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
I'm content to allow non-randomness explanations (as speculative possibilities) from whatever source, philosophy, science, etc. It just seems clear to me that the randomness piece of evolution makes it untenable. I'm content with the evaluation that the current evolutionary understanding is inadequate.
I know the direction to search is away from randomness-infected evolutionary theory. The best guesses lie in some non-randomness direction.
ID is promising in that it is a non-randomness direction. Add to my faith honest research and I'm content.
Hey, I got posts #1900 and 2000. One more and I
have a monopoly, and I can build a motel.
Do you understand the distinction between random with a continuous distribution, and random with a gaussian distribution?
Good luck chasing mirages in the shadows!
The textbook example you linked to had qualifiers.
Translation: We are quacks and frauds like Uri Geller, and our phenomenon is non-existent in double blind studies.
Sheldrake is another quack who's data goes south when his experiments are done with controls.
No, it's been a while since I've studied distribution of any kind.....stat & research classes at KSU in 95. The Gaussian rings a bell.....curve???? :>)
Ed, when I offer an opinion you can consider it right or wrong. That's up to you. Calling me a creationist liar proves nothing except perhaps that you are limited in your ability to intellectually oppose my opinion so you resort to what you guys call ad hominem argumentum. I think that's what you call it at any rate.
Richard Dawkins: “Society, for no reason that I can discern, accepts that parents must have an automatic right to bring their children up with particular religious opinions and can withdraw them from say, biology classes that teach evolution.”
If you think that is the writing of a man in favor of religious liberty, you're whacked. But perhaps you should ask Dawkins if his evil twin wrote it?
I understand that most of the translation work is done. The remaining work is to match fragment xyz to Biblical text abc or to Talmudic commentary 123 -- or is this piece of parchment something new?
The current theory, as I understand it, is the Essenes copied a minor portion by themselves, maybe 10-25%, but the rest were scripts written outside the community. One conjecture is that they believed they were already in the "end-times" and had been copying and burying scrolls for years The 66-72 Jewish revolt may have forced them to speed it up and accept outside texts.
... Also, fragments of every Biblical book except Esther have been found, as well as many other non-Biblical texts.
The wining and dining and seducing the King like in Esther probably wouldn't have appealed to them. But the Jews didn't have a "accepted" canon back then.
... as well as in the coming of the prophesied Messiah, whose kingdom they foresaw as drawing close to earth, which is exactly what Jesus claimed.
Orthodox Jews were expecting a strong triumphant King that would redeem the Jewish nation en masse. Jesus was clearly not the Messiah as the Jews understood him to be.
I am saddened when bright people fall for quackery. Conan Doyle was taken in by a couple of teenage girls and their pictures of garden fairies. The psychologist William James was sucked in by a medium, whom he labeled the white crow.
In my lifetime I have seen large numbers of people taken in by plants with feeings, pyramid power, Atlantis in beach stone, and a dozen others.
I always associated this with left wing, new age hippie thinking, but I will have to re-evaluate this.
It indicates that Euclid was intelligent. (Or whoever invented the algorithm.) Not all fields have an Euclidean algorithm.
This has experimental consequences. So far, all the experimental evidence comes down on the side of randomess.
From a previously posted example: in a bunch of radioactive atoms, some decay, some sit around. The half-life for decay can be measured as can the probability of any given atom decaying in given time interval. In both theory and practice, it cannot be determined which atom will decay next nor when a given atom will decay. Were such a determination possible, one could separate the "hot" from the "cold" atoms and label each atom by it's scheduled decay time. Labelled atoms obey Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics whereas unlabelled one obey either Fermi-Dirac or Bose-Einstein statistic. Experimentally only the FD or BE have been observed.
And yet Israel exists.
"I recently met in Jerusalem with Professor Leon Lederman, Nobel Prize winning physicist. We were talking science, obviously. And as the conversation went on, I said, "What about spirituality, Leon?" And he said to me, "Schroeder, I'll talk science with you, but as far as spirituality, speak to the people across the street, the theologians." But then he continued, and he said, "But I do find something spooky about the people of Israel coming back to the Land of Israel."" Gerald Schroeder
God works in mysterious ways. :-}
Technically, a Gaussian distribution is continuous. Did you mean Gaussian versus uniform?
Yes, it did, but it only had one suggestion that hardly bespeaks the utter lack of certitude involved in suggesting abiogenesis.
Well, I hope you're happy!
No.
Conjecture: inference based on inconclusive or incomplete evidence; guesswork.
Theory: Systematically organized knowledge applicable in a relatively wide variety of circumstances; especially, a system of assumptions, accepted principles, and rules of procedure devised to analyze predict, or otherwise explain the nature or behavior of a specified set of phenomena
Both definitions from the American Heritage Dictionary, Collegiate edition, 1976.
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