Posted on 06/23/2007 12:21:46 PM PDT by GodGunsGuts
Pro-Darwin Biology Professor Laments Academia's "Intolerance" and Supports Teaching Intelligent Design
Charles Darwin famously said, "A fair result can be obtained only by fully balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question." According to a recent article by J. Scott Turner, a pro-Darwin biology professor at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, New York, modern Neo-Darwinists are failing to heed Darwin's advice. (We blogged about a similar article by Turner in The Chronicle of Higher Education in January, 2007.) Turner is up front with his skepticism of intelligent design (ID), which will hopefully allow his criticisms to strike a chord with other Darwinists.
Turner starts by observing that the real threat to education today is not ID itself, but the attitude of scientists towards ID: "Unlike most of my colleagues, however, I don't see ID as a threat to biology, public education or the ideals of the republic. To the contrary, what worries me more is the way that many of my colleagues have responded to the challenge." He describes the "modern academy" as "a tedious intellectual monoculture where conformity and not contention is the norm." Turner explains that the "[r]eflexive hostility to ID is largely cut from that cloth: some ID critics are not so much worried about a hurtful climate as they are about a climate in which people are free to disagree with them." He then recounts and laments the hostility faced by Richard Sternberg at the Smithsonian:
It would be comforting if one could dismiss such incidents as the actions of a misguided few. But the intolerance that gave rise to the Sternberg debacle is all too common: you can see it in its unfiltered glory by taking a look at Web sites like pandasthumb.org or recursed.blogspot.com [Jeffry Shallit's blog] and following a few of the threads on ID. The attitudes on display there, which at the extreme verge on antireligious hysteria, can hardly be squared with the relatively innocuous (even if wrong-headed) ideas that sit at ID's core.
(J. Scott Turner, Signs of Design, The Christian Century, June 12, 2007.)
Turner on the Kitzmiller v. Dover Case
Turner sees the Kitzmiller v. Dover case as the dangerous real-world expression of the intolerance common in the academy: "My blood chills ... when these essentially harmless hypocrisies are joined with the all-American tradition of litigiousness, for it is in the hand of courts and lawyers that real damage to cherished academic ideas is likely to be done." He laments the fact that "courts are where many of my colleagues seem determined to go with the ID issue” and predicts, “I believe we will ultimately come to regret this."
Turner justifies his reasonable foresight by explaining that Kitzmiller only provided a pyrrhic victory for the pro-Darwin lobby:
Although there was general jubilation at the ruling, I think the joy will be short-lived, for we have affirmed the principle that a federal judge, not scientists or teachers, can dictate what is and what is not science, and what may or may not be taught in the classroom. Forgive me if I do not feel more free.
(J. Scott Turner, Signs of Design, The Christian Century, June 12, 2007.)
Turner on Education
Turner explains, quite accurately, that ID remains popular not because of some vast conspiracy or religious fanaticism, but because it deals with an evidentiary fact that resonates with many people, and Darwinian scientists do not respond to ID's arguments effectively:
[I]ntelligent design … is one of multiple emerging critiques of materialism in science and evolution. Unfortunately, many scientists fail to see this, preferring the gross caricature that ID is simply "stealth creationism." But this strategy fails to meet the challenge. Rather than simply lament that so many people take ID seriously, scientists would do better to ask why so many take it seriously. The answer would be hard for us to bear: ID is not popular because the stupid or ignorant like it, but because neo-Darwinism's principled banishment of purpose seems less defensible each passing day.
(J. Scott Turner, Signs of Design, The Christian Century, June 12, 2007.)
Turner asks, “What, then, is the harm in allowing teachers to deal with the subject as each sees fit?” ID can't be taught, he explains, because most scientists believe that "normal standards of tolerance and academic freedom should not apply in the case of ID." He says that the mere suggestion that ID could be taught brings out "all manner of evasions and prevarications that are quite out of character for otherwise balanced, intelligent and reasonable people."
As we noted earlier, hopefully Turner’s criticisms will strike a chord with Darwinists who might otherwise close their ears to the argument for academic freedom for ID-proponents. Given the intolerance towards ID-sympathy that Turner describes, let us also hope that the chord is heard but the strummer is not harmed.
This kind of "philosophy" is just public mental masturbation. Toss out an unsolvable problem and invent an imaginary friend who just happens to have the magic caulk that fills the holes in the argument. Then declare victory.
If every "thing" requires a cause, then presto, by decree, God isn't a "thing." We can all have IQs above room temperature if we just close our eyes and believe.
HOLD IT... O'bulbous one(whale) we havn't finished with WHAT IS MATTER?.. yet..
WHAT IS MATTER?... you havn't sung this song yet..
What is it... not what does it do..
You hold that existence has no prior cause, that existence is a first cause. These are both viable positions to consider and no different from those who hold existence distinct from matter. Do the work.
I see.. the "Observer Problem" I think you've got it..
You may have backed over it and tripped.. ;)
Other scientists are watching individual microbes evolve into entire ecosystems. Paul Rainey, a biologist at the New Zealand Institute for Advanced Study at Massey University, has observed this evolution in bacteria, called Pseudomonas fluorescens, that live on plants. When he put a single Pseudomonas in a flask, it produced descendants that floated in the broth, feeding on nutrients. But within a few hundred generations, some of its descendants mutated and took up new ways of life. One strain began to form fuzzy carpets on the bottom of the flask. Another formed a mat of cellulose, where it could take in oxygen from above and food from below.
Other parts of the article talk about analysis of the specific mutations in the DNA, and attempts to find out how the changes affected the evolved critters. One interesting section was about single celled organisms that tied their tails in clumps and formed structures in a cooperate venture that almost sound like complex life forms, but the article didn't point out that fact.
At least these scientists are actually doing something, instead of just sitting and musing over the universe. How boring.
A fistful of clay in the hands of a tinker being of considerably more value and utility.
There’s sports, too. Don’t forget Frank Thomas.
The great thing about the "observer problem" seems to be that since we're all "observers", it can be invoked at any time against anyone, with regards to any argument.
Absolutely. For some odd reason the problem is easily forgotten or overlooked. There are three aspects to the problem:
(a) observation yields limited knowledge, such that what we know is but knowledge in part. This is obvious. If our knowledge were exhaustive, we would no longer discover anything. But it is easily forgotten. If the observer problem has a problem it is that we often take what have discovered to hold for what we haven't discovered, or don't care to know, often by applying principles in one area of thought to stop the gaps elsewhere. All the -isms suffer from this, logicism, marxism, legalism, scientism, dogmatism, biblicism.
(b) observation cannot fix the subject of study, such that "the act of observation itself disturbs the observed object, and thus changes the total system."
(c) observation results in concepts abstracted from existence, such that further theoretical speculation yields conclusions that may not hold true for the thing in the real. Thought is a world of its own. The $100 in my mind, for all its worth, is not a $100 in my pocket. A useful theory, as Ortega puts it, must "mate happily with reality" to become knowledge.
However, that article was posted on DarwinCentral.org over an hour ago.
Well, I should stop right there and insist that you begin another thread. This thread began with an article on the subjects of Darwin, evolution, biology and ID relating to what a university professor was teaching.
I will help you along the way toward understanding this if you wish.
How positively gracious of you.
Tell me of a single case in nature where you have regular production of complex information, such as at Mount Rushmore, or DNA, where a non-intelligent force produces.
Evolution "produces information" all the time. This recent article talks about several examples. A great demonstration of evolution theory and it's ability to generate information is in the various experiments at Caltech's Digital Life Lab. In one experiment, they constructed a computer "virtual machine" that has the ability to "run" a very simplistic instruction set that roughly corresponds with the laws of chemistry. They began with a set of 15 instructions, representing a simple "program" that statistically could have self-assembled itself from random molecules if it had been actual chemistry, and were able to evolve new programs that could, for instance, add numbers together.
The rates and process of mutation, as well as some of the characteristics of DNA where mutations can result in loops or missing segments is simulated in the virtual machine.
And of course, actual evolution of simple one celled creatures generates information all the time, as detailed in the linked article above. The one interesting evolution I think is the bacteria that can only live on Nylon, I think it is, which didn't exist in nature until Dupont invented it a few decades ago. These are all demonstrations of a "non-intelligent" process that produced complex information.
When you carefully explain, dispassionately, without venom and vitriol, I will discuss how the second living organism evolved. But, first things first.
Ah. So you wish to keep the discussion on an issue that science admits up front that it does not have the answer to, rather than go into an issue where science most assuredly does have the answer. Good tactic. But I won't play that game.
Weren’t you the one who asked the absurdity “who created God?”
As near as I can tell dogma is immune to errors of observation, and all else is flawed by it.
If you assume that He exists at all.
You know, I'm not even interested in the subject. That kind of discussion is very dependent on word meanings and assumptions that I believe it is a waste of my time to think about it. If this was strictly an academic setting, among people that did not hold obvious agendas to convince me of the truth of their faith over my lack of it, then it might be interesting. But not here in this forum.
I don't respond to pressure, and all I see here is pressure, not an intelligent discussion on a subject that is interesting.
Evolution is interesting. It can be observed, tested, and is going on all around us right now. Conjecture on the universe is none of those things..
Yes, there is a tension between dogma and observation. There are all kinds of dogmas, theological, epistemological, philosophical.
There is also a tension between observation and the observed.
Beyond the atomic level, describing matter gets iffy. Beyond a hypothetical Lederman style t-shirt, we don’t have much hope of fully understanding matter.
Why? Do you have the answer?
Yes. It doesn’t take long. It is amusing to observe some who continue to imagine they are in agreement after months of daily posts and you know they aren’t but you tune in now and then to see how long it will continue.
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