Intelligent Design 3.0?


What? I’ve been so neglectful of the ID gang that I completely missed an announcement five years ago that they were establishing something called Intelligent Design 3.0. Seriously, you can’t rely on me for news about the Discovery Institute because I fucking don’t care anymore. They shot their wad 20 years ago, and right now they’re a limp, exhausted pseudo-movement that thinks raising a number on their label makes them innovative.

Here’s what they announced in 2019.

After the Discovery Institute staff Christmas lunch last week, Stephen Meyer sat down with me for a quick video discussion of an extensive research project that, until now, has been deliberately kept from public. It’s Intelligent Design 3.0, an effort not to make the scientific case for ID directly but, instead, to use design insights to open up avenues for new scientific discoveries. It is being supported by the Center for Science & Culture, thanks to the generosity of our donors:

That’s it. That’s all they had then. They declare that they are making an effort not to make the scientific case for ID directly, so that’s the non-news…but the really important news is that they have generous donors. So it was a gimmick to raise money.

In 2024, they are now claiming major advances. The first is that they made their annotated bibliography longer.

It’s a talking point for evolutionists that in the past two decades, intelligent design has stalled. Hardly! On the contrary, I’m delighted today to share with you two very impressive measures of how much ID has advanced in that time. One is the latest update of our “Bibliography of Peer-Reviewed and Peer-Edited Scientific Publications Supporting the Theory of Intelligent Design.” Go to the link to download the full bibliography, with annotations, which is the length of a book — 186 pages in total. That’s not bad for such a young field.

It’s pretty bad when you take into account that a lot of the articles are from their in-house fake journal, BIO-Complexity. I also notice that they still have a huge number of articles by the prolific David L. Abel, head of the Department of ProtoBioCybernetics and ProtoBioSemiotics, Origin of Life Science Foundation, Inc.. It’s easy to pad a bibliography if you have no standards and no quality control.

Their second major accomplishment is…they’ve created an Intelligent Design 3.0 website! If you’re wondering what’s on it, they’re bragging about publishing more garbage papers. They don’t have any real revelations, but just list a lot of legitimate fields that they claim to have contributed to.

The third and current phase of ID research extends ID 2.0 to new systems and fields, showing the heuristic value of intelligent design to guide scientific research. This research includes not only testing the origin of new systems, but also using ID to answer questions and make novel contributions in burgeoning fields, such as epigenetics, synthetic biology, systems biology, genomics (e.g., investigating function for junk DNA), systematics and phylogenetics, information theory, population genetics, biological fine-tuning, molecular machines, ontogenetic information, paleontology, quantum cosmology, cosmic fine-tuning, astrobiology, local fine-tuning, and many others.

I looked deeper to see what they claim to have innovated in one topic, junk DNA, and this is it: one paragraph, plus two citations to papers by Richard Sternberg and James Shapiro, published in 2002 and 2005.

Evolutionary scientists have long-claimed that the vast majority of our DNA which does not code for proteins is useless genetic “junk.” Intelligent design theorists, on the other hand, have long-predicted that much of this non-protein-coding DNA likely has important biological functions. This prediction flows naturally out of the fact that intelligent agents typically design things with function and for a purpose. Because of this ID prediction, quite a few ID proponents have been involved in research investigating function for non-protein-coding DNA—what was previously considered “junk.” Many of these scientists are part of our Junk DNA Workgroup, a collaboration of scientists who are seeking function for “junk DNA.” Many of these researchers are in sensitive positions so we do not list their names or publications.

They’re doing this research, but they can’t tell you who’s doing it! Yeah, I am filled with confidence.

I can at least praise their synergy: one goal is to pad their bibliography, and their second goal is to name a bunch of fields and buzzwords that they can use to pad their bibliography. Empty filler for the win!

They do have a long list of contributors to ID3.0, but it’s almost entirely the same old tired faces that have long been associated with the Discovery Institute. There’s a lot of rehashing of the same moribund nonsense.

I was amused to see Paul Nelson’s name listed again. One of his projects is “waiting time” and I will concede that he’s an expert on making people wait, but he’s not doing any research at all.

Comments

  1. mordred says

    Okay, I’m not a biologist. That’s probably why I don’t get what ID 3.0 is supposed to be.

    Or is all that stuff really just word salad with a few sciency words thrown in? /s

  2. raven says

    It is cargo cult science and research.

    They are mimicking the appearance of science and research while not actually doing any science or research.
    Fake journals, fake peer review, fake scientists.

  3. says

    Sounds like another attempt at the tried and true tactic of pointing to some real science and going: “I was just about to say that.”
    I look forward to the day where they actually manage to predict something, rather than just trying to take credit for what’s already known.

  4. stuffin says

    Buzzwords was the word that best fit what I got of their scientific terminology.

    BIO-Complexity, Department of ProtoBioCybernetics and ProtoBioSemiotics, Origin of Life Science Foundation, Inc.

    Those are $20 words.

  5. says

    I hope they put forth a theory of ensoulment. And perhaps a description of how the sensus divinatus works that does not involve mushrooms. I believe the question of whether hell is exothermic or endothermic has been resolved. But its location is still up for grabs.
    What interests me most is the interface problem – how an immaterial soul can interact with and affect a meatbag. It is hugely consequential to the question of free will and morality, and oddly there is no explanation even offered. The interface problem may also cover the question of the hand of god. How does that work, anyhow?

  6. bcw bcw says

    Is Intelligent Design 3.0 what took down all the computers at Delta and UAL and led to all those flight cancellations today?

  7. John Harshman says

    Jesus F. Christ! Their contribution to “systematics and phylogeny” is Ewert’s dependency graph.

  8. Pierce R. Butler says

    … five years ago that they were establishing something called “Intelligent Design 3.0”.

    By now they should have gotten to at least ID 3.1.

    I wanna see the list of bug fixes.

  9. says

    Only 186 pages? Surely an entire institute can do better than that. The scholar I studied for my PhD had a list of publications in several languages around 48 pages long and that was before you counted the publications written about him.

  10. says

    Actually they are in “good” company the now jailedTurkish creationist and cult leader Harun Yahya has a bibliography approaching theirs in size. That says a lot right there.

  11. says

    <sarcasm> Remember, Windows didn’t become fully useful until version 3.11, so it’s maybe just a bit early to criticize the DI for producing something less than fully useful with version 3.0. </sarcasm>

  12. StevoR says

    @1. mordred : “Or is all that stuff really just word salad with a few sciency words thrown in? /s”

    Yes.

    Also their way to pretend evolution isn’t real and their “Goddit “theory that everything was made by their mythological Diety is as valid as actual scientific evidnece proving that idea false.

  13. Bekenstein Bound says

    I think I’ll wait for ID 3.11 for Workgroups, myself. <snerk>

    As for the Delta clusterf#@!, would that, perchance, have anything to do with why I can’t seem to stay logged in here for more than a few minutes to a day or two at a time lately? :P

  14. says

    Bekenstein: I haven’t had problems staying logged in to FTBlogs like PZ’s, which require us to be logged in to comment. Other FTBlogs, such as Mano’s and CD’s — which don’t require you to log in but allow you to manually enter a name and email address — tend to quietly log me out for no apparent or stated reason. Not sure what the difference is there, but it predates this mega-glitch (meglitch?) by years.

  15. Louis says

    Oh fuck! I missed Paul Nelson Day this year. Sorry, PZ. I’ll send your belated present over right now.

    Louis

  16. Doc Bill says

    @18 Louis

    Ah, the Salad Days! My favorite memory was an interview Paul Nelson gave in which he said he had something like Seven Proofs that demonstrated evolution to be false and “intelligent design” creationism the logical alternative. The interviewer perked up and said, “Oh, wow, what are they?” And Paul, believe it or not, said, “Well, unfortunately I left the list in my hotel room.” The dogged interviewer persisted, “OK, fine, I’m sure your list is just pining for the fjords of Norway, but tell us just one.” No, no, no, Paul continued, it would do it justice, no, sorry, we’ll just have to do this another time.

    And, so, was established a Second Paul Nelson Day upon which he would produce his list of Seven Proofs, concisely written on a Holiday Inn memo pad. We wait.

  17. cheerfulcharlie says

    The problem with ID of any stripe is that early organisms left no fossils. The idea than that ID is based on, that there are some biological features that irreducibly complex that cannot be explained by evolution cannot be demonstrated, not even in principle. It is argument from incredulity. With oceans of material and millions of years to work, biology can give us basic organisms and irreducible complexity is simply not a viable explanation for anything like ID.

  18. ajwade says

    One of the papers from this project, “Algorithmic Specified Complexity in the Game of Life”, was discussed in a Conway’s Life enthusiast forum a few years back. I’d forgotten quite how bad the paper was, but I guess we weren’t the target audience.

  19. says

    And, so, was established a Second Paul Nelson Day upon which he would produce his list of Seven Proofs, concisely written on a Holiday Inn memo pad. We wait.

    Would that be before or after Towel Day?

  20. Robbo says

    i can’t wait for Intelligent Design 95. you know–the one that will freeze up with the blue screen of death.