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
Well, yes, but every definition of ID contains an implicit assumption of vitalism. That is a problem of ID, not a problem of our definition, which cannot define ID as anything other than what ID is.. LOL
He doesn't have to. You see, being a creationist means you can snipe from the sidelines, but never actually have to get into specifics. It's a special dispensation enjoyed by the truly benighted.
That is correct, but as stated above, a definition of intelligence is not necessary to classify a hypothesis as an "intelligent design" hypothesis. All that you need is that the cause specified by the given hypothesis be intelligent.
The objection you raise, also raised in a different context by xzins and PatrickHenry, derives so far as I can tell from the fallacy of the excluded middle that is so common amongst ID theorists such as Alamo-Girl. It appears in statements such as this (fabricated by me as an exemplar):
The eye is irreducibly complex, therefore since the odds of an eye springing fully formed out of the ether are infinitesimal, some vague, undefined intelligent actor created eyes.
When you try to pin down the intelligent actor, the answer given by ID advocates is something along these lines (again fabricated by me as an exemplar):
Umm.. It could be god, random particles floating around interstellar space, or, you know, something kinda like the groupthink.
Since they don't bother to specify the intelligent designer (a question that we have pending), then you have this question of: What is "intelligent" and what is "intelligence" for the purpose at hand.
But, in any event, I have had every intention of addressing the point whenever we get to the stage of classifying "panspermia" and "collective consciousness" (which we're not doing yet). We cannot classify anything as an intelligent cause unless we establish that it is in fact intelligent..
I've never submitted to Nature (until the Good Friday agreement, I was boycotting British journals, as any good Irishman should, but they don't seem to have felt the sting ;-)). Science, though, have similar policies.
The current rash of rejections is largely a reflection of British academic politics. Merit evaluations in the UK reward publishing a small number of very high rated papers; they have 'impact factors' for each journal, and Nature is either the highest or one of the highest. So British academics are pressured to get one or a couple of Nature papers a year, rather than 5 or 6 in 'lesser' journals. IMO it's stupid, but I think it accounts for the recently higher rejection rate.
That is impossible. Based on what we know of human physiology, it is exceedingly unlike any human being could make it to 150, let alone 900.
Yet another example of where a literal reading of the bible contradicts not only science but ordinary common sense.
The giant uneaxmined premise, of course, is that it's possible to come up with a practical (I won't ask for rigorous) way of distinguishing life from non-life.
The undisclosed potential modification that I alluded to above deals with that issue.
That is what I initially suggested when I proposed the term "speciation" in place of life v non-life, but Alamo-Girl (and HiTech RedNeck) objected to the restriction of Intelligent Design hypotheses to direct alternatives of the modern synthesis theory of genetic evolution. PatrickHenry also presented comparable alternatives, but Alamo-Girl would veto those as well.
I happen to agree with Alamo-Girl that anything can be contemplated within the parameters of an Intelligent Design hypothesis. The following, by example:
The Dell Principle: AntiGuv's computer hardware configuration is explained by the production and marketing institution known as Dell Inc., rather than by spontaneous assembly on his desk.
It may be far more useful to narrow the definition for present purposes, but Alamo-Girl doesn't want us to do that and I don't really have any objection with regard to the questions at hand.
Didja click the links? AndrewC and I went over this already. Go read and come up to speed. We identify objects of unknown origin as man-made by comparing them with other objects of known origin--man-made and naturally ocurring.
I assume that you agree with him that there is a way to determine design in living organisms. How does one do so? Do you have examples of designed and undesigned organisms against which we can compare unknown specimens? Or is there another way?
We once had a very interesting thread on this: The Design Inference Game.
You owe me a new, coffee-free monitor.
Be honest, you just make this stuff up as you go. Or do you have some credible source for this claim?
How about this one: Time has always been the same.
Nope. Science always operates with a set of unknowns as its basis. Abiogenesis is an unknown. Creation out of nothing is an unknown. No human witness means, quite frankly, no certitude where the bigger picture is concerned. As donh pointed out, it took science over 80 pages to "prove" 1 + 1 = 2 and even then it took fifty years for a correction to manifest itself.
When science is taught it should be taught with qualifiers. It's not hard, and it is not harmful, to maintain a tone of uncertainty where the bigger questions are considered.
No individual can establsh a "legal" definition of science. There may be groups of scientists here or there that are in general agreement (for example we'd be hard pressed to find one that denies 1 + 1 = 2). But the reality is that every observer is his own scientist, and every obeserver operates with a large set of unproven assumptions.
Do you believe in a heliocentric solar system because you've seen with your own eyes, or because others have told you what they themselves have observed?
No kidding? Where did you get the other 999,995 kingdoms?
Good to see you write in terms of likelihood. A shorter length of time given for human observation throughout history only means less knowledge upon which to build. The stock in trade of science is human knowledge. All hypotheses, experimentation, and recording of results must take place by way of human intelligence. If a human observer was not present in time 4.5 billion years ago, then the proposition that the earth is 4.5 billion years old must be treated as reasonable conjecture. Nothing more, and nothing less.
As for a 969 year-old human observer, I take it by faith that the biblical proposition is true. However I am disinclined to think the Gregorian calendar was in use when these words were first spoken. The biblical account reads with considerable detail where human generations are denoted, and for good reason. Until the creation could be set aright through God's intervention in human flesh, it was necessary that the line of human flesh through whom the Creator would intervene be documented.
I can understand how comparisons are of value in determining the presence of intelligent design or not. What I am asking is, when the comparisions are made, what attributes of the object lead to the observer to a conclusion?
Oh, I didn't realize you were being silly, but what difference would it make specific to the statement regarding light from distant galaxies?
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