Posted on 10/20/2005 9:13:56 AM PDT by gobucks
Intelligent design is as unscientific as the flat Earth theory and should not be taught in school science classes, a coalition representing 70,000 scientists and science teachers has warned.
Yesterday they expressed "grave concern" that the subject was being presented in some Australian schools as a valid alternative to evolution. Proponents of intelligent design claim that some living structures are so complex they are explicable only by the action of an unspecified "intelligent designer".
But the scientists and teachers say this notion of "supernatural intervention" is a belief and not a scientific theory, because it makes no predictions and cannot be tested.
"We therefore urge all Australian governments and educators not to permit the teaching or promulgation of intelligent design as science," they say in an open letter to newspapers.
"To do so would make a mockery of Australian science teaching and throw open the door of science classes to similarly unscientific world views - be they astrology, spoon bending, flat Earth cosmology or alien abductions."
Advertisement AdvertisementThe signatories to the letter include the Australian Academy of Science, the Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies and the Australian Science Teachers Association. The coalition was brought together by the executive of the faculty of science at the University of NSW, led by its dean, Professor Mike Archer.
The president-elect of the Australian Science Teachers Association, Paul Carnemolla, said concern had been sparked by the strength of the intelligent design movement in the US, which has the backing of US President, George Bush, and the availability of slick American DVDs presenting the concept as science.
Australian science teachers were not opposed to it being taught in religion or philosophy classes. "But we felt it was important that, as scientists and science educators, we made it very clear to students and parents where we stood on this issue."
At Pacific Hills Christian School in Dural intelligent design is taught in science classes. The school's principal, Ted Boyce, said he was not persuaded by the Australian scientists' and teachers' stance and it was appropriate to teach it as an alternative explanation for the origin of humanity.
"We believe it is as valid to do that as to teach evolution. It would be unacademic and unscientific not to do so," Dr Boyce said.
The chief executive of Christian Schools Australia, Stephen O'Doherty, said intelligent design was likely to be discussed in science classes in many Christian schools and this was beneficial for learning.
It was a complex issue, he said. "The idea that there is an unexplained scientific hole in evolutionary theory … is a debate some scientists are having. To have that discussion in class is good and leads to questions like: how does scientific method work and what is science?"
The Federal Minister for Education, Science and Training, Dr Brendan Nelson, alarmed scientists earlier this year when he said schools should be able to teach intelligent design, but he later clarified his position, saying it should be restricted to religion or philosophy classes.
Australian Nobel laureate Peter Doherty told the Herald recently that intelligent design had no place in science classes.
The only one (ID) being pushed forward now is:
1. Man evolved from little squishy things.
2. The earth is billions of years old.
3. There is no evidence in the last few million years of fossil records therefore God may no longer exist.
With evolution you get the first two taught, with ID you get all three being taught. Take you pick.
Can yo point to where Scott agreed?
Find an island, with plenty of water, game, etc, and release 100 male great Danes and 100 female chihuahuas.
I predict that after 100 years there will be no dogs on the island.
Same prediction for 100 female great Danes and 100 male Chihuahuas.
But, if you released both males and females of both breeds, I would make two predictions:
1) They will behave like separate species (ie there will be no mongrels), and
2) The great Danes will still be there. Whether the Chihuahuas survive or are hunted to extinction by the Danes, I don't have a clue.
Assuming this scenario is correct, it would follow that great Danes and chihuahuas are different species.
In fact, I beleive that domestic dogs are a ring species, where size, rather than geographic distribution, prevents interbreeding between the extremes.
Me: Like what?
You: Like how to go about becoming an intelligent designer.
Why would you think that isn't being done now? The are hundreds, probably thousands of courses on design being taught in science curriculums throughout the world. Whole fields of study, e.g., ergonomics, are devoted to it. Do you imagine the chemists at DuPont were randomly combining elements and compounds when they came up with Teflon? Do you imagine the computer scientists at Intel are using weegie boards to design their next generation of chips?
That would be a really interesting experiment. Pity that it would be seen as "unethical" or "environmentally harmful". You would have both PETA and environmentalists attacking it. Still I think it should be done anyway. If I had the money I would sponsor it.
"Nonsense. We can actually test spoon bending claims. It is far more scientific than ID."
And test it we have, at Stanford and Cambridge. The results were fairly conclusive that the effect is real and unexplainable by current physical theories. But you won't hear it from a "scientist"...except me.
Professional magicians have suggested the alternative explanation which is that scientists (even at Stanford and Cambridge) aren't very good at spotting the tricks used by hucksters who claim to be able to do stuff like bending spoons and make a good income out of fooling the public.
That is false. Meaningful predictions of both the Big Bang and Inflation theories have been made and have been tested. It is what makes them, unlike ID, scientific theories. Anyone who follows scientific matters even cursorily knows this.
Now, I would guess that your ignorance of evolution is just as great as your ignorance of cosmology. How about a test? Can you identify three significant ways that evolutionary theory has changed from Darwin's formulation?
Yes, you are correct that several frauds make a living off tricking the public and even scientifically trained observers. But there have been other laboratory test regimens that have taken that factor out completely and relied on statistics. It's hard to do that for spoon bending, of course, but for something like mentally controlling the (mechanical) roll of a die, studies have been performed at Duke, Stanford, Cambridge, and Princeton which have all showed the chances of the abnormal results obtained were on the order of trillions to one. These are starting to leak into the mainstream journals.
In the scientific sense, "prediction" doesn't mean just a guess about future events which can't then be tested in order to prove or disprove. Science "predicts", i.e. hypothesizes, and then proves experimentally. No one has reproduced the Big Bang in even a tiny way, nor have physicists been able to stick for more than a few consecutive years, to a hypothesis that the universe is expending, vs. a hypothesis that it is shrinking. Creationists are making predictions too -- just read the book of Revelation. But those predictions are no more testable than physicists theories about what prompted the Big Bang, or about whether the universe is irreversibly expanding, irreversibly contracting, or changing directions from time to time.
I'm no "creationist". I think the Bible is a book of fairy tales, with some valuable philosophical insights incorporated. Like Cinderella, the story is pure fiction, but the underlying principle that the shabbily dressed servant is often a finer human being than the well-dressed rich people s/he waits one and cleans up after, is very true. But I think scientists should be honest about which of their theories have held up to numerous experimental tests, and which are still in the realm of imaginative theorizing. The creationists haven't done squat to explain how their "God" came into being, any more than physicists have advanced any fact-based explanation for what triggered the Big Bang. These are basically the same question.
They are thinking small. They are not thinking about designing worlds.
On you other points, you clearly don't know what prediction means scientifically. A scientific theory has two parts, a mathematical/deductive theory and a physical interpretation of the terms of that theory. A prediction of the scientific theory is the physical interpretation of a deduction of the theory. If a prediction is confirmed by experience we say it is confirming evidence of the theory. (Note that this does not mean the theory is proved, a common fallacy.) If, however, experience shows a prediction to be false, the theory is false (or at least highly suspect, there may after all be something wrong with the dis-confirming experience).
Now that you understand that, you will see that our practical, or even possibly in-principle, inability to recreate the purported Big Bang does not mean the theory makes no testable predictions. As I said, it does make such predictions and these predictions have been tested and have confirmed the theory. One such prediction is the so-called cosmic microwave background. Another is the primordial distribution of the light elements.
One last minor point. You seem to have the mistaken impression that scientists have thought that the universe is shrinking. Again, this is ignorant. Everyone agrees, based on observations of distant objects, that the universe is expanding. What has been surprising is recent evidence that the universal expansion is now accelerating but was decelerating in the distant past.
So you think it would be a good use of educational resources to teach courses in designing worlds?
Not whole courses, but including the basic concept of "intelligent design" in a scientific way, rather than in a thinly-veiled "Bible is literally true" way, would be beneficial. The proposals for including any version of "intelligent design" in high school science curricula have only been to give it a little coverage within regular courses, not to offer entire courses on just that concept.
Whole courses devoted "designing worlds" concepts might be appropriate for graduate level science students, but certainly not for high schoolers or undergrads. The example I offered, of designing single celled organisms which could survive and evolve on Mars, is something that serious grad student biologists could reasonably undertake. Thinking through all the factors that would need to be considered -- availability of certain chemical elements, temperature ranges on different parts of the planet, chemical compounds which would be produced by the organisms and how those would change the Martian environment, radiation levels, etc. -- in determining what features the designed organism would need in order to thrive, and where on the planet they should be placed, could certainly fill up a worthwhile course at that level.
Most scientists NOW agree the universe is expanding. They didn't always. And who knows if they'll continue to. Not so long ago, there was an overwhelming consensus among scientists that the Earth was cooling, and that we urgently needed to take action to keep it warm (I'm old enough to remember being taught in grade school that scientists had discovered that "the Earth is cooling and millions of people are going to die if we don't stop it"). Now the consensus is that it's warming, and debate centers on how much of that is human-caused, not on whether it's warming or not.
As you point out, passing one or more tests of predictive value doesn't "prove" a theory. The global cooling theory passed a lot of scientists' experiments supporting the correctness of the theory. But it was later found to be utterly wrong. That some scientists have run experiments testing the predictive value of little bits and pieces of their explanations for their Big Bang theory, puts that theory on the same footing as the global cooling theory in teh 60s and 70s. "Intelligent design" proponents also use experiments on little bits and pieces of things to support their theory. And clear falsification of their general theory hasn't happened yet, nor has there been clear falsification of the current version of evolutionary theory. The widely accepted theory that environmental effects on an animal can't be passed down to offspring in the form of modified genes, is teetering on the edge, as very convincing research on gene expression is showing powerful effects of in utero programming, directly correlated to environmental factors like diet and stress, which get passed down at least 2 generations (and quite possibly more) in the form of very different gene expression patterns.
And I have better things to do than outline chapters from basic biology texts for you.
So you have the time to write several hundred word replies but can't jot down three changes in evolution since Darwin. The point was to give you an opportunity to show you actually know something about evolution. I will take it as confirmed that you don't know very much. Don't let that stop you from posting on it though, it doesn't stop the other anti-Es here.
Most scientists NOW agree the universe is expanding. They didn't always.
Sorry, I won't let you revise your claim. You said
nor have physicists been able to stick for more than a few consecutive years, to a hypothesis that the universe is [expanding], vs. a hypothesis that it is shrinking.and that is wrong. Before Hubble the consensus was that the universe was static and unchanging. Since Hubble there has been agreement that the universe is expanding. There were two significant theories, Steady State and what has come to be known as the Big Bang. In both of these theories the universe expands. When the cosmic microwave background was discovered in the 60s, Big Bang, which had predicted it, was the clear champ.
That some scientists have run experiments testing the predictive value of little bits and pieces of their explanations for their Big Bang theory, puts that theory on the same footing as the global cooling theory in teh 60s and 70s.
Oh please. Little bits and pieces? The cosmic microwave background is a little bit or piece? Your attempt at spin is risible. There is no comparison between the explanatory power or tested predictions of Big Bang theory and some flash-in-the-pan global cooling theory.
"Intelligent design" proponents also use experiments on little bits and pieces of things to support their theory. And clear falsification of their general theory hasn't happened yet...
I see you know as little about ID as about evolution. ID makes no testable predictions. It is therefore incapable of falsification. And, of course, that means it's not a scientific theory.
I am hardly "anti-evolution". IF anything resembling intelligent design played a part in the beginning or subsequent development of life on Earth, IMO most of the process was clearly left to evolution. I don't see intelligent design as excluding evolution (though certainly many of the loud ID proponents are promoting a version which excludes most aspects of evolution).
In the hypothetical scenario I gave, of contemporary scientists deliberately producing one or a few simple one-celled organisms which could survive and evolve on Mars, that would be "intelligent design". And if no human or other intelligent entity ever touched or influenced Mars again, a few billion years down the road, some highly evolved intelligent Martian creatures would be correct in hypothesizing that "intelligent design" had played a role in their coming into existence. That would in no way negate the fact that they had evolved from simple one-celled organisms.
Neither do I. Neither do all (or virtually all, there may be an exception or two) of the pro-E posters on these threads. What is objected to, fundamentally, is that anti-Es think ID should be taught as a scientific theory when it is not. Another big, but lesser issue is that anti-Es pretend that evolutionary theory isn't scientific when it is, in fact, a very strong scientific theory. In most cases I'd say this is simply abysmal ignorance of evolution and science in general. For example, I wish I had a dime for every "if humans evolved from apes, why are there still apes?" post. But there are a handul for whom science and its naturalistic methods are an affront for religious or philosophical reasons.
As for your hypothetical scenario, a highly evolved Martian descended from primitive, designed creatures could propose that their progenitors were designed, but unless they could make testable predictions from that proposal, it would be "true" but not scientific.
If you prefer to call Great Danes and Chihuahuas a separate species based on the weak definition of speciation it's OK by me but you should acknowledge that the mechanism which brought about their reproductive isolation and hence their "speciation" was intelligently designed by breeders, no?
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