They could better tell which one was about to tread on them.
Posted on 05/25/2005 3:41:22 AM PDT by billorites
Science feeds on mystery. As my colleague Matt Ridley has put it: “Most scientists are bored by what they have already discovered. It is ignorance that drives them on.” Science mines ignorance. Mystery — that which we don’t yet know; that which we don’t yet understand — is the mother lode that scientists seek out. Mystics exult in mystery and want it to stay mysterious. Scientists exult in mystery for a very different reason: it gives them something to do.
Admissions of ignorance and mystification are vital to good science. It is therefore galling, to say the least, when enemies of science turn those constructive admissions around and abuse them for political advantage. Worse, it threatens the enterprise of science itself. This is exactly the effect that creationism or “intelligent design theory” (ID) is having, especially because its propagandists are slick, superficially plausible and, above all, well financed. ID, by the way, is not a new form of creationism. It simply is creationism disguised, for political reasons, under a new name.
It isn’t even safe for a scientist to express temporary doubt as a rhetorical device before going on to dispel it.
“To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.” You will find this sentence of Charles Darwin quoted again and again by creationists. They never quote what follows. Darwin immediately went on to confound his initial incredulity. Others have built on his foundation, and the eye is today a showpiece of the gradual, cumulative evolution of an almost perfect illusion of design. The relevant chapter of my Climbing Mount Improbable is called “The fortyfold Path to Enlightenment” in honour of the fact that, far from being difficult to evolve, the eye has evolved at least 40 times independently around the animal kingdom.
The distinguished Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin is widely quoted as saying that organisms “appear to have been carefully and artfully designed”. Again, this was a rhetorical preliminary to explaining how the powerful illusion of design actually comes about by natural selection. The isolated quotation strips out the implied emphasis on “appear to”, leaving exactly what a simple-mindedly pious audience — in Kansas, for instance — wants to hear.
The deceitful misquoting of scientists to suit an anti-scientific agenda ranks among the many unchristian habits of fundamentalist authors. But such Telling Lies for God (the book title of the splendidly pugnacious Australian geologist Ian Plimer) is not the most serious problem. There is a more important point to be made, and it goes right to the philosophical heart of creationism.
The standard methodology of creationists is to find some phenomenon in nature which Darwinism cannot readily explain. Darwin said: “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.” Creationists mine ignorance and uncertainty in order to abuse his challenge. “Bet you can’t tell me how the elbow joint of the lesser spotted weasel frog evolved by slow gradual degrees?” If the scientist fails to give an immediate and comprehensive answer, a default conclusion is drawn: “Right, then, the alternative theory; ‘intelligent design’ wins by default.”
Notice the biased logic: if theory A fails in some particular, theory B must be right! Notice, too, how the creationist ploy undermines the scientist’s rejoicing in uncertainty. Today’s scientist in America dare not say: “Hm, interesting point. I wonder how the weasel frog’s ancestors did evolve their elbow joint. I’ll have to go to the university library and take a look.” No, the moment a scientist said something like that the default conclusion would become a headline in a creationist pamphlet: “Weasel frog could only have been designed by God.”
I once introduced a chapter on the so-called Cambrian Explosion with the words: “It is as though the fossils were planted there without any evolutionary history.” Again, this was a rhetorical overture, intended to whet the reader’s appetite for the explanation. Inevitably, my remark was gleefully quoted out of context. Creationists adore “gaps” in the fossil record.
Many evolutionary transitions are elegantly documented by more or less continuous series of changing intermediate fossils. Some are not, and these are the famous “gaps”. Michael Shermer has wittily pointed out that if a new fossil discovery neatly bisects a “gap”, the creationist will declare that there are now two gaps! Note yet again the use of a default. If there are no fossils to document a postulated evolutionary transition, the assumption is that there was no evolutionary transition: God must have intervened.
The creationists’ fondness for “gaps” in the fossil record is a metaphor for their love of gaps in knowledge generally. Gaps, by default, are filled by God. You don’t know how the nerve impulse works? Good! You don’t understand how memories are laid down in the brain? Excellent! Is photosynthesis a bafflingly complex process? Wonderful! Please don’t go to work on the problem, just give up, and appeal to God. Dear scientist, don’t work on your mysteries. Bring us your mysteries for we can use them. Don’t squander precious ignorance by researching it away. Ignorance is God’s gift to Kansas.
Richard Dawkins, FRS, is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, at Oxford University. His latest book is The Ancestor’s Tale
They can't both simultaneously be true. Are you then claiming we should avoid telling someone the truth if it upsets them?
I will put myself up in defense of Ich here. I personally came to believe in Christianity AFTER I had already studied evolution, seen the evidence for it, and decided that the evidence indicated that it was the best explanation for the diversity of life. I was NOT converted to evolution by anti-Christians.
Very profound Ed, very profound. You've made me take a fresh look at Marx and Dawkins' views on religion with your perceptive analysis and cogent commentary.
Fresh look, sam opinion. Both would've banned religion if they could.
Here, I'll save you the trouble and Jim some bandwidth:
Creationist Liar! Nahnahnahnahnah.
I admit to not being up to speed on this issue, but it seems to me all that would be needed to do parallax measurements would be an adjustable micrometer eyepiece and a telescope of sufficient resolution (large enough apeture and good enough optical quality).
Measure the angular separation between the desired two stars, wait several months to create a large enough baseline, and measure again. Repeat on successive years to be sure the change in separation isn't due to proper motion, then compute the distance trigonometrically.
What I don't know is when micrometer eyepiece was invented, or what it's limits of accuracy were, but in theory at least, parallax could be measured without the need for photographic imaging.
Gerard S. Harbison, Professor of ChemistryWhat? Surely you mean "Gerard S. Harbison , a.k.a. Beloved and all-knowing leader." ;oP (went to see what your research was about and got a free laugh)
I'm sorry, but that is merely an assumption on your part based entirely upon statements withing the book itself, and tradition handed down to you.
I want to repost something I wrote on another crevo thread, as this seems to be the thread of the day.
I have no idea what context he was speaking in. He said "one of the first living things." Maybe he was talking about the first multicellular organisms. At any rate, you seem to want to ignore the fact that the eyes were very complex early-on:
==========================
We can be justifiably amazed that these trilobites, very early in the history of life on Earth, hit upon the best possible lens design that optical physics has ever been able to formulate.
~Ellis, 2001, p.49
Ah, so it was always obvious to you, huh? Okay, longie ....
Anyway, I suspect it would require more than merely measuring the separation between two stars. First, the odds are that neither would be close enough to us to exhibit any parallax. Second, if by chance you happened to observe one that was close enough, you wouldn't know which of the two had "moved." You'd need to get a very precise visual fix a large group, and compare that with a sighting of the same group six months later. Then you could see which one had changed position. That's why I assumed (wrongly it seems) that photography must have been involved.
That may be difficult since the church was largely coterminous with scientific inquiry at the time. Furthermore, textbooks related to the Galileo controversy tend to focus on the perceived conflict between religion and science. My point is that Galileo did not only challenge the church. He challenged the predominant science of his day.
Ha! Until it comes to the matter of free inquiry and teaching being suppressed by authority!
Bessel used parallax to determine the distance to 61 Cygni announcing his result in 1838. Clearly to succeed it was important to choose a star which was close to the Sun. His method of selecting a star was based on his own data for he chose the star which had the greatest proper motion of all the stars he had studied, correctly deducing that this would mean that the star was nearby. Since 61 Cygni is a relatively dim star it was a bold choice based on his correct understanding of the cause of the proper motions. Bessel, using a Fraunhofer heliometer to make the measurements, announced his value of 0.314" which given the diameter of the Earth's orbit, gave a distance of about 10 light years. The correct value of the parallax of 61 Cygni is 0.292".John Herschel, when he learnt of Bessel's achievement, wrote to him describing it as: "... the greatest and most glorious triumph which practical astronomy has ever witnessed."
Olbers, told of Bessel's achievement on his 80th birthday, said it was a gift that: "... put our ideas about the universe for the first time on a sound basis."
The Royal Astronomical Society awarded him their gold medal to mark this achievement.
What utter bull. Late on in trilobite evolution, they evolved a Huygens doublet. Big deal. I mean, think for yourself, just once, MM. Is it even plausible this was a better lens than, say, the objective in a good 4 inch refractor? Most modern telescopes have moved well beyond simple achromatic doublets. And actually, several other species have evolved the same thing, independently, since, including the caterpillars of the cabbage white butterflies that are currently devouring my broccoli. Oddly enough, when I pull 'em off and stomp 'em. the advanced optics don't seem to be much of a help.
Drag yourself away from the creationist tracts and read a real scientific account of tribolite eyes. It's a good article.
The first attempts to determine parallaxes using photography were done during the period 1887-1889 by Pritchard at Oxford. Although there was considerable debate over the merits and even possibility of doing astrometry using photographs, photography turned out to be an excellent way to measure parallaxes, as the accuracy was much greater than using visual methods and the labor was much less intensive. Furthermore, by taking a photograph, a permanent record was made of the measurement, so that the image could be examined at once or later, and it could be remeasured again and again for new information. In 1900 Kapteyn designed a systematic method to take these photographs, in allowing each photographic plate to be exposed three times during a single night, and four nights spaced throughout the year, such that in the end there are twelve exposures for every star on the plate.
Page won't come up. I will try later. I'd like to know this.
Yes, you have.
However, if you're going to try to assert that because of his political shortsightedness, he should be scorned in his entirety as a human being, and that therefore his scientific views should be scorned and/or ignored and/or have been discredited as a result, then, well, congratulations, you've commited the age-old fallacy (and cheap and sleazy debate tactic) of the ad hominem argument, and I laugh at your pathetic attempt and at your intellectual dishonesty.
And I laugh at you baseless assertions conjured up out of thin air. My attacks on Dawkins' views are a direct result of his ad hominem cheap shot at folks in Kansas. As they say in the court rooms on TV, he opened the door. My attacks on his views on religion are not only warranted, they are true.
And if you're *not* doing that (and it certainly *looks* as if you are), then what in the hell *is* your reason for repeatedly dragging such irrelevant side issues into a science discussion?
See above. Again, Dawkins is no virgin. He attacks religion constantly. His attack on the folks in Kansas gave me ample reason to review his bigotry. I posted his views and links to his articles exposing those views. In return I got "creationist liar". Big freaking deal. That bothers me as much as an 80 degree day laced with sunshine on the golf course.
What exactly are you trying to accomplish, and what do you expect the result to be? Yeah, Dawkins is a knee-jerk British leftist, but he's hardly alone, there are millions like him. So bloody what?
I am exposing Dawkins for what he is. Keep in mind this is a conservative website dedicated to doing just that. And believ you me, I'll continue to do it when it is warranted and I've got the spare time.
Whereas to you, apparently (and a lot of other folks unhappy with evolution), ideology and politics trump science/truth/evidence. And we all know where *that* leads...
False assertions. Evolution is not a cause of happiness or unhappiness in my life any more than the fact that we breathe air. Truth is truth, nothing can trump it. The truth as I see it is that both Marx and Dawkins would've or would ban religion if they could. I've provided ample evidence to support that opinion. In return, I have gotten no countermanding evidence but loads of Creationist Liars. Shrug.
Here's what you're obviously missing: The science *does* trump ideology and politics -- or more accurately, it's separable from them. If Dawkins is right on the science, he's right. Period. No matter *what* other things he may say, believe, or do on other subjects. And if he's wrong on the science, he's wrong. His personal politics is completely irrelevant -- except to people unclear on the concept of arguing the science on its merits, and who therefore have to spew bile about the man's views on *other* subjects in a cheap attempt to sidetrack the actual discussion of the science.
I was with you until the bile spew ad hominem bs. The you lost me. Like I said truth is truth. If you don't like the mirror being held up to Dawkins, tell him to stick to science and shut his bigotted mouth concerning religion. Otherwise, he's fair game.
Now do you want to discuss the science -- or what Dawkins may have written about it -- or do you want to keep waving the ad hominem brush around despite the fact that no one's falling for it? And no, your being aghast over us not falling for it doesn't carry any water either.
Again, you wave the ad hominem flag as a silencer. It won't work. There is nothing ad hominem about pointing out Dawkins veiws on religion when he makes bigotted attacks based in religion on an entire states population. If that causes you and the "list" angst, so be it.
They could better tell which one was about to tread on them.
800?
800. Truly prime!
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