I've been waiting for the opportunity to post this, and that's probably the best one I'm going to get. This is supposed to be one of the actual pics from the prison scandal:
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
*holding tongue*...
This forum itself is enough evidence for me. These tools, and these responses, weren't brought about without the assistance of intelligence and design. If you want to attribute this stuff to nothing more than natural selection and random mutations, be my guest. But please do not insist that your view be the only one permitted by law in the schools toward which I am paying taxes.
I've been waiting for the opportunity to post this, and that's probably the best one I'm going to get. This is supposed to be one of the actual pics from the prison scandal:
What kind of expletive is that? Intelligent or unintelligent? By design, or by natural selection?
Looks more to me like your test for the speed of light.
All but the primal prime of 666...on which you currently are overdue for rent.
But something you are above admitting to yourself, let alone other people. Guess you were a born genius. Congratulations.
Well, that's his first misstep. He's simply wrong, and HE'S being purposely "disguised for political reasons" as he likes to put things.
ID is NOT Creationism. Nor is a dog a cat.
ID is appeal to a mathematical model of probabilities and improbabilities about the likelihood of complexity occuring randomly in nature.
Creationism is a theory of origins that posits God bringing about, in 6 days as per the judeo-christian bible, all that we see in the universe.
I just got an article on Evolution and Judaism from 'The Scientist'. It's not bad. Want me to post it?
I sense a "Village Fugs" revival coming soon....
(Let's see how many people pick up on that obscure allusion....)
Except that we're not talking about that. Your underlying fallacy here is essentially an argument from incredulity: I can't think of a way for evolution to have happened naturally, therefore it must have been designed.
If you think you have in any way shown us evidence for intelligent design as the term is used to challenge evolution, you're wrong.
What you're doing is called "bait and switch."
Sure. If you like it, then I assume it's more about science than religion.
I already told you. That belongs to Darwin Central.
... by using numbers chosen through no rational criteria, having no demonstrable relationship to the events they purport to model, and combining them to get a really, really big other number, and then applied arbitrarily in an attempt to point out how improbably everything is.
Very scientific.
Whereas, you have personally observed God making a Protist with a lightning bolt in a pile of sludge, I guess.
In honor of one of the Ancient Egyptian Gods, no doubt, like Ptah, Thoth, etc.
They correctly apply the numbers based on the field of probability and statistics.
Intuitively, a person knows that my car (a complex thing) didn't just accidentally happen.
My brain is far more complex than my car.
Life itself is far more complex than anything....so much so that they don't even have a description of what it is. If you don't think so, then find a corpse and ask a scientist to describe in detail what it is that left that used to be there.
Certain posters may pick up a sly Will Cuppy reference here.
Not to be confused with sports fans.
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