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
You'll be singing a new tune when the Begonian Star Guild gets here..
I still laugh when I remember the classic thread where someone was talking about "Intelligent-Design-which-isn't-about-god-really-we-swear-it", and Right Wing Professor remarked (concerning the bizarre structure of DNA), "If there were a designer, he would have had to have been drunk."
...and then some moron responded with, "Yours was a deliberate, unprovoked and pointless attack on religion which proved nothing except your enmity towards religion."
Gosh, I thought that ID wasn't *about* religion...
No you didn't.
You stated random mechanisms always yield complexity.
Clue for the confused #1: An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications
A random mechanism yielded pi which you said was not complex.
Clue for the confused #2: This random process does *not* yield pi (nor did Doctor Stochastic say that it did). It yields a random rational number of rather high complexity which is statistically constrained to likely be in the close neighborhood of pi, because the probability of a "hit" is related to pi itself. But the result itself is guaranteed to *not* actually be the non-complex constant "pi" (because pi is irrational, whereas the result of the Buffon needle-throwing experiment will be rational since it is the quotient of two integers).
Clue for the confused #3: Tallying up the "hits" and dividing by the total number of drops is a deterministic conversion which drastically reduces the amount of complexity in the original sequence of drop results.
Clue for the confused #4: Consider the similar case of flipping a fair coin 1023 times in a row. The resulting sequence has a Kolmogorov Complexity near 1023 bits. Now do the Buffon's Needle method in order to approximate the probability of a "hit" (a head) on any given flip, which is exactly 0.5 -- divide the number of heads (0-1023) by the number of flips (constant 1023). Due to the "lumping" effect of extracting only the total number of heads (while ignoring their sequence), the numeric result of (Nhits/1023) has a Kolmogorov Complexity of only around 10 bits (fewer, actually, since the distribution of the number of heads is not uniform across 0-1023), resulting in over a 99% reduction in complexity.
[The sequence of crossings (or non-crossings) in a large number of throws may be complex.]
That "probability" does not equal one then.
Clue for the confused #5: "May" in this context is not used in the sense of "may or may not". It is used in the sense of, "you may have a brain, but you're not using it." Doctor Stochastic was saying, "Although the sequence of throws may be complex, a deterministic description of throws is not".
[Only a randomly generated sequence can yield complexity.]
How many times do I have to flip a coin.....
How much complexity do you want?
Oh never mind the "probability" is still not one.
Sure it is.
From the same population as the first two. Could you be a bit more specific as to what exactly you're trying to learn about here?
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos."
Thank you for your very excellent reply. In my experience, the "creationist" school tended to be from only the 6 day/young earth group. I appreciate the instruction otherwise.
Collective consciousness is Eastern metaphysics
What school of "Eastern metaphysics" holds that "collective consciousness" intelligently designed life on Earth? I will help out with a few examples that don't: Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Jainism, and Shintoism.
OR, they are a branch of our own family tree that made it into space long ago, and built the Monuments on Mars before skipping out of the Solar System entirely. Homo Habilis on anti-steroids.
OR, they are an artificially induced cross between the Rigelian Lizard People and us, to radically alter their space-faring dissapated blood line, or to shake them out of their doldrums, or to serve them as a congruently designed shepard/interpreter slaves when the come to collect all our magnificent nervous systems to be transplanted as control devices to run their ships and machinery.
OR, they are the demons and fairies and trolls that have always been around, but rarely glimpsed by humans, and whose cultures operate hidden from our view in the corners of our planet we don't occupy.
Or, wait, no--they are the numerous illicit offspring of Clinton's drug-addled genes, organized by the CIA to mutilate our cattle and breed with our woman using massive machinery, in order to produce a tractable race of hairless secret agent love slaves.
I believe you might have over-focused on the suggested solutions to the intelligent designer question to the exclusion of the reason for asking such a question in the first place.
Since the data indicates that randomness is not a probably answer, then the right direction is most likely in some direction other than randomness. That suggests purposefulness and design....thence, intelligent design.
Hypothetically, as if you were concerned with answering the question, What would YOU speculate as the source of the intelligent design?
The problem, of course, is that our experience limits our speculations.
I am over-focused on truth, reality, logic, and reason. My specific focus in that remark was: Don't make false statements, and no, it's not OK to make false statements just because you're trying to be creative.
Since the data indicates that randomness is not a probably answer, then the right direction is most likely in some direction other than randomness.
Yeah, you're right. That direction appears to be evolution, which isn't random.
That suggests purposefulness and design....thence, intelligent design.
No, it doesn't. And even if it did, panspermia is still not a theory of intelligent design and the only religions that I'm aware of that attributed the development of life to "collective consciousness" were a few Native American legends, and they did not specify anything "intelligently designed"..
Hypothetically, as if you were concerned with answering the question, What would YOU speculate as the source of the intelligent design?
If life on Earth is the product of intelligent design, then some kind of transcendent deity is almost certainly the designer.
The problem, of course, is that our experience limits our speculations.
Yes, that is a problem, but the main problem is that there's no evidence of intelligent design, deities, extraterrestrial seeding, or an entity of collective consciousness.
PS. And where I say 'no evidence of intelligent design' I am obviously referring to no evidence of speciation attributable to intelligent design other than human endeavor. Just in case someone (there's always someone) needs that explicitly clarified.....
We would disagree on the randomness that's a necessity of the evolution model.
Also, there's plenty of evidence of a deity. So far as our worldview imposing limitations of our ability to speculate, it's a given in many other disciplines. Therefore, it makes sense here.
Just so I know where you're coming from: Using standard definitions, I am a religious person (see my tagline.) Are you?
I'm not understanding the distinction you are making with your "other than."
If indeed we did, then one or both of us would be wrong. If it were only one, then that would almost certainly be you.
Also, there's plenty of evidence of a deity.
If there were any evidence of a deity, much less plenty, we wouldn't be having this debate.
So far as our worldview imposing limitations of our ability to speculate, it's a given in many other disciplines. Therefore, it makes sense here.
Nor did I dispute that.
Just so I know where you're coming from: Using standard definitions, I am a religious person (see my tagline.) Are you?
No.
We have created new species of microbes in labs. Also, several domesticated plants and animals are due to human endeavor distinct species from those of which they originated.
That's an ugly, awkward sentence!
Take two:
Due to human endeavor, several species of domesticated plants and animals are now distinct from those species of which they originated.
I think I will be able to find plenty of quotes from evolutionists who will use the "randomness" word and/or synonymous language in describing their view.
You don't deny I'll be able to find those, do you?
No, why should I? If you wish I'll be happy to discuss any that you find.
Thanks. I wasn't sure what you meant by the "other than."
I got it with the first sentence, but the rewrite was better.
We need an FR "redo" button, so we can take back posts. I always see mistakes right AFTER I hit the "post" button. :>)
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