Re: Is Jonathan Wells any type of ID perp to eulogize?

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/
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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.
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The latest article even has a picture of him giving a scam lecture on his bogus Icons of Evolution creationist denial book.
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Shouldn't the ID perps be more interested in producing the ID science that they have always lied about having?
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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.
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https://web.archive.org/web/20110814145400/http:/ www.creationists.org/ archived-obsolete-pages/2002-03-11-OSBE- wells.html
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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:
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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.
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http://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Ohio-debates-evolution- Scientists-accuse-2864344.php
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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:
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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.
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Does anyone wonder why none of the ID perps want to remember these Wellsian contributions to the ID bait and switch scam?

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But honestly, do they have anybody better?
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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.)
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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.
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Some of the ID perps did some actual science.

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When they weren't working on ID, sure.
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 > 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.

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That is the point I was trying to make, although perhaps I did not express it well.
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 > 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.
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https://evolutionnews.org/2025/03/richard-sternberg-on-the- information- beyond-the-genome/

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I don't think we substantially disagree on any of this. If I came off as arguing with you, my sincere apologies.
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 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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Kestrel Clayton
"Every normal woman must be tempted, at times, to stoke the fire,
host the black mass, and begin eating hearts." — Rose Bailey