Posted on 08/18/2005 5:16:50 PM PDT by RightWingAtheist
This year contains two notable scientific anniversaries. The one most widely mentioned is the centenary of Albert Einstein’s three trailblazing papers in the German scientific journal Annalen der Physik on the nature of matter, energy, and motion. Those papers opened up broad new territories for exploration by physicists. The discoveries that followed, and the technology that flowed from those discoveries, helped shape the whole 20th century. Radiation therapy and nuclear weapons, the laser and the personal computer, global positioning satellites and fiber-optic cables — all trace at least part of their lineage to Einstein’s papers. The 20th century was the Age of Physics. The first quarter of that century — when dramatic discoveries in the field were coming thick and fast, with theory racing to keep up — was a wonderfully exciting time to be a young physicist.
It seems to me that we are passing from the Age of Physics to the Age of Biology. It is not quite the case that nothing is happening in physics, but certainly there is nothing like the excitement of the early 20th century. Physics seems, in fact, to have got itself into a cul-de-sac, obsessing over theories so mathematically abstruse that nobody even knows how to test them.
The life sciences, by contrast, are blooming, with major new results coming in all the time from genetics, zoology, demography, biochemistry, neuroscience, psychometrics, and other “hot” disciplines. The physics building may be hushed and dark while its inhabitants mentally wrestle with 26-dimensional manifolds, but over at biology the joint is jumpin’. A gifted and ambitious young person of scientific inclination would be well advised to try for a career researching in the life sciences. There is, as one such youngster said to me recently, a lot of low-hanging fruit to be picked. Charles Murray, in his elegant New York Times op-ed piece on the Larry Summers flap (for more on which, see Christina Hoff Sommers elsewhere in this issue), wrote of the “vibrancy and excitement” of scholarship about innate male-female differences, in contrast to the stale, repetitive nature of research seeking environmental sources for those differences. Sell sociology, buy biology.
This fizzing vitality in the life sciences is, as Larry Summers learned, very unsettling to the guardians of political correctness. It is at least as disturbing to some Biblical fundamentalists, which brings me to this year’s second scientific anniversary. The famous “monkey trial” in Dayton, Tenn., happened 80 years ago this summer. John Scopes, a young schoolteacher, was found guilty of violating a state statute forbidding the teaching of evolution theory. Well, well, the wheel turns, and the other day I found myself looking at a newspaper headline that read: “Pa. School Board at the Center of Evolution Debate.” The story concerned the town of Dover, Pa., which was sued by the ACLU in federal court at the end of last year over its incorporation of “intelligent design” (I.D.) arguments in the public-school biology curriculum.
It is odd to be reminded that I.D. is still around. I had written it off as a 1990s fad infecting religious and metaphysical circles, not really touching on science at all, since it framed no hypotheses that could be tested experimentally. The greater part of I.D. is just negative, a critique of the standard model of evolution by natural selection, in which random mutations that add to an organism’s chances of survival and reproduction lead to divergences of form and function and eventually to new species. This theory, said I.D. proponents such as Phillip E. Johnson (Darwin on Trial, 1991), Michael J. Behe (Darwin’s Black Box, 1996), and William A. Dembski (The Design Inference, 1998), is full of conundrums and unexplained gaps — the mechanisms of mutation, for instance, are poorly understood.
Biologists are not much impressed with this critique, since conundrums and gaps are normal features of scientific theories. Atomic theory was in considerably worse shape in this regard when Einstein published his three great papers. A few decades of research clarified matters to the point where the theory’s practical applicability and predictive value could revolutionize human existence. Nor are scientists much impressed by the facts of Behe’s being a biochemist and Dembski’s having done postgraduate work in math and physics. (Johnson is a lawyer.) This just recalls Newton’s fascination with alchemy and Kepler’s work on the Music of the Spheres. Scientists have all sorts of quirky off-duty obsessions.
And I.D. was always off-duty. Scientifically credentialed I.D.-ers have been reluctant to submit their theories to peer review. Kenneth R. Miller, a professor of biology at Brown University and a critic of I.D., wonders why Behe has never presented his ideas to the annual conference of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, as is his right as a member. As Miller explained, “If I thought I had an idea that would completely revolutionize cell biology in the same way that Professor Behe thinks he has an idea that would revolutionize biochemistry, I would be talking about that idea at every single meeting of my peers I could possibly get to.” Dembski likewise declines to publicize his research through peer-review conferences and journals. His explanation: “I find I can actually get the turnaround faster by writing a book and getting the ideas expressed there. My books sell well. I get a royalty. And the material gets read more.” Ah.
It is not surprising that most working scientists turn away from I.D. with a smile and a shrug. Phillip Johnson, in a 1992 lecture, predicted that Darwinism would “soon” be thoroughly discredited, leading to a “paradigm shift” and a whole new view of biology. Thirteen years later there is not the faintest trace of a sign that anything like this is going to happen. To the contrary, the fired-up young biologists who will revolutionize our lives in these coming decades take the standard evolutionary model for granted, not only because it is an elegant and parsimonious theory, but because I.D. promises them nothing — no reproducible results, no research leads, no fortune-making discoveries in genomics or neuroscience.
If the science of I.D. is a joke, the theology is little better. Its principal characteristic is a flat-footed poverty of imagination. “Don’t eff the Ineffable,” went the sergeant-major’s injunction against blasphemy. With a different reading having nothing to do with blasphemy, effing the Ineffable — what A. N. Whitehead called “misplaced concreteness” — is exactly what the I.D.-ers are up to. Their God is a science-fiction God, a high-I.Q. space alien plodding along a decade or two ahead of our understanding. The God of Judaism and Christianity is infinitely vaster and stranger than that, and far above our poking, groping inquiries into the furniture of our rocky little daytime cosmos. His nature and deeds are as remote from our comprehension as, to quote Darwin himself on this precise point, Newton’s laws are from a dog’s. The prophet Isaiah held the same opinion: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
I.D. had its little hour in the spotlight of public curiosity, and will linger on for a while among those who cannot bear the thought that living tissue might be a part of the natural universe, under natural laws. Neither science nor religion ever had much use for I.D. Both will proceed happily on their ways without it
A clarification: the remark about 'lipstick on a pig' was not meant to suggest that Biblical stories don't have many valuable qualities. My only point was that such stories are not, nor were they ever intended to be, scientific theories.
Well, it was the original title, and I did add the keywords "evolution" and "crevolist" so that those who do look up articles that way (like I do) would find it. But basically, I let my posts go through the same process of selection and competition that the natural world goes through. If no one posts to or even reads a comment I made, well, that's life.
Thanks for the ping!
Brilliant piece. Thanks for posting it.
A true compliment when it comes from you! You're welcome!
From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist.... I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our being.
Whoops. Thought this was a discussion questioning the theory of evolution.
Not funny at all. Derbyshire is neither an liar nor a fool. In fact, he epitomizes the opposite of both.
Load of crap. Darrow asked the judge to instruct the jury to find Scopes guilty and thereby prevented any closing arguments. This was a predetermined strategy so that Bryan, who was a terrific speaker, could not give his closing statements dealing with the scientific challenges to evolution and the negative effects of social Darwinism. By doing this Darrow also ensured a guilty verdict so that the case could be appealed and the constitutionality of the law challenged in the state supreme court.
Bryan did not ask for harsher punishment but instead offered to pay the fine for Scopes![xx] Bryan had objected to the law imposing a penalty when he first learned of anti-evolution laws being considered by state legislatures.
Edwin Hubble
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einprayr.htm
Some choice quotes
It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
I cannot conceive of a personal God who would directly influence the actions of individuals, or would directly sit in judgment on creatures of his own creation. I cannot do this in spite of the fact that mechanistic causality has, to a certain extent, been placed in doubt by modern science. My religiosity consists in a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we, with our weak and transitory understanding, can comprehend of reality. Morality is of the highest importance-but for us, not for God.
Go quote-mine somewhere else, and leave a great man alone.
"God does not play dice" imports a belief in an objective intelligibility in the continuous dynamic structures and transformations in the space-time reality of the universe which we may apprehend, but only at relatively elementary levels through open structures, even though they are mathematically precise in their formalisation. As I understand him, even Heisenberg toward the end of his life concluded that in quantum theory the scientist is in touch with nature which in its depth is so subtle and elusive that it cannot be explained in terms of the couplet "chance and necessity". That "God does not play dice" highlights the fact that chance is after all a negative way of thinking, or rather a way not to think. This is a lesson I believe that many scientists today, especially perhaps in biology, need to learn-their appeal to "chance" too often appears to be a sort of "scientist's God of the gaps"!
But "just to stir the pot" just consider how you might define a "scientific fundamentalist"--they don't know when to quit being pedantic, in all the wrong times and places.
I heard a story once about someone breaking up with a too-academic girlfriend; during the obligatory "I'm sorry it's not working out" dinner she spent the entire time pontificating about insurance fraud in ancient Greece.
But as Dilbert creator Scott Adams pointed out,
"Everyone is someone else's weirdo!"
Cheers!
Watch me wriggle out of this one :-)
Depends on whether you are looking for pearls of wisdom or scanning with a B.S. detector--are you a believer or a skeptic?
And to complete the analogy to pigs, since we are using Biblical references, how about a reference to "pearls before swine" (ducks for cover while running for exit...)
Cheers!
read later bump
Ah the good old "Annalen der Physik". Which, of coursse, is translated into the "Anal Physics."
A lot of people didn't realize just how many German physicists were really into gay porn. However, I have been told that Einstein subscribed to the journal "just for the articles".
Einstein did not believe in a personal God or an afterlife.
But he was not an a-theist. Not by a long shot.
He had a great appreciation and awe for what/who he called "the Old One"...the cosmic intelligence that laid out the universe whose secrets he could only dimly appreciate through scientific theory. Selected quotations do not adequately address Einstein's beliefs.
Isn't that what used to be called "quibbling"?
The concept both schools of thought share is....that there is/was an intelligent Creator and we are living in a universe of His/Her design.
It is the nature of that Creator....how "human-like" He is, and/or how "God-like" are we....is secondary and a matter of religious faith.
I have no idea what you think the difference between a 'personal god' and a 'cosmic intelligence' is. Einstein used the metaphor of 'god' to express his feeling that the Universe obeyed a set of meaningful and consitent laws. He also expressed regret this metaphor was exploited by the religious to attribute to him beliefs he did not hold. This thread is a case in point.
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