Nothing to See Here!

Inquiring Minds Dare Not Question Dominant Narratives

A potential industrial threat to right whales, poor forest management in California, and intelligent design theorist William Dembski’s 1998 Cambridge University Press monograph The Design Inference—what do these three things have in common? Each was found to dilute or challenge a dominant narrative, spurring mainstream gatekeepers to pursue a nothing-to-see-here, just-keep- moving-along strategy.

Let’s take each of the three in turn.

Green Energy vs. Right Whales

The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) notes that the right whale “is one of the most endangered large whale species in the world” and concedes that ocean-based windfarm technology can “pose risks to North Atlantic right whales through increased risk of vessel strikes, noise, entanglement, and habitat changes that may reduce prey availability.” But not to worry. BOEM praises offshore wind farms as “an abundant, efficient and clean alternative domestic energy resource with the potential to generate jobs and combat the effects of climate change” and reassures readers that BOEM is tasked with “managing the development of offshore energy and mineral resources in an economically and environmentally responsible way.”¹

However, as the Save Right Whales Coalition reports, a whistleblower in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries says the federal government appears to be throwing right whales under the bus in its headlong pursuit of “green” energy.² Specifically, NOAA’s Director of Protected Species, Dr. Sean Hayes, warns that continued construction and operation of wind turbines along a key section of the eastern U.S. coast could lead to the whale’s extinction.

NOAA and BOEM released a joint strategy to address the problem, but according to the Save Right Whales Coalition, “there is little evidence that the proposed mitigation measures are effective, practicable or backed up by sufficient funds.”

According to Michael Shellenberger, a Time magazine “Hero of the Environment” and president of Environmental Progress, “Under pressure from the White House, the U.S. government has ignored its top scientist” on the matter “and pushed forward to industrialize the oceans and risk the extinction of the North Atlantic Right Whale.”³

Are Shellenberger and Hayes right? A good question, but it’s not one the mainstream media appears interested in reporting on in a balanced manner. Most articles on the topic from major outlets read like press releases for the multibillion-dollar offshore wind farm industry.

Pruning the Truth

Why was the summer of 2023 such a bad year for wildfires in California, Maui, and elsewhere? Climate scientist Patrick Brown says the reasons for the wildfires are multifaceted, but that poor brush and forest management undoubtedly contributed. However, he says, you will hear little from the mainstream media about any causal factors other than climate change. In fact, he admits that he left out other contributing factors in a recent paper he wrote to give the paper a fighting chance of getting accepted by Nature. The ploy succeeded, and Nature accepted the paper, “Climate Warming Increases Extreme Daily Wildfire Growth Risk in California.”

The paper, Brown says, “focuses exclusively on how climate change has affected extreme wildfire behavior. I knew not to try to quantify key aspects other than climate change in my research because it would dilute the story that prestigious journals like Nature and its rival, Science, want to tell.”

He urges reform:

I left academia over a year ago, partially because I felt the pressures put on academic scientists caused too much of the research to be distorted. . . . But climate scientists shouldn’t have to exile themselves from academia to publish the most useful versions of their research. We need a culture change across academia and elite media.⁴

Gatekeepers at Cambridge

William Dembski has a similar story to tell. He got his statistical monograph on design detection published with Cambridge University Press. The work presented a mathematically rigorous method for detecting whether something was the product of chance or intelligent design. It was peer-reviewed by leading minds in the field and received high praise upon publication.

But Dembski had judiciously left something out of the monograph: namely, that when his design-detection apparatus is directed toward biology, it triggers a design inference for things like the origin of the genetic information needed to code for the many new body plans (phyla) in the history of life. He left it out because he knew it would be frowned upon by key gatekeepers.

A few years later, he approached the press about a sequel. “My editor at Cambridge, Terence Moore, had initially been quite happy with the first edition of The Design Inference,” Dembski reports in the introduction to the recently released second edition of the book. “It had been the bestselling Cambridge philosophical monograph over the previous five years. I therefore approached him about whether Cambridge would be open to publishing a sequel that made explicit the connection between design inferences and biological evolution.”

It wasn’t to be. Dembski continues:

By that point, my own views in favor of intelligent design and critical of Darwinism were public knowledge. Pulling back the curtain on the inner workings of the press, Moore told me that members of the Cambridge Syndicate (especially one or two biologists) opposed my work on intelligent design, and that even if such a sequel were approved on this side of the Atlantic, the Syndicate would likely deep-six it.⁵

So Dembski published the sequel with another academic press.

Later he wanted to pursue a second edition of The Design Inference, and knowing that Cambridge was now allergic to the book, he bought back the rights and pursued a revised and expanded edition with Discovery Institute Press, where I serve as executive editor.

The BBC Mangles Design Detection

One nice thing about the new edition is that Dembski no longer has to be coy about the challenge his design filter poses for modern evolutionary theory. Another is that the second edition, co-authored with Winston Ewert, also answers critics of Dembski’s design filter. One of those critics is biologist Kenneth Miller, who had insisted that Dembski illicitly infers design purely from the complexity of a biological system. But this is a strawman. Dembski’s actual design-detection filter yokes complexity, or improbability, with what he terms specification.

Here is an example. If someone flipped a coin a thousand times, the resulting sequence of heads and tails would be astronomically improbable. There isn’t “world enough and time” to replicate that particular sequence by chance a second time. But we would still assume the sequence was random. Why? Because it isn’t specified. That is, the sequence doesn’t fit an independent pattern.

But now imagine someone kidnaps an American soldier, gags him, sticks him in an undisclosed room, and posts a live video feed of him online, complete with a countdown clock and the message, “Pay up, or else.” The soldier sits at a table, calmly flipping a coin. He flips it. It lands in his palm. He slaps it onto his wrist for the result. The result of each flip is plain to see.

The clock is ticking down. The ransom demand is insanely high. Panic is setting in. But then one of the soldier’s army buddies remembers that his friend is an amateur magician and used to win free drinks with games of “chance” involving coin tosses. The army buddy writes down the emerging sequence of heads and tails and soon discovers that it spells out, over and over, an address in Morse code. They send in a rescue team and, sure enough, they find the soldier in a back room, coin in hand.

Notice what happened. The improbable, complicated sequence of heads and tails that had seemed unspecified and therefore random turned out to be specified, to fit a meaningful pattern. A design inference immediately followed.

That’s how Dembski’s design filter works in a nutshell. And he argues that many origin events in the history of life involve both astronomical improbabilities (complexity) and specifications. For example, the genetic information needed to code for the first living cell is an astronomically improbable sequence, and it’s specified in that it fits an obviously meaningful pattern—namely, that required for a living, self-reproducing cell.

But in his critique of Dembski’s design filter, Kenneth Miller left the impression that it was purely about improbability. Worse, Dembski says that when BBC Horizon had Miller and Dembski on to give each side of the argument, Dembski’s part was “edited so that it seemed my entire argument rested on improbability and did not include specification.” The editors then inserted Miller’s strawman rebuttal of Dembski.⁶

Intelligence, Patience, Perseverance

Design theorists are not surprised by such treatment. After all, the theory of intelligent design doesn’t merely dilute the case for a reigning scientific paradigm as, for instance, a focus on poor forest management would have diluted the climate-change narrative of Patrick Brown’s Nature article concerning California wildfires. No, design theory positively refutes the reigning paradigm of Darwinian materialism and, into the bargain, challenges a cherished worldview—scientific materialism—that depends upon it.

Shocked outrage isn’t the proper response to being misrepresented as Dembski was. We live in a fallen world, and the eschaton is not a single protest movement or political election away. It is over the far horizon. Until then, we shine what light we can on the truth, encourage the torchbearers in the vanguard, and with patience and perseverance await the dawn.

Notes
1. “Protecting North Atlantic Right Whales During Offshore Wind Energy Development,” Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.
2. “Whistleblower Speaks Out: Offshore Wind Will Drive Whales to Extinction,” Save Right Whales, December 4, 2022.
3. Michael Shellenberger, Twitter, August 12, 2023, 4:29 PM, @shellenberger.
4. Patrick T. Brown, “As a scientist, I’m not allowed to tell the full truth about climate change,” New York Post, (September 5, 2023).
5. William A. Dembski and Winston Ewert, The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities: 2nd Edition, Revised and Expanded (Discovery Institute Press, 2023), (43–44).
6. Ibid., 73.