Posted on 05/25/2005 3:41:22 AM PDT by billorites
Science feeds on mystery. As my colleague Matt Ridley has put it: “Most scientists are bored by what they have already discovered. It is ignorance that drives them on.” Science mines ignorance. Mystery — that which we don’t yet know; that which we don’t yet understand — is the mother lode that scientists seek out. Mystics exult in mystery and want it to stay mysterious. Scientists exult in mystery for a very different reason: it gives them something to do.
Admissions of ignorance and mystification are vital to good science. It is therefore galling, to say the least, when enemies of science turn those constructive admissions around and abuse them for political advantage. Worse, it threatens the enterprise of science itself. This is exactly the effect that creationism or “intelligent design theory” (ID) is having, especially because its propagandists are slick, superficially plausible and, above all, well financed. ID, by the way, is not a new form of creationism. It simply is creationism disguised, for political reasons, under a new name.
It isn’t even safe for a scientist to express temporary doubt as a rhetorical device before going on to dispel it.
“To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.” You will find this sentence of Charles Darwin quoted again and again by creationists. They never quote what follows. Darwin immediately went on to confound his initial incredulity. Others have built on his foundation, and the eye is today a showpiece of the gradual, cumulative evolution of an almost perfect illusion of design. The relevant chapter of my Climbing Mount Improbable is called “The fortyfold Path to Enlightenment” in honour of the fact that, far from being difficult to evolve, the eye has evolved at least 40 times independently around the animal kingdom.
The distinguished Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin is widely quoted as saying that organisms “appear to have been carefully and artfully designed”. Again, this was a rhetorical preliminary to explaining how the powerful illusion of design actually comes about by natural selection. The isolated quotation strips out the implied emphasis on “appear to”, leaving exactly what a simple-mindedly pious audience — in Kansas, for instance — wants to hear.
The deceitful misquoting of scientists to suit an anti-scientific agenda ranks among the many unchristian habits of fundamentalist authors. But such Telling Lies for God (the book title of the splendidly pugnacious Australian geologist Ian Plimer) is not the most serious problem. There is a more important point to be made, and it goes right to the philosophical heart of creationism.
The standard methodology of creationists is to find some phenomenon in nature which Darwinism cannot readily explain. Darwin said: “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.” Creationists mine ignorance and uncertainty in order to abuse his challenge. “Bet you can’t tell me how the elbow joint of the lesser spotted weasel frog evolved by slow gradual degrees?” If the scientist fails to give an immediate and comprehensive answer, a default conclusion is drawn: “Right, then, the alternative theory; ‘intelligent design’ wins by default.”
Notice the biased logic: if theory A fails in some particular, theory B must be right! Notice, too, how the creationist ploy undermines the scientist’s rejoicing in uncertainty. Today’s scientist in America dare not say: “Hm, interesting point. I wonder how the weasel frog’s ancestors did evolve their elbow joint. I’ll have to go to the university library and take a look.” No, the moment a scientist said something like that the default conclusion would become a headline in a creationist pamphlet: “Weasel frog could only have been designed by God.”
I once introduced a chapter on the so-called Cambrian Explosion with the words: “It is as though the fossils were planted there without any evolutionary history.” Again, this was a rhetorical overture, intended to whet the reader’s appetite for the explanation. Inevitably, my remark was gleefully quoted out of context. Creationists adore “gaps” in the fossil record.
Many evolutionary transitions are elegantly documented by more or less continuous series of changing intermediate fossils. Some are not, and these are the famous “gaps”. Michael Shermer has wittily pointed out that if a new fossil discovery neatly bisects a “gap”, the creationist will declare that there are now two gaps! Note yet again the use of a default. If there are no fossils to document a postulated evolutionary transition, the assumption is that there was no evolutionary transition: God must have intervened.
The creationists’ fondness for “gaps” in the fossil record is a metaphor for their love of gaps in knowledge generally. Gaps, by default, are filled by God. You don’t know how the nerve impulse works? Good! You don’t understand how memories are laid down in the brain? Excellent! Is photosynthesis a bafflingly complex process? Wonderful! Please don’t go to work on the problem, just give up, and appeal to God. Dear scientist, don’t work on your mysteries. Bring us your mysteries for we can use them. Don’t squander precious ignorance by researching it away. Ignorance is God’s gift to Kansas.
Richard Dawkins, FRS, is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, at Oxford University. His latest book is The Ancestor’s Tale
Is dropping a pin on equally spaced parallel lines a random mechanism?
Three rules for improving your survival fittness (due to Nelsen Algren):
1. Never play cards with a man called Doc.
2. Never eat at a place called Mom's.
3. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.
Now that's an interesting "thing". Maybe Ichy could explain its ancestry and evolution?
At first I was going to say that some things are beyond even my ken (not to mention my Barbie), but then I realized that it clearly must be a relative to the RhinoCycle.
If it is to be as it is, is he to go on, or to be in on it?
Why did Hemmingway's chicken cross the road? To die. In the rain.
I've been told that my participation in the action in question makes it impossible to avoid the stated outcome.
Is dropping a pin on equally spaced parallel lines a random mechanism?
Only someone who was a real Buffon would think to make such a suggestion. He should be needled repeatedly.
Yeah in a way it is I think. The Bible even states that we have that freedom to believe or not. Believing is to accept something as being the truth. It's saying something is real, genuine but whether we choose to believe it as truth is certainly a matter of personal choice.
There's also a variant with a camel that ends with, "yeah, but *we* just ride it into town..."
(You really need to rewrite that sentence; however, I'll presume you are referrin to Buffon. Note that the act of dropping the pin may be independent of whether it lands on lines or polka dots.)
Maybe. Depends on the height of the pin release and the elasticity of both the pin and whatever the lines are drawn on.
Doc stuck those on me too, but here's a couple more:
1. Never trust a man with no neck.
2. Never pet a dog that's on fire.
DS, you want to start a collection?
Science doesn't employ burning at the stake to make it's scientific arguements. That would be as opposed to the Catholic church in Galileo's day.
Your understanding of the studies, effects, and trial of Galileo is skewed from the inside. You would rather not admit that a.) the church was in large part a champion of science at the time, and b.) science was clinging to Aristotelian dogma like most of the rest of the world.
I understand this perfectly well. It has little bearing on the big issues in the Trial of Galileo as conventionally understood by conventional historians.
The Trail occured because the inquisition did not want the ideas in his book spread around--not because Galileo offended their sensibilities, even if a couple of recent books, largely by Catholic apologists, say otherwise.
This is ridiculous, paper-thin, historical revisionism.
Ichy, you need to get a life than I do 8>{
Look, all I can do is repeat what I said ---I don't know how, but I think it's possible that evolution, at least in some form, can co-exist with creationism. I truly think God has worked this out so one doesn't have to exclude the other.
Quote mining Damon Runyon would probably be more fruitful.
I'll take that answer as yes. And the probability of the pin falling on a line when the length of the pin is equal to the distance between the parallels is what?
There is exactly the same amount of courtroom quality evidence for the theory that God created the heavens and earth, as for the Norse theory of God's vs. Giants now buried deep in the earth. And about the same measure of respectable second-hand witnesses. Furthermore, plenty of Greeks would have been ready to step up to the microphone and swear their certain knowledge derived from no courtroom-quality evidence whatsoever, just like you. Why should I take you any more seriously than I take them?
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