Posted on 01/28/2005 6:50:34 AM PST by Heartlander
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| The Branding of a Heretic |
By: David Klinghoffer The Wall Street Journal January 28, 2005 |
Original Article
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The question of whether Intelligent Design (ID) may be presented to public-school students alongside neo-Darwinian evolution has roiled parents and teachers in various communities lately. Whether ID may be presented to adult scientific professionals is another question altogether but also controversial. It is now roiling the government-supported Smithsonian Institution, where one scientist has had his career all but ruined over it.
The scientist is Richard Sternberg, a research associate at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington. The holder of two Ph.D.s in biology, Mr. Sternberg was until recently the managing editor of a nominally independent journal published at the museum, Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, where he exercised final editorial authority. The August issue included typical articles on taxonomical topics--e.g., on a new species of hermit crab. It also included an atypical article, "The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories." Here was trouble.
The piece happened to be the first peer-reviewed article to appear in a technical biology journal laying out the evidential case for Intelligent Design. According to ID theory, certain features of living organisms--such as the miniature machines and complex circuits within cells--are better explained by an unspecified designing intelligence than by an undirected natural process like random mutation and natural selection.
Mr. Sternberg's editorship has since expired, as it was scheduled to anyway, but his future as a researcher is in jeopardy--and that he had not planned on at all. He has been penalized by the museum's Department of Zoology, his religious and political beliefs questioned. He now rests his hope for vindication on his complaint filed with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC) that he was subjected to discrimination on the basis of perceived religious beliefs. A museum spokesman confirms that the OSC is investigating. Says Mr. Sternberg: "I'm spending my time trying to figure out how to salvage a scientific career."
The offending review-essay was written by Stephen Meyer, who holds a Cambridge University doctorate in the philosophy of biology. In the article, he cites biologists and paleontologists critical of certain aspects of Darwinism--mainstream scientists at places like the University of Chicago, Yale, Cambridge and Oxford. Mr. Meyer gathers the threads of their comments to make his own case. He points, for example, to the Cambrian explosion 530 million years ago, when between 19 and 34 animal phyla (body plans) sprang into existence. He argues that, relying on only the Darwinian mechanism, there was not enough time for the necessary genetic "information" to be generated. ID, he believes, offers a better explanation.
Whatever the article's ultimate merits--beyond the judgment of a layman--it was indeed subject to peer review, the gold standard of academic science. Not that such review saved Mr. Sternberg from infamy. Soon after the article appeared, Hans Sues--the museum's No. 2 senior scientist--denounced it to colleagues and then sent a widely forwarded e-mail calling it "unscientific garbage."
Meanwhile, the chairman of the Zoology Department, Jonathan Coddington, called Mr. Sternberg's supervisor. According to Mr. Sternberg's OSC complaint: "First, he asked whether Sternberg was a religious fundamentalist. She told him no. Coddington then asked if Sternberg was affiliated with or belonged to any religious organization. . . . He then asked where Sternberg stood politically; . . . he asked, 'Is he a right-winger? What is his political affiliation?' " The supervisor (who did not return my phone messages) recounted the conversation to Mr. Sternberg, who also quotes her observing: "There are Christians here, but they keep their heads down."
Worries about being perceived as "religious" spread at the museum. One curator, who generally confirmed the conversation when I spoke to him, told Mr. Sternberg about a gathering where he offered a Jewish prayer for a colleague about to retire. The curator fretted: "So now they're going to think that I'm a religious person, and that's not a good thing at the museum."
In October, as the OSC complaint recounts, Mr. Coddington told Mr. Sternberg to give up his office and turn in his keys to the departmental floor, thus denying him access to the specimen collections he needs. Mr. Sternberg was also assigned to the close oversight of a curator with whom he had professional disagreements unrelated to evolution. "I'm going to be straightforward with you," said Mr. Coddington, according to the complaint. "Yes, you are being singled out." Neither Mr. Coddington nor Mr. Sues returned repeated phone messages asking for their version of events.
Mr. Sternberg begged a friendly curator for alternative research space, and he still works at the museum. But many colleagues now ignore him when he greets them in the hall, and his office sits empty as "unclaimed space." Old colleagues at other institutions now refuse to work with him on publication projects, citing the Meyer episode. The Biological Society of Washington released a vaguely ecclesiastical statement regretting its association with the article. It did not address its arguments but denied its orthodoxy, citing a resolution of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that defined ID as, by its very nature, unscientific.
It may or may not be, but surely the matter can be debated on scientific grounds, responded to with argument instead of invective and stigma. Note the circularity: Critics of ID have long argued that the theory was unscientific because it had not been put forward in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Now that it has, they argue that it shouldn't have been because it's unscientific. They banish certain ideas from certain venues as if by holy writ, and brand heretics too. In any case, the heretic here is Mr. Meyer, a fellow at Seattle's Discovery Institute, not Mr. Sternberg, who isn't himself an advocate of Intelligent Design.
According to the OSC complaint, one museum specialist chided him by saying: "I think you are a religiously motivated person and you have dragged down the Proceedings because of your religiously motivated agenda." Definitely not, says Mr. Sternberg. He is a Catholic who attends Mass but notes: "I would call myself a believer with a lot of questions, about everything. I'm in the postmodern predicament."
Intelligent Design, in any event, is hardly a made-to-order prop for any particular religion. When the British atheist philosopher Antony Flew made news this winter by declaring that he had become a deist--a believer in an unbiblical "god of the philosophers" who takes no notice of our lives--he pointed to the plausibility of ID theory.
Darwinism, by contrast, is an essential ingredient in secularism, that aggressive, quasi-religious faith without a deity. The Sternberg case seems, in many ways, an instance of one religion persecuting a rival, demanding loyalty from anyone who enters one of its churches--like the National Museum of Natural History.
Mr. Klinghoffer, a columnist for the Jewish Forward, is the author of "Why the Jews Rejected Jesus," to be published by Doubleday in March.
Discovery Institute is a non-profit, non-partisan, public policy think tank headquartered in Seattle and dealing with national and international affairs. For more information, browse Discovery's Web site at:
http://www.discovery.org.
If one states ‘nature must have and can only do it’ this is a dogmatic position that does nothing for science. ID has been used throughout history and naturalism is a recent occurrence that has caused this either/or event
I only hope that you did not miss the point entirely…
The creation of life was before my time. I suspect it was there all along.
Which point(s)? Most of the remarks were appropriate to an undergrad physics prep class.
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I'll have to look into Count Korzybski.
Perhaps the most difficult dilemma to explain is the fact that individual particles such as photons, electrons and neutrinos are a very real part of our universe and yet to also understand that if photons are to be particles rather than waves as they sometimes are, it requires a conscious observer to collapse the wave-function--to make the reality of our universe, real indeed. It seems that for our universe to exist as it does at all, the universe must be observed by a supreme, conscious observer. Of course, waves also exist in our universe but if this is truly a conscious observer, then it requires little imagination to understand this observer could choose to observe, or not to observe a particular system in order to achieve a desired result. But who/what might this observer be?Enter chairman of the Mathematical Physics Department at Tulane University, world renowned cosmologist and avid atheist, Frank Tipler. Actually, I must clarify that although Tipler was once a confessed atheist, through his research in physics he has shown mathematical evidence for this supreme observer to exist and today seems very much the ardent IDist. Tipler shows this supreme observer to be quantum mechanics acting within the universe. He writes: "I have been forced into these conclusions by the inexorable logic of my own special branch of physics."
Tipler constructs a single pocket of increasingly higher level organization evolving to the ultimate Omega Point which he implies to be a god of quantum mechanics that acts as an intelligent observer from the future backward to the past. Tipler's advanced math and physics is well beyond the scope of this paper, however, I would encourage the interested reader to research this further as it is quite fascinating.
Personally, I like the 'I/we don't know' position.
So do I, but unfortunately the current position is ‘nature did it’.
Wouldn't they be excommunicated for heresy? I believe it's better to preserve their anonymity.
And unfortunately it seems to be human nature to demand an explanation (knowledge) rather than just say and accept 'I don't know'.
Perhaps the most difficult dilemma to explain is the fact that individual particles such as photons, electrons and neutrinos are a very real part of our universe and yet to also understand that if photons are to be particles rather than waves as they sometimes are, it requires a conscious observer to collapse the wave-function--to make the reality of our universe, real indeed.Absolute bull.
it requires a conscious observer
I admit, I'm not up on my physics, and maybe I'm just stating a something already well known, but doesn't this turn Heisenberg on his head. Now instead of the observer just affecting the observation the observer is required for what is observed to occur.
I find it hard to argue with that logic…
Let’s try this:
1. Had the rate of expansion of the big bang been different, no life would have been possible. A reduction by one part in a million million would have led to collapse before the temperatures could fall below ten thousand degrees. An early increase by one part in a million would have prevented the growth of galaxies, stars, and planets.
2. The material of the observable universe is isotropic (evenly distributed) to an accuracy of 0. 1 percent. Such an accuracy is antecedently improbable and slight variations would rule out life.
3. Had the values of the gravitational constant, the strong force constant (the force binding protons and neutrons in the nucleus), the weak force (the force responsible for many nuclear processes [e.g., the transmutation of neutrons into protons]), and the electromagnetic force been slightly greater or smaller, no life would have been possible.
4. In the formation of the universe, the balance of matter to antimatter had to be accurate to one part in ten billion for the universe to arise.
5. The random coalescing of several unrelated factors necessary for life someplace in the universe is highly improbable. This can be seen by examining the factors on earth necessary for life. The point is not, however, that it is amazing that these factors came together on earth instead of somewhere else. Rather, it is amazing that they came together anywhere, and earth is used to illustrate the factors necessary. Had the ratio of carbon to oxygen been slightly different, no life could have formed. If the mass of a proton were increased by 0.2 percent, hydrogen would be unstable and life would not have formed. For life to form, the temperature range is only 1-2 percent of the total temperature range, and earth obtains this range by being the correct distance from the sun, just the right size, with the right rotational speed, with a special atmosphere which protects earth and evens out temperature extremes. In addition, the planet which had these factors just happened to contain the proper amount of metals (especially iron), radioactive elements to provide the right heat source, and water-forming compounds. Perhaps the proper temperature range could be obtained in another way. But earth shows how delicate and multifaceted are the independent factors involved in maintaining the correct temperature for life. 3
6. The chance formation of life from nonlife (abiogenesis) has been estimated at around 1 x 1040,000 Thus, the probability of life forming anywhere in the cosmos is miniscule. Furthermore, in the process of reacting in some prebiotic chemical soup, the reactants often need to be isolated from their environment at just the right time and reintroduced at just the right time for the reaction to continue. This is achieved in the lab by investigator interference, but it is difficult to conceive of a mechanism to do this in nature and to do it at just the right time.
Every time light interacts with matter (that is, act like a photon and not a wave), the wave function collapses.
A consciousness is of course not required. The Holy Warrior nutcases just shrug and go on to the next bad penny.
Try letting science be science and religion be religion. Hello?
Statistics are seductive and science, however precise, is imprecise. Beware of what you don't know. Faith and knowledge are two different things.
The odds of a creationist accurately modeling anything for the purposes of computing odds a are estimated (by me) at 1 in 10^^googolplex.
BTW, 1 x 1040,000 is just 1040,000. That makes no sense as odds or as a probability. Did you mean one in 1040,000? Or one in 10 to the 1040,000 power? Or 1 in 10 to the 40,000 power?
"Well, how about THIS ONE then?"
</Creationist_mode>
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