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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 09:55:01 -0400
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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.

-- 
[The address listed is a spam trap. To reply, take off every zig.]
Kestrel Clayton
"Every normal woman must be tempted, at times, to stoke the fire,
host the black mass, and begin eating hearts." — Rose Bailey