Have you ever really looked at intelligent design?

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.)

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.

No the ID discussion in astrophysics includes not only the conditions needed for life, but the very conditions that hold the universe together at all levels and in three dimensions. But whether scientists take something "seriously" or not in this case is impossible to say, because it was proposed by prominent astrophysicists. Therefore, scientists take it seriously.

When scientists can write book after book saying nothing preceded the big bang, or it doesn't matter because there is no way of figuring it out, then I can not take scientists seriously at that point. They leave the realm of science at that point. Or that once time and space are totally crushed in ablack hole's singularity who knows they may be emerging in another universe but hey that doesn't matter because no information can escape from a black hole and we can never know. Or that at the smallest level we can never see the tiniest elements of matter because it's smaller than a photon, and BTW at some point we can never know where the particle is, it occupies all possible locations at once. And then there is the ability for the behavior of one particle to affect another at a distance with no physical connection.

I'm not saying this to insult scientists or religious, but what scientists don't know and can't comprehend is astounding, and if you doubt me wait until 1000 years from now and I fairly confidently assure you all present scientific "fact" will have been rewritten.

It is astoundingly arrogant and ignorant for an intelligent scientist to assess all they don't know and can't even think about, and then insist they "know" that the answers all lead to randomness.

"When scientists can write book after book saying nothing preceded the big bang, "

Hmm...could you point me to one of those books, please? I haven't seen any such statement in a serious book on astrophysics.

Perhaps you found this in a creationist's book or website. It doesn't sound much like what an scientist would say. A scientist might say he didn't know, but he's unlikely to make a statement like that one.

So, a reference, please?

Discover magazine had a good article about Pennock's evolving code a couple of months back.

February 2005, "Testing Darwin", by Carl Zimmer.

The whole article is here:

Testing Darwin

Great paragraph: "The Avida team makes their software freely available on the Internet, and creationists have downloaded it over and over again in hopes of finding a fatal flaw. While they've uncovered a few minor glitches, Ofria says they have yet to find anything serious. “We literally have an army of thousands of unpaid bug testers,” he says. “What more could you want?”

A couple of supporting Web sites:

The Avida-ED Project

Darwin Proved Right by Experiment with "Alien" Life

I'm really not in the mood for finding references right now. But I don't read creationist literature. Most scientists absolutely state that they cannot know anything that preceded the big bang. This is because all time and space was collapsed, for some odd reason they cannot address because it is unknowable, into a tiny singularity described as being infinitely dense and of various sizes down to infinity but all smaller than the earth. Within this singulartity there was no time or space and of course nothing surrounded it. This burst forth because (hmm good question) and the "stuff" that happened in the subsequent milliseconds randomly decided all the forces of nature, particles, etc we know today. None of these existed before that big bang.

It is impossible for scientists to look before the big bang. It's similar to the singularity of a black hole. We can only study what emerged.

Stephen Hawkings came close to stepping outside this view, In one of his books, he talked about time taking place throughout the universe as if observed from outside the universe. But none of this can be called science as opposed to religion. It is all an attempt to stretch one's mind around concepts that are unknowable, at least to us now.

You must think I'm for creationism and against science. Nothing could be farther from the truth. But I won't allow religion or science to pretend they have figured everything out, when they quite clearly have not.

If you want, get me some cites to scientific discussion of the universe preceding the big bang, and preceding the primordial egg, and explaining how where when and why the primordial egg existed. And when you do find a scientist or two taking a stab at those questions, make sure they provide empirical proof. By definition they can't and most won't try because just prior to the big bang there was no measurable time or space and they cannot devise any method of "looking" to a "time" before that.

This is standard scientific theory I have spent a lifetime reading scientific literature, not creationist literature.

Have you ever really looked at intelligent design?

Yes, and I have found it wanting not only in accepted Scientific rigor but also in Truthfulness.

There is a category of Science termed 'Junk Science' that includes such false 'Causes' as Global Warming, DDT, Silicone Breast Implants, etc.

Creationism/ID'ism definitely falls into this category.

Unfortunately, Creationism/ID'ism falls NOT ONLY into the category (garbage can) of Junk Science but also into the much more dangerous category of 'Junk Religion'. This category is typified by such Totalitarians as Jim Jones and his Kool-aid drinkers. More importantly for the Free Republic Website, many ignornant ignoramuses here insist on pushing this crap here at Free Republic and thereby marginalizing the reputation of this site and the Conservative Movement.

I will not allow this to happen.

Both are true. They believe there was no "time" at that "time." Therefore, they both cannot know, and they believe it was impossible for anything to preexist in any sense that we can understand. It's not a whatever point, the whole point is where did all this come from and why. Science can't answer that and sometimes says it doesn't want to. But then when science started the conversation, I thought they were explaining everything and dismissing a First Principle based on their empirical data. The fact is their knowledge collapses into mystery at all levels, and they say those mysteries are unknowable and unobservable. Is there a God? Is this all random? I don't know but they certainly don't know, either.

On evolution, a much smaller subject, I think evolution has occured and science may ultimately find all of its mechanisms. I find it interesting they haven't yet. But the real question is why did life form why does it evolve why is there intelligence, etc. Maybe for a reason or cause beyond randomness.

There are big questions in cosmology and particle physics about the big bang and black holes. For very good reasons, these issues are at the frontiers of the field of physics. However, you seem to be saying that simply because we do not know everything about such things, we therefore must know nothing.

There is A LOT that we DO know about the universe. We know that at one time all the matter in the universe must have been concentrated in the same place. The physics of what exactly happened at that moment are not fully known, but that's half the fun of it.

I have a good buddy working at RHIC on Long Island where they are trying (with some success, depending on who you ask) to recreate a state of matter that the entire universe likely was composed of at some point immediately after the "beginnning". They do NOT know EVERYTHING that happened at that moment, but every day they learn something new. Every day they try to push the boundaries back a little farther. It is true that we don't know what happened before the big bang. But trying to claim that the whole idea is bunk because of that puts you on thin ice.

Scientists DON'T know everything, but we can talk with a great deal of certainty about many things. The strength of the scientific method lies not just in finding evidence for what we do know, but defining limits on what we don't know. The problems you describe are just the sort of thing that we love to sink our teeth into, not examples that question the validity of all previous work done in that field of research.

I didn't question the validity of scientuific work. I'm extremely interested in the science you are discussing. But here the discussion is whether there is some intelligent design behind the universe, or can science prove it is all random. At that point, science is not even close to disproving the existence of a designing force behind the universe. Yet many of the scientists are deeply committed to randomness and the conviction there is no God. They feel strongly that science eliminates the possibility. On that they are deeply mistaken.

And just to tweak the scientists a little further, every once in a while their measurements throw them a curve ball, so the very foundations of their theories shake just a bit. Was there a big bang for sure? Are the galaxies moving away from one another at the right speed? Why do some very distant objects not show the correct red shift, when they should be incredibly far away? Etc. even the big bang, the expanding universe, etc. may not be the answers 200 years from now.

So the scientists are awfully presumptuous when they think they have disproven God.

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.

There's an easy way to test this statement.

Suppose you have a biological specimen where you already know that the answer to "how did it get that way" is "intelligent design." Is science able to correctly determine the origin of that specimen?

Let's start out with something easy: bacteria and yeast that have been genetically engineered to produce human insulin. The correct answer to "how did it get that way" is clearly "intelligent design."

Now, if application of scientific rules can get the correct answer ("somebody did it"), then the premise of this article (and indeed the whole case against ID) is false.

And if the application of scientific rules cannot get the correct answer, then science needs to be adjusted to reality.

The whole thing boils down to one thing: is "somebody did it" an acceptable scientific hypothesis? The answer in this case is obviously yes. (And standards of proof will still apply, and one can even define the relevant tests.)

Yes, and I have found it wanting not only in accepted Scientific rigor but also in Truthfulness.

Hm. Well, that's cute but ultimately silly. Your post reveals a rather apalling lack of both Scientific Rigor and Truthfulness. You're not making a scientific argument. You're just stomping around and waving your arms.

Let's first look at your epithetical reference: "Creationism/ID." This is a strawman, which improperly conflates a specific religious view, with a valid scientific hypothesis. Not very impressive, except as bluster.

Second, and really damning to your case, you've neatly excluded from scientific scrutiny a very large number of cases where "somebody did it" happens to be the correct explanation. Think of the many instances where genetic engineering has been used in agriculture and medicine, for example.

Are you really saying that it's impossible for science to tell the difference between something that was genetically engineered, and something that just happened to evolve that way?

Your argument requires there to be an organism in which some function has been designed de novo and implanted. I know of none such. The example of insulin genes in bacteria is not relevant; we can detect those because we know what an insulin gene looks like, and we can tell it's in the wrong place. If we designed a new gene from scratch and inserted it in a bacterium, could we, barring some coded message, detect it had been designed? No, we couldn't.

And if the application of scientific rules cannot get the correct answer, then science needs to be adjusted to reality.

Science can't be adjusted to accomodate impossibilities.

Your argument requires there to be an organism in which some function has been designed de novo and implanted. I know of none such.

Huh? Why does my argument require such a thing? I have simply presented you a set of organisms for which we know that a particular characteristic was due to intelligent interaction.

The example of insulin genes in bacteria is not relevant; we can detect those because we know what an insulin gene looks like, and we can tell it's in the wrong place.

It is in fact completely relevant, as you have kindly offered us the very test needed in this case to support a hypothesis of "Somebody did it." Thus you've demonstrated the fallacy of saying that a design hypothesis is "unscientific" because it is impossible to test.

Science can't be adjusted to accomodate impossibilities.

Well, since we're obviously not talking about "impossibilities," I'll write that off as an ideological, rather than scientific comment.

You're claiming we can detect design. But in your example we're not detecting design; we're detecting that a known gene has been put somewhere we don't expect it.

The problem is, this happens naturally, by virus/plasmid translocation of genes. A virus will very occasionally incorporate a gene from one organism into its own genome, and then infect another organism; then (rarely again) the gene can be incorporated in the new genome. The combination of several very rare events doesn't happen very often, except in bacteria, and that's why we can study evolution by molecular genetic means. But it does mean that if we find a gene in the 'wrong' place, there is a naturalistic mechanism by which it could have got there.

So yours is not a useful test for ID. Sorry.

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