CBEB’s

William Dembski finally returned to Uncommon Descent (incidentally, Galapagos Finch returned to The Brites around the same time) and kicked off his return in grand fashion. Supposedly, a “producer from one of the national talking heads programs” wants Dembski or Jonathan Wells to appear on their program. We know it’s not Glenn Beck or any of the programs on Fox News, because the producer requested the following:

…can you or they provide any samples of things that intelligent design theory has predicted, which researchers have later determined to be true?

The Isaac Washington of Information Theory then made the following request:

I have my own list of answers, but I’d like to hear those of this group.

My friend, can your heart stand the shocking facts of ID predictions from outer space?

As can be expected, hilarity ensued. Of course, Joe G. showed up and pasted the same thing he pastes everywhere else, but my favorite “prediction” came from vjtorley:

(2) For the same reasons, we can be confident that robots will never be able to take over the world, and that humans will never be able to create a “master race” of superior beings that could turn on us and destroy us.

I don’t know if vjtorley is a sockpuppet or not, but that is some choice Tard. Good work, my friend! (Just to be on the safe side, I’m still keeping my Old Glory insurance policy paid up…)

As we all know, it’s just not a good UD thread without someone getting disappeared. Fortunately, I saved the comments thread so that this gem by Shoghi is preserved:

I am a middle school student who is interested in the science of intelligent design. I have a snow day today and I saw the post about predictions intelligent design can make. That got me excited to post on your blog. I tried going to Overwhelming Evidence blog but nothing ever happens there. I read the Edge of Evolution and The Design Inference. I’ll admit, I didn’t understand a lot of what I read, but it did provide me with a great source of discussion with my science teacher. For our science fair this year, I decided to test some of the ideas I learned about Intelligent Design.

I designed a controlled experiment that would test the hypothesis that organisms are frontloaded with information that allows them to survive in a totally unique environment that could not have possibly been an evolutionary adaptation.

My question/problem was the following: Can spiders survive in new environments that they have never had a chance to live in before either now or its ancestors?

My hypothesis: Spiders will be able to survive in new environments because they are frontloaded with information that will allow them to survive in new and unique environments. This information that allows them to survive could not have been gained by evolution, therefore it was frontloaded by an intelligent designer.

My procedures (short version): Find spider hatchlings that have been born in the wild outdoors. Place them inside a broken computer (I choose a computer because they haven’t been around long enough for spiders to evolve any adaptations to living with). Next, place the computer on top of a pole outdoors. Wait and observe to see if they can build a web and then successfully reproduce.

My Results: Most of the spiders moved away, disappeared or died. However, one spider stayed in the computer and made a home. It was able to catch bugs and survive.

My conclusion: Evolution could not explain why the spider survived in this radically different new environment. It was a completely different one than its ancestors lived in. The only possible explanation was that it was frontloaded with the ability to survive in a variety of environments.

My teacher said my procedures were good, and my idea was creative. I got an A!

That was comment #52 in the thread; it’s now gone and the current #52 is a post by none other than DaveScot. Also gone is comment #85, by jerry:

Shoghi,

A very clever experiment and one that offers prospects for the future. One thing to consider which is whether all the spiders were genetically similar, which is beyond your capabilities now. Also it may be that there was only room for one spider in the computer and what you witnessed was a true survival of the fittest. That is also an interesting hypothesis and maybe in the literature some place. I suggest you write to some college professors about your design for their ideas but do not mention ID or else they might react differently than if you said what was the basis of your experiment. Instead of using the term front loading, use the concept that the gene pool contained enough variation that one or more spiders may have had the right genetics to survive.

Any middle school student that designed such an experiment is light years ahead of the game.

Another mysterious disappearance is that of William Dembski. Minus the vanished comments, there are 167 responses in the thread, and Dembski has yet to produce his list of answers. Is he combing through the Gospel of John, using the Bible Code to get his predictions? Maybe his list of ID predictions got mixed up with all the details he provided to Ann Coulter for her book, Godless.

This week held great potential for a Dembski Friday Meltdown, but it looks like we’re going to have to wait.