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From: Kestrel Clayton <richZIG.e.clayZIGton@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: Is Jonathan Wells any type of ID perp to eulogize?
Date: Thu, 13 Mar 2025 11:21:28 -0400
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On 13-Mar-25 11:06, RonO wrote:
> On 3/13/2025 8:55 AM, Kestrel Clayton wrote:
>> On 12-Mar-25 17:03, RonO wrote:
>>> On 3/12/2025 12:18 PM, Kestrel Clayton wrote:
>>>> On 12-Mar-25 10:15, RonO wrote:
>>>>> https://evolutionnews.org/
>>>>>
>>>>> For some reason there have been several articles about Jonathan 
>>>>> Wells (died Sept 2024) up at the creationist news site of the 
>>>>> Discovery Institute in the last week.  Isn't Wells exactly the type 
>>>>> that you do not want to have associated with the current ID scam? 
>>>>> Wells, was never an IDiotic "theorist" like most of the other ID 
>>>>> perps.  All that he was into was the usual creationist obfuscation 
>>>>> and denial (the switch scam).   Wells admitted to getting his PhD 
>>>>> in order to support his religious beliefs, and he was likely never 
>>>>> serious in his scientific endeavors in terms of adding anything to 
>>>>> our scientific knowledge.  He spent his whole "science" career 
>>>>> doing as little as possible to better our understanding of nature.
>>>>>
>>>>> The latest article even has a picture of him giving a scam lecture 
>>>>> on his bogus Icons of Evolution creationist denial book.
>>>>>
>>>>> Shouldn't the ID perps be more interested in producing the ID 
>>>>> science that they have always lied about having?
>>>>>
>>>>> Wells should be known as being one of the ID perps (Wells and 
>>>>> Meyer) that ran the first bait and switch in Ohio in 2002.  Wells 
>>>>> wrote a report on the first bait and switch claiming that they had 
>>>>> decided to do it before giving their ID perp dog and pony show to 
>>>>> the Ohio rubes. Even though he knew that the bait and switch was 
>>>>> going to go down and that the Ohio rubes were not going to get any 
>>>>> ID science to teach in the public schools Wells told the board that 
>>>>> the ID science had been developed enough for the issue to be forced 
>>>>> into the public school system.
>>>>>
>>>>> https://web.archive.org/web/20110814145400/http:/ 
>>>>> www.creationists.org/ archived-obsolete-pages/2002-03-11-OSBE- 
>>>>> wells.html
>>>>>
>>>>> QUOTE:
>>>>> Steve Meyer and I (in consultation with others) had decided ahead 
>>>>> of time that we would not push for including intelligent design 
>>>>> (ID) in the state science standards, but would propose instead that 
>>>>> the standards include language protecting teachers who choose to 
>>>>> teach the controversy.
>>>>> END QUOTE:
>>>>>
>>>>> You have to understand that Meyer had been the lead cheerleader for 
>>>>> teaching ID in the public schools at this time.  He was a coauthor 
>>>>> on both the teach ID scam booklet (1999) and the Utah law review 
>>>>> article (2000) claiming that it was legal to teach ID in the public 
>>>>> schools. When it came time to put up or shut up, Meyer decided to 
>>>>> start running a bait and switch scam.  From then on ID has only 
>>>>> been used as bait to force the rubes into taking a stupid 
>>>>> obfuscation and denial switch scam, and the rubes can't mention ID 
>>>>> nor creationism ever existed.
>>>>>
>>>>> http://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Ohio-debates-evolution- 
>>>>> Scientists-accuse-2864344.php
>>>>>
>>>>> QUOTE:
>>>>> With equal fervor, Jonathan Wells, senior fellow at the Discovery
>>>>> Institute, a Seattle organization dedicated to alternative scientific
>>>>> theories, contended that there was enough valid challenge to Darwinian
>>>>> evolution to justify intelligent design's being ordered into the
>>>>> classroom curriculum -- not as a religious doctrine, he maintained, 
>>>>> but
>>>>> as a matter of "a growing scientific controversy."
>>>>> END QUOTE:
>>>>>
>>>>> Until the bait and switch started to go down the Discovery 
>>>>> Institute had included teaching ID in their Teach the Controversy 
>>>>> political ploy. Wells continued supporting that scam even though he 
>>>>> knew that the Ohio rubes were never going to get any ID science to 
>>>>> teach.
>>>>>
>>>>> Does anyone wonder why none of the ID perps want to remember these 
>>>>> Wellsian contributions to the ID bait and switch scam?
>>>>
>>>> But honestly, do they have anybody better?
>>>>
>>>> At their very most respectable, ID advocates are neo-astrologists 
>>>> like Behe: "Somewhere, somehow, something MIGHT be wrong with 
>>>> evolution, and you can't prove otherwise." At the other end you have 
>>>> out-and-out scammers who promise science they know they will never 
>>>> have, who know very well they're playing a shell game to sneak Book- 
>>>> of-Genesis creationism into public schools on the taxpayer's dime. 
>>>> (And an awful lot of Group A sooner or later reveal themselves as 
>>>> Group B.)
>>>>
>>>> If there's a ID proponentsist who genuinely deserves academic 
>>>> honors, I'm sure I can't think of their name. The ID doinks need to 
>>>> find — or invent — their saints and martyrs wherever they can, 
>>>> because it's damn slim pickings otherwise.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Some of the ID perps did some actual science.
>>
>> When they weren't working on ID, sure.
>>
>>  > They were not all pretend > scientists like Wells, Nelson, Luskin, 
>> Dembski and Meyer.  Both Behe and
>>> Minnich got tenure and became Professors at their respective 
>>> universities.  Both fully understand what science actually is, and 
>>> that is why their testimony during the Dover creationist fiasco was 
>>> so dishonest.
>>
>> That is the point I was trying to make, although perhaps I did not 
>> express it well.
>>
>>  > They both decided to prevaricate as much as the thought that > they 
>> could get away with.  They both fully understood that there was not
>>> any ID science worth teaching in the public schools, but they tried 
>>> to lie about it, and deny that they understood why the bait and 
>>> switch had been going down 100% of the time for the previous 3 
>>> years.  They had been in full support of using ID solely as bait for 
>>> the previous 3 years.  Wells claimed that Minnich was there when the 
>>> decision to start running the bait and switch was made.  Sternberg 
>>> may have had a career in science, but he flushed it down the toilet 
>>> in order to dishonestly support the ID scam.  The ID perps have been 
>>> paying him a salary since 2007 as compensation for what he did for 
>>> them, but his science output dropped to zero after joining the ID 
>>> scam unit of the Discovery Institute.  Sternberg is a sad case.  He 
>>> could not use his expertise to support the dishonest ID scam, so he 
>>> spent about the next decade working on whale fossil gap denial.  Behe 
>>> destroyed that effort by claiming that whale evolution was just the 
>>> type of evolution expected to be due to natural selection.  It had 
>>> obviously occurred by natural means, but it was a bad type of 
>>> evolution that Behe's designer would have done differently.  A decade 
>>> of bogus effort down the tubes.  Sternberg has had to work up some 
>>> other angle since then. According to a recent article Sternberg is 
>>> exploring "information beyond the genome".  What is really sad is 
>>> that Sternberg was a taxonomist, and his work had likely fully 
>>> supported biological evolution before he quit science in order to 
>>> sell ID as bait.
>>>
>>> https://evolutionnews.org/2025/03/richard-sternberg-on-the- 
>>> information- beyond-the-genome/
>>
>> I don't think we substantially disagree on any of this. If I came off 
>> as arguing with you, my sincere apologies.
>>
> 
> I do not view it as arguing, just discussing the topic.

Fair! Just wanted to be certain I wasn't coming off wrong.

(Also, this is abuse. Arguments are 12A, just down the hall.)

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