1. Comment #81240 by nrvous on October 24, 2007 at 1:19 pm

Eugenie Scott is a great lady. She features pretty heavily in the book "Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America's Soul" by Edward Humes, an account of the Dover PA flap, well worth reading if you are at all interested in the ID-in-schools debate.

My review, for those who are curious...

http://boybedlamreview.com/issue1/thinedgeofthewedge.htm

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2. Comment #81254 by PN.Shreeniwas Aiyer on October 24, 2007 at 1:55 pm

Why can't these awards and lectures of Richard Dawkins Foundation, these lectures and ideas related science be made simple and presented in the developing world? I can understand why they are not being presented in the Arab countries but they can be presented in Asian and non Muslim countries.

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3. Comment #81282 by Zakie Chan on October 24, 2007 at 2:30 pm

Eugenie Scott is great! Though, as Massimo Pigliucci points out, her view on the clash of religion and science smacks of political correctness.

Regardless, I still think shes awesome.

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4. Comment #81301 by Matt H. on October 24, 2007 at 2:56 pm

That was a really interesting talk. Thanks to Eugenie and to Josh and Wayne for putting it up.

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5. Comment #81316 by jonnyzero on October 24, 2007 at 3:22 pm

It's actually Hovind, not Ham that is in prison for taxes.

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6. Comment #81342 by JD Cherry on October 24, 2007 at 3:50 pm

Yeah, that was a pretty major oversight.

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7. Comment #81383 by bluebird on October 24, 2007 at 4:36 pm

Eugenie Scott is a breath of fresh air after listening to the odiferous balderdash from Ben Stein & Bill O'Reilly last night.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yzgBj8deKE

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8. Comment #81388 by idragosani on October 24, 2007 at 4:40 pm

Did she get Ken Ham and Ken Hovind mixed up?

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9. Comment #81412 by loki on October 24, 2007 at 5:13 pm

AHHHH just watched the Ben Stein & Bill O'Reilly video there. Going to have to watch some of the Eugenie Scott Video again to regain some sanity. I think she is my new hero. Thats on my top ten graphs list aswell! yes, I have a graphs list..

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10. Comment #81455 by stptrck75 on October 24, 2007 at 6:57 pm

Unfortunately I can never point my Christian friends to her lecture, due to her major mix up of Ham and Hovind. Quite a shame and a waste of an opportunity for her. She blew it in the first 30 seconds. All credibility gone.

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11. Comment #81461 by HappyPrimate on October 24, 2007 at 7:04 pm

Great talk. I've also heard an interview with Barbara Forrester on the Dover case. I am certainly going to add the upcoming DVD to my collection. Thanks for posting all the talks from the AAI for us who could not attend. Much appreciated.

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12. Comment #81536 by Auld on October 24, 2007 at 10:05 pm

"Did she get Ken Ham and Ken Hovind mixed up?"

I thought it should be KenT Hovind, and not Ken Hovind? ; )

In any case, I thought it was just a minor slip-up. No harm done. It was clearly unintentional. On the whole, a wonderful presentation.

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13. Comment #81570 by Atanu on October 24, 2007 at 11:03 pm

PN Iyer writes above:

Why can't these awards and lectures of Richard Dawkins Foundation, these lectures and ideas related science be made simple and presented in the developing world? I can understand why they are not being presented in the Arab countries but they can be presented in Asian and non Muslim countries.

India accounts for a large part of the "Asian and non-Muslim countries" referred to above. Indians of the non-Abrahamic religious pursuation (Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, Sikhs, etc) have absolutely no problems with science in general and specifically with Darwinian evolution. I speak not only for myself, as a Hindu and an atheist, but also for everyone I know in India.

Hindus are not indoctrinated early in life that humanity was specifically created by god (or whatever.) What we are taught is that all living beings are a manifestation of the creative power of the universe and that all living things are related -- in the sense that they have a spark of the divine. So for an atheistic Hindu like me, it was never a struggle for me to understand the inherent logic of Darwinian evolution, nor did I have to struggle in accepting the findings of modern cosmology. This is distinctly different for those who are taught the myths of the Abrahamic faiths.

Aside: First time I am commenting on this blog. Have been a huge fan of Prof Dawkins. Have an autographed copy of "River out of Eden" -- got it signed at a lecture at UC Berkeley a few years ago. Thank you Prof Dawkins. May your tribe increase.

Atanu Dey
www.deeshaa.org

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14. Comment #81649 by Quine on October 25, 2007 at 2:03 am

I took a look at the expelledthemovie.com pile of crap, and it is very disappointing that after Dover we still have to address this. Perhaps it is just going to have to be fought again and again and again. What a world.

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15. Comment #81679 by notsobad on October 25, 2007 at 3:05 am

Even talking about it any more is giving those idiots too much credit.

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16. Comment #81704 by USA_Limey on October 25, 2007 at 4:00 am

(OFF TOPIC)

Am I the only one who is beginning to wonder why we haven't seen the talk by Sam Harris yet?

Could it be, Comrades, his message was not welcome and it has been excised from atheist history; down the memory hole so to speak?

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17. Comment #81740 by Jaffas85 on October 25, 2007 at 5:48 am

Is the teaching, or possibility of teaching, creationism or Intelligent Design in U.S. schools now completely banned federally by the Supreme Court because of the First Amendment?

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18. Comment #81742 by notsobad on October 25, 2007 at 5:52 am

USA_Limey,
you do realize that this site and its admins do not equal 'atheist history'?

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19. Comment #81762 by USA_Limey on October 25, 2007 at 6:28 am

Comment #81742 by notsobad:

USA_Limey,
you do realize that this site and its admins do not equal 'atheist history'?

My tongue was firmly in my cheek old chap. I'll try and make it more obvious next time.

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20. Comment #81832 by Pi Guy on October 25, 2007 at 8:49 am

"Is the teaching, or possibility of teaching, creationism or Intelligent Design in U.S. schools now completely banned federally by the Supreme Court because of the First Amendment?"

It was not banned at all. And the case, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, was not argued in the Supreme Court but, rather, in US District Court in central Pennsylvania. Judge Jones' decision indicated that ID was not to be taught in science class as the evidence presented at trial led to the obvious conclusion that ID is not science at all as it has no empirical basis for its arguments and there are no studies to date that support it or, more importantly, that are designed in a such a way as to make it falsifiable. In other words, it doesn't meeI believe, however, that he explicitly stated that it is a topic suitable for discussion in a philosophy or history course. We shouldn't pretend that people don't support that view. It's just not science class material. Period.

If anything, the "freedom of religion" clause is likely what makes people think that they should be allowed to teach ID as science in the first place. The Constitution has no bearing on what is accepted science. It only addresses what people can say about it.

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21. Comment #82048 by notsobad on October 25, 2007 at 3:33 pm

USA_Limey, here you go:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M31mkLp3jWQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_quRZ_ALMo

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22. Comment #82113 by Shrunk on October 25, 2007 at 5:30 pm

I'm no legal expert, but isn't it unusual for judges to be as scathing in the wordings of their judgements as they seem to be in these creationist cases? It's as if they are saying, "You bothered wasting my time with THIS?"

The Dover trial was full of so many inanities. Right from the start: This is a case that hinges entirely on proving that ID has nothing to do with religion. So who does the defense choose as their law firm? The Thomas More Law Center. WTF?

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23. Comment #82816 by Morro on October 27, 2007 at 8:39 pm

Eugenie is the sexiest woman alive!

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24. Comment #83596 by Warning_No_God on October 30, 2007 at 2:40 pm

What a brilliant mind and communicator.

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25. Comment #84097 by LawJik on November 1, 2007 at 6:47 am

She is great, I remember her from a Penn and Teller's Bullshit episode. On the bible.. or maybe just ID, not sure.

Either way, love listening to her, and thank you RDF for the video. <3

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26. Comment #84116 by commonhumanity on November 1, 2007 at 7:44 am

Hindus are not indoctrinated early in life that humanity was specifically created by god (or whatever.) What we are taught is that all living beings are a manifestation of the creative power of the universe and that all living things are related -- in the sense that they have a spark of the divine. So for an atheistic Hindu like me, it was never a struggle for me to understand the inherent logic of Darwinian evolution, nor did I have to struggle in accepting the findings of modern cosmology. This is distinctly different for those who are taught the myths of the Abrahamic faiths.

Thank you, Atanu Dey, for your excellent first post - welcome! Your thought here reminded me of a poem I wrote earlier. In the South here in the USA, we use the term "Kissing Cousin Kin" to designate the people we deem close enough to hug and kiss when we see them. Of course, we hug and kiss just about everybody, so it works out nicely that we are all kin! <3
THESE MY KISSING COUSIN KIN

Open the family scrapbook to find
DNA as paradigm
shaping our place in the scheme of things,
tracing back the trail we've come,

sibling to humans all over the globe,
and to all humans down through time:
Black, pale, ruddy, brown. . .
including Jesus and Attila the Hun.

First cousin to the apes and chimps.
Second cousin to reptiles and birds,
insects, spiders, fish, and worms.
Third cousin to plants and fungi,

protozoan, bacterium.
Kissin' cousins was the term
we used for these more distant ones.
We gather around the Thanksgiving Table

of Elements we descended from,
these my kissing cousin kin,
this our extended family,
extending further than we'd ever dreamed.
----Dorothy Sutton
www.people.eku.edu/suttond/

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27. Comment #84334 by chuckgoecke on November 1, 2007 at 7:09 pm

This is a great review of recent and historic creationism/ID developments. Those people sort of remind me of the moles or gophers in the game at Chuck-E-Cheese and other arcades, where one smacks down the animals into their borrows, and they pop up elsewhere, up-smack-down-up... Kind of a fun game, I seem to recall; I'd probably like it even better now, imagining the Pat Robertson's and his sort, not to mention some of our fearless political leaders as the little rats to smack.

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28. Comment #84477 by lordcow on November 2, 2007 at 6:08 am

great talk, but the first part as referenced on the richarddawkins.net homepage has been taken down: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r218oKwjIME

and put back up as http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3PnKswZtPI

anyone know why and if it changed at all?

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29. Comment #87105 by MUDDELED on November 11, 2007 at 8:12 am

Intelligent design.As we (human beings) are part of the evolutionary process and definitely not perfect,is why evolution will continue trying to put right, its mistakes.

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30. Comment #88288 by Dianelos Georgoudis on November 15, 2007 at 7:20 pm

I think Eugenie Scott's presentation was excellent, certainly much more informative than any other of the presentations I have watched. I also think her organization is doing a great job keeping stealth-religion out of American schools, and it was gratifying to see that the court system in the US is working quite efficiently and indeed contrary to what may be the wishes of the majority in the country. Still I have two questions:

1. Isn't intelligent design a scientific hypothesis? I mean no matter the hidden (or not so hidden) motivations of the people who push for the teaching of ID at schools, isn't ID itself on its own merits a scientific hypothesis? After all some phenomena are explained by the intelligence design hypothesis, e.g. the Stonehedge. So why exactly does the same hypothesis become unscientific when applied to phenomena related to biology?

Let me qualify my question by stating my own position as clearly as I can: Darwin's theory of natural evolution is clearly one of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time, one whose truth is as well justified as any other scientific theory's. Indeed Darwin's idea may yet prove useful far beyond the context of the origin of the species: it is already been used (via meme theory) to explain phenomena related to human intelligence and culture, is being used in artificial intelligence, and may still prove to play an important part in explaining the origin of life, i.e. how the first biological replicator came to be (my own pet theory is that that the first replicator may be the result of a scaffolding which evolved through Darwinian mechanisms but whose chemistry was such that no signs of it survived; it left no fossils behind). Secondly, even though to me it seems that ID is a scientific hypothesis, it has only managed to become very weak science because:

a) it does not explain anything,

b) to my knowledge all of the examples put forward as cases of irreducible complexity after the first replicator have already been solved,

c) even if some cases of irreducible complexity were found that prove more difficult to solve within Darwinism, this would not invalidate Darwinism's power to explain the overall evolution of the species,

d) the burden of proof for ID lies squarely on those who suggest it, and taken into account the vast range of possibilities and combinations of possibilities that blind physical processes offer it's very hard to see how the proponents of ID could ever come close to offering strong arguments for their case (in short, it's not enough for IDrs to challenge Darwinists to explain how X could have evolved through blind physical processes).

What's more, even if ID were much more solid science than it now is, it does not follow that it should be taught at schools, until such time that it really becomes a scientific theory of comparable power to Darwinism, a very improbable state of affairs which at best lies far in the future. So there is absolutely no question that ID should not be taught as schools, and indeed in all other advanced societies the US phenomenon of the ID movement is watched with derision. But having said all that, it bothers me when Darwinists claim that ID is not a scientific hypothesis, for it strikes me as a dogmatic stance and as the very antithesis of the scientific ethos. ID, it seems to me, clearly is a scientific hypothesis, albeit a failed one at this point in time.

2. My second question is related to the first one. While watching Scott's speech in Youtube I noticed they had there another video there with her debating somebody called Stephen Meyer (see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnVnN9JLpq0&feature=related ) Now, the journalist who guided the debate made a really terrible job, so it's not a very instructive video, but my question concerns something Scott says at some point: "Intelligent design makes the claim that there are things out there in nature that are unexplainable by natural cause, therefore they were created or designed by an intelligent agent (and nobody is fooled about who that is [or something to that effect – ed note]). Now how can you call that science when your basic organizable principle is 'we can't explain this by natural cause'? What science does is explain things through natural cause, and the whole idea of intelligent design just completely flies in the face of that." But what kind of argument is this? Suppose, for discussion's sake, that somebody manages to prove beyond all reasonable doubt and on purely scientific grounds that the evolution of the species, or else that the origin of life on Earth, cannot have been the result of blind physical processes. What then? Would Scott brand this result unscientific because, well, basically because she does not like the result? And what's this about an intelligent designer not being a natural cause? Doesn't science teach that intelligence is a natural phenomenon? For all we know some extraterrestrial civilization designed the first replicators and planted them on Earth as some kind of experiment, or perhaps in order to populate the cosmos with life, or for some other reason, who knows. I mean this is a possibility entirely compatible with ID. So why would this be a non-natural cause? Now it is plausible that at least 99% of those who push ID believe that the designer in question is God, but the scientific thing to do is evaluate a scientific hypothesis on its merits and not on the motivations or hidden agenda of those who expound it. So, it seems to me, to argue that ID is not scientific because it postulates a non natural cause is wrong on multiple levels.

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31. Comment #88303 by Timnea on November 15, 2007 at 10:51 pm

Unspecified things could be intelligently designed in an unspecified way by an unspecified designer who lives in an unspecified place and who might return at an unspecified time to maybe take his worshipers to an unspecified location while torturing every one else for an unspecified length of time.

Now thats my kind of hypothesis :-)

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32. Comment #88358 by Yaweh on November 16, 2007 at 6:48 am

Would Scott brand this result unscientific because, well, basically because she does not like the result?

Scientific theories are general explanatory principles that emerge from many detailed, specific hypotheses that have survived repeated testing.

Evolution by natural selection is a scientific theory. Many particular hypotheses concerning transitional forms, gene frequencies in specific populations over time, etc., have been tested and proven over many years and published in the scientific literature.

Not one single, specific hypothesis in support of intelligent design has survived analysis.

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33. Comment #175256 by AtheistGirl on May 5, 2008 at 3:15 am

Unfortunately I can never point my Christian friends to her lecture, due to her major mix up of Ham and Hovind. Quite a shame and a waste of an opportunity for her. She blew it in the first 30 seconds. All credibility gone.

Just watched this video. How does Eugenie get Ham and Hovind mixed up? I don't see it.

She starts talking about Hovind without mentioning his name but she does bring Hovind's picture up on screen when she is talking about the Christian Science Evangelism organisation and the tax dodging/court trial.

Also, as she says this, her presentation puts some "prison bars" over the picture of Hovind - not Ham.

Maybe I'm missing something but I really can't see how anyone can mistake what she is saying. Seems obvious to me but maybe I'm missing something. I'll watch it again.

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34. Comment #175262 by epeeist on May 5, 2008 at 3:33 am

Comment #88288 by Dianelos Georgoudis

Isn't intelligent design a scientific hypothesis?

No it isn't. It doesn't fit with Kuhn's requirements, i.e. accuracy, broadness of scope, self-consistency and consistency with other theories, parsimony and fruitfulness of further research programmes. Neither does it fit with Popper's idea of falsifiability as providing demarcation between science and non-science.

Indeed, as Behe was forced to admit in the Kitzmiller-Dover trial any definition of science that was wide enough to include ID would also be wide enough to include astrology. You don't think that astrology is a science do you? If so, you might care to read http://www.cavehill.uwi.edu/bnccde/ph29a/thagard.html

For all we know some extraterrestrial civilization designed the first replicators and planted them on Earth as some kind of experiment, or perhaps in order to populate the cosmos with life, or for some other reason, who knows. I mean this is a possibility entirely compatible with ID.

It can't be ruled out, but one should prefer probable impossibilities to improbable possibilities. Hence the research into abiogenesis.

Of course showing that the earth was seeded by some natural (as opposed to supernatural) entity only leads you into regression.

And I suspect it wouldn't satisfy the cdesign proponentsists since they are actively looking for the designer to be a specific deity.

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