The crucifixtion of Lawrence VanDyke.
Mar. 17th, 2004 03:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsFor those of you coming into this late, here's the story. Mr. VanDyke is a last-year law student at Harvard University who wrote, at first anonymously, an effusive and glowing review of Darwinism & Public Education: The Establishment Clause and The Challenge of Intelligent Design, by one Francis Beckwith.
Brian Leiter, a professor of law and philosophy in Texas, wrote a scathing response, identifying the writer as Lawrence VanDyke and saying,
But the circus really got started when National Review magazine, the flagship publication of William F. Buckley, Irving Kristol, and the rest of the neocon gang, screamed that Leiter was being "unfairly targetted for his opinions." The author of the piece is one Hunter Baker, who goes on to say that if Leiter doesn't lighten up he may damage his reputation.
Remember, the original book is by Francis Beckwith. What does Baker fail to mention in his article? He's Beckwith's graduate student and teaching assistant! He has a vested interest in defending Beckwith and VanDyke. Journalistic integrity, anyone?
The creationists are coming out of the woodwork, but aside for a few at the very top who choose their words carefully not many are making much of an impression. Worse, still, several of the more tenacious ones have trotted out the impressive-sounding but well-debunked claims about "intelligent [sic] design" and it's predictive or assistive capacity with respect to scientific investigation. The fact that some scientists have nifty-sounding research papers under their imprimaturs before outing themselves as creationists does not mean that the papers they published support creationism.
VanDyke has responded, but his response gets another round in the shredder. VanDyke also poked his head into a few blogs and, most problematic-- for him, at any rate-- is the debate on the Law & Religion mailing list. Meanwhile, Leiter goes on to document that Baker's own journalist fraud may be worth a defamation suit. And the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Paranormal Claims weighs in on how the whole shebang is about "getting ID noticed by the courts, getting credentials."
You can follow the links and follow-ons and see just how weird the whole thing can get.
I just have to wonder: did VanDyke know, going into this little adventure, that he was sacrificing his career? In the era of the Internet, he will never escape this fact: in his first public appearance in his chosen profession, Lawrence VanDyke wrote a deliberately fallacious review in favor of pseudo-science. I have to wonder where the Discovery Institute finds these victims, but grooming them must be something like the way Hamas prepares suicide bombers.
His half-hearted withdrawl from the field of battle includes the classic "I'm not a scientist, I don't know if the science is good" excuse. Makes you wonder if his law will be any better.
Brian Leiter, a professor of law and philosophy in Texas, wrote a scathing response, identifying the writer as Lawrence VanDyke and saying,
The author of this incompetent book note . . . is one Lawrence VanDyke, a student editor of the Review. Mr. VanDyke may yet have a fine career as a lawyer, but I trust he has no intention of entering law teaching: scholarly fraud is, I fear, an inauspicious beginning for an aspiring law teacher. And let none of the many law professors who are readers of this site be mistaken: Mr. VanDyke has perpetrated a scholarly fraud, one that may have political and pedagogical consequences.Pretty vicious, but not unwarranted based on the content.
But the circus really got started when National Review magazine, the flagship publication of William F. Buckley, Irving Kristol, and the rest of the neocon gang, screamed that Leiter was being "unfairly targetted for his opinions." The author of the piece is one Hunter Baker, who goes on to say that if Leiter doesn't lighten up he may damage his reputation.
Remember, the original book is by Francis Beckwith. What does Baker fail to mention in his article? He's Beckwith's graduate student and teaching assistant! He has a vested interest in defending Beckwith and VanDyke. Journalistic integrity, anyone?
The creationists are coming out of the woodwork, but aside for a few at the very top who choose their words carefully not many are making much of an impression. Worse, still, several of the more tenacious ones have trotted out the impressive-sounding but well-debunked claims about "intelligent [sic] design" and it's predictive or assistive capacity with respect to scientific investigation. The fact that some scientists have nifty-sounding research papers under their imprimaturs before outing themselves as creationists does not mean that the papers they published support creationism.
VanDyke has responded, but his response gets another round in the shredder. VanDyke also poked his head into a few blogs and, most problematic-- for him, at any rate-- is the debate on the Law & Religion mailing list. Meanwhile, Leiter goes on to document that Baker's own journalist fraud may be worth a defamation suit. And the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Paranormal Claims weighs in on how the whole shebang is about "getting ID noticed by the courts, getting credentials."
You can follow the links and follow-ons and see just how weird the whole thing can get.
I just have to wonder: did VanDyke know, going into this little adventure, that he was sacrificing his career? In the era of the Internet, he will never escape this fact: in his first public appearance in his chosen profession, Lawrence VanDyke wrote a deliberately fallacious review in favor of pseudo-science. I have to wonder where the Discovery Institute finds these victims, but grooming them must be something like the way Hamas prepares suicide bombers.
His half-hearted withdrawl from the field of battle includes the classic "I'm not a scientist, I don't know if the science is good" excuse. Makes you wonder if his law will be any better.
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Re: Funny thing is
Date: 2004-04-04 11:05 am (UTC)The core problem with Intelligent Design is that we humans recognize design because we know that "design" is something humans do; we only recognize artifacts because we analogize from existing artifacts, and we know that only sentient beings design artifacts. So, in order to demonstrate "intelligent design" in nature, one must understand explicitly the designer. But ID explicitly eschews knowledge of the designer and claims that it can detect design without the analogizing. What they claim is impossible.
Secondly, the core of Intelligent Design theory hosts something called the "explanatory filter," which is a way of discerning using information theory whether or not something has so much "information" in it that a reasonable person must assume it was designed by intelligence. The problems with this thesis are severalfold: first, there's so much overlap between "emergent" (biologically functional yet not deliberately designed) and "designed" that "emergent" covers the whole spectrum-- a reasonable person not ideologically wedded to the notion that there must be a designer can accept that all biology can result from non-intelligent processes. Without a sufficient demarcation, ID is fatally flawed.
Secondly, it's a misuse of information theory, which requires a sender, a receiver, and a message-- the information. ID therefore proposes that biology is "a message," but to whom? Us? Future generations? ID doesn't say, and without saying whom, ID is again fatally flawed.
There's a reason why not a single biologist working in the field either uses or expects to use intelligent design theory: it so far has not contributed and nobody ever expects it to contribute to either the theoretical work of expanding the boundaries of knowledge, or provide a foundation for the work of cataloging and corresponding what we learn in the field with the knowledge we have.