Thursday, September 25, 2014

William Dembski's talk at the University of Chicago

Invited by Leo Kadanoff, William Dembski spoke on Aug 15, 2014 at the University of Chicago's "Computations in Science" seminar. Jerry A. Coyne - a professor in the department of ecology and evolution at the same university - questioned the judgement of the seminar's organizers. Afterwards, the Discovery Institute was very pleased with its paladin William Dembski.
"The talk itself and the Q&A afterward, which were at a pretty high level, went very well."
, and they loved a concluding remark by Leo Kadanoff:
I think the ball is in the court of people who believe in evolution. They have to deal with these questions. ...Bill has made his case and we should all go home and think.
At William Dembski's former blog Uncommon Descent, a video of the talk-cum-questions was posted on Sep 14, 2014:

This video has gotten very little resonance. To make it easier to access, I have created a transcript, which I will publish on this blog in a short series of posts. Obviously, the usual caveats apply: I'm not a native speaker, but I tried my best to understand and reproduce the talk as truthfully as possible. I apologize in advance for my errors, which inevitably have occurred, and I'm grateful for any correction.

How "official" is the video?

The question arose: who actually taped the talk? Some student, who then put it up on youtube? I think that it is a work of members of the Discovery Institute:
  1. The youtube channel MissIngaNiball on which the video is presented seems to belong to Robert Marks (wikipedia, American Loons), or at least a member of his family (in which case a predilection for feeble puns would be hereditary).
  2. Two stills taken from the video are credited to Paul Nelson (wikipedia, American Loons)in the Discovery Institute's article.

Dembski's talk: Part 1 - 5

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