Posted on 01/28/2005 4:28:41 PM PST by metacognative
Panicked Evolutionists: The Stephen Meyer Controversy
The theory of evolution is a tottering house of ideological cards that is more about cherished mythology than honest intellectual endeavor. Evolutionists treat their cherished theory like a fragile object of veneration and worship--and so it is. Panic is a sure sign of intellectual insecurity, and evolutionists have every reason to be insecure, for their theory is falling apart.
The latest evidence of this panic comes in a controversy that followed a highly specialized article published in an even more specialized scientific journal. Stephen C. Meyer, Director of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, wrote an article accepted for publication in Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. The article, entitled "The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories," was published after three independent judges deemed it worthy and ready for publication. The use of such judges is standard operating procedure among "peer-reviewed" academic journals, and is considered the gold standard for academic publication.
The readership for such a journal is incredibly small, and the Biological Society of Washington does not commonly come to the attention of the nation's journalists and the general public. Nevertheless, soon after Dr. Meyer's article appeared, the self-appointed protectors of Darwinism went into full apoplexy. Internet websites and scientific newsletters came alive with outrage and embarrassment, for Dr. Meyer's article suggested that evolution just might not be the best explanation for the development of life forms. The ensuing controversy was greater than might be expected if Dr. Meyer had argued that the world is flat or that hot is cold.
Eugenie C. Scott, Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education, told The Scientist that Dr. Meyer's article came to her attention when members of the Biological Society of Washington contacted her office. "Many members of the society were stunned about the article," she told The Scientist, and she described the article as "recycled material quite common in the intelligent design community." Dr. Scott, a well known and ardent defender of evolutionary theory, called Dr. Meyer's article "substandard science" and argued that the article should never have been published in any scientific journal.
Within days, the Biological Society of Washington, intimidated by the response of the evolutionary defenders, released a statement apologizing for the publication of the article. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the society's governing council claimed that the article "was published without the prior knowledge of the council." The statement went on to declare: "We have met and determined that all of us would have deemed this paper inappropriate for the pages of the Proceedings." The society's president, Roy W. McDiarmid, a scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey, blamed the article's publication on the journal's previous editor, Richard Sternberg, who now serves as a fellow at the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the National Institute of Health. "My conclusion on this," McDiarmid said, "was that it was a really bad judgment call on the editor's part."
What is it about Dr. Stephen Meyer's paper that has caused such an uproar? Meyer, who holds a Ph.D. from Cambridge University, argued in his paper that the contemporary form of evolutionary theory now dominant in the academy, known as "Neo-Darwinism," fails to account for the development of higher life forms and the complexity of living organisms. Pointing to what evolutionists identify as the "Cambrian explosion," Meyer argued that "the geologically sudden appearance of many new animal body plans" cannot be accounted for by Darwinian theory, "neo" or otherwise.
Accepting the scientific claim that the Cambrian explosion took place "about 530 million years ago," Meyer went on to explain that the "remarkable jump in the specified complexity or 'complex specified information' [CSI] of the biological world" cannot be explained by evolutionary theory.
The heart of Dr. Meyer's argument is found in this scientifically-loaded passage: "Neo-Darwinism seeks to explain the origin of new information, form, and structure as a result of selection acting on randomly arising variation at a very low level within the biological hierarchy, mainly, within the genetic text. Yet the major morphological innovations depend on a specificity of arrangement at a much higher level of the organizational hierarchy, a level that DNA alone does not determine. Yet if DNA is not wholly responsible for body plan morphogenesis, then DNA sequences can mutate indefinitely, without regard to realistic probabilistic limits, and still not produce a new body plan. Thus, the mechanism of natural selection acting on random mutations in DNA cannot in principle generate novel body plans, including those that first arose in the Cambrian explosion."
In simpler terms, the mechanism of natural selection, central to evolutionary theory, cannot possibly account for the development of so many varied and complex life forms simply by mutations in DNA. Rather, some conscious design--thus requiring a Designer--is necessary to explain the emergence of these life forms.
In the remainder of his paper, Meyer attacks the intellectual inadequacies of evolutionary theory and argues for what is now known as the "design Hypothesis." As he argued, "Conscious and rational agents have, as a part of their powers of purposive intelligence, the capacity to design information-rich parts and to organize those parts into functional information-rich systems and hierarchies." As he went on to assert, "We know of no other causal entity or process that has this capacity." In other words, the development of the multitude of higher life forms found on the planet can be explained only by the guidance of a rational agent--a Designer--whose plan is evident in the design.
Meyer's article was enough to cause hysteria in the evolutionists' camp. Knowing that their theory lacks intellectual credibility, the evolutionists respond by raising the volume, offering the equivalent of scientific shrieks and screams whenever their cherished theory is criticized--much less in one of their own cherished journals. As Dr. John West, Associate Director of the Discovery Institute explained, "Instead of addressing the paper's argument or inviting counterarguments or rebuttal, the society has resorted to affirming what amounts to a doctrinal statement in an effort to stifle scientific debate. They're trying to stop scientific discussion before it even starts."
When the Biological Society of Washington issued its embarrassing apology for publishing the paper, the organization pledged that arguments for Intelligent Design "will not be addressed in future issues of the Proceedings," regardless of whether the paper passes peer review.
From the perspective of panicked evolutionists, the Intelligent Design movement represents a formidable adversary and a constant irritant. The defenders of Intelligent Design are undermining evolutionary theory at multiple levels, and they refuse to go away. The panicked evolutionists respond with name-calling, labeling Intelligent Design proponents as "creationists," thereby hoping to prevent any scientific debate before it starts.
Intelligent Design is not tantamount to the biblical doctrine of creation. Theologically, Intelligent Design falls far short of requiring any affirmation of the doctrine of creation as revealed in the Bible. Nevertheless, it is a useful and important intellectual tool, and a scientific movement with great promise. The real significance of Intelligent Design theory and its related movement is the success with which it undermines the materialistic and naturalistic worldview central to the theory of evolution.
For the Christian believer, the Bible presents the compelling and authoritative case for God's creation of the cosmos. Specifically, the Bible provides us with the ultimate truth concerning human origins and the special creation of human beings as the creatures made in God's own image. Thus, though we believe in more than Intelligent Design, we certainly do not believe in less. We should celebrate the confusion and consternation now so evident among the evolutionists. Dr. Stephen Meyer's article--and the controversy it has spawned--has caught evolutionary scientists with their intellectual pants down.
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R. Albert Mohler, Jr
And does this mean you've retracted the 'concentration camp' libel against Dennett?
No, I can't. I know the difference.
Radical. Science is the body of peer-reviewed published work. Perhaps science is a passing fad, but this would grease the skids.
In post 1919 you said: "As to the proof: It is not faith if the proof is possible, even if the philosophy prof marks up the paper so it bleeds."
But in post 1923 you said: "Radical. Science is the body of peer-reviewed published work. Perhaps science is a passing fad, but this would grease the skids."
Er, I cannot reconcile these two statements. If your "proof" were possible even though it was rejected by the authorities, you still wouldn't want it published in an outlet for rejected papers even though you consider it a "proof"?
IOW, the appeal to the anthropic principle in lieu of a scientific or mathematically plausible explanation is tantamount to asserting the metaphysical naturalist "religion".
It is precisely the same kind of argument as "God did it" - only in this case "nature did it".
Are you a professor? You're not right. Maybe your just a single wing....
Did you even read the book? page 519!
If he said you were going into a zoo...would it be libelous for you to call it a concentration camp?
[invented by the way by the brits in the Boer War]
That Boer War has many similarities to our civil war. If one draws a analogy scale of wars, the Boer falls between our Civil War and our Revolution, closer to the War between the States.
Yes they can, but if they have caused a mutation that generated another species, what did that mutant breed with? After all, one of the definitions of "species" is that it the organism can successfully breed with others of it's own species, but not with any other.
The bottom line is that to a person whose worldview of reality ("all that there is") is that which occurs in nature - the arguments are equally asserted to rationalize the metaphysically naturalist (or atheist) worldview. For instance, that God is an unnecessary hypothesis - or that physical laws and constants had to be the way they were for physicists to identify them - or that someday a physical explanation will be given for everything.
Nowadays when people refer to Occam's Razor, they often express it more generally, for example as "Take the simplest solution".
The relevance to atheism is that we can look at two possible explanations for what we see around us:
There is an incredibly intricate and complex universe out there, and there is also a God who created the universe. Clearly this God must be of non-zero complexity.
And the Medieval Religion, the Holy Church of Rome, was exactly that too.
That definiton of "science" is your own and very limited.
Galileo, for example, found himself not a peer, yet reviewed very harshly by peers. What if those peers had succeeded?
It is folly to seperate "religion" from science. There are many follies -- confusing the acceptability of hard expertimentally proved theory with idle or near-idle spiritual speculation is also folly.
Full knowledge of life and reality includes philosophy, "religion", hard science, math, logic, even soft science like evolutionary theory or creation theory. It is wise to include G-d knowledge when that knowledge can be shown to have a reliable chain-of-custody, and spiritiual inferences that can be arrived at by logic, hard science and math, or by deduction from reliable chain-of-custody revelation.
And so too "science" -- that "science" exactly as you defined. Institutionalized science is the modern version of the Medeival High Church of Rome. It may well fall -- as you called it!
Will it -- in its lengthly throes of death -- parallel the Church's decline? Will we have an Inquisition? Are we having one?
It may or may not be a statement of philosophical faith, but it is a statement of methodology. There is no way to demonstrate or research the contrary to this position. How would you go about demonstrating that there can be no physical explanation for a phenomenon? Can you give me an example where this has been demonstrated?
No, it isn't. Occam's razor is an operational principle of science and has nothing to do with metaphysical naturalism. (Unsurprising, considering William of Occam was a theologian and a monk). The Anthropic Principle, in whatever variant, is an attempt to deduce something about the Universe from the fact that we exist. One is not the other. js1138 said he saw no need to invoke 'information theory' to explain evolution. That would simply be an application of Occam's razor. It implies nothing about the existence of a god or the tendency of that god to intervene in the current evolution of the universe.
As for solipsism, it can adequately be refuted without invoking Occam.
Which book?
I should certainly know better than to argue with someone so ignorant he mis-spells his own username.
Darwin's Dangerous Idea..by Dennet, where he calls for the cultural isolation [like that phrase better?] of church goers and 're-education' for their young.
Speaking of ignorance..you don't know what a cognative is....this is like taking tax payer money for teaching Establishment Darwinism..I feel a liitle guilty
Einstein for instance was able to pull Riemannian geometry off-the-shelf to describe relativity. Ditto for mirror symmetries and dualities. (Vafa) And what are we to make of an extra temporal dimension "unifying" alternative string theories? (also Vafa)
This is what Wigner called the "unreasonable effectiveness of math".
Such structures are forms according to Plato, i.e. universals. And in the view of Max Tegmark (and others such as Barrow, Rucker, Nozick) they are the true reality of the physical realm. In other words, the corporeals we perceive in four dimensions are actually mathematical structures in higher dimensionality.
This is the big tension between biology and chemistry on the one hand – and the mathematicians and physicists on the other hand. According to Pattee, the biologists are not interested in such questions as “what is life?” – but that is of extreme importance to mathematicians who have been invited to the table by the likes of Dawkins. Information theory, btw, is a discipline of mathematics.
The mathematicians speak of self-organizing complexity (von Neumann challenge) or functional complexity or Kolmogorov complexity. They look at randomness differently. They are interested in autonomy and semiosis. Understanding the information (communications) in biological life is crucial to them.
Not necessarily so with the biologists and chemists who center so often on the empirical laboratory experiments or observations.
I’m very fond of Marcel-Paul Schützenberger’s metaphor for what is happening. I’ve modified it somewhat, as follows. The biologists and chemists stand at the door fumbling with their keys absolutely convinced that one of them will fit the lock all the while the mathematicians and physicists are trying to point out that it is a combination lock.
Of a truth, it may take both a key and a combination.
But one thing for sure is that Darwin never asked or answered what life “is” or the origin of it. And even though it is the general domain of biology, the question is seldom asked much less answered by that discipline (with the notable exception of Bauer). But now the mathematicians have arrived on the scene – Pattee, Rocha, Kauffman, Wolfram, Yockey, Schneider, Adami, etc. – the haze is starting to clear so maybe, just maybe, they will jointly be able to open that door after all.
But with the mathematicians on the scene, the demonstration will reach well beyond the corporeal.
Indeed, js1138's assertion that he can see "no need" for information theory in evolution is Occam's Razor.
However, I continue to assert that his statement is also an appeal to the anthropic principle wrt evolution because he presumes that evolution is fully explained by nature alone, i.e. without information theory.
The excerpt at 1929 illustrates that both Occam's Razor and the Anthropic Principle are asserted in support of metaphysical naturalism which was my entire point in post 1902.
IOW, assert either one or the other (or both) if you like, but it is precisely the same kind of argument as "God did it" only in this instance, it is that "nature did it".
Nor does my American Heritage Dictionary.
this is like taking tax payer money for teaching Establishment Darwinism..I feel a liitle guilty
Try feeling a little stupid; the first step in fixing a problem is to realize you have one.
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