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 dont yet know; that which we dont 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 isnt 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 cant 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 scientists rejoicing in uncertainty. Todays scientist in America dare not say: Hm, interesting point. I wonder how the weasel frogs ancestors did evolve their elbow joint. Ill 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 readers 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 dont know how the nerve impulse works? Good! You dont understand how memories are laid down in the brain? Excellent! Is photosynthesis a bafflingly complex process? Wonderful! Please dont go to work on the problem, just give up, and appeal to God. Dear scientist, dont work on your mysteries. Bring us your mysteries for we can use them. Dont squander precious ignorance by researching it away. Ignorance is Gods 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 Ancestors Tale
Maybe not for someone intent on naural selection, random mutations, etc. as the only explanation for the presence of intelligent beings and the goods that intelligent beings produce. You tell me. How do you know there is such thing as intelligence? Where do you look for it?
Are you off your meds or something?
Don't take meds unless I have a cold or the flu, but as my screen name, rambling sentences, contorted grammar, and frequent mispellings might suggest, cheap beer is my elixer of choice. At the present moment I look forward to popping open a cold one in about 30 minutes.
I'm glad you admit Darwin Central is occupying my property; to wit:666
Pay the rent.
How do you correctly apply numbers to unknown conditions with an unknown number of variables occurring over an undetermined period of time and claim the result is anything other than nonsense?
Intuitively, a person knows that my car (a complex thing) didn't just accidentally happen.
My brain is far more complex than my car.
I will take your word for it -- it's only true of certain people.
But be that as it may, your example is nothing more than bait and switch.
Well no, on examination my statement stands up pretty well on it's own. Were I you, I wouldn't be overly proud of the fact that, in a regime where if you are literate, chances are the Pope paid for your schooling, and where not to be Catholic or to disagree with the Papal version of science gets you burned at the stake like Geordono Bruno, or sentenced for life like Galileo, or hounded into exile like Spinoza, that pretty much everybody is officially catholic, and officially agrees with the Pope and the head of the inquisition wholeheartedly.
I also could officially win every argument on FR, and and ban whoever I wanted, if I was allowed to threaten my opponents and the FR classroom monitors with burning at the stake. And then FR would be officially donh'ish, and then I could constitute the reading and thinking population of FR, and be officially offended everytime a modern Galileo tried to post here.
Probability of deterministic mechanisms yielding complexity = 0.00.
Probablity of random mechanisms yielding complexity = 1.00.
Probability of chaotic mechanisms yielding complexity can be between 0 and 1 but they take an infinite time to do so.
It is not essentially an argument from incredulity, and even if it were, it makes sense. Is it "arguing from incredulity" when one argues that Mount Rushmore must be the result of intelligent design because of the number of chisel strokes evidenced on its face? Yes. But it is a reasonable argument nonetheless.
The numbers and probabilities involved with the amount of information currently bouncing around in the universe in such organized fashion as to be able to a.) comprehend it, b.) organize it to some degree, and c.) communicate about it, speak for themselves. Incredulity has no effect on plain numbers and probabilities, and that is what the proponents of ID are working with.
I can't think of a way for evolution to have happened naturally, therefore it must have been designed.
The fact is, I can easily think of a way for evolution to have happened, but I am disinclined to bring the baggage of "naturally" as germane to studying the processes available for observation and testing. That little purse seems to fit you comfortably and you wear it proudly. Some of us can do without it.
I already told you. That belongs to Darwin Central.Oh, that reminds me... *hands back 'accidentally' stolen DC beer coaster*
Okay, I admit, I got really bored and had to channelize my creativity.
You described the shutdown. You didn't describe "what left."
Also, the analogy does hold. An extremely complex system doesn't just happen. Suggestions that reproduction gets us out of the dilemma simply ignores that the extremely complex biological system includes an extremely complex reproductive system. It's like saying that because the car comes from a factory that makes cars then it could have made itself, or that because it includes a repair code system within its computer memory, then that means it ACTUALLY COULD have made itself."
C'mon now. :>)
????
My car is complex, and it's obvious that it didn't make itself.
Don't be silly, of course you could.
Horse manure. It is the postulate (it doesn't even rise to the level of "theory") that, as the name "Intelligent Design" explicitly states, some (unspecified) form of (unspecified) intelligence added some (unspecified) amount of (unspecified) "design" into life on Earth at some (unspecified) time(s).
Any "model of probabilities and improbabilities" employed by the IDer's is done solely in support of their attempts to "prove" that certain aspects of life "could not have" evolved. The purpose of this is to try to bolster the credibility of "intelligent design" as the "obvious" alternative, but they obviously aren't clear on how science works. Weakening one theory in no way supports a different hypothesis. ID is not the "default" explanation which "wins" by eliminating the competition. Mankind outgrew that particular fallacy centuries ago.
So please stop repeating nonsense like trying to claim that Intelligent Design "is" an "appeal to a mathematical model of probabilities", as if it's nothing more than a particular analytical method. Instead, probability calculations (usually naive and bogus ones) are just one of the *tools* they attempt to employ in order to flail about for "support" for what ID actually *is* -- the notion that life was "designed", that it was CREATED. In short, creationism by another name.
Creationism is a theory of origins that posits God bringing about, in 6 days as per the judeo-christian bible, all that we see in the universe.
So you're claiming there's no such thing as an "old Earth creationist"? Are you remarkably naive, or just dishonest?
Yes, young-Earth Biblical creationists are one *kind* of creationist. But there are many other kinds. By definition, anyone who posits that an act of conscious creation was involved in the formation of life can fairly be classified as a "creationist", although obviously there are many different "flavors". One of those flavors is the pseudo-scientific postulate of "ID".
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc, thy name is Fester.
Well, I'm afraid it is. And that you think it would make sense if it were a logical fallacy indicates you not only don't know what I'm talking about, you don't know what you're talking about.
Is it "arguing from incredulity" when one argues that Mount Rushmore must be the result of intelligent design because of the number of chisel strokes evidenced on its face? Yes. But it is a reasonable argument nonetheless.
There are other lines of evidence (pun intended), to follow in the Mount Rushmore case. It's not an argument from incredulity, although someone profoundly silly could convert it into one. ("No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people" - H. L. Mencken).
Incredulity has no effect on plain numbers and probabilities, and that is what the proponents of ID are working with.
They're making up numbers to suit themselves and applying them to a situation no one knows anything about. They then use the numbers to bolster ... an argument from incredulity.
If we go back in time to your great-great-grandparents, the odds against your being born are astronomically against. Unless you want to argue that you don't exist, you're not going to get very far.
Come to think of it, you'll probably get a lot farther arguing you don't. Makes for better conversation at cocktail parties.
The fact is, I can easily think of a way for evolution to have happened, but I am disinclined to bring the baggage of "naturally" as germane to studying the processes available for observation and testing.
What's the scientific test that would demonstrate the supernatural?
That little purse seems to fit you comfortably and you wear it proudly. Some of us can do without it.
And some of us feel the same way about smothering science with either nonsense (in the case of ID), or religion.
And please don't attempt to convert this into an argument against religion. It's not. It's an argument against religion restricting science.
Hey! I never got a coaster! (However, I kept a glass from the dining hall) :-)
It's "obvious" because we know that people make cars.
The Hawaiian Islands are highly complex -- and they *did* "make themselves".
Complex things *can* be the product of intelligent design. They can *also * be the product of natural processes.
So I'm afraid that the entire "argument" of ID ("it's complex, therefore it must have been designed, QED") just falls flat on its empty-headed face.
No one's saying it did. Your car has mo bearing on evolution.
Many do, actually.
Suggestions that reproduction gets us out of the dilemma simply ignores that the extremely complex biological system includes an extremely complex reproductive system.
So start with a simpler one. Duh.
It's like saying that because the car comes from a factory that makes cars then it could have made itself,
It's nothing at all like saying that. You obviously don't understand the position you're (poorly) attempting to critique.
or that because it includes a repair code system within its computer memory, then that means it ACTUALLY COULD have made itself."
Again, no.
Materialists do say that it just randomly came about. You remember....Maybe lightening...maybe protein soup...maybe a snowball in a hot place.... Sheesh.
It's obvious that my car is a complex system and that it didn't make itself. It is not illogical at all to apply that same observation to other complex systems.
Earlier generations of life forms DID HAVE reproducing/replicating systems. Otherwise, you wouldn't be talking about them.
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