Cornell president condemns intelligent design

©2005 Syracuse.com ^ | 10/21/2005, 12:03 p.m. ET | By WILLIAM KATES

[Behind Liberal Lines]

ITHACA, N.Y. — Cornell University Interim President Hunter Rawlings III on Friday condemned the teaching of intelligent design as science, calling it "a religious belief masquerading as a secular idea."

"Intelligent design is not valid science," Rawlings told nearly 700 trustees, faculty and other school officials attending Cornell's annual board meeting.

"It has no ability to develop new knowledge through hypothesis testing, modification of the original theory based on experimental results and renewed testing through more refined experiments that yield still more refinements and insights," Rawlings said.

Rawlings, Cornell's president from 1995 to 2003, is now serving as interim president in the wake of this summer's sudden departure of former Cornell president Jeffrey Lehman.

Intelligent design is a theory that says life is too complex to have developed through evolution, implying a higher power must have had a hand. It has been harshly criticized by The National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which have called it repackaged creationism and improper to include in scientific education.

There are brewing disputes involving evolution and intelligent design in at least 20 states and numerous school districts nationwide, including California, New Mexico, Kansas and Pennsylvania. President Bush elevated the controversy in August when he said that schools should teach intelligent design along with evolution.

Many Americans, including some supporters of evolution, believe intelligent design should be taught with evolution. Rawlings said a large minority of Americans — nearly 40 percent — want creationism taught in public schools instead of evolution.

For those reasons, Rawlings said he felt it "imperative" to use his state-of-the-university address — usually a recitation of the school's progress over the last year — to speak out against intelligent design, which he said has "put rational thought under attack."

[DBeers]

Cornell University Interim Former President Hunter Rawlings III -- blah blah blah yadda yadda yadda...

What is with this interim thing -are they attempting to assert more credibility to his meanderings?

[DrDavid]

"Testable" doesn't simply mean "reproducible in a lab". Testable means that observations can be made regarding predictions derived from the theory. A theory is "tested" for predictions that pan out (or don't) in nature.

If all that is required to be called a theory, is to match what is observed around us, then ID is certainly as close to a "theory" as macro evolution. These "observations" are circumstantial evidence, which can provide a foundation for a theory but don't tell the whole story.

The real trick is to create an experiment that will disprove the theory if it succeeds. If you can't construct an experiment that can disprove the "theory" it isn't a theory yet.

[Coyoteman]

If all that is required to be called a theory, is to match what is observed around us, then ID is certainly as close to a "theory" as macro evolution. These "observations" are circumstantial evidence, which can provide a foundation for a theory but don't tell the whole story.

The real trick is to create an experiment that will disprove the theory if it succeeds. If you can't construct an experiment that can disprove the "theory" it isn't a theory yet.

Lets define some terms and try again (from a google search):

Theory: a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world; an organized system of accepted knowledge that applies in a variety of circumstances to explain a specific set of phenomena; "theories can incorporate facts and laws and tested hypotheses"; "true in fact and theory"

Hypothesis: a tentative theory about the natural world; a concept that is not yet verified but that if true would explain certain facts or phenomena; "a scientific hypothesis that survives experimental testing becomes a scientific theory"; "he proposed a fresh theory of alkalis that later was accepted in chemical practices"

Belief: any cognitive content (perception) held as true

Impression: a vague idea in which some confidence is placed; "his impression of her was favorable"; "what are your feelings about the crisis?"; "it strengthened my belief in his sincerity"; "I had a feeling that she was lying"

Based on this, evolution is a theory. CS and ID are beliefs.

You might study some science methodology. You have erred in several places.

DrCoyote

[Dimensio]

If all that is required to be called a theory

It's not. Among other things, a theory must also be falsifiable. If there is no hypothetical observation that would prove ID to be false, then it isn't a theory.

The real trick is to create an experiment that will disprove the theory if it succeeds. If you can't construct an experiment that can disprove the "theory" it isn't a theory yet.

Indeed. There are such criteria for evolution -- for example, finding a Precambrian rabbit fossil, or a transposon in whales and cows but not hippos. What does ID have?

[Behind Liberal Lines]

The former Cornell President, Rawlings, was brought in as interim president after the most recent president resigned suddenly.

[narby]

It is not logical to think that such variety of life could be a random happening.

Evolution is not "random". This is your fundamental misunderstanding that stands in your path. Snow flakes are "random" from each other, but still follow a pattern. Water molecules are "random" in liquid state, yet form perfect mirrors in calm puddles following a pattern. Ice crystals line up molecules in long orderly chains that completely defy "randomness".

The underlying biology that drives evolution is not "random" in any sense of the word. That's why it works. But still it is not "predictable" any more than you can predict the shape of the next snow flake you examine. But when you see that six sided flake, you can identify it as a water ice snowflake because it follows the rules of snowflake theory. Likewise, we can examine the common virus DNA sequences in apes and humans, and determine that the pattern they make follows evolution theory.

You should join a great many other faithful people and rejoice at God's grand invention of evolutionary biology. By far the greatest invention in the universe, and yet you don't seem to grasp that God is capable of doing it because of your simplistic interpretation of Genesis. Sad.

[mlc9852]

Why do you assume DNA sequence means we are descended from some extinct common ancestor? Human DNA is closely related to other animals also. Why assume the ape direction?

[PatrickHenry]

Why do you assume DNA sequence means we are descended from some extinct common ancestor? Human DNA is closely related to other animals also. Why assume the ape direction?

Species that are more closely related should share a greater portion of their DNA.. Excerpt:

[A]n hypothesis of evolutionary relationships is provided by the fossil record, which indicates when particular types of organisms evolved. In addition, by examining the anatomical structures of fossils and of modern species, we can infer how closely species are related to each other. When degree of genetic similarity is compared with our ideas of evolutionary relationships based on fossils, a close match is evident.

Another service of
Darwin Central
The conspiracy that cares

[mlc9852]

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2001-07/llnl-wfc070501.php

Why are humans so close to mice?

[Thatcherite]

You are misusing the word assume. I've shown you the retroviral evidence before. A simple example Every retrovirus that both chimps and gorillas share, humans share also. Humans and chimps share some more retroviruses that are not common to gorillas. This is because the common ancestor of chimps and humans is closer to us than the common ancestor of gorillas, which split off earlier. The entire tree of life can be traced in this way, and the molecular evidence exactly matches that which was expected from the morphological evidence.

[b_sharp]

From a post by Dr. John Harshman - talk.origins

[You need to view this in a font in which all the characters take up the
same amount of room. If you view it in a proportionally-spaced font,
both the tree and the DNA sequence will fail to line up properly.]


Evidence for human relationships to the other apes.


But first, a primer on DNA and how it can be used to understand
phylogenetic relationships. If you understand
this already, skip ahead to "Here is a set of DNA sequences" below the
dotted line.


DNA is double helix, each half being a twisted string of chemicals,
called bases or nucleotides, on a backbone. The bases come in four
flavors, each with a slightly different chemical formula, which can be
represented as single letters: A, C, G, or T, from the first letters of
each chemical's name. Because each of the two strings completely
determines the other one, we can ignore one of them, and because of
DNA's beads-on-a-string structure, we can completely describe a given
gene by a linear sequence of the four bases. So if I tell you that the
DNA sequence in some gene in some species is AAGAAGCTAGTGTAAGA, I have
completely described that particular part of the DNA molecule.


Different species have slightly different sequences, and when we line up
the corresponding sequences from different species, the patterns of
bases (letters) at each position (or site) in the sequence can tell us
about their relationships. Consider a set of 5 species. At any
particular position in the sequence each species has either A, C, G, or
T. For my purposes I don't care about the particular bases, only about
the patterns of similarity, so I'm going to use a different symbolism to
describe those patterns. I'll use lower case letters to represent
identical bases. So if I say a position has pattern xxyy, I mean that
the first two species have one base and the last two have another. The
real bases could be TTCC, GGAA, or any other combination. There
are many possible patterns: xxxx, xyzz, xyxy, etc. But only a few of
them can be used to determine relationships. It should be obvious that
xxxx, all bases the same, tells us nothing. If only one base differs,
such as xyxx, that also tells us nothing except that one species is
different from all the rest; but we already knew it was a separate
species. The only patterns that make a claim of relationships are those
in which two species have one base, and the other two have another:
xxyy, xyxy, and xyyx. Why is this? Because such patterns split the
species into two groups, implying a tree that looks something like this:


y x If all the species on the left have state y, and
\ / all the species on the right have state x, then
\ / somewhere in the middle (the branch marked *),
\_____/ there must have been a change in that site --
/ * \ a mutation -- either from y to x or x to y
/ \ (we can't tell which from this information).
/ \
y x


A little further note: the patterns that I represent in rows above
(xxyy, etc.) are shown in columns in the DNA sequences below. That is,
in the sequences below, you read across to find the sequence in a single
species, but you read down to read the contents of a single site in five
species. So the first column of the sequence, reading down, would be
CCTT, which is an xxyy pattern.

---

Here is a set of DNA sequences. They come from two genes named
ND4 and ND5. If you put them together, they total 694 nucleotides. But
most of those nucleotides either are identical among all the species
here, or they differ in only one species, or they have three separate
states. Those are uninformative about relationships, so I have removed
them, leaving 47 nucleotides that make some claim. I'll let you look at
them for a while.


[ 10 20 30 40 47]
[ . . . . .]
_____________1111211321 1131311112 3133122121 1111111111 1111111
gibbon _______CCCATCCCTA AGTCCATAAC ACTTATTGCC TACGCCAGCC ACACTAA
orangutan _____CCCACCCTCA AGACTACAAT GCCCACCGTC TACGCCAGCC ACACTAA
human ________TATCTTTTTG GAATTCCTCC GTCCGTTACT CCTATTTCTT GTGACCG
chimpanzee ____TATCCTTCCG GATTCCCTCT ATTTGCCATT CCTATTTCTT GTGACCG


I've marked with a 1 all those sites at which gibbon and orangutan match
each other, and the human and chimpanzee have a different base but match
each other. (That's the xxyy pattern mentioned above,) These sites all
support a relationship between human and chimp, exclusive of gibbon and
orangutan. You will note there are quite a lot of them, 35 to be exact.
The sites I have marked with 2 or 3 contradict this relationship. We
expect a certain amount of this because sometimes the same mutation will
happen twice in different lineages; we call that homoplasy. However you
will note that there are fewer of these sites, only 12 of them, and more
importantly they contradict each other. Each number stands for a
different hypothesis of relationships; number 2 is for sites that
support a relationship between gibbons and humans, and number 3 is for
sites that support a relationship between orangutans and humans (all
exclusive of the rest). One and two, one and three, or two and three
can't both be true at the same time. So we have to consider each
competing hypothesis separately. If you do that it comes out this way:


hypothesis sites supporting pattern
1 (human + chimp) 35 xxyy
2 (human + gibbon) 6 xyxy
3 (human + orangutan) 6 xyyx


I think we can see that the human + chimp hypothesis is way out front,
and the others can be attributed to random homoplasy. This result would
be very difficult to explain by chance.


Let's try a statistical test just to be sure. Let's suppose, as our null
hypothesis, that the sequences are randomized with respect to phylogeny
(perhaps because there is no phylogeny) and that apparent support for
humans + chimps is merely a chance fluctuation. And let's try a
chi-square test. (I'm not going to explain chi-square tests here; just
understand that it's a statistical test that tells us the probability
that we would see the patterns we see if sequence differences were
random.) Here it is:


hypothesis obs. exp. (obs.-exp)^2/exp.
human + chimp (1) 35 15.67 23.9
human + gibbon (2) 6 15.67 93.5
human + orangutan (3) 6 15.67 93.5
sum 47 47 210.9


These are all three possible hypotheses of relationship, and the
observed number of sites supporting them. Expected values would be
equal, or the sum/3. The important column is the third one, which is a
measure of the "strain" between the observed and expected values. The
larger the sum of this column ("the sum of squares"), the greater the
strain. There are 2 degrees of freedom (meaning that if we know 2 of the
observations, we automatically know the 3rd), and the sum of squares is
210.9. That last number gets compared to a chi-square distribution to
come up with a P value.


It happens that P, or the probability of this amount of asymmetry in the
distribution arising by chance, is very low. When I tried it in Excel, I
got P=1.7*10^-8, or 0.000000017. That's pretty close to zero, and
chance can be ruled out with great confidence.


Having ruled out chance, now the question is how you account for the
pattern we see. I account for it by supposing that the null hypothesis
is just plain wrong, and that there is a phylogeny, and that the
phylogeny involves the humans and chimps, being related by
a common ancestor more recent than their common ancestor with orangutans
or gibbons. How about you?


By itself, this is pretty good evidence for the human/chimp connection.
But if I did this little exercise with any other gene I would get the
same result too. (If you don't believe me I would be glad to do that.)
Why? I say it's because all the genes evolved on the same tree, the true
tree of evolutionary relationships. That's the multiple nested hierarchy
for you.


So what's your alternative explanation for all this? You say...what?
It's because of a necessary similarity between similar organisms? But
out of these 47 sites with informative differences, only 12 involve
differences that change the amino acid composition of the protein; the
rest can have no effect on phenotype. Further, many of those amino acid
changes are to similar amino acids that have no real effect on protein
function. In fact, ND4 and ND5 do exactly the same thing in all
organisms. These nested similarities have nothing to do with function,
so similar design is not a credible explanation.


God did it that way because he felt like it? Fine, but this explains any
possible result. It's not science. We have to ask why god just happened
to feel like doing it in a way that matches the unique expectations of
common descent.


By the way, if you want to see the full data set I pulled this from, go
here:


http://www.treebase.org/treebase/console.html


Then search on Author, keyword Hayasaka. Click Submit. You will find
Hayasaka, Kenji. Then click on Search. This brings up one study, in the
frame at middle left. Click on Matrix Fig. 1 to download the sequences.
You can also use this site to view their tree. The publication from
which all this was drawn is Hayasaka, K., T. Gojobori, and S. Horai.
1988. Molecular phylogeny and evolution of primate mitochondrial DNA.
Mol. Biol. Evol., 5:626-644.

[Doctor Stochastic]

...the molecular evidence exactly matches that which was expected from the morphological evidence.

Note that the molecular evidence contains errata and grafitti as well.

[Thatcherite]

Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. Knocks my explanation into a cocked hat.

[PatrickHenry]

A modified version of my "cheating student" example:

You're a teacher. You observe that the test results for students seated one-behind-the-other are somewhat interesting. A misspelled word in an answer from the first student is, surprisingly, also present on the papers turned in by each of the students behind him. It doesn't appear on the papers of any other students. How could such a thing happen?

You also observe that the second student in the row made a spelling error of his own. Amazingly, this too is seen on each of the papers from those seated behind him -- but not on any other student's paper.

Then you notice that the third student in the row made his own error. And that is somehow present on the papers of those behind him -- but on no other papers.

The last student in the row -- perhaps by coincidence? -- just happens to have all of that row's earlier misspellings on his own paper, plus perhaps some of his own.

Question: How blind do you have to be not to figure out how those errors came to be repeated on those papers? And how difficult would it be, even without a seating chart, to figure out who sat behind whom?

[WildTurkey]

Item	Evolution	ID	fizziwig
Common Descent	Common Descent	Common Descent	Supports ID?
Age of Earth	Earth is billions of years old	Earth is billions of years old	Supports ID?
Age of Man	Man evolved over millions of years	Man evolved over millions of years	Supports ID?
God	Do not teach children God is dead	Teach school children God is dead	Supports ID?

[Coyoteman]

Your example about the students is apt.

I heard a paper recently on mtDNA. A particular individual in southern Alaska, some 11,000 years old, was tested for mtDNA. It was found that his type (haplogroup A) matched individuals in the local village. But, through some mutations in haplogroup A (very much like the spelling errors in your example) this individual could also be traced directly and almost continuously (i.e., with lots of intermediate individuals) to descendants as far away as the tip of South America, with a few also in the southeastern United States. Based on when particular mutations occurred, the direction and to some degree the timing of the migrations could be determined.

Stay dry and anchored!

[WildTurkey]

Item	Evolution	ID	fizziwig
Common Descent	Common Descent	Common Descent	Supports ID?
Age of Earth	Earth is billions of years old	Earth is billions of years old	Supports ID?
Age of Man	Man evolved over millions of years	Man evolved over millions of years	Supports ID?
God	Do not teach children God may be dead	Teach school children God may be dead	Supports ID?

[PatrickHenry]

Based on when particular mutations occurred, the direction and to some degree the timing of the migrations could be determined.

Clearly, this reveals the itinerary of the designer, as he traveled around introducing his designer DNA into various populations.
</internet idiot mode>

[WildTurkey]

The fact that plants and animals are able to adapt in such a variety of ways definitely makes me think there must be some "intelligence" involved.

You do know that ID agrees that man evolved from simple evolutions and that we should teach the children that God may be dead.

[WildTurkey]

Where do you think God fits in evolution?

ID says God played no hand in evolution and may be dead.