Challenged by Creationists, Museums Answer Back

The New York Times ^ | 9/20/2005 | CORNELIA DEAN

[Right Wing Professor]

ITHACA, N.Y. - Lenore Durkee, a retired biology professor, was volunteering as a docent at the Museum of the Earth here when she was confronted by a group of seven or eight people, creationists eager to challenge the museum exhibitions on evolution.

They peppered Dr. Durkee with questions about everything from techniques for dating fossils to the second law of thermodynamics, their queries coming so thick and fast that she found it hard to reply.

After about 45 minutes, "I told them I needed to take a break," she recalled. "My mouth was dry."

That encounter and others like it provided the impetus for a training session here in August. Dr. Durkee and scores of other volunteers and staff members from the museum and elsewhere crowded into a meeting room to hear advice from the museum director, Warren D. Allmon, on ways to deal with visitors who reject settled precepts of science on religious grounds.

[js1138]

ID's alternative history is that an intelligent agent had some role in the deliberate creation of life and that this theory can be tested by looking at complex biological systems to determine if they could have arisen through a natural process or not.

Show me the test. At the moment I deny there is such a test. Some have been proposed, but they have not held up to scrutiny. I believe Dembski proposed a rather specific mathematical measure, but it can't identify strings produced by genetic algorithms that mimic evolution.

[Question_Assumptions]

I asked, "Put another way, under what circumstances would you believe that life didn't arise and develop through natural processes, alone?"

To which you replied:

If you are an ID advocate, that's your job. Science is busy and productive teasing out the natural causes. It makes no sense for science to stop and say, "You know, we're stumped. We might as well give up."

You've repeated over and over that in order for something to be Real® Science, the theory must be falsifiable. OK. I'm calling you on it. Please tell me how one could falsify evolution. If you can't, then I'll have to assume that evolution can't be falsified and, by your own definition, it's not Real® Science.

[Question_Assumptions]

Show me the test. At the moment I deny there is such a test.

Show me the test that would falsify evolution. At the moment I deny there is such a test. At least not one that would meet the standards you are demanding from ID.

[Right Wing Professor]

Please tell me how one could falsify evolution

If I may...Haldane's classic example is finding a rabbit fossil in a Cambrian stratum. But we could also find a mammalian genome that is closer to that of a fish than to other mammals.

[donh]

Show me the test that would falsify evolution. At the moment I deny there is such a test. At least not one that would meet the standards you are demanding from ID.

pick two fossil forms in the geological column, that are putatively related. Predict what a form intermediate between these two would look like. Look in the geological column halfway between the original finds. See if you find the intermediate form mostly here, and mostly not elsewhere.

This happens several thousand times a year. It is a frequently assigned grad student task.

[inquest]

If gravity were magically turned off, would the moon move away from the earth?

It most certainly would. Its momentum would carry it in a straight line in whatever direction it happened to be moving at the time of shutoff. That would carry it farther and farther from the earth.

[longshadow]

"It is impossible to know Reality through logic and science. It is known only in intuition which is a direct vision and experience transcending intellectual processes and scientific observations and reasonings."

Wow..... talk about "unfalsifiable" -- that's just breathtaking.

[longshadow]

I've never started a 1000 post thread.

Your noteworthy achievment will be duly recorded in your Permanent Record at DarwinCentral, and you will be alotted an additional unit of pasta as a token of the Grand Master's appreciation for your ongoing efforts on behalf of the cause.

[PatrickHenry]

Your noteworthy achievment will be duly recorded in your Permanent Record at DarwinCentral ...

Fool! The thread was started by Right Wing Professor. Your blunder will be duly recorded instead.

[donh]

Uh, actually, I didn't know that. If you would, could you tell me about "Bookmark"? And you are permitted to call me "Mrs. CyberKlutz" and I won't take offense!

There is a "bookmark" link just after the article at the top of a thread. To see your bookmarks, click on your FR name, where it's a link (it isn't always) anywhere in a thread, and then pick "links". You can investigate other people's bookmarks by a similar ruse.

[inquest]

Of course it's unfalsifiable. It's basically an axiomatic statement. Stripped of it's airy language, all it's really saying is that in order to comprehend anything around you, you have to make a leap of faith that what you see and experience is indeed real.

[Elsie]

And if 'god' was seen on TV, speaking to a TV reporter, you could clamm, "not in a medium that can be simulated on the computer."

---

What you mean is that He hasn't spoken DIRECTLY to you yet!

[js1138]

There are several possible falsifications of Evolution, but you will have to bear with me for a bit of science history.

When a theory is proposed it is based on existing evidence, but it also requires that any future evidence must conform to the theory. A theory that invisible aliens rearrange your room while you sleep and modify your memory so you don't notice is not a theory. A theory must have consequences in terms of future observations.

When Newton proposed his formulas for gravity, he could demonstrate that all data collected to date conformed. But the successful prediction of the return of Halley's comet, based on Newtons Laws, was considered the crowning confirmation. A similar kind of successful prediction confirmed Einstein's general relativity.

So what does evolution predict? First of all it does not predict the future of life in detail, any more than your weatherman predicts the weather for next year. Ecosystems are more complex than weather. It does, however, predict many things.

It predicts, for example that fossil finds will all be consistent with a tree structured genealogy. In modern biochemistry, it predicts that genomes will be consistent with a tree structured genealogy. It predicts that no feature or attribute of an organism will exist solely for the benefit of another species.

In addition to these kinds of predictions, a number of processes have to exist to support evolution. There must be some way of coding inherited features that preserves the form from one generation to another while allowing variation. This might seem obvious, but genetics was unknown to Darwin, and DNA was a hundred years in the future. When the physical mechanisms for inheritance and variation were discovered, they had exactly the properties expected by Darwin.

I mentioned Newton. People are always impressed by prediction of large physical phenomena. Darwin used the observed rate of variation and used this data to predict the minimum time necessary to evolve from a single celled organism to the multitude of forms seen today. His guess was several hundred million years. The modern estimate of the Cambrian age is 500 million years.

What would constitute disproof of natural selection? That is a bit like asking what would constitute disproof of the heliocentric system of planets. Perhaps some overwhelming series of anomalies in the genome. I know that some ID advocates are placing high hopes on conserved non-coding DNA. But when an anomaly is found, the first thing science does is try to explain it. How would ID approach it differently? What is the alternative to seeking a natural explanation? It took a hundred years to solve the chemical mystery of genetics. Is impatience a virtue?

[Elsie]

Why do you think it's false?

[PatrickHenry]

Serious prime coming up ...

[Elsie]

If gravity were magically turned off, would the moon move away from the earth? No.

YES!!

(You did NOT turn off momentum!)

[Elsie]

Yea!

1,000!

[Elsie]

Yea!

1,000!

[Elsie]

Yea!

1,000!

[PatrickHenry]

Take no chances.