’ll be a student debate soon as well, but details of that are still to be determined.

 

We’re back at Cornell for a new semester, and should be posting soon. On the agenda: a look-back at this summer’s intelligent design course, a look-ahead at the new semester, and several looks around at what is happening in evolutionary biology and intelligent design.

In case you hadn’t realized, though; keeping this place updated isn’t exactly our highest prority, and how much writing  you will see over the next months will depend mostly on the intensity of our classes and labwork. Classes begin Thursday.

Allen MacNeill has posted a more detailed syllabus for this summer’s intelligent design course, Evolution and Design: Is there purpose in the universe?  and includes a link to the course blog. It is still in the process of being set up right now, but after June 27 will be a good place to look for information on the course.  Ofcourse this website will also continue to be updated by IDEA’ers.

 

At the beginning of last month Cornelius Hunter gave a lecture with that topic at Cornell, and now the video is finally online.  To watch it (in wmv; apologies to linux users) go here.

Many thanks to Jim Hilker and 4U Training Solutions for providing this. 

A little the worse for wear, perhaps, and bleary-eyed from lack of sleep; but even finals have an end.  So welcome back!  Please be patient with us for a few days as we re-adjust to life outside Uris library.  This rest of this week is still a chaotic ‘interim time’ as we finish those few random assignment, and a few of us have last-possible-day exams on friday, but by Saturday the dorms will be closed and spring semester  finished.  We’ll be around and busy all summer, hopefully getting further into all the interesting issues there wasn’t time to research during the schoolyear.

For most of the semester we try to do it all at once– be full time students, taking the most difficult classes, and at the same time be conscientious  IDEA’ers. We work through our homeworks, prelims, lab reports, and at the same time try to answer all our challengers and detractors, explain our position to whoever asks, and in general attempt to do our part of "representing intelligent design on campus". 

But at the end of the year, when study week and finals come around, we give up on the balancing act and, for just a few weeks, pretend we’re ordinary students who never challenged any status quo.  We  shut down our listserve, excuse ourselves from ongoing arguments, and sometimes put  vacation notifiers up in our emails– and then we shut down our computers and move into the library.  For a few weeks we pretend we never dreamed of discussing anything else except what is intrinsically relevant to our classes: the Church-Turing thesis or the undecidability of second-order logic, what transition state theory tells us about the kinetic isotope effect, or the intricacies of genetics. 

So it’s that time of year, and according to tradition, we will all be disappearing.  Since no-one will be able to watch over this website, comments will be temporarily disabled, beginning tomorrow; apologies if that inconveniences anyone, but it can’t be helped.  In a few weeks, finals over, we’ll pick up where we left off. 

This morning there was a pretty decent article by Nadia Chernyak in the Cornell Sun about the new intelligent design class offered here this summer.

. . .MacNeill first came up with the theme for the seminar when brainstorming with Prof. Will Provine, ecology and evironmental biology, for topics for this summer’s seminar class. MacNeill says that the idea was inspired by the Kitzmiller v. Dover case, in which the Dover Area School District in Dover, Pa. was sued for requiring the teaching of intelligent design in high school science classes.

"Given the Dover case, [Provine and I] thought it’d be interesting to teach [this year’s seminar] on Intelligent Design," MacNeill said.

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We will make an attempt to get back to regualar IDEA’ish discussions here soon (it looks as if there has been too much in the way of "news" these days!), but Allen wrote a bit of commentary on the background to this summer’s class that seemed worth linking to.

And for those who have asked– yes, I expect both this blog and the Evolution List will be regularly updated this summer. 

We’ve  gotten a few concerned looks from friends in the wider ID community over our endorsement of Cornell’s new course on intelligent design, BioEE 467, given that the professor is an evolution proponent who has made slightly intemperate remarks on ID in the past.   As a clarification–yes, we know all that.  We also know that MacNeill works hard to ensure fairness, and we do not believe he will let his personal views stifle free thought and inquiry.

And yes, a class can be badly skewed, and yes, there are plenty of potential pitfalls.  But a bit of earnest debate never hurt anything, and I trust that, as people all intent on the same real goal– a "search for truth" so to speak, through science– we can hold each other accountable.   

More for your reading amusement than anything else (not to get accurate information), where we’re being talked about:

Telic Thoughts (good comment thread)

Darwinian Fundamentalism

Uncommon Descent (well…..)

WorldNetDaily

Syracuse Post Standard

Associated Press

And Allen MacNeill on his own blog, in an endeavor to stifle the media misinformation frenzy.
 

by H. Kern Reeve

A response to Mark Psiaki’s follow-up, posted here 

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Cornell’s Evolution department has a promising new course being offered this summer, entititled "Evolution and Design: Is there Purpose in Nature?". For more details go to the EvolutionList, or for our "official position" on it, see our press release below.

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Cornelius Hunter gives his perspective of his visit to Cornell over at ID the Future:

Last night I visited Cornell University to give a presentation on evolutionary thought, and participate in a panel discussion on evolution and intelligent design with life science professors Richard Harrison and Kern Reeve. Like giving a theoretical lecture followed by an experimental demonstration, this two-event format allowed me both (i) to explain the non scientific philosophical background of evolution and (ii) to show a live demonstration of evolutionary thinking to prove my point.

(more at ID The Future…) 

 by Mark L. Psiaki

I have the following critiques of points made last night (April 5, 2006) at the Panel Discussion on Intelligent Design and Evolution in which Prof. Cornelius Hunter of Biola University represented intelligent design and Profs. Richard Harrison, chair of the Ecology & Evolutionary Biology Department at Cornell, and Kern Reeve, professor in the Cornell department of Neurobiology & Behavior, represented evolution.  I don’t think that Prof Hunter made adequate replies to some of the problems with points made by Profs. Harrison Reeve. The important additional responses, as I see them, are as follows

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The IDEA Club press release on next week’s events:

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This is off-topic as regards the scientific issues, but on-topic as regards some objections that have been brought up against ID theory here at Cornell, and especially on the Evolutionlist (now online).  I always find it amusing when people go on about "ID is not only bad science, it is also bad religion!"   For one thing,  we ought to be willing to consider the truth value of a given theory whether or not it has uncomfortable religious or philosophical consequences, and then again . . . if I really wanted religious advice from them I would have asked :-).  There was probably a reason I didn’t.

The argument goes this way. "According to good theology, Christians are supposed to accept everything on faith.  Faith (and this is a Richard Dawkins definition) means blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence.   If intelligent design is true you might perhaps not require  this sort of faith to believe in God.  Therefore all good Christians should flee from ID theory, and the perfidious slippery slope toward rationalism that it entails."

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Welcome to the weblog of the Intelligent Design Evolution Awareness Club (IDEA) at Cornell University!  This is an experiment, so we’ll see how the next month goes and may go offline at any time without notice. If we do and you’re annoyed, email us (idea@cornell.edu) and tell us why it matters.

We don’t promise anything– in particular, we don’t promise (or anticipate providing) any sort of continuous stream of articles and reading material.  We’re all busy students with more than enough to do keeping up with homeworks, lab reports, research and exams; and we don’t intend to write anything just for the sake of updating frequently. 

This blog is not a battle ground– come to our meetings for that! and not political in any way, shape or form.  Though at times we may discuss court cases or school board decisions related to the current controversies, the focus here is the science of intelligent design and evolution, and new research and insights into both.

Please feel free to leave comments and tell us what you think; we like to hear from both sides of the issue, and the only requirement is basic civility and no ad hominem attacks.  If you are a member of IDEA Cornell and would like to become a contributor, talk to one of the officers or email idea@cornell.edu and we’ll help you get started.