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.

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. 

We’ve started a website to catalog some of the false statements and propaganda techniques Randy Olson uses in his documentary, Flock of Dodos.

The whole website can be found here. We’ve included information on the argument from suboptimal design that Olson uses a lot.

In one of our more interesting pages we investigate Olson’s claims that Jonathan Wells lied. As we write:

In Randy Olson’s pseudo-documentary Flock of Dodos, Olson remarks that he has problems with some of John Calvert’s sources. To demonstrate, he asks Calvart about the faked drawings that Jonathan Wells says appears in several evolutionary textbooks. After a prolonged ransacking of Calvart’s library they finally do find Haeckel’s faked drawings — in an old 1914 book whose covers are falling off.

Okie dokie, so Wells is a liar. . . or maybe not. A couple of us had taken evolution classes where we had seen those fake drawings– was Cornell using 1915 textbooks or something more recent? We decided to check out a few biology textbooks to check who was twisting the truth.

Evolutionary Biology (3rd edition © 1998) Haeckel’s faked drawings are actually reproduced without any note to show they are fake (see below). Although there is some discussion in the text of problems with Haeckel’s biogenetic law, the drawing is presented as factually correct.

Read the rest here.

In Flock of Dodos, filmmaker and marine ecologist Randy Olson asks the question, who are the real dodos in the evolution/intelligent design debate: 1) the intelligent design (ID) advocates who disbelieve a purely mechanistic Darwinian explanation for the origin and development of life, or 2) the legions of Darwinist academics who seem unable to connect with and convincingly explain their position to the majority of Americans who stubbornly cling to beliefs in origins that are not solely Darwinian. Flock of Dodos (FOD) is intentionally light-hearted, reflecting Olson’s desire to avoid yet another dreary documentary of droning talking heads, a format which quickly triggers the “Where’s the remote?” reflex in most viewers. Olson is a trained filmmaker, and his stated intent is to connect with his audience on an emotive level. In FOD he succeeds in this, using a combination of often self-deprecating humor, animation and a Charles Kurault-like “on the road” motif. 

However,  the film is not the impartial assessment of the ID debate as it is sometimes billed. Whether by simply reflecting the filmmaker’s own leanings (he was a tenured professor of evolutionary marine ecology at the University of New Hampshire before turning to filmmaking) or through an intentional desire to do so, the film conveys both explicit and subtle messages that seek to steer viewers at an emotive level against the ID position. I am no expert in ID, having only recently begun to read on the subject. But I have seen enough to conclude that, for whatever reason, FOD mischaracterizes or omits pertinent issues in the ID debate. Some were evident during the film and subsequent audience interaction with Olson; others become more apparent on reflection. In no particular order, I will list some of my concerns: 

• "Intelligent design holds that living organisms are so complex that they must have been created by a higher force - God."
• "Intelligent design says that life is so complex that God created it."

Atheists and those committed to antiteleological worldviews would like us to falsely believe that ID is a strictly religious idea, but even news sources that are constantly ridiculed for supposedly pumping the religious right agenda, like FoxNews, cannot get ID right.

   

In fact, I have developed a very keen sense of perceiving this error before even viewing the article. If I simply put the mouse pointer over the hyperlink of an article about ID, this new sense informs me of the error. This extraordinary sense has yet to be incorrect, because this misleading statement is in every media article I’ve read! I am kidding about the ESP, of course.

   

Any reporters reading this please note: the statements quoted above are not definitions of intelligent design. Some in the ID community call this Incredulous design. ID is based on observed physical effects of intelligent activity, not being amazed by nature. Here are some definitions of intelligent design, and here as well. Anyone knowledgeable about ID knows instantly that the reporter has an agenda, or does not know what ID is, if the quotes above are given.