Posted on 07/01/2002 7:25:44 AM PDT by aculeus
My deliberately provocative title is borrowed from Leonard Krishtalka, who directs the Natural History Museum at the University of Kansas. Hired-gun "design theorists" in cheap tuxedos have met with some success in getting close to their target: public science education. I hope to convince you that this threat is worth paying attention to. As I write, intelligent design (ID) is a hot issue in the states of Washington and Ohio (see Physics Today, May 2002, page 31*). Evolutionary biology is ID's primary target, but geology and physics are within its blast zone.
Creationism evolves. As in biological evolution, old forms persist alongside new. After the Scopes "Monkey Trial" of 1925, creationists tried to get public schools to teach biblical accounts of the origin and diversity of life. Various courts ruled the strategy unconstitutional. Next came the invention of "creation science," which was intended to bypass constitutional protections. It, too, was recognized by the courts as religion. Despite adverse court rulings, creationists persist in reapplying these old strategies locally. In many places, the pressure keeps public school biology teachers intimidated and evolution quietly minimized.
However, a new strategy, based on so-called ID theory, is now at the cutting edge of creationism. ID is different from its forebears. It does a better job of disguising its sectarian intent. It is well funded and nationally coordinated. To appeal to a wider range of people, biblical literalism, Earth's age, and other awkward issues are swept under the rug. Indeed, ID obfuscates sufficiently well that some educated people with little background in the relevant science have been taken in by it. Among ID's diverse adherents are engineers, doctors--and even physicists.
ID advocates can't accept the inability of science to deal with supernatural hypotheses, and they see this limitation as a sacrilegious denial of God's work and presence. Desperately in need of affirmation, they invent "theistic science" in which the design of the Creator is manifest. Perhaps because their religious faith is rather weak, they need to bolster their beliefs every way they can--including hijacking science to save souls and prove the existence of God.
William Dembski, a mathematician and philosopher at Baylor University and one of ID's chief advocates, asserts that: " . . . any view of the sciences that leaves Christ out of the picture must be seen as fundamentally deficient."1 Whether or not they agree with Dembski on this point, most Americans hold some form of religious belief. Using what they call the Wedge Strategy,2 ID advocates seek to pry Americans away from "naturalistic science" by forcing them to choose between science and religion. ID advocates know that science will lose. They portray science as we know it as innately antireligious, thereby blurring the distinction between science and how science may be interpreted.
When presenting their views before the public, ID advocates generally disguise their religious intent. In academic venues, they avoid any direct reference to the Designer. They portray ID as merely an exercise in detecting design, citing examples from archaeology, the SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) project, and other enterprises. Cambridge University Press has published one ID book,3 which, the ID advocates repeatedly proclaim, constitutes evidence that their case has real scientific merit. ID creationist publications are nearly absent from refereed journals, and this state of affairs is presented as evidence of censorship.
This censorship, ID advocates argue, justifies the exploitation of public schools and the children in them to circumvent established scientific procedures. In tort law, expert scientific testimony must agree with the consensus of experts in a given field. No such limitation exists with respect to public education. ID advocates can snow the public and school boards with pseudoscientific presentations. As represented by ID advocates, biological evolution is a theory in crisis, fraught with numerous plausible-sounding failures, most of which are recycled from overt creationists. It is "only fair," the ID case continues, to present alternatives so that children can make up their own minds. Yesterday's alternative was "Flood geology." Today's is "design theory."
Fairness, open discussion, and democracy are core American values and often problematic. Unfortunately, journalists routinely present controversies where none exist, or they present political controversies as scientific controversies. Stories on conflicts gain readers, and advertising follows. This bias toward reporting conflicts, along with journalists' inability to evaluate scientific content and their unwillingness to do accuracy checks (with notable exceptions), are among the greatest challenges to the broad public understanding of science.
ID creationism is largely content-free rhetoric. Michael Behe, a biochemist at Lehigh University and an ID proponent, argues that many biochemical and biophysical mechanisms are "irreducibly complex."4 He means that, if partially dismembered, they would not work, so they could not have evolved. This line of argument ignores the large number of biological functions that look irreducibly complex, but for which intermediates have been found. One response to Behe's claims consists of the tedious task of demonstrating functions in a possible evolutionary path to the claimed irreducibly complex state. When presented with these paths, Behe typically ignores them and moves on. I admire the people who are willing to spend the time to put together the detailed refutations.5
The position of an ID creationist can be summarized as: "I can't understand how this complex outcome could have arisen, so it must be a miracle." In an inversion of the usual procedure in science, the null hypothesis is taken to be the thing Dembski, Behe, and their cohorts want to prove, albeit with considerable window-dressing. Dembski classifies all phenomena as resulting from necessity, chance, or design. In ruling out necessity, he means approximately that one could not predict the detailed structures and information we see in biological systems from the laws of physics. His reference to chance is essentially equivalent to the creationist use of one of the red herrings introduced by Fred Hoyle:
A junkyard contains all the bits and pieces of a Boeing 747, dismembered and in disarray. A whirlwind happens to blow through the yard. What is the chance that after its passage a fully assembled 747, ready to fly, will be found standing there?6 Having dispensed with necessity and chance, Dembski concludes that design has been detected on the grounds that nothing else can explain the phenomenon--at least according to him.
Of course, design has no predictive power. ID is not a scientific theory. If we had previously attributed the unexplainable to design, we would still be using Thor's hammer to explain thunder. Nor does ID have any technological applications. It can be fun to ask ID advocates about the practical applications of their work. Evolution has numerous practical technological applications, including vaccine development. ID has none.
As organisms evolve, they become more complex, but evolution doesn't contravene the second law of thermodynamics. Dembski, like his creationist predecessors, misuses thermodynamics. To support the case for ID, he has presented arguments based on a supposed Law of Conservation of Information, an axiomatic law that applies only to closed systems with very restricted assumptions.7 Organisms, of course, are not closed systems.
ID's reach extends beyond biology to physics and cosmology. One interesting discussion concerns the fundamental constants. There is a well-known point of view that our existence depends on a number of constants lying within a narrow range. As one might expect, the religious community has generally viewed this coincidence as evidence in favor of--or at least as a plausibility argument for--their beliefs. The ID creationist community has adopted the fundamental constants as additional evidence for their Designer of Life--apparently not realizing that many fine-tuning arguments are based on physical constants allowing evolution to proceed. Physical cosmology is largely absent from school science standards. Where present, as in Kansas, it is likely to come under ID attack.
I have only scratched the surface here. Don't assume everything is fine in your school system even if it seems free of conflict. Peace may mean that evolution, the core concept of biology, is minimized. No region of the country is immune. Watch out for the guys in tuxedos--they don't have violins in those cases.
Adrian Melott is a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. He is also a founding board member of Kansas Citizens for Science.
Letters are encouraged and should be sent to Letters, Physics Today, American Center for Physics, One Physics Ellipse, College Park, MD 20740-3842 or by e-mail to ptletter@aip.org (using your surname as "Subject"). Please include your affiliation, mailing address, and daytime phone number. We reserve the right to edit.
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References 1. W. Dembski, Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science & Theology, InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, Ill. (1999), p. 206. 2. See http://rnaworld.bio.ukans.edu/id-intro/sect3.html. Another source is http://www.sunflower.com/~jkrebs/JCCC/05%20Wedge_edited.html 3. W. Dembski, The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities, Cambridge U. Press, New York (1998). For a review by W. Elsberry, see http://inia.cls.org/~welsberr/zgists/wre/papers/dembski7.html. 4. M. Behe, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, Free Press, New York (1996). 5. See http://www.world-of-dawkins.com/catalano/box/behe.htm. See also http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~lindsay/creation/behe.html 6. F. Hoyle, The Intelligent Universe, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, New York (1983), p. 18. 7. W. Dembski, No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, Md. (2002).
Oh, yeah, I run into these creationist atheists all the time. Nothing unusual at all.
By the way, it would behoove you to learn a manner or two.
In October 1983 the speed of light, c, was declared a universal constant of nature defined as 299,792.458 Km/s and as such is now used in the definition of the meter. However, in a recent article on this subject, Wilkie² points out that ëmany scientists have speculated that the speed of light might be changing over the lifetime of the universeí and concludes that ëit is still possible that the speed of light might vary on a cosmic timescale.í Van Flandern1 agrees. He states that ëAssumptions such as the constancy of the velocity of light ... may be true in only one set of units (atomic or dynamical), but not the other.í
Historically, the literature, particularly from the 1920's to the 1940's, amplifies this conclusion and indicates that if c is varying it is doing so in dynamical units, not atomic. Thus, the values for c obtained by Michelson alone were as follows in Table A (with full details in Table 5).
DATE VALUE OF C (km/s)
1879.5 299,910 ±50
1882.8 299,853 ±60
1924.6 299,802 ±30
1926.5 299,798 ±15
These results are not typical of a normal distribution about today's fixed value. However, the 1882.8 result is confirmed by the values from two other experiments. One by Newcomb in 1882.7 yielded a c value of 299,860 ±30 Km/s, while Nyren using another method in 1883 obtained a definitive value of 299,850 ±90 Km/s (see discussion below for details). In other words, Michelson's 1882.8 result was completely consistent with the other values obtained that year. The mean of these three values (299,854 Km/s) lies above today's value by 61.8 Km/s, though the standard deviation of these three values is only ±5 Km/s. The quoted probable errors thus seem to be conservative.
Assuming no c variation, the least squares mean for all these data show they are distributed about a point 53 Km/s above today's value. The mean error is ±45.8 Km/s, which places today's value beyond its lower limit. If the students t-distribution is applied to these data, the hypothesis that c has been constant at its present value from 1879.5 to 1926.5 can be rejected with a confidence interval of 98.2%. One would expect that other results from this type of experiment would lie below today's value by a similar amount to restore the normal distribution. This is not observed.
Assuming, then, that the variation is real, it represents a measured decay of 112 Km/s in 47 years. A linear, least squares fit to these data gives a drop of 1.62 Km/s per year. The resulting correlation coefficient r = -0.879, and this decay correlation is significant at the 98.9% confidence level from the t-statistic. This is not an isolated instance: similar trends occur with all methods of c measurement, individually and collectively, involving 163 data points. Some are illustrated in Figures I and II. Despite a preference for the constancy of atomic quantities, Dorsey3 did concede that 'As is well known to those acquainted with the several determinations of the velocity of light, the definitive values successively reported...have, in general, decreased monotonously from Cornu's 300.4 megameters per second in 1874 to Anderson's 299.776 in 1940...' In fact, even Dorsey's reworking of the original data left c values generally above those currently prevailing.
The continuing drop in the measured value of c with each new determination elicited further remarks on the topic until the mid 1940's. By then the wealth of comment can be gauged by the representative sample in the final reference (360) given below. The listing includes 18 from Nature alone. A variety of possible decay curves for c was espoused, and the resulting experiments invalidated some proposals. The effects of c variation on some other quantities were discussed, and a number of scenarios eliminated by experiment.
It can be shown that however things are dated, that if c is not constant, then the date is not either.
So who wants to discuss Maxwell's Equations?
Oh, I know you guys are all worried about the ramifications of the Roemer, Bradley, Whittaker/Kulikov and toothed wheel experiments. I could go on forever, but I'm sure that would bore most evolutionists. I'm sure that evolutionistst are scientists. That's why I include the following table concerning measured light-speed. I'm certain that non-creationists can explaing the results:
REFINED LIST OF C DATA
NO. DATE OBSERVER METHOD VALUE OF C (Km/s)
1 1740 Bradley Aberration 300,650
2 1783 Lindenau Aberration 300,460 ±160
3 1843 Struve Aberration 300,020 ±160
4 1861 Glasenapp Jupiter Satellite 300,050
5 1874.8 Cornu (Helmert) Toothed Wheel 299,990 ±200
6 1874.8 Cornu (Dorsey) Toothed Wheel 299,900 ±200
7 1876.5 Harvard Observat. Jupiter Satellite 299,921 ±13 8 1879.5 Michelson Rotating Mirror 299,910 ±50
9 1882.7 Newcomb Rotating Mirror 299,860 ±30
10 1882.8 Michelson Rotating Mirror 299,853 ±60
11 1883 Nyren Aberration 299,850 ±90
12 1900.4 Perrotin Toothed Wheel 299,900 ±80
13 1902.4 Perrotin Toothed Wheel 299,860 ±80
14 1902.4 Perrotin/Prim Toothed Wheel 299,901 ±84
15 1906.0 Rosa and Dorsey Electromag. Units 299,803 ±30
16 1923 Mercier Waves on Wires 299,795 ±30
17 1924.6 Michelson Polygonal Mirror 299,802 ±30
18 1926.5 Michelson Polygonal Mirror 299,798 ±15
19 1928.0 Mittelstaedt Kerr Cell 299,786 ±10
20 1932.5 Pease/Pearson Polygonal Mirror 299,774 ±10
21 1936.8 Anderson Kerr Cell 299,771 ±10
22 1937.0 Huttel Kerr Cell 299,771 ±10
23 1940.0 Anderson Kerr Cell 299,776 ±10
24 1947 Essen,Gordon-Smith Cavity Resonator 299,798 ±3
25 1947 Essen,Gordon-Smith Cavity Resonator 299,792 ±3
26 1949 Aslakson Radar 299,792.4 ±2.4
27 1949 Bergstrand Geodimeter 299,796 ±2
28 1950 Essen Cavity Resonator 299,792.5 ±1
29 1950 Hansen and Bol Cavity Resonator 299,794.3 ±1.2
30 1950 Bergstrand Geodimeter 299,793.1 ±0.26
31 1951 Bergstrand Geodimeter 299,793.1 ±0.4
32 1951 Aslakson Radar 299,794.2 ±1.4
33 1951 Froome Radio Interferom. 299,792.6 ±0.7
34 1953 Bergstrand Geodimeter 299,792.85 ±0.16
35 1954 Froome Radio Interferom. 299,792.75 ±0.3
36 1954 Florman Radio Interferom. 299,795.1 ±3.1
37 1955 Scholdstrom Geodimeter 299,792.4 ±0.4
38 1955 Plyler et. al. Spectral Lines 299,792 ±6
39 1956 Wadley Tellurometer 299,792.9 ±2.0
40 1956 Wadley Tellurometer 299,792.7 ±2.0
41 1956 Rank et. al. Spectral Lines 299,791.9 ±2
42 1956 Edge Geodimeter 299,792.4 ±0.11
43 1956 Edge Geodimeter 299,792.2 ±0.13
44 1957 Wadley Tellurometer 299,792.6 ±1.2
45 1958 Froome Radio Interferom. 299,792.5 ±0.1
46 1960 Kolibayev Geodimeter 299,792.6 ±0.06
47 1966 Karolus Modulated Light 299,792.44 ±0.2
48 1967 Simkin et. al. Microwave Interf. 299,792.56 ±0.11
49 1967 Grosse Geodimeter 299,792.50 ±0.05
50 1972 Bay,Luther,White Laser 299,792.462 ±0.018
51 1972 NBS (Boulder) Laser 299,792.460 ±0.006
52 1973 Evenson et. al. Laser 299,792.4574 ±0.0011
53 1973 NRC, NBS Laser 299,792.458 ±0.002
54 1974 Blaney et. al. Laser 299,792.4590 ±0.0008
55 1978 Woods et. al. Laser 299,792.4588 ±0.0002
56 1979 Baird et. al. Laser 299,792.4581 ±0.0019
57 1983 NBS (US) Laser 299,792.4586 ±0.0003
Lets not discuss how everthing came from nothing. Lets not discuss the issue of chirality, even so that's a really interesting issue in my mind (and quite impossible short of a miracle). Lets discuss how varying light-speed might affects how evolutionists view their world.
Is anybody interested in discussing the physics of light speed variability and the affect of light speed on dating of things presumed to be billions of years old, or will this devolve into a flame war?
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