Intelligent Denials: Bush's science adviser defends evolution!

The American Prospect, ^ | 22 February 2005 | Chris Mooney

[PatrickHenry]

When it's your job to serve as the president's in-house expert on science and technology, being constantly in the media spotlight isn't necessarily a mark of distinction. But for President Bush's stoically inclined science adviser John Marburger, immense controversy followed his blanket dismissal last year of allegations (now endorsed by 48 Nobel laureates) that the administration has systematically abused science. So it was more than a little refreshing last Wednesday to hear Marburger take a strong stance against science politicization and abuse on one issue where it really matters: evolution.

Speaking at the annual conference of the National Association of Science Writers, Marburger fielded an audience question about "Intelligent Design" (ID), the latest supposedly scientific alternative to Charles Darwin's theory of descent with modification. The White House's chief scientist stated point blank, "Intelligent Design is not a scientific theory." And that's not all -- as if to ram the point home, Marburger soon continued, "I don't regard Intelligent Design as a scientific topi."

[PH here:]
I'm not sure the whole article can be copied here, so please go to the link to read it all:
Chris Mooney, "Intelligent Denials", The American Prospect Online, Feb 22, 2005.

[Ben Chad]

"Why are there still FISH?"

I was going to post the same response.

[Chaguito]

Gibbs and Boltzmann seemed to give some credence to the idea of "logical" entropy, while not using the word. The difference is the difference between distribution of heat vs. the distribution of molecules. One is the classical J/K term, while the other follows by analogy, and is described by Boltzmann's constant. Because heat is continuous and molecules discontinuous, there is, as yet, no "analytical" solution to the "logical" entropy of mixing of molecules. That's what I meant by "logical" entropy. I'm fairly certain that my terminology will not satisfy in such an arcane topic.

It was my understanding that "informational" entropy as a concept was derived specifically from the same concepts, namely that the information available in a closed system would tend toward disorder without the input of useful energy. Thus, the word snoober draws three times as many hits as a potentially useful term "logical entropy." Given time, the spread will undoubtedly grow.

[Chaguito]

This is not a flame! Please!

If evolution as a theory does not deal with how life first appeared, what theory does? Isn't the concept of "molecules to man" simply a logical extension of evolution beyond the topics Darwin treated specifically?

[RightWingAtheist]

That doesn't necessarily mean they're scientifically literate though; in many cases it's simply applying the rhetoric of science to politics (just like the IDers do to religion), and they only "support" science to the extent that they see it as a bulwark against their enemies. If Muslims started to demand equal time for Allah in biology class, or some feminist Wiccan demanded that they teach the Gaia myth in her children's classroom, don't be surprised if they'd make an about face

[longshadow]

Thus, the word snoober draws three times as many hits as a potentially useful term "logical entropy." Given time, the spread will undoubtedly grow.

"Meaning" is context sensitive; "information" is context insensitive. "Usefulness" is a function of meaning, and, by extention, is also context sensitive.

[longshadow]

If evolution as a theory does not deal with how life first appeared, what theory does?

Abiogenesis. It isn't yet a theory, as no one has figured it out completely, and it would be extremely difficult to test.

[poinq]

OK, I am fine with all this. But personally I don't believe that Darwin and evolution explain everything. As a computer scientist (aka software developer), I can tell you it is very difficult to come up with the thousands of advanced systems in the human body or that of several species not human. I just don't believe that random chance explains the forward motion of all these highly interrelated and complex systems in a human body.

And as a father, I am amazed and confounded how a single cell in less than a year, can create a million cell organism that has all these systems. That the first cell makes other cells which have specialties and that those cells make further cells with differing specialties. Possibly more amazing and complex than the human body is the creation of the human body from a single cell.

I have a rule that I live by, which is that everything I learned in the seventies was false. Conservation of matter, Innocent until proven guilty, no water on Mars, John F. Kennedy was faithful to his wife. and so on. It goes along with Paul Simon's line "after all the crap I learned in high school...". I include Darwin in that crap. Well, look how completely wrong they were about the number of genes there are in the human body. So there is a bunch of stuff they don't know. I would say most stuff they still don't know.

I believe Darwin explains minor differences in species. This one is black to hide better or this one has longer feathers to fly longer. But that is a far cry from explaining the human brain, hand or eye. This concept of ID is someone else's not mine. But I don't find Darwin anymore feasible than creation.

[microgood]

I am not certain I understand what you find fault with in that statement, would you elaborate please?

In plain English, and in the context of his post he is saying that science-literate posters(pro-evolution and anti-creationist and ID) have been warning the unwashed masses(everyone but rapid evolutionists) that if a few conservatives in the Republican Party adopted ID or creationist views that the democrats could, with obvious justification, attack the whole conservative movement (which he erroneously thinks is 99% pro-evolution) and claim that we all are a bunch of ignorant, unwashed fools, whose religious views would drag us all back into the Dark Ages when in fact that is only true of those that disagree with rabid-evolutionists.

The obvious problems with this statement is:

Noone gives a dang who the guy in the article is or what he thinks.
Evolution has nothing to do with any election one way or another except we might lose the 230 votes PH has on his evo ping list.
Opposite to what he thinks, the vast majority of conservatives either disagree with evolution or do not care about it one way or the other and are Christians.

I really see no difference between the agenda of many of the evos on this thread and the ACLU. But it is more of the anyone that disagrees with an evolutionist is an idiot that sometimes sets me off.

And that post reminded me of a quote by Orwell which was something like "Some ideas are so stupid only an intellectual could believe them."

[WindOracle]

I would suggest MOST conservatives probably do not really give a damn one way or the other on that particular issue. I think most consider that argument to be rather minor among the things we have to worry about, or they do not view it as a thing which threatens their faith one way or the other. I subscribe to both actually, but find it an interesting topic. I think the ones who are making a SERIOUS issue of it are probably a few activists, for the most part, though many more are sympathetic to those activists cause.

As far as this part goes ...
the dems would use the anti-evolution sentiments of a few activists and attempt to brand the whole conservative movement as a bunch of ignorant, unwashed fools, whose religious views would drag us all back into the Dark Ages.
that is precisely how they ARE trying to brand the whole conservative movement.

[microgood]

that is precisely how they ARE trying to brand the whole conservative movement.

But not based on Creationists or ID. Most don't even know who or what those ideologies are about, except at the local level where most parents support the school initiatives.

You are correct if you are talking about the far Left but it has not worked in the last two presidential elections. The Religious Right Scaremongering argument for the left is no longer viable in American politics except when speaking to the choir. Mainly because younger people are rejecting the 60s and going back to more traditional values.

Almost 80% of Americans believe that 10 Commandment Monuments should not be removed from the public. In fact now the ACLU is helping the Republicans. If you look at people that are running for President on the Democratic side now like Hillary, God is every other word coming out of their mouth.

JesusLand is making a huge comeback in politics and the Religious Right concept is on the ashheap of history. Those lessons have been learned and the Republicans have adapted. The Demos have not.

[WindOracle]

To a great deal I agree with you. But I am living in a rural town pretty close to the very heart of the Bible Belt, and the evolution issue is not something I hear spoken of around the table at the coffee shop in the morning. We are for the most part a very conservative lot, and most are pretty devout church-goin men, but this does not seem to be the most pressing issue on the agenda.

[microgood]

I grew up very religious because of my grandparents. My father was not interested in religion. When I went to college, I majored in Philosophy (which I have a degree in) and it tore all my beliefs down to nothing. I had to rebuild them based on reasoning and philosophy. There are many valuable lessons to learn from science and evolutionary thinking. But they have to do with the physical world, not the human side of us. Science is a tool and to the extent evolutionary thinking can help that effort, fine.

But those who claim they know what we evolved from 500 million years ago, I just believe to be speculation. Historically based evolutionary theory is a lot like epidemiological studies (like smokers have a higher incidence of....) and deal with correlation but not causation.

When it comes to dealing with the human condition: sorrow, happiness, boredom, war or whatever else, only the accumulation of historical knowledge about the human condition is useful. That is why the 60s generation is so lost. They assumes everything that existed before their birth was irrelevant and that is why history will not remember their contribution when it come to the human condition. In fact they will be the poster boys for what not to do. I am from the same era, but was lucky to get wisdom from my grandparents.

Thanks for your correspondence. You are obviously a seeker of truth.

[Thatcherite]

Mostly, they're just resting, but I'm afraid some are dead.

They aren't dead!!! They are pining for the fjords.

[Thatcherite]

In addition to that, the chief philosopher and popularizer of evolution, Richard Dawkins, is one of those English nuts who was trashed on this website for writing letters to those folks in Ohio to get them to vote against W.

You should thank those English fruitloops. Their intervention probably helped W get re-elected... No-one likes being told what to do by a bunch of "smart" guys from another country and they probably solidified W's vote. What baffles me is how a load of clever guys in England couldn't see that.

Just because Dawkins is wrong about US politics it does not make him wrong about biological science. He is an expert in the biological sciences and knows nothing about US politics.

Dawkins' patronizing letter to Ohio voters is an embarrassment to the mainstream scientific cause just as many posters here who attack the science of evolutionary biology from a position of almost complete ignorance are an embarrassment to the conservative cause. In general if people made sure that they understood a subject before lecturing others about it we'd all be a lot better off. That goes for both Dawkins on US politics and many posters in these debates on evolution.

[Atlantic Friend]

'If we evolved from monkeys.... How come there are still monkeys?"

In a nutshell, because not every monkey species found itself forced to evolve, and among those who did some failed or proved deadends like puny 'homo africanus' and vegetarian 'homo robustus'.

[Thatcherite]

1. The small pop. with the initial mutation is too small to have a sufficient number of mutations (per breeding individual) to get a second successful mutation to further differentiate the species. 2. The overwhelming percentage of mutations due to all causes are harmful or uselessly neutral.

These two points imply that you don't have a handle on the role that geographical isolation, genetic drift, and natural selection play... Once populations become geographically isolated genetic drift alone moves them apart in DNA space, occasional beneficial mutations fixing in one population or the other are the icing on the cake.

It is true that harmful mutations are much more common than beneficial ones, (and neutral mutations are more common than either, hence genetic drift of geographical isolated groups) but that isn't the whole story. Most harmful mutations are VERY harmful, and immediately get selected out in the most final and permanent manner, either before birth or soon after.

[Atlantic Friend]

This is a very skewed analogy, since it's based on the assumption that lower forms of life (or even matter) were just spare parts filling no other purpose than to turn into us (or the 747).

[crail]

Gibbs and Boltzmann seemed to give some credence to the idea of "logical" entropy

No. I'd like to see a source on that. Everything you've read about entropy in the English language is simply a struggle to understand the equation. Physists work with equations, not with Webster's. In my travels, I've only ever seen one equation to define thermodynamic entropy, combined with a huge number of poor translations into English. Ignore the English, read the equation.

Because heat is continuous and molecules discontinuous, there is, as yet, no "analytical" solution to the "logical" entropy of mixing of molecules.

Huh?

It was my understanding that [snip] information available in a closed system would tend toward disorder without the input of useful energy.

No. Informational entropy was so named because the equation that defines what it is is exactly the same as the equation which descibes what thermodynamic entropy is. However, the first and second laws are different equations describing how thermodynamic entropy behaves. They are the laws of thermodynamics, not the laws of entropy, and they contain many terms not applicable to information theory. Such as temperature. How do you define the temperature of a stream of ones and zeros? Bits have no momentum. Energy? Also not applicable to bits.

For example: take oil and water and shake it up. The thermodynamic entropy of the mixed system is now low because there is a lot of potential energy that can be dissipated and turned into kinetic energy. In terms of thermodynamic entropy, this conversion is very favorable. However the informational entropy is high because it would take a lot of bits to describe the arrangement, with very little redundancy. Now wait. As it settles and seperates into an ordered arrangement, the system is dissipating potential energy, thus increasing its thermodynamic entropy, as it should. However, it is also decreasing it's informational entropy. In the end the locations of oil and water can be described by a large grid of solid ones, and a large grid of solid zeros, which is very redundant and very low in entropy. As thermodynamic entropy increased, informational entropy decreased. If there was a second law of informational entropy, Kraft has found a way to break it. However, the real story is that one should not apply the laws of thermodynamics outside the field of themodynamics.

For a good discussion of entropy see Entropy in Relation to Incomplete Knowledge which discusses both kinds and how not to interpret each. Or see an introductory information theory text in which you will find it does not discuss the second law of thermodynamics, except perhaps in relation to thermodynamical systems.

[Aloysius88]

small pop. = fewer mutations large pop. = difficulty in mutation spreading I realize what you are talking about but the problem is a multi-variable problem with time, population, mutation frequency and harm, and information complexity all having to be dealt with. If you start crossing off variables you can make the problem seem solvable.

occasional beneficial mutations fixing in one population or the other are the icing on the cake.

The theory seems to call for isolation of the new population to fix the new beneficial mutation and so seems to tend toward ever more isolated smaller populations thereby trending away from a density that would ensure greater mutational frequency.

[Aloysius88]

small pop. = fewer mutations
large pop. = difficulty in mutation spreading

I realize what you are talking about but the problem is a multi-variable problem with time, population, mutation frequency and harm, and information complexity all having to be dealt with. If you start crossing off variables you can make the problem seem solvable.

occasional beneficial mutations fixing in one population or the other are the icing on the cake.

The theory seems to call for isolation of the new population to fix the new beneficial mutation and so seems to tend toward ever more isolated smaller populations thereby trending away from a density that would ensure greater mutational frequency.