Posted on 09/29/2005 7:32:43 AM PDT by Right Wing Professor
HARRISBURG Wednesday morning, as day three of the Dover Panda Trial meandered into discussions of stoner logic and street cred, one of the lawyers for the school district, Patrick Gillen, asked Robert Pennock, a philosopher of science from Michigan State University and a serious, serious brainiac, whether the idea of "intelligent design" was a Big Ten theory.
Pennock who, I can't stress this enough, is an incredible brainiac looked puzzled. It was clear that he had never heard of any connection between the idea of intelligent design and what some consider the best college football conference in the country. He paused for a moment and then spoke, kind of haltingly.
"As a member of a Big Ten school, I should know that," he said.
Gillen clarified.
"I said 'big tent,'" he said.
But when you think about, in the context of Pennock's testimony and his academic cred, intelligent design really isn't a Big Ten idea. It's more of a Conference USA idea.
Think about it. On the surface, intelligent design seems like a credible scientific theory. It sounds scientific. The people pushing it say it's scientific.
But if you apply the rules of science, the notion that the idea has to be supported and tested using credible, tangible evidence, it really isn't. It's like a Conference USA school playing, say, Michigan State and being exposed as a mere facsimile of a major college football team.
Later, Gillen asked Pennock a question about what someone would believe about design when they saw a computer model of evolution that he and other scientists have created.
I'll get to that, but first, this computer model is kind of hard to explain. Pennock explained, well, how it worked and what it demonstrated and just how incredibly amazing it is. And it really sounded amazing. As best as I can describe it, it starts with a line of computer code that can replicate itself. Then, it replicates and mutates. And here's where the mechanisms of natural selection come in. Most of the mutations are bad and those codes don't do anything. Some, though, evolve and grow more and more complex.
In the end, the scientists have a digital organism for want of better expression that can perform complex tasks and by examining the record of its creation, they can figure out how it happened.
Really, it's a lot more amazing than I make it sound.
Did I mention that Pennock is a brainiac? Anyway, back to Gillen's question about whether somebody looking at the computer program could believe that it was created by a programmer. Pennock explained how the program worked, and that during the process as the code evolves, and at the end of the process, you can't really tell who or what created it because it essentially created itself.
Gillen persisted and Pennock explained he couldn't really answer the question. "You're asking me a psychological question about what somebody believes. They could believe all sorts of things," he said.
He got into what some people believe later. Young Earth creationists, for instance, believe our planet is between 6,000 and 10,000 years old, based on analysis of Scripture. Sure, you can believe that, Pennock said. But it ignores the evidence or claims that the evidence was placed there by God to fool us, which, when you think about, is a kind of odd way to describe the deity, as some kind of cosmic prankster.
And that's when Pennock unloaded this: "For all we know, the world may have been created five minutes ago and we've all been implanted with memory chips."
Whoa.
Dude.
And thus did intelligent design somehow join the wow-have-you-ever-looked-at-your-hand-I-mean-really-looked school of stoner intellectual epistemology.
Later, the trial took a fun turn, if your idea of fun is watching a lawyer badger some woman.
You knew it was going to be fun when Richard Thompson, another of the lawyers for the school district, referred to "a bit of street wisdom" while questioning Julie Ann Smith, one of the plaintiffs in the case and the mother of two.
Thompson, a white guy in a dark blue suit on the descending side of middle age, is all about the street, homey.
The street wisdom was "don't believe everything you read in the newspapers."
Word, Home-Slice.
And yet, that wasn't the most entertaining aspect of Wednesday's proceedings.
That came when Robert Muise, the third member of the school district's legal team, rose to object when plaintiff Beth Eveland began to testify about a letter to the editor she had written.
"Hearsay," he intoned.
In general legal terms, hearsay is essentially a witness testifying to something they learned from a third party, and, except for some exceptions, is not permitted in court since the person repeating the words has no idea whether they are true because they were obtained third-hand. (And some people say this column has no educational content.)
In this case, Muise was objecting to Eveland testifying about her own words.
Judge John E. Jones III, the federal jurist hearing the case, looked at Muise, bearing an expression that he couldn't really believe what he just heard.
The judge asked Muise, "Who wrote the letter?"
Muise said, "She did," and sat down.
As they say on the street, the judge punked him.
Ping for a great column about the Dover Panda trial.
Actually, most life forms are breathtakingly simple:
mix 2 parts booze, one part of hot air, one part of old money, one cup of ambition, a cup of connections, and a cup of leftism - and you get a kennedy. You do not even need to shake and bake. And the design of this recipe is surely not particularly intelligent, either.
yeah it was pretty funny, but being from a C-USA school.... F*** him!!
I donno. Want me to ping the list?
Yo! Homey! They gots pandas in Dover? Fer shizzle?
I gotta get over there. Those pandas be the bomb!
Whoa.
Dude.
And thus did intelligent design somehow join the wow-have-you-ever-looked-at-your-hand-I-mean-really-looked school of stoner intellectual epistemology.
I remember some nights like this...in particular the utter profundity of the TV jingle "Sometimes you feel like a nut - sometimes you don't" for Almond Joy vs. what-was-the-other-one, Dude? Whoa! I was too stoned to catch the name, Bro.
BTW, have you ever really looked at your hand, man? While your at it, check out this ID stuff too. Knarly! We could have been just created only nanoseconds ago, with memories and everything.
< /humor> Better take my meds. :)
Seriously....it sounds like the school board has some knuckle-draggers as attorneys in this case. More proof of evolution, I suppose.
I've heard this theory before. Very compelling under the right circumstances.
Well, maybe I'll just put a link to this thread on the other one. It's in the editorial sidebar, anyway.
Nice tagline!
And the computer the program is found in must have evolved also!
A program that evolves
LOL!
I'd appreciate it. I like the article, but if there are too many threads going on all at once on the same topic it gets confusing.
sounds like Pennock offers the usual hand waving arguments that biologists have been trying to get by with for 50 years. The best thing to do is to teach nothing about origins of life because nobody knows, and it doesn't give fellas like you any pretence for arrogating an extra 50 I.Q. points to yourself over anybody that disagrees with you.
It isn't the first slap-down, either. I don't think Thomas Monaghan got nearly enough for his million dollars.
You've got that backward!
With lots of same-topic threads,
they'll support themselves,
and order will form
spontaneously among
all the ideas . . .
An extra 50? C'mon, guy, no one's going to believe we're a 100 points smarter!
:=)
What attorneys aren't?-)
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