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 Einsteins 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 Einsteins 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 years 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 organisms 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 (Darwins 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 theorys practical applicability and predictive value could revolutionize human existence. Nor are scientists much impressed by the facts of Behes being a biochemist and Dembskis having done postgraduate work in math and physics. (Johnson is a lawyer.) This just recalls Newtons fascination with alchemy and Keplers 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. Dont eff the Ineffable, went the sergeant-majors 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, Newtons laws are from a dogs. 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
No, it isn't.
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.
Yeah, I know, but I was discussing the concepts they don't share. In particular, the first harmonizes with science and the other rejects science. That is no trivial distinction, and that is why the distinction is not even remotely "quibbling"..
Nonsense.
PS. When you wish to argue a point, it is usually much more effective not to post a quote that totally refutes the point you're attempting to argue..
I agree that Einstein was an atheist and a great scientist. I disagree that Einstein was anything near a great man. Any man who would prefer death to bearing arms and in the same breath defame the soldiers with the balls to do same is far from great. Especially a man who lived during the holocaust.
Out of context quote. This was said with respoect to Einsteins view's of quantum mechanics at the time. He did not like the idea of a physical phenomenon being described in a probabilistic sense, nor did he like the Hiesenberg Uncertainty Principle. This had nothing to do with debates about evolution.
This would be the man who wrote to Roosevelt to inform him of the potential of atomic weapons, and to urge him to begin construction of one to use against Hitler?
Einstein was philosophically a pacifist, true, but when faced with real evil, he chose to fight it using the most powerful weapons available.
It's rather interesting that Mr. Derbyshire can start off the sentence saying that ID promises them nothing, and finishes up by saying that if "they" do ID themselves, they can make a fortune.
It's absolutely correct to say that if the ID folks want to be included in "science," they have to do a lot better job of being scientific. At the same time, this particular sentence shows the difficulty with honestly dismissing ID out of hand: it's an inherently plausible explanation.
At some point, there will be a need for biologists to be able to find and identify the handiwork of other biologists in various life forms (think, e.g., bioweapons, if nothing else). I suspect that this will finally put to bed the oft-repeated claim that ID us "untestable."
He also opposed its use in Japan. But that is neither here nor there, there are two sides to that discussion.
Would you like to defend his execrable remarks about the men who bare arms in defense of themselves and their country or do you think such remarks are not characteristic of "great men"?
Not to be confused with men who arm bears. ;)
I'd first have to be familiar with those remarks.
You think someone 'wrote' the law of universal gravitation. Why?
Einstein (and others before him and since) express awareness that the existence of natural laws with their extraordinary complexity, is not logically attributable to chance.
Actually, Einstein hoped the laws were simple, not complex. He spent a long time trying to unify gravitation with electromagnetism, for that reason. And why is it more logical to attribute the regularities of the universe to a sentient entity than it is to chance?
They make heavy use of small caps (god), quote marks ("god", and their own metaphors...."cosmic intelligence"
Time for an English lesson. We use upper case only to identify particular individuals. Since Einstein's god was certainly not the Christian god and in fact not a personal god at all, normal usage would not capitalize it.
The scare quotes around 'god' are there to denote that Einstein himself denied he was really referring to a personal god.
And 'cosmic intelligence' is not my metaphor. I resent having words attributed to me that are not mine.
Lack of certainty, and Discomfort on the part of some, about what came before science...should not be a reason to exclude an encompassing dialogue from the science classroom.
The science classroom is no place for a 'Dialogue' (why upper case?) about pre-scientific creation myths, regardless of how prevalent they are in the culture.
Are you saying space aliens are plausible?
Because Behe says ID is not about religion.
No .... the space aliens are your idea.
The reason I say ID is "inherently plausible" is because we humans have an innate understanding of the concept of design -- we practice it all the time, and so it's not that hard to extend the idea to the origin or development of life. (And on the latter, it's all the more plausible because we've been using ID to influence the development of life for thousands of years.)
Whether or not ID is a true explanation of things, it is nevertheless true that we can think about how we would go about the process of creating life.
I'm guessing that with about 10 seconds of thought you, personally, could sketch out at a top level the steps needed to do it, and within a minute you'd probably be diving into one or another of the vexing questions (e.g., how would you store and retrieve information....?)
See what I'm getting at?
How many non-fundamentalist Christians or Jews believe in ID? ID is a "scientific theory" based on religious beliefs. Can anybody point to Hindu, Buddist, or Atheist scientists who support ID?
No. Space aliens are Behe's and other Intelligent Designers' idea.
The Designer in Intelligent Design is not God according to Behe, because Intelligent Design is not about religion. That only leaves unknown extra-terrestrial intelligences that were here before any life existed on the planet.
In Behe's own words from his "Molecular Machines":
There is an elephant in the roomful of scientists who are trying to explain the development of life. The elephant is labeled "intelligent design." To a person who does not feel obliged to restrict his search to unintelligent causes, the straightforward conclusion is that many biochemical systems were designed. They were designed not by the laws of nature, not by chance and necessity. Rather, they were planned. The designer knew what the systems would look like when they were completed; the designer took steps to bring the systems about. Life on earth at its most fundamental level, in its most critical components, is the product of intelligent activity.
No, but it's hot stuff with the Muslims:
Harun Yahya International. Islamic creationism
Why Muslims Should Support Intelligent Design, By Mustafa Akyol.
But I didn't bring them up.
I'm not particularly interested in your interpretation of who Behe was talking about in the passage you quoted. It could be aliens, or it could be God, but it's not particularly relevant to the basic question of whether something was designed, vs. occurred through an accumulation of random mutations.
Again, all I'm saying is that the idea of design is inherently plausible, because we're so very familiar with it.
Self referent reference place marker.
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