1. Strong Anthropic Principle - I exist as the result of a highly unlikely chain of events. Because my existence is so improbable, I must conclude that a "Higher Power" must be behind my existence.
Dean: Refuted here. Similar arguments have been used historically to explain what at the time was unexplainable, e.g. the revolution of the planets and the flight of an arrow. Science eventually reached a point where such leaps from the physical to the metaphysical were no longer necessary.
My problem with this principle is that leap. We go from the testable to the untestable. We also elevate ourselves to the status of the reason for the universe to exist. That stinks too much of Earth-at-the-center-of-the -universe stuff to me.
2. Weak Anthropic Principle: Cogito Ergo Sum - I exist because I observe myself to exist.
I have no serious problem with this one.
3. My problem is that you are introducing a philosophical or quasi-religious concept into a science class. These questions are beyond the scope of science and should be taught in a philosophy class.
Why don't you push for its teaching there? Or why not in PE? After all this concept has as much to do with science as it does with dodgeball.
1. Strong anthropic principal - It's not science in the technical definition of "science." It's a theory that is not testable or provable. In that sense it becomes sort of a statement of faith.
2. Weak anthropic principal - Sort of a semantically dumbed down version of the strong anthropic principal. It fundamentally ignores the possibility of non-carbon based life.
Both of these strike me as the result of limitations of our observational opportunities (we can't see and study universes different than our own), limitations of imagination (life "as we know it" becomes "life - period"), or limitations of current theory. In many respects I consider the anthropic principal to be the modern equivalent of the belief that earth (mankind) is the center of the universe.
I am going to need more time on the rest of these so I'll try to tackle them tonight.
1. The SAP states that since intelligent, language-creatures exist, and since this is a priori unlikely to occur in a random universe, that therefore the universe must have conditions favorable to such creatures and could not have been any other way. This seems like an unwarranted assumption to me.
2. The WAP states that since intelligent, language-creatures exist, the Universe has conditions favorable to such creatures, which is a perfectly good conclusion. The difference between SAP and WAP is that WAP concludes something about the way the universe is, whereas SAP concludes something about the way the universe must be.
3. There's nothing wrong with raising the question, "what accounts for the high degree of apparent design in living creatues?" is a very important and deep one. What's wrong is misrepresenting false answers to the question as being on a par with the actual answer.
4. If SETI actually manages to find anything interesting patterns in EM signals, it will be evidence, but not conclusive evidence, that there is, in fact, intelligent extraterrestial life. If, however, it is later discovered that there is a nonintelligent mechanism which is capable of forming EM signals into interesting designed patterns (an analogue of evolution through natural and sexual selection), and there proves to be substantial evidence that this nonintelligent mechanism is, in fact, responsible for the signals detected (an analogue to the fossil and genetic record), then we will have to discount the hypothesis that aliens are behind it. In this case, the objects producing the EM signals themselves could be considered lifeforms (possibly intelligent, possibly not).
Similarly, until the mechanism of evolution was proposed, and there was substantial evidence that it was responsible for the apparent design of lifeforms, the hypothesis that God did it was as good as any other.
5. I have not read that book, so I cannot provide an intelligent answer to this question. My apologies.
6. None of them, obviously. Nor should your child be prevented, by court order, from exposure to any of the related beliefs discussed above (evolution, intelligent design, Flying Spaghetti Monsters, aliens, etc.). You're free to teach your children that 2+2=5 or to send them to a religious institution or private school that does. That doesn't mean that public schools should teach that 2+2=5 in math class.
1) The universe must be such that intelligent life will evolve.
2) Any observed universe must be such that intelligent life could evolve. Further, no matter how unlikely such evolution is, it will be observed to have occurred.
4) SETI is firmly grounded in the scientific tradition of observation. Positive or negative results will be useful data. There is no fundamental reason that theories must proceed observation (and in fact, some of the most important modern theories followed observations, such as quantum theory). I would say it is quite different from Dembski because it is not "asking questions", it is obtaining observational data.
5) Having not read the book, I have no comment on this.
1) I know of no evidence for it, nor can I conceive of how we could accumulate evidence for it unless we can transcend certain limits (i.e. the fact that we inhabit a single universe). The manifestation of a being which makes a credible claim to have created our universe having used this principle as part of the design spec would make me reconsider - i.e. if a being appeared, explained that it had created us and our universe, and as evidence altered the physical constraints of the universe or made half the stars in our galaxy disappear.
2) It's a tautology; since carbon-based life has evolved, the Universe must be such that carbon-based life can evolve.
3) I stopped beating my wife yesterday, why do you ask?
I'll reframe your question in a way which isn't deliberately insulting. Why am I so strongly against it? Because my opinion, formed through my own investigation and not through taking anyone's word for it it, is that ID is not a scientific endeavor. You yourself define it as 'twaddle'; I object to attempts to dilute the already weak process of teaching young people in this country scientific thinking with twaddle.
4) I don't think the *mechanics* of what SETI is doing are unscientific - there's nothing wrong with gathering data - but yes, I do think that if they ever discover 'evidence of intelligent life' in the form of seemingly non-random patterns of data, a lot of the same criticisms leveled at ID will be leveled at those conclusions.
5) I haven't read it so I can't directly address your question. However, I'm a little dubious of the implied claim that anyone has ever said that reading 'Of Pandas And People' would render a child unable to understand photosynthesis, meitosis, or genetics (my wife's bruises are healing nicely, thanks). I do think that introducing this book does have the potential to confuse students about how science works. If nothing else, it seems to be teaching them that scientific theory development works by taking ideas roundly rejected by the scientific community and subjecting them to a second round of review by ninth graders.
6) Personally, although I think the whole thing is profoundly stupid, I'm uncertain about the court orders. I prefer public exposure and the resulting ridicule as a way of deterring school boards from making this kind of decision.
The 'scientific method' is philosophy, too. There is an underlying philosophy - several, actually - to scientific research. That philosophy must be covered for a full understanding to be reached.
The ID line fails to be 'science' because it isn't falsifiable. If you cannot say 'this is how you prove me wrong' in a doable way, you aren't doing science. If you can't make a prediction which separates your hypothesis from competing hypotheses, and which experiment can find to be right, or wrong, you aren't doing science. If you don't run the experiment, you aren't doing science. Merely hypothesizing isn't science - you also have to draw predictions from these hypotheses, test them by experiment - natural or otherwise, and then others must be able to replicate your experiments. You cannot do science without the experiments, and you cannot gain acceptance without successful experimentation.
Unless you can exhaust all possible alternative theories, you cannot point to the failures of others as evidence for your own hypothesis. Proof by exhaustion is difficult and tedious even in mathematics, where the assumptions are known and mostly uniform. In a real world of science where the postulates are unknown and disagreed on, proof by exhaustion is in practice impossible. Pointing out the flaws in evolution do absolutely nothing to advance the idea of ID as science in scientific terms, only in rhetorical and political terms.
People didn't finally accept Einstein because his math made sense, they accepted him because his theories predicted then-unknown things which proved to be true. What is taught in primary science classroom should be science, and primarily generally accepted science, at that. Before having testable hypotheses which proved correct, Einstein wouldn't have belonged in a classroom any more than ID does now.
1-2) Anthropic principles - I'll 'go with' the idea that any theory of the universe we come up with must allow the realization of carbon based life, for the same reason that any complete theory of physics must allow for the development of protons - a theory which doesn't at least grossly correspond to reality is useless. The stronger versions are foolish - there is no reason to suspect that there don't, or can't, exist 'other' universes outside of our own which consist entirely of neutrinos or whatever. Wherever ours came from, there could be others. A universe may only be OBSERVED if its development leads to the development of life - there is no 'observed' without 'observers'. That doesn't mean that things can't happen without observation. If a tree falls in a forest, it still causes ripples of compression to propogate through air, whether there is a chipmunk or not to understand those ripples as 'sound'.
3) Physical Science is naturalist - it is predicated, explicitly, on the idea that everything observable has a natural and (at least idirectly) observable cause - that there are no extrauniversal, nonobservable phenomena - though their could be intrauniversal things we can't see, yet. ID is obviously not like this. Putting ID in science class is like putting grammar in mathematics class. If it doesn't fit, you must, uh, quit.
The difference can be clarified by putting this question: If it were determined that the best theory is to say that this universe was created by an intelligence, what is the next step? The scientific response is to ask - what is the nature and origin of that intelligence? what is the nature and origin of the verse it inhabits? ID returns with, essentially, religion.
When you stop using naturalism as an explanation, it is no longer physical science(the type of 'science' in the 'science' classroom, it is theology, and belongs in a theology classroom. (Theology could be considered as, at least ideally, the 'science' of religion. Studying the mind is 'psychology' and thus doesn't belong in the biology or 'life science' class. Studying protozoa is 'biology' and doesn't belong in the physics classroom. And studying the supernatural isn't physics, biology, chemistry, astronomy, geology, etc. and doesn't belong in the physical science classroom.
4) We have uncontrovertable evidence of the existence of intelligent life in the universe. SETI is merely an attempt to find a second realization of this phenomenon. We know our methods for SETI aren't sufficient to find 'ourselves' at more than about 20 LY range, so the lack of success at finding other life is neither surprising nor discouraging. I think the current SETI is mostly a waste of time and effort, and until it is successful it is a waste of time to spend more than a few minutes of sidebar on it in a classroom as an example of current bleeding-edge research, but it IS scientific - it is, in fact, testing predictions derived from hypotheses. We have no such evidence for an intelligent 'designer'. We ourselves cannot 'create' life without using as the building blocks existing lifeforms, and we have no evidence that anyone else can.
William Dembski is many things, but a scientist he is not. Look at his degrees - divinity, mathematics, philosophy, but no science. (Math ain't science. Math is a tool in a toolbox. It can be used as a tool in creating hypotheses, it can be used as a tool in analysing results. Without context it is useless. That 2+2=4 in base 10 is all well and good, but it doesn't mean anything until we say 2...what?)
5) Irrelevant. Reading Moby Dick in biology class wouldn't prevent your kid from understanding genetics, photosynthesis, or meiosis either, except to the extent that time spent on that tome is time not spent on those topics. It still doesn't belong there. It belongs in English class. It COULD prevent your kid from understanding evolution, because ID proponents so often misrepresent evolutionary theories.
6) None of them - if you want to raise them with your kids, have at.
Vis a vis raising these topics in a science classroom in a public school - what classroom? Psychology, life science, general physical science? What we call 'science' education at the primary/secondary level is actually restricted to physical science. Economics doesn't belong there. Neither does psychology. Neither does linguistics. All are 'sciences' - they are 'social sciences'. Theology, of which ID is a theorem, is a third animal, which could be called 'supernatural sciences' or 'metaphysics'.
As for the presence of supernatural science in the classroom - 'Congress shall make no law regarding the establishment of religion', a principle which has been extended to the states, of which public schools are a part. Religion can be defined in these terms as 'what you believe' about SS - it is in the most scientific terms the 'theories' of theology. If you draw ANY conclusions in your study of 'theology', you are taking on a religion. If you teach these conclusions in a class, you are establishing them as the religion of that class. Thus, you are, at a small level, 'establishing' religion. If you draw no conclusions, you, again, aren't doing any kind of science. (Imagine teaching copernicus while trying to 'balance' 'Earth is the center' with 'Earth orbits sun' and not drawing conclusions.) This is an argument of law, not reason, because my premises are too far from those of an ID advocate for us to discuss anything 'reasonably'. My reasoned argument is that the primary and secondary classroom should be devoted to 'canon' - well accepted science, ss, and math, widely regarded literature, generally accepted grammar and spelling. No quack science, no Harry Potter, no Ebonics. ID isn't in that category. Some Bible is fine - if it is taught as an example of pursuasive literature or fiction and analyzed in those terms.
(E.g. Job. How does the language of Job lend credibility to the story? Would it be as credible if argued in English at a fifth grade level? Is the 'god' character's behavior consistent with other presentations in the same literature? How do Job's assumptions about his relationship to god advance the plot? What are the contradictions in the behaviors of the protagonists? What conclusions is the author trying to lead the reader to? What changes in behavior by protagonists which are in character for that protagonist might have lead to other conclusions? What other conclusions can be drawn, other than the author's? You can do all of this without drawing conclusions about the ultimate truth of any of this, and thus without 'establishment'. If the teacher teaches any of it as 'truth', it is establishment.)
(Yes, I know this is reaching a bit. Yes, I believe the 'under God' has no business in a Pledge made lawful by Congress. Neither do I think the invocation at the beginning of Congress or the Court is legal. No I don't support Newdow, I think Newdow is a fool - if he wins, someone will just amend the Constitution with an amendment I'd just as soon not see passed. See 'gay marriage' and 'overreach'.)
Finally, all of this conversation about putting ID in the 'science' classroom is premature. Until ID generates some testable predictions which are shown to be true, none of it has moved beyond speculative hypothesis. Egon Spengler had hypotheses, but they didn't belong in any classroom until he had actually captured some ghosts and presented some replicable results. Placing untested hypotheses in science classrooms makes a mockery of real science.
I'll tackle what bugs me about #3: if life was designer, the designer was incompetent. Wouldn't it be more efficient to make the Earth completely flat and give us all wheels? Wouldn't it be better to run the nerves from the retina BEHIND the eyeball (thus making our eyesight more acute and avoiding the blind spot and the mental hack necessary to make us unaware of it)? Other animals have better eyes than we do; how come man, the "most perfect creation," has such inferior eyes? How about that vagus nerve, which goes from one point to another in the head -- by means of a loop down through the chest? (This is true even in giraffes!) Why won't our knees and elbows bend backward? That seems unnecessarily limiting to me. Didn't the designer think it would be useful to be able to pick up things behind us sometimes? Why do our tonsils and appendices get infected and have to be removed? Why are the testes in a pouch that moves up and down to keep them at the right temperature -- why didn't the designer just design them so they worked right at body temperature? Why do all the nerves that go to the hand go through a little tunnel in the carpal, making us prone to repetitive stress injury? Why do we have a "funny bone" and what's up with that knee reflex? Why, as we get older, do we lose hair where we want it and gain it where we don't? Why do we have redundant kidneys and lungs (good!) but only one heart (duhhhhh)? Why do men have nipples? Why does meat taste so good to us when it would be a far better use of resources to subsist on vegetables? Why do we look so much like hairless, neotenic apes and share so much DNA with them?
To me these are all obvious indications of descent with modification. I mean, you would have to be willfully blind or hopelessly ignorant not to see them. The DNA evidence is arguably the most conclusive. Homeobox (Hox) genes identical to ours, which help determine body structure, are found not only in other mammals but in the lowest forms of multicellular life. That Darwin managed to concoct his theory simply through the observation of morphology without modern molecular biology at his disposal (or indeed any idea how traits were inherited) is indisputable evidence of his genius.
To look at the human body and say "it was obviously designed" (with the subtext, as is ALWAYS the case since at root this is implicitly a religious argument, that the designer was omnipotent and omniscient, or at least WAY smarter than we are because we sure don't know how to make bodies from scratch) is to ignore the many kludges in the system. Any modern engineer could design a better body. And in a century or so we'll probably be able to build it. If we can do better than God, then what's so special about God?
As Scott Adams wrote in "The Religion Wars" -- If God is so smart, why do we fart?
Moreover, evolution "hangs together." It ties in with other things we know about the universe, other fields of science. You can say "well, if we evolved from apes, then we should be able to find a gene or set of genes for characteristic X that both apes and men have" and what do you know, assuming you can find the genes for the characteristic (not always easy, but that's not because they don't exist, it's because it's a HARD problem we've only begun to solve) -- well, there they are. All of modern biology and medicine reinforces evolutionary theory because it wouldn't even exist without it.
Given the fact that we can observe evolution in action as well as its results, it seems reasonable that, on a long enough time scale, it is also the mechanism behind speciation and as a result is the cause of the variety of life we see on this planet. I mean, we can never prove it, because we don't have a time machine and nobody lives long enough to observe speciation (which is the reason why the guy offering $250K for any evidence of evolution creating a new species is a crank -- in any case there are already fairly compelling examples he could draw from). Any alternative hypothesis has to be more reasonable than a simple extension of what we already know happens and it has to explain things better than evolution does -- the predictions it makes must be more useful. But intelligent design makes no predictions.
To come in and say "evolution is wrong, life was designed" you have to ignore pretty much all of the last fifty years or so of science. I find willful ignorance offensive. I find the advocacy of willful ignorance dangerous. I find the willingness of otherwise sane and intelligent people to allow such danger into our schools frightening, because these kids are the ones who are going to be the doctors and scientists responsible for my health in my old age, and I don't want them ignorant!
Advocates of "intelligent design" don't want kids to debate the theory in school. We don't have kids debate the heliocentric theory, with one group taking the position of Galileo and another group persecuting the first as the Catholic church did. To stage a debate implies that there is still scientific controversy on the matter, and that is the real goal -- to make students believe that both hypotheses are equally valid, equally supported by evidence, when this is not the case at all. It's like saying that tomorrow, I could either be hit by a meteor, or I could not be hit by a meteor -- two alternatives, so fifty-fifty chance, right? It's the same thing couched in somewhat more sophisticated language. They're trying to put intelligent design on the same level as evolution, and they're trying to do it not by making ID a good scientific theory but through political maneuvering.
By the way, I got to the second page of "Of Pandas and People" before I encountered an outright falsehood: "According to today's view, matter has within itself a tendency toward self-organization leading to life." I can believe some scientists hold this as a hypothesis, but it certainly is not the mainstream view. (And if it were, science would not be content to say "matter self-organizes," it would be obsessed with why and how, rather than settling for "God did it.")
The book (or at least the excerpt available on Amazon) also completely glosses over notions of probability and the extremely long timescales over which life arose. If there's only a one in a gazillion chance of some unusual event happening -- such as the generation of a self-replicating molecule -- but you have a gazillion molecules in the primordial soup for a million years, it's almost certain to happen -- and more than once. These timescales are so far outside our usual experience they are hard to intuit or even fathom, so glossing over the issue without even an attempt to explain it amounts to dishonesty. (The index also does not contain an entry for "time.") There was a perfect opportunity to bring it up but the author failed to do so. Anyone who has read Dawkins would be familiar with the argument, and anyone writing a book about the origin of life would certainly have read Dawkins, so I can only assume that this was left out intentionally. There's not even a hand-waving dismissal -- it's as if the author doesn't think it's important, when in fact it is crucial to the understanding of the theory of evolution, and to offer an alternative to evolution you need to address it.
I can't be certain that this book (like "intelligent design" itself) is exactly the kind of pseudoscientific rubbish that uneducated people such as high school students would find plausible because they can easily grasp and imagine it, while evolutionary theory is more difficult -- but it doesn't look promising. The argument of ID seems to be "you can't imagine how this could happen, can you? so it couldn't have" -- but most people aren't very imaginative at all (although of course, they have been told they are, again and again, to reinforce their self esteem). Even the title, a nod to Gould's "The Panda's Thumb," can be seen (okay, uncharitably) as an attempt to give the book an aura of legitimacy it has not earned.
By the way, I got to the second page of "Of Pandas and People" before I encountered an outright falsehood: "According to today's view, matter has within itself a tendency toward self-organization leading to life." I can believe some scientists hold this as a hypothesis, but it certainly is not the mainstream view. (And if it were, science would not be content to say "matter self-organizes," it would be obsessed with why and how, rather than settling for "God did it.")
The answers so far have been fascinating. Many have contained outright falshoods. E.G.:
"Mathematics is not a science" -- there are quite a few mathematicians in the National Academy of Sciences who would be surprised to hear this, and quite a few physicists, molecular biologists, astronomers, and other scientists who've worked directly with mathematicians who would be similarly shocked to hear it.
"The anthropic principles are not science." Physicists, particularly cosmologists, would be surprised to hear this, since they came up with both. Plus, most of the descriptions given by respondents have been wrong. Here's a pretty good overview of the anthropic principle(s). Nevertheless I find it telling, this absolute insistence that these are not scientific questions.
"Ebonics" is a "quack science" -- It is likely that not a single linguist on this planet would agree with this statement. Perhaps linguistics is not a science either.
We do seem to have a general admission: nothing about presenting this material for discussion in any classroom would prevent any child from being able to understand the scientific method, how to construct a falsifiable experiment, or to understand any of the fundamentals of the biological sciences such as genetics, photosynthesis, and the normal things that any child being taught elementary biology is taught.
I would also agree that science education is terrible in this country--and I think the entire problem with it is summed up ably by this statement:
"...primary and secondary classroom should be devoted to 'canon' - well accepted science, ss, and math...."
God I would have hated to have this person as my science teacher in K-12. In fact I encountered many like him, and I hated the guts of each and every one of them.
A friend of mine who teaches biology at a major university recently noted the difference he sees between his students today and those he saw 35 years ago when he first began teaching. The students are somewhat brighter today, and are far more eager to get good grades. But the vast majority of them now focus intensely on regurgitating the contents of textbooks and dutifully repeating whatever their teachers say. This is his grad students he's talking about, as well as undergrads. He finds it depressing because 30 or 40 years ago, it was common for students to challenge him, to ask him difficult questions, to think for themselves and think on their feet, and this mentality appears to be all but dead today.
I think it probably has less to do with what we spend on science education, and far more to do with how we teach it--teaching it as "canon" pretty much describes the whole problem in one word for me.
Chapter 1 of Of Pandas and People is available free, which is why I linked it. Here it is again.
I'm not answering any other questions because I asked for responses to my specific questions and not anything else. If you want to bring up other issues, request that I start a new thread. I'm looking for answers to my specific six questions.
The students are somewhat brighter today, and are far more eager to get good grades. But the vast majority of them now focus intensely on regurgitating the contents of textbooks and dutifully repeating whatever their teachers say. This is his grad students he's talking about, as well as undergrads. He finds it depressing because 30 or 40 years ago, it was common for students to challenge him, to ask him difficult questions, to think for themselves and think on their feet, and this mentality appears to be all but dead today
An interesting observation. I've never been to Japan, but from what I understand, regurgitating textbook knowledge is exactly what's looked for &questioning the teacher is somewhat taboo, yet they do rather well in the sciences by common report.
Guess what I'm asking is: Is the teacher depressed because teaching is not interesting to him if he isn't challenged? Is it a cultural limitation [or strength] of ours that we demand questioning &mostly reward that?
Maybe the cultural differences shape what kind of sciences we're good at. Japan, it seems, does very well with technology, while we do somewhat better with basic science...
I do not agree that presenting this material in the classroom would have no effect on children's learning about the scientific method. I do agree that nothing about presenting this material would prevent a child from understanding photosynthesis.
Oh, I should mention, Of Pandas and People is a text book for primary bio-sciences education that self-proclaimed defenders of science are seeking to have banned from Dover, Pennsylvania science classrooms on First Amendment grounds.
Okay Elizabeth: What would they be prevented from understanding about the scientific method? If you could point to the specific parts of the chapter I linked that would help.
Dean
The answers so far have been pretty good, yet you dismiss them rather easily by writing about the sad state of science teaching in American schools.
Don't confuse the two issues. Just because science is taught badly doesn't mean that Intelligent Design will make things better.
Some of the answers have been quite good, some attrocious. But you're right, I violated my own rule by answering a question that wasn't really part of what I asked.
Firstly, mathematics may or may not be a science depending on what you mean by the term. Unlike the physical sciences, it does not rely on observation and experiment. It happens to share with science the primary goal of getting things *right* (although, for mathematicians, that means logically right, and for physical scientists, it means correctly describing the universe we inhabit), and it is an extremely useful tool in the sciences. Some consider it a science, some consider it its own animal. It's not uncontroversially either science or not science.
The anthropic principles are not science. The weak one is strictly a logical statement (and hence a tautology), the strong one is metaphysics. Neither is subject to refutation by experiment.
Ebonics isn't a science, linguistics is. It is, as you say, however, a perfectly good linguistic object of study, even if the name is silly -- what's wrong with "Black English"?
You're right that science education is dismal in this nation, although I'd disagree with you as to the primary cause. Lowest-common denominator curricula and excessive interest in the biographies of scientists rather than their work are real culprits.
1&2 best expressed by piet hein
the universe may
be as great as they say
but it wouldn't be missed
if it didn't exist
3 TIMSS (trends in international math and science study) says american students have been catching up with the best of their international peers from 95 -03. why toss them several steps backwards now?
4. SETI looks for physical proof of life on other planets. Dembski looks to imploy faulty logic "if A then B" implies "not B then not A" to "prove" an unfalsifiable 'hypothesis'.
5. it wouldn't prevent them from understanding any of it but it would strongly suggest there was no need or purpose to understanding any of it.
6. don't shield any of them but don't introduce them in a science class. why so? see 3.
"Oh, I should mention, Of Pandas and People is a text book for primary bio-sciences education that self-proclaimed defenders of science are seeking to have banned from Dover, Pennsylvania science classrooms on First Amendment grounds."
this is completely irrelevant. the people trying to get it banned are just some parents, which is why they are "self-proclaimed" and not "proclaimed" defenders of science. and the first amendment grounds is clearly the wrong way for skeptics of ID to fight this fight. but either way, regardless of who is doing what for what reason regarding intelligent design in the classroom in PA has nothing to do at all with the six questions you asked, two of which contain the fallacy of the excluded middle.
and dean, as a matter of fact, mathematics is not strictly a science. that doesn't mean mathematicians can't be scientists, or that scientists can't be mathematicians, but they are separate categories. mathematics is not tied to any given reality, but the generally accepted definition of science is that it must be based on pyhsical phenomena (i.e.: our observable universe).
and the anthropic principles are also not scientific theories, but merely conjectures made by people who happen to be scientists. not everything that comes out of a scientist's mouth is ipso facto science. the principles state that based on the fact that carbon based life forms exist in this universe, then this universe is uniquely amicable to carbon-based life. as has been argued elsewhere, this is argumentum ad ignorantiam. that non-carbon-based life has not been observed to exist in this universe does not mean that it does not exist. nor does the presence of carbon-based life in this universe imply that this is the only universe that has carbon-based life, or even that this universe's set of fundamental constants are the optimum for carbon-based life.
as to your biologist friend, i would venture that perhaps the reason he think his students were more creative or challenging in their questioning 30 years ago is because he now has 30 years of challenging-question-answering under his belt, and thus the "challenging" questions students are likely to ask in his course have mostly all been asked, and he now has the answers at his fingertips. so, from his perspective, they are asking easy questions. but perhaps the first time those questions were raised, say when he first started out 30 or 40 years ago, he was stumped.
pandas and people is unrelated to empiricism, falsifiability, photosynthesis, et al., so i'm not sure what this question is getting at. it's like asking: "what makes you think C++ would prevent my child from understanding gravity?"
Dean
Back to my answers:
3. Design inference doesn't frighten me - if I might be vain enough to assert that I am an "intelligent and thoughtful person". It's bad information, and I don't want my child taught bad information for the same reason that I don't want him taught Aristotilian cosmology or Lamarkian evolution.
4. The SETI project is based on a hypothesis that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe, and that life can be detected using current technology. So far SETI has proven that life does not exist.
5. After reading Chapter 1 of Pandas &People, I'm left shaking my head at the leap of the author: complex systems cannot come about naturally, therefore they must have been made.
The linked material (is that the whole first chapter?) looks reasonable to me on a quick scan. It's mostly about problems with abiogenesis theories.
I'm assuming that OPAP relies on 'specified complexity' in asserting that intelligent design can be tested using the scientific method. There are, like, a zillion critiques of how Dembski is using this concept, but here's a good one:
If specified complexity cannot be reliably identified and used to correctly predict intelligent intervention, ID cannot be tested using the scientific method. My reading on the subject indicates that that's pretty widely agreed to be the case (I'd be interested in hearing about anyone who is sympathetic to this concept who is not an ID proponent). Therefore, it purports to be teaching about the scientific method, while giving what is in fact an example of what not to do. To the extent the whole issue is understood at all by the student, if it teaches him that the scientific method applies here, it's wrong. Which seems, well, bad.
If my assumption that OPAP relies on SC for ID's 'testability' is wrong, let me know.
...but then again, I also said that you don't get to change the subject until you've answered the six questions. So perhaps I should answer them myself:
1) The Strong Anthropic principle essentially asserts that the universe must be constructed in such a way that intelligent life will eventually come into existence.
2) The Weak Anthropic principle is that any observed universe must be constructed in such a way that it might evolve, even if it might be improbable.
3) I think there's nothing that should frighten them but that they very clearly do act frightened (Elizabeth Reid's objections notwithstanding). It seems to be a fear that we're going to turn back to the dark ages and embrace irrational things (e.g. "flying spaghetti monsters") if we allow free inquiry on these questions in the science classsroom.
4) SETI is clearly science, because it is perfectly acceptable through many areas of science to use empirical data and to draw inferences when a complete data set is not available. If SETI is not science, then neither are most of the fields of archaeology, paleontology, forensic science, or cryptography. A lot of what pathologists do would have to be rejected as science, too.
5) There is no part of this book--at least the first chapter--that would harm any child's science education in any way. It has some inaccuracies, most of which appear to be simply from being a little outdated. It's got far fewer inaccuracies than the biology texts I studied in High School and Junior High, that's for sure. I think contemplation of the questions it raises would greatly improve the thinking skills of young children interested in science, not because of the "falsehoods" it contains but because of the valid objections it raises.
6) None of them would. Banning these from my child's classroom in the name of the first amendment does far more harm than good.
Now, to answer other challenges: ID should certainly be discussed in philosophy, just like the anthropic principle should be discussed in philosophy classes as well as classes on theoretical physics and cosmology. Philosophical questions are part of science and always have been. The ID people raise valid objections and draw some inferences. This should be fair game for discussion in the science classroom since science is central to the discussion. The notion that we're going to have religion or philosophy teachers whipping out biology texts and explaining what they think is wrong with them would be outrageous.
I'm aware that Dembski's position has been widely criticized. Some of the criticisms lack rigor--see, for example, the bizarre claim above that mathematics is not a science--but some are quite rigorous and serious. There are always minority opinions in science, and almost all opinions in science have their detractors. That's part of how it works.
I am old enough to remember when the theory of warm-blooded dinosaurs was a minority opinion, and I witnessed it become the majority opinion--one which, by the way, to this day still has detractors among paleontologists. The history of science is replete with such things, which is why empiricism and falsifiability are such critically important concepts: debate on most questions continues until verifiable empirical proof settles the question.
Elizabeth: I substantiate it by saying that if you posit that this material will harm a child's ability to understand how science works, then you obviously fear something here. Unless you think harming science education is a happy cheerful thing?
I read in Time magazine yesterday a guy who claimed that Intelligent Design is a "stalking horse" for religion. That sounds like a fear to me. If it's not a fear, what is it?
I've read repeatedly from the anti-ID people that this whole question threatens to throw us back to the dark ages where unreason ruled and science was subjugated to religious thought. I've also had anti-ID people quite pedantically assert that ID is nothing but "God in the gaps" thinking and that if we allow it to be contemplated in science classrooms, we will be teaching children that if we don't understand something it means God did it, which is not just a non-sequitur, it's pretty obviously a fear-based non-sequitur in my eyes.
I guess if you view fear as the basis for all attempts to avoid an undesirable outcome, you're right. I think this dilutes the word 'fear' to meaninglessness. By that standard, the prospect that my milk might go bad scares me as demonstrated by my care in putting it back in the fridge.
And about Dembski... would it improve the quality of scientific education if all minority views held by just a few scientists got their own textbooks?
I've read repeatedly from the anti-ID people that this whole question threatens to throw us back to the dark ages where unreason ruled and science was subjugated to religious thought.
Many scientists also exhibit similar behavior regarding global warming. But on the other hand, many religious people get all knackered up over evolution, so I'm not sure what that gets you.
ID is bad information which excludes it in my view. Will the Dark Ages return? I hope not because sackcloth makes me itch.
So if the universe is intelligently designed, what about RVMan's suggestion that it isn't perfect? After all I'm going bald yet can't breath underwater because I lack gills. And what's the deal with leaving a ticking timebomb inside of me: my appendix! Do you know how many people die a year from ruptured appendices?
So if you want to entertain "intelligent design", I think you should also consider "stupid design".
I'd say "undesirable outcome" is a pretty bland way of describing how some of ID's critics react. Thundering denunciations and hysterical claims that this threatens to destroy science education seem to be at least as common as calm, rational expressions of concern--not here, but in other places.
As for minority views: I think it would improve all science textbooks at just about every level to note the existence of significant minority opinions held by qualified scientists. I can't think of anything that would better improve the general public's understanding of what science is and isn't. I would applaud it, wildly.
Regarding "Stupid Design": hell yeah. One of my favorite topics is to note just how poorly designed the human body is. Human females are obviously poorly designed for reproduction, for example, simply because they suffer more pain in the birthing process and a higher chance of dying from it than most species. It's also a rather cruel joke that the human penis has no bone in it, unlike most other species, so as we age our sexual ability is whittled away. I could go on, but Jerry gave a bunch of other terrific examples above.
Dean wrote: I substantiate it by saying that if you posit that this material will harm a child's ability to understand how science works, then you obviously fear something here.
it won't harm his ability to understand how science works but it will harm his desire to understand how science works because ID says the existance of a designer precludes understanding.
Intelligent Design and Perfect/Sensible Design are not the same thing and saying that a particular design is stupid is not the same as saying an intelligence designed it.
Guns are obviously intelligently designed, but just try going on a gun lover's forum and ask them about stupid design features. Just be prepared for the tidal wave you receive.
In light of all the stupid shit that gun designers pull, I guess they just appeared randomly.
BK
Sorry for being off-topic, I really don't care much is ID is taught in schools one way or the other. All I can really hope for is an honest presentation of evolution. That it is not fact, just the best theory we have right now. It predicts data not observed to date and doesn't predict data that is observed, but it does a better job predicting more observed data than anything else so far.
it won't harm his ability to understand how science works but it will harm his desire to understand how science works because ID says the existance of a designer precludes understanding.
I'm sorry, where does ID say that? Could you provide a citation?
It's possible some of ID's opponents fear it, although again, you've offered no support for that beyond your say-so (and a half-claim that I fear it myself no matter what I say). However, I submit that by substituting 'why do intelligent and thoughtful people object to this so strongly' for 'why does it frighten them so much', you would be characterizing the totality of the opposition more accurately. I can tell you why I opppose it strongly; I can't tell you why I fear it so much, because I don't. Find someone who says he's frightened, and ask him.
The problem with saying we'll "note the existence of significant minority opinions held by qualified scientists" is that it doesn't end the quarrel. Who decides what is a significant minority opinion, and how many qualified scientists need to hold it (and who decides who is qualified)? The objection to ID by the scientific community rests exactly on the question of whether this minority opinion is worth anything. I can't think of another major 'scientific controversy' where one of the positions is held to be not just wrong but intellectually incoherent by the vast majority of scientists in the relevant field, that anyone's proposing we put in science textbooks.
The book (or at least the excerpt available on Amazon) also completely glosses over notions of probability and the extremely long timescales over which life arose. If there's only a one in a gazillion chance of some unusual event happening -- such as the generation of a self-replicating molecule -- but you have a gazillion molecules in the primordial soup for a million years, it's almost certain to happen -- and more than once. These timescales are so far outside our usual experience they are hard to intuit or even fathom, so glossing over the issue without even an attempt to explain it amounts to dishonesty. (The index also does not contain an entry for "time.") There was a perfect opportunity to bring it up but the author failed to do so. Anyone who has read Dawkins would be familiar with the argument, and anyone writing a book about the origin of life would certainly have read Dawkins, so I can only assume that this was left out intentionally. There's not even a hand-waving dismissal -- it's as if the author doesn't think it's important, when in fact it is crucial to the understanding of the theory of evolution, and to offer an alternative to evolution you need to address it.
Actually, the timescales are not your friend. I've pointed out elsewhere that Dembski deals with that issue quite convincingly, as does Stuart Kauffman, not an ID advocate. Also, so does Johnjoe McFadden in his book Quantum Evolution, another non-IDer.
The odds aren't one in gazillion, with a gazillion chances or more to succeed. That is merely part of the modern creation myth called Darwinism, that we inculcate our students in.
Writing in the November-December issue of American Scientist, Pat Shipman, an adjunct professor of anthropology at the Pennsylvania State University:
These events prompted me to take ID seriously, and this movement scares me. Now I feel like a jogger in the park at night who realizes that she is far too isolated and that the shadows are far too deep. At first I ignored that faint rustling behind me, convincing myself it was just wind in the leaves. Louder noises made me jump and turn around, but I saw nothing. Now I know that I and my colleagues in science are being stalked with careful and deadly deliberation. I fear my days are numbered unless I act soon and effectively. If you are reading this, the chances are that you are in the same position.
I would say that a reasonable person would label that description as "fear".
I think you're right. I just don't think that her emotions should be extrapolated to everyone who opposes ID. (Dean, maybe she'd like to answer that question?)
Dean and I have both observed strong emotion from members of the anti-ID crowd. He calls it fear. I figure some is fear, some is anger, some is hate, but whatever it is, it is strong. You may not feel fear, anger or strong emotion. Others do. I, for example, do, but from the other side. I call mine anger. I don't think Dean extrapolated this strong emotion to everyone.
1. I ain't sure. I suspect it means that humans are the center of universe and are here for a purpose
2.I ain't sure. I suspect it means that humans are meaningless creatures, without purpose. Birth, copulation, death -- nothing more.
3. It frightens them, becaue they have become ivory tower utopians, and now they (reluctantly) face a challenge to their authority.
4. SETI is based on sound scientific principles. There may or may not be life outside of this planet. How should we go about trying to confirm this? I dunno, but it is a good question, and I guess the brainiacs in charge, believe that if life exists elsewhere, the footprints can be detected by radio waves or sumptin' like them.
5. Their ain't nuthin' wrong with the first chapter I read -- except that it cuts against the normal grain you'd expect to read if you were inculcated with the standard evolutionist mantra that I was.
6. None. We should allow kids to read this. If they become smarter and get better jobs, so be it. If they become dumber, and don't do so well, it will likely fade away. I like flexibility and experimentation at the local lever. Sheesh, can public schools get any worse?
Barnes, H.
p.s. Let me close with my standard comment. ID seems more like philosophy of science, than science.
An interesting notion, but it doesn't make any sense. My question was merely to ask for evidence for something you claimed. I didn't make the complimentary claim, so there isn't anything to turn around.
But proceeding from there, the implication in your response is that ID really doesn't say it.
If you accept the existence of a designer, what is left to understand?
About what? If you just wish to understand whether the process is, at its heart, materialist or teleological, either answer could be said to leave you with nothing "left to understand". If you are interested in the details, there are apparently many, no matter which side you choose to align yourself with.
So getting back to your initial claim, it isn't ID "saying" that at all, but you saying that about the prospect of an ID world, because of your philosophical dispostion.
Roger,
Okay. I can accept that philosophical disposition will influence perception. But I'd still like to know what there is to understand in the details, that is testable using scientific principles, if you accept the existence of a designer?
I'm not denying there's strong emotion; I feel some myself (I would characterize it as 'frustration' primarily but maybe anger is closer). I'm not saying that everyone has to be dispassionate to be taken seriously or anything.
I react negatively when Dean says, "What are you guys afraid of?" because it seems to imply that the anti-ID majority recognizes, secretly, that the ID proponents are right... or at least on the right track... and quick, we have to suppress this information because otherwise we will be shown up as fools and charlatans who have been hiding and denying the TRUTH! In other words, our objections prove our fear, and our fear proves that deep down we know we're wrong!
I guess if it's understood that fear of an idea doesn't imply a hidden belief that it's correct, only a belief that it's harmful, I'll stop bringing this up.
SAP is the notion that the universe is the functioning of a creative urgency or fecundity that denotes that life is not an accident and observation of that phenomena will demonstrate this creative function is its essential and continuing nature.
WAP is the notion that limited biolife is a carbon based phenomena based on chemical complexities with no inherent purpose but to resolve the equations in the primordial stew and its by-products.
Design inference challenges entrenched scientists that have decided that the meal is the menu, and the restruaunt is no longer serving items on the real menu. This is definitely not an acceptable aim as the business of education in science is not to memorize the Krebs cycle or evolutionary doctrine but <i>to employ itself in the education of the intellect of the student to reason well in all matters, to reach out towards truth. </i>
SETI is beyond my ken at the moment.
Chapter 1: Pandas and People is about as benign as it can get.
None of Dean’s questions need be shielded from his or anyone else’s children.
Fear of ID. Yeah it causes really, really bad stuff. Probably global warming, tsunami's in science departments like world-wide.
Reminds me of a Christmas/New Years season a while back. I'm in line directly behind a woman who wants stamps for her greeting cards. The postal worker gives her some of these classic rennaisance painting stamps of Madonna and Child. The lady went completely berserk: "we don't need any freaking religion stuff."
#4 - The SETI project is a weird cross of science and faith. It's a place where rational analysis of data gets intertwined with crop circle anecdotes. I wasn't able to easily find the questions Dembski is asking, but I presume they have to do with probabilities of outcome. If that is true, then at least SETI has some chance of providing verifiable evidence of their effort. Unless they don't and then absence of evidence won't qualify as evidence of absence so the search will just go on forever.
#5 - I haven't read the first chapter of "Of Pandas and People" so I have no idea.
#6 - I wouldn't want court orders shielding my children from any of the questions, but just for the sake of argument, at what age would you think the court order would become invalid?
Fear:Yes, I've seen fear. A lot of it, most pointedly expressed, and in many locations. It really makes a fellow wonder just why everyone is so het up. Its more than just "I want my theory to win." rah-rah enthusiasm, and closer to The End is Nigh.
Moonbat idiots.
How about this read? A certain vocal segment of the scientific community is afraid that the hoi polloi is going to insist on having their way, and that this will impact the community's funds, prestige, and oh yeah, the pursuit of science?
And some people choose to spread lies rather than confront honestly. Last time I got into this one, I found to my shock, that some people, whom I would have thought to be good conservatives were not above lying. Thankfully, it was not here, but it turned me off commenting for a while, I think. This type of despicable behavior is far more damaging than ID could be.
The real problem is that this segment is anti-democratic. In this case, who determines what minority scientist gets the nod to be included in the schoolbooks...why the elected representatives of the people do! Any other answer is anti-democratic, and downright dangerous.
Could they be wrong? Why yes they could. I wasn't aware scientists spoke ex cathedra; schoolboards and scientists in my view are often wrong. It comes from being human. This hankering for a more efficient system where the "right" answer gets forced on the people reminds me of some of the critiques of democracy...its inefficient, and the people are stupid. Hmm, well, I say, the elites are often disconnected from reality by their gobs of money, and if you want to change America's essentials, just go.
Why am I having to say this stuff that should be completely obvious? Vox populi vox dei. I blame the lack of a good history education. Money needs to be diverted from teaching science and spent on history until people stop supporting tyranny.
Lets make it a court order...No more money will be spent on any scientific grant until all scientists affirm their willingness to submit to the law, and renounce legal coups.
More seriously, as to why humanity isn't perfect. Its a finite universe. You'd complain if you got all you asked for, but didn't have the ability to teleport from one star to another. Eventually you run up against the limits of your finiteness, and you'd complain as you juggled stars. Because there would still be limits.
And remember, Christianity gave birth to Science. Science was born in a world considered to be created by God, and yet somehow it not only survived, but it thrived. Actually, I think it may be faltering a bit in a world without God. A deconstructed world is not a very friendly place for Science I'd guess. I think you can choose to have God and his Order, or you can choose to have a Celestial Chaos as the foundation of your society. And Chaos does not give birth to Science, nor does it protect Science.
As large as this thread is, you probably won't see this comment, but I'll post it anyway.
It's also probably a really silly question to ask and based on the answers above it is way below the usual level of debate on your site, but I am just wondering.
When ID people use the "logic" that the level of complexity and harmony in living beings can only be explained by design, because random chance could not do such a thing, what do they say when you ask who designed God? Isn't God, by definition, the most complex and harmonious entity in existence? Wouldn't that mean that ID logic itself would say that God must have had a designer? Then don't you get right into the "turtles all the way down" argument?
Like I said, probably way too simple for this crowd, but I've always wondered how they react to this.
Regarding fear: I had in fact read Pat Shipman's statement before, but I didn't remember where, thanks. I heard similar sentiments expressed when NPR aired a story on this, and I've seen dark allusions to sinister fundamentalist forces out to destroy science before from anti-ID people. There's also the example of what happened to Dr. Richard Sternberg, which to me bespeaks an orthodoxy that is fearful of being challenged in any way and is willing to do almost anything to hurt someone who wants to explore these ideas in a scientific context. There are also examples of the assholes over at Panda's Thumb finding out about a PhD candidate in science who admitted to beliving in ID and trying to intervene to prevent him from getting his doctorate just because of that--search the Discovery Institute's site for documentation on that.
If it helps, Elizabeth, I admit to having fears too. I fear the quashing of dissent in science. I fear the quashing of inquisitiveness in young minds. I fear using the blunt instrument of the courts to impose what is and is not acceptable to explore in the classroom. I am appalled at what is clearly, to my mind, censorship in the name of the first amendment.
At the famed Scopes Monkey Trial, Clarence Darrow argued, "If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools, and the next year you can make it a crime to teach it in the hustings or in the churches."
Change "evolution" to "intelligent design" and tell me how that statement reads any different. The anti-ID people are trying to criminalize the teaching of what is at worst a thought provoking but likely false theory. That scares the crap out of me far more than any would-be "damage" from exposing the kids to this debate.
"If you accept the existence of a designer, what is left to understand?"
Dale's a smart guy who works at a medical school, but I have to say, this very question tells me that something's very wrong with science teaching these days. It's not just Dale who says this, for this thinking seems implicit in everyone who claims that this is a dangerous and harmful line of inquiry: that all thought will stop if we accept its premise.
Indeed, I've been endlessly lectured on other blogs by folks like Richard Bennett, Steve Verdon, and PZ Myers, amongst others, on how this is dangerous "god in the gaps" thinking where we declare that anything we don't understand is a miracle from God. That is total horse shit and not what the ID people are saying at all. I know because unlike a lot of people, I actually spend time reading their stuff.
Let me answer the question though: if you accept the possibility of a designer, the number of questions after that are endless--and as it turns out, most of them (not all, but most) are the same as if you don't. But it comes to simply this:
How did the engineer accomplish it?
Throughout most of the history of science, the vast majority of scientists, including such exalted figures as Isaac Newton and many many others, all simply just assumed that what they were doing was exploring God's handiwork and discovering how He accomplished things.
It didn't stop them from asking questions, did it? So why would it stop anyone from asking questions today?
The entire presumption that this is a way of shutting down inquiry is a non-sequitur. In fact it opens new areas of inquiry, and furthermore, it can serve as a useful foil to those who reject the idea of a cosmic engineer. It appears to me that all spending time on the ID question does is spur greater intellectual rigor.
Indeed, it is the anti-ID people who are trying to shut down inquiry from all I see. "The question is settled, anyone who still questions it is a psuedoscientist and a flake and a nutjob who must be kept away from our children at all costs lest their brains be corrupted by an excess of curiosity."
That's what I see.
I should note something: when I started this I thought this was a harmless bit of twaddle and banning it by court fiat was a very, very bad idea. That was as far as I went until I looked further into it. The more I read, the more I think these guys are fully credentialed scientists who have published some peer reviewed work, and who admit that what they're doing is in its infancy and that they are indeed a minority voice. But they do appear to have something valuable to say. They might even provide useful insights for researchers. And they can certainly serve as a useful foil for teaching.
I must admit, the vehemence with which they are so thoroughly demonized and so frequently misquoted that got me curious to read more. Dembski's Dover Expert Witness Report and rebuttal pretty well changed my mind.
The personal abuse I've taken from some of ID's more vocal critics also played into my curiosity, I must admit. Not in this discussion but stuff I've gotten from Steve Verdon, Richard Bennett, and other bloggers has been rather annoying. I admit to being stubborn in that way--if you tell me a line of inquiry is dangerous and what position I "must" take I will probably dig in my heels, hit the books, and study even further. Just by being abusive toward me, some of the anti-ID people have caused me to read more of the ID people's materials... and what I found was far from dangerous, some of it was thought-provoking and interesting. Whoops.
...and by the way, to close my thoughts for the night, I broght up the Anthropic Principle(s) because for 30 years critics of the questions have claimed that they're pointless, unscientific, of little value, a hidden form of creationism, etc. when in fact quite a few cosmologists and theoretical and mathematical physicists find the principles worthy of exploring.
Dembski is a mathematician who's done work in theoretical physics. His primary interest is in the field of probability, and how you may look at an event or series of events and try to determine whether they came about through random chance or through some intelligent causality.
What if it turns out life was created by being from another dimension? Or time travellers? Or some force like the Monolith in Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Oddyssey?
In the field of forensics police scientists can often determine whether someone was murdered or died of natural causes, without knowing who did it and purely through inference. The entire field of paleontology would collapse if we denied that inference is a part of science.
Given everything we know about the current state of the universe, there is absolutely no process we know of that can spontaneously create a simple single-celled organism--the odds of it happening even once in the entire universe is so low as to be practically zero, even given billions of years and the entire size of the universe. The anti-ID people say, "well, it's something we just don't understand yet." The ID people say, "it's someone or several someones we don't know about yet." "Let's figure out more so we can understand better" is the next logical step in either case.
When you look at most of what's being done in the biological sciences today, can you name even one field that would collapse if Darwin's theory turned out to have problems? If so, what would that be? What area of medical research would be harmed if it turned out that a flying spaghetti monster had designed the platypus? I suggest you'll find almost no research that would be harmed by it.
But I say it could influence their research. Because at some point they might ask, "hmm, okay, if we have evidence of an engineer here, that might give us some insights to what we're doing in this other area." Maybe not, but it's certainly possible.
Dean, forgive the intrusion, but I've read all the comments and I've had enough.
Okay, this is getting downright loathsome. Religion does NOT color one's ability to understand the scientific method of observation. If it did so my grandfather would have never recieved his degrees in Biology and Botany. It is reprehensible that self-styled 'learned' people would stoop so low as to bring into question someone's ability to rationally observe and comment upon nature, or humanity.
It is repugnant that I, and my family (both my children and my predecessors) are being labeled and tarred as 'god' addicts that can't observe anything rationally because we have a belief in a supreme being.
If religion, the belief in a higher being, or any form of drawing inferences from the available data one can observe, would destroy one's ability to use scientific principle, my children would be too dumb, too 'god fearing', to idiotic to understand the way the body works, or a plant works, or how to conduct an experiment. To claim such shows nothing but gross contempt and abuse of those that won't 'tow the line' that you're trying to feed them.
You should all be ashamed of yourselves and your 'knowledge' that would place you and your ilk on a pedastal while in effect spitting on and crapping on those that don't agree with you. You have a form of verbal and mental problem, it is your belief that YOU are the supreme being in relation to those that have any form of belief in a higher power.
I'd have never aced Chemistry, Earth Science, or Biology if my mental fog of belief made the scientific method uncontemplateable. I'm perfectly capable of making a falsefiable experiment, and I can do it without bad mothing and degrading those that don't believe in a God and feel threatened to their core by those that do.
You really are a bunch of sad little spoilt brats playing with your toys. Can't share for fear anyone will listen to someone other than your own self-appointed supremecy. Sad, pitiful little way to life your lives, terrified children will be able to view both and make their own decissions...which won't follow your self proclaimed "RIGHT" answers.
I pity you all for your hatered, and for your sense of supremacy over your fellow man. Must get lonely up there among the Gods you don't believe in...
I've been running SETI@Home 24/7 for years. I don't trouble myself with philosophy. If something happens to turn up, I'll be pleased. If not, I'll be dead.
I'm somewhere to the right of President Bush. Fairly libertarian, believe in gun rights, absolutist on free speech, love science--I'm a SF writer after all...etc., have voted Republican for every Presidential election I've voted in, and done so for most of the lesser offices.
I did vote for Bredesen, but then the previous Republican governor was a massive crook, and he wanted to create a new tax!!
Rhianna is quite on target. Is she a Democrat? I couldn't say, but even a Democrat is occasionally correct.
Hi, I'm new to Dean's World, although I have been a reader for some time. I'd like to talk about the anthropic principle, because I feel that this physics principle is misunderstood due to the creation/evolution debate... and so viable science gets lost.
I'd like to note that I learned about physics for the anthropic principle from physicists, without prior knowledge that it has religious implications. What I discovered was a bunch of honest and consistent evidence that it's actually a thermodynamic principle that has everything to do with energy-efficiency in flat but expanding universe:
1) What is the Strong Anthropic Principle? And what does it mean to you?
It means that the forces are configured in a manner so as to produce increasingly efficient forms of dissipative structures that are capable of making real, massive particles from vacuum energy.
That's the difference between a flat universe and a wide-open universe, the time that it takes for the second law of thermodynamics to take its entropic toll is restricted by the anthropic principle so that expansion process is economically maximized to the most-even distribution of energy possible via a "near"-flat universal configuration, (**inherent design**) and so the anthropic principle is no "coincidence" at all, it defines the only possible configuration, per the principle of least action.
Black holes and Supernovae are the only two other knowns sources for the creation of real particles from **negative vaccum energy**... but they are less energy-efficient at it, "pound-for-pound", so to speak, which is why intelligent life arises after enough time has passed. Our contribution to the evolutionary process is critical, since it only requires the creation of a few particles per year, per galaxy, to maintain the overall flat geometry of an expanding universe, where a flat universe is restricted to dissipate energy with the greatest efficiency.
2) What is the Weak Anthropic Principle? And what does it mean to you?
The weak anthropic principle defines where life will occur in our universe via habitable "sites" where life can arise and evolve. The thermodynamic need for it indicates that life will be as common as the need requires.
That makes it a "biocentric" principle... so the implications of the principle which derive that we occupy a "preferred place and time"... will then include all banded spiral galaxies that exist on the same evolutioary plane as us, (in the same lateral layer, age-wise).
3) What is it about the question of design inference that should frighten intelligent and thoughtful people so much that they should support banning it from the nation's K-12 science classrooms?
They know what's behind it.
4) To what extent is the SETI project based on scientfic principles, in your mind? Furthermore, in what empirically-definable way is it different from the questions that mathematician William Dembski is asking?
Neither Dembski, Behe, nor the rest of the DI's finest differentiate natural "goal-oriented" design from intelligent design, which represents an unfounded and unscientific leap of faith when they assume the claim that evidence for "purposeful" design in nature constitutes evidence for intelligent design.
Given that the anthropic principle is actually a biocentric thermodynamic principle, a testable prediction falls out which says that Seti will blow the doors wide open to a whole level of similar beings across a fine "plane" of our universe, and this will happen at about the same time everywhere across the universe, (as radio transmissions are restricted by the speed of light), for the same reasons, since life elswhere should be at approximately the same level of technological development as us, for the reasons previously given.
This represents a form of "universal consciousness", in terms of "self-awareness".
"The Awakening"... *que erie music*
5) After reading Chapter 1 of Of Pandas and People, I find myself wondering: what precise parts of it would cause my child to be unable to understand the basic scientific method, unable to comprehend empiricism, unable to comprehend falsifiability, and unable to understand such basic scientific concepts as photosynthesis, meitosis, or genetics? Can you tell me which parts of it would?
Claims that goal-oriented design in nature are evidence intelligent design are completely unwarrented without direct proof that an intelligent agent was involved, and without proof the claim is directed toward an unjustified cause, since natural design is the default scientific conclusion until you prove otherwise.
6) Which of the above questions should be shielded from my children for their own good by court order? Why so?
There's a real problem here because evobiologists also wrongly *believe* that evidence for goal oriented design in nature constitutes evidence for god.
Dean writes : Let me answer the question though: if you accept the possibility of a designer, the number of questions after that are endless--and as it turns out, most of them (not all, but most) are the same as if you don't. But it comes to simply this:
How did the engineer accomplish it?
If most of the questions are the same, then the existence or non-existence of a designer becomes irrelevent. So what I would like to know is what do you see as the biggest difference in the questions?
As a believer, I'm not allowed to answer the questions. So I won't. But I will answer this amusing rant:
I'll tackle what bugs me about #3: if life was designe[d], the designer was incompetent. Wouldn't it be more efficient to make the Earth completely flat and give us all wheels?
Because we'd all roll off the planet into outer space!
Wouldn't it be better to run the nerves from the retina BEHIND the eyeball (thus making our eyesight more acute and avoiding the blind spot and the mental hack necessary to make us unaware of it)?
LOL. If our eyesight was too acute, then God couldn't allow us to have beer. Imagine the trauma of waking up with the wrong person after a night of excessive drinking. It was either allow beer and degrade eyesight quality, or improve human eyesight and eliminate beer. I proclaim the Creator's wisdom.
Dale: Well I said most of the questions would be the same, not all of them.
One prediction the ID theorists make is that there will likely be nothing which is truly functionless at the molecular level, i.e. no such thing as "junk" DNA, and if you can't find a purpose for something you're probably not looking hard enough. William Dembski quotes noted paleontologist and National Academy of Sciences member Lynn Margulis as saying:
"[If] some natural biological process, as yet undiscovered, yields the organisms we have without relying solely on conventional natural selection operating on random variation,…then Darwin et al. have found a mechanism that works in simple cases (which it certainly does!) but misses more important mechanisms of evolutionary change and adaptation. The search for the missing mechanisms can only be helped by people like you asking tough questions. Keep at it!"
Nobel laureate Robert Laughlin went further. He said:
"Much of present-day biological knowledge is ideological. A key symptom of ideological thinking is the explanation that has no implications and cannot be tested. I call such logical dead ends antitheories because they have exactly the opposite effect of real theories: they stop thinking rather than stimulate it. Evolution by natural selection, for instance, which Charles Darwin originally conceived as a great theory, has lately come to function more as an antitheory, called upon to cover up embarrassingb experimental shortcomings and legitimize findings that are at best questionable and at worst not even wrong. Your protein defies the laws of mass action? Evolution did it! Your complicated mess of chemical reactions turns into a chicken? Evolution! The human brain works on logical principles no computer can emulate? Evolution is the cause!"
In short, that evolution has become the catch-all explanation for anything and everything not understood, and that's lazy. It's also frequently been allowed to become non-falsifiable--i.e. no better than saying "God did it!"
Look, they got over 400 scientists to sign this petition expressing skepticism of conventional wisdom on Darwin, including evolutionary biologists, biochemists, moledular biologists, mathematicians, theoretical physcists, and more. Can we please at least stop pretending that these folks don't have some potentially valuable insights?
Moreover, do I have to agree with them to think that they shouldn't be treated like pariahs?
I'm certainly interested in learning more about the anthropic principle, especially the rather bold predictions being made. They're certainly appealing.
I'm not sure I follow all your logic, nor the sinister "they know what's behind it" remark, which just sounds like more of the fearmongering we've seen so much of surrounding this issue. It also strikes me that some of what you're up to with anthropic principle study would mesh rather well with what the ID people are at least attempting to do--I note once again that Dembski's work is as a mathematician, that he's done postdoctoral work in theoretical physics, and that that most of his study is concentrated around the idea that you can take events that seem random and mathematically show intelligent purpose behind them instead. He's produced some work in that regard in the peer reviewed literature.
It may be that there's a useful debate to be had there. My only concern is the crushing of the spirit of free inquiry, embracing paranoid conspiracy theories to justify censoring classroom discussions, and the trashing of careers of scientists who hold dissenting views, all of which I consider unhealthy.
One prediction the ID theorists make is that there will likely be nothing which is truly functionless at the molecular level, i.e. no such thing as "junk" DNA
I read that in Dembski's work, and frankly I don't understand how that prediction is derived from the premise. We design automobiles and there are lots of attributes of automobiles that have no function other than to appeal to our senses. Do we know that the Designer has no aesthetic goals, and would we know them if we saw them? What if 'junk DNA' is the molecular equivalent of tailfins or racing stripes or those hubcaps that keep spinning when the car is stopped? (And how in the Designer's name is this falsifiable? If failure to find a function for something is just a sign that you haven't looked hard enough or accumulated enough information, how can you ever declare something non-functional and falsify the prediction? You can't, that's how.)
I will also note that the petition you've linked does not represent an endorsement for intelligent design; it expresses skepticism about Darwinian evolution. I have absolutely no objection to any textbook or science course noting things which are unexplained by current evolutionary theory. Is there a similar petition signed in support of the usefulness and validity of intelligent design?
It's surprising where you find non-falsifiability in things that often look like science, isn't it?
As for the petition: you're absolutely right that it does not endorse ID explicitely, although it was distributed by the Discovery Institute and everyone signing it had to know exactly who that was. They're quite up front about it and of course they also note in their own descriptions of the petition that some of the signers are not ID theorists but some are.
What this points to is what Lynn Margulis and Robert Laughlin were quoted as saying above: Darwin has become so sacrosanct it is treated as a religion and a non-falsifiable catch-all for explaining anything not understood. Dembski will tell you openly that there are more challenges to the conventional view of Darwin than ID, that ID is only one of them (and will also say, frankly, that ID probably shouldn't be in K-12 science classrooms right now, but that banning it by court order would be worse).
I have absolutely no objection to any textbook or science course noting things which are unexplained by current evolutionary theory.
Not to follow up to myself, but...
I've always thought that if I were on the ID team, THAT would be what I'd press for, a thorough and intensive discussion in science textbooks of predictions of evolutionary theory which have not been borne out and which currently have no good alternative explanation, just-so stories, and so on. Maybe press for thought experiments on how evolutionary theory could be falsified. It'd be almost impossible for anyone to object to as long as it was kept completely factual and would be a crack in what ID'ers apparently see as the blank wall of evolutionary theory. I think everyone would benefit from that, I'd be all for it personally.
A friend of mine who teaches biology at a major university recently noted the difference he sees between his students today and those he saw 35 years ago when he first began teaching. The students are somewhat brighter today, and are far more eager to get good grades. But the vast majority of them now focus intensely on regurgitating the contents of textbooks and dutifully repeating whatever their teachers say. This is his grad students he's talking about, as well as undergrads. He finds it depressing because 30 or 40 years ago, it was common for students to challenge him, to ask him difficult questions, to think for themselves and think on their feet, and this mentality appears to be all but dead today.
I've never seen those explanations of WAP and SAP before.
I'm not sure I can agree with your WAP argument:
so the implications of the principle which derive that we occupy a "preferred place and time"... will then include all banded spiral galaxies that exist on the same evolutioary plane as us, (in the same lateral layer, age-wise)
As with most tautologies, people tend to underestimate the power of the WAP - especially in a flat, infinite universe, which the evidence is tending more and more to point to. WAP is so powerful that it does not matter how improbable life actually is in any of those spiral arms. Even if only one banded spiral galaxy in 10 ^ 1000 could actually evolve intelligent life by this time, WAP says "Well, here we are, no matter how improbably. Deal with it." It is not possible to draw any probabilistic conclusions using WAP.
Elizabeth: I would be too. My objections stem from the portrayal of science as involving canons, with scientists a priestly class, and science something you learn by accepting whatever you're told.
Children are not tabula rasa. They have a natural inquisiteveness that should be nurtured and sharpened whenever possible. This is why I also bristle at the whole "the kids will be confused by this" mentality. Ah bullshit, they're smarter than most people think, and inquisitiveness should be encouraged.
My feelings on this probably have their roots in my own childhood, where I was warned away from reading about certain subjects that were supposedly "too advanced" for me, and from discovering through my own reading that some of what was in my textbooks was wrong. I knew about warm-blooded dinosaurs before my teachers did, for example.
I also have a visceral loathing for teachers who pronounce on any subject in science as if it is Ex Cathedra. I had more than one run in with people like that growing up, and I still recognize them as an adult. I fear that such people have no idea what real science is all about--free and open debate, falsifiable hypotheses and predictions, and empirical results. And when you don't have all of that because you can't, you draw the best inferences you have from the data you have, all the while acknowledging what you don't know and what's only a guess.
How do they know it's junk? How do they differentiate between "junk" DNA and functional DNA?
These are the same people who predicted 100,000 genes, before undertaking the human genome project, but found only 30,000.
Typical, arrogant science geeks -- they have not ascertained the function or purpose of the certain segments of the DNA chain, so they deem it "junk". Why not just, humbly, say, "We don't know what these nucleotides do. We don't know if they are contain functional genes or not." It would be much more sensible and accurate and scientific, then simply labeling as "junk" that which they don't understand.
That's why people mistrust scientists. They make the same mistakes over and over and over again.
I completely agree with everything you just wrote, so I don't really think we're that far apart in a lot of ways.
Establishments can be closed-minded and protective of their 'special' knowledge, and pretty snotty to challengers at the gate. Scientists who fought tooth and nail to get their ideas recognized can be incredibly dismissive of the new ideas of others. It sucks, and as a reasoning species we have to keep a watch on that tendency. I will note, though, that a lot of ideas that initially got a WTF? from the scientific community took hold fairly rapidly once people had a chance to think about them.
I think where we part ways is that once I've done whatever amount of investigation I'm going to do, and decided that a particular challenge is without merit, I'm far, far less willing than you seem to be to go out of my way to give its proponents money and publicity and classroom space, just so we can have a challenge out there. Dissent, whether political or scientific, isn't intrinsically worthwhile. It's worthwhile to the extent that it's intelligent and pointed, offers alternatives, makes a difference, lays out the choices more clearly and tells us how we can choose between them. If a challenge fails those tests, I'm just not that interested in continuing to nurture it on the off chance that a pony is hiding in there somewhere
sorry man - I need to pass on answering teh questoins in the present context. After you introduced me to Dembski, I just have no stomach for it any longer. I have read much more since on him and my opinion of ID has gone from "sympathetic but prefer it stay in philosophy class" to "outright hostile".
I am, by the way, all in favor of teaching the limitations of scientific theories in class. In fact, this was done routinely in my high school and in college. Many of those limitations/"problems" have since actually been resolved, as science does not stand still. Others have not. Maybe your experience was different; you are ten years older than I am. But I was taught very well by my middle class public schooling in Chicago suburbia, and it was in fact that teaching that led me to a scientific career.
ID proponents *invent* "problems" in evolutionary theory, rather than address limitations of the theory that hardcore evolutionists will readily acknowledge. The IDers do this because they do not seek honest dialouge, they seek disinformation and have an agenda. If they had a real point, then they should have been able to make their case without deception. That they can't is telling.
Dean said:
I'm certainly interested in learning more about the anthropic principle, especially the rather bold predictions being made. They're certainly appealing.
Hi Dean, I should warn you that this is an "entropic" interpretation, which is different from the tautologous form.
I'm not sure I follow all your logic, nor the sinister "they know what's behind it" remark, which just sounds like more of the fearmongering we've seen so much of surrounding this issue.
There is no doubt about "what's behind it", but the fact of the matter is that you're right, it shouldn't matter if you're wearing a cross if you're holding science in your hand.
If you really want to know how I feel about this, then go here
It also strikes me that some of what you're up to with anthropic principle study would mesh rather well with what the ID people are at least attempting to do—
We are in agreement that there is "purpose" in nature, much to the chagrin of many a good neo-darwinian. I have extremely strong feelings about this that have a tendency to get out of hand when willful ignorance rears its ugly head, so I'm trying to be as diplomatic about this as possible.
I note once again that Dembski's work is as a mathematician, that he's done postdoctoral work in theoretical physics, and that that most of his study is concentrated around the idea that you can take events that seem random and mathematically show intelligent purpose behind them instead. He's produced some work in that regard in the peer reviewed literature.
Yes, but my point is that Dembski does not differentiate non-random events that show purpose, from those that show intelligence. They assume without good reason that one is evidence for the other, which is wrong, but the get away with it due to the reactionary "fearmongering" that shores up the walls of the "slippery-slope".
Your point is valid, in other words, but that doesn't remove the dishonesty behind IDists motivations.
It may be that there's a useful debate to be had there. My only concern is the crushing of the spirit of free inquiry, embracing paranoid conspiracy theories to justify censoring classroom discussions, and the trashing of careers of scientists who hold dissenting views, all of which I consider unhealthy.
Free inquiry comes from honest observations that people attempt to quantify, not from a pre-existing agenda that people attempt to rationalize with reality. The motives of the members of the Discovery Institute are dishonest in this sense.
~
TallDave said:
I've never seen those explanations of WAP and SAP before.
Dave, this is a new "entropic" interpretation, and I am the nobody originator, so that doesn't surprise me that you've never heard of it, although it doesn't make me wrong eithere, as the physics speaks for itself without the need or appeals to higher authority.
I'm not sure I can agree with your WAP argument:
Rick wrote:
so the implications of the principle which derive that we occupy a "preferred place and time"... will then include all banded spiral galaxies that exist on the same evolutioary plane as us, (in the same lateral layer, age-wise)
Dave also said:
As with most tautologies, people tend to underestimate the power of the WAP - especially in a flat, infinite universe, which the evidence is tending more and more to point to.
This version of the principle isn't tautologous, since it identifies good reason for the physics to be the way that it is, especially in a flat, **finite** bound universe.
WAP is so powerful that it does not matter how improbable life actually is in any of those spiral arms. Even if only one banded spiral galaxy in 10 ^ 1000 could actually evolve intelligent life by this time, WAP says "Well, here we are, no matter how improbably. Deal with it." It is not possible to draw any probabilistic conclusions using WAP.
You might want to check out my website, probabilities have nothing to do with this:
Elizabeth: I agree utterly that dissenters must be intelligent and pointed, and offer alternatives. That's extroardinarily important. Ditto if it lays out choices clearly and tells us how to choose between them. Yes and yes.
On the other hand I am more cautious than you in dismissing whole lines of inquiry simply because they're not popular at the moment. A case in point because I happen to be close to it at the moment is the subject of aneuploidy and cancer. For over 35 years, almost all cancer research has been gone to viruses and on so-called oncogenes as the presumed cause of cancer. Tens of billions and probably close to as many man-hours have been poured into them, producing surprisingly little. Meanwhile, over a hundred years ago it was proposed that chromosomal abnormalities known as aneuploidy might be the true cause of cancer. The theory fell out of favor until an obscure professor at Berkeley wrote a series of papers in the 1980s showing the many, many flaws in the oncogene and virus theories of cancer, poking hole after hole in them, and proposing aneuploidy as a mechanism that needed to be looked at instead. The old stallions in the field dismissed the papers, but the young ones, the grad students and new PhDs, were far less dismissive.
Now just in recent months articles have been appearing in Science and Nature not only remarking upon the aneuploidy phenomenon, but giving it serious respect and suggesting that it may be the center of cancer research in the coming years.
This guy's been treated to shabbily by his colleagues over the last 15 years, to a truly offensive degree. Now there's a very good chance we'll see his name of the Nobel rosters within the next decade.
Aziz: What I see of the ID people is that they appear to be a handful of radicals who've published a number of papers on non-ID topics who've managed to get a tiny handful of things published that focus on the area of design. They claim what they're doing is in its infancy in trying to establish a new framework. If the accusation is that they're being dishonest, I'd like to see that stick with some hard facts.
I'm willing to ask some hard and specific questions of these folks--I imagine they'd take my emails.
Oh by the way, the aneuploidy theory of cancer also has other implications, for aneuploidy may play a role in the mechanism for speciation that evolutionary researchers have been looking for. If you think about it it makes a certain sense; mutations and natural evolution don't cause you to gain or lose chromosomes, but aneuploidy does.
Rick: I view willful ignorance as one of teh gravest of sins. If you'd show me the clear evidence of dishonesty by Dembski—the only ID theorist I've famililarized myself with in depth—that would be cool.
Dean: Refuted here. Similar arguments have been used historically to explain what at the time was unexplainable, e.g. the revolution of the planets and the flight of an arrow. Science eventually reached a point where such leaps from the physical to the metaphysical were no longer necessary.
My problem with this principle is that leap. We go from the testable to the untestable. We also elevate ourselves to the status of the reason for the universe to exist. That stinks too much of Earth-at-the-center-of-the -universe stuff to me.
2. Weak Anthropic Principle: Cogito Ergo Sum - I exist because I observe myself to exist.
I have no serious problem with this one.
3. My problem is that you are introducing a philosophical or quasi-religious concept into a science class. These questions are beyond the scope of science and should be taught in a philosophy class.
Why don't you push for its teaching there? Or why not in PE? After all this concept has as much to do with science as it does with dodgeball.
More later.
2. Weak anthropic principal - Sort of a semantically dumbed down version of the strong anthropic principal. It fundamentally ignores the possibility of non-carbon based life.
Both of these strike me as the result of limitations of our observational opportunities (we can't see and study universes different than our own), limitations of imagination (life "as we know it" becomes "life - period"), or limitations of current theory. In many respects I consider the anthropic principal to be the modern equivalent of the belief that earth (mankind) is the center of the universe.
I am going to need more time on the rest of these so I'll try to tackle them tonight.
2. The WAP states that since intelligent, language-creatures exist, the Universe has conditions favorable to such creatures, which is a perfectly good conclusion. The difference between SAP and WAP is that WAP concludes something about the way the universe is, whereas SAP concludes something about the way the universe must be.
3. There's nothing wrong with raising the question, "what accounts for the high degree of apparent design in living creatues?" is a very important and deep one. What's wrong is misrepresenting false answers to the question as being on a par with the actual answer.
4. If SETI actually manages to find anything interesting patterns in EM signals, it will be evidence, but not conclusive evidence, that there is, in fact, intelligent extraterrestial life. If, however, it is later discovered that there is a nonintelligent mechanism which is capable of forming EM signals into interesting designed patterns (an analogue of evolution through natural and sexual selection), and there proves to be substantial evidence that this nonintelligent mechanism is, in fact, responsible for the signals detected (an analogue to the fossil and genetic record), then we will have to discount the hypothesis that aliens are behind it. In this case, the objects producing the EM signals themselves could be considered lifeforms (possibly intelligent, possibly not).
Similarly, until the mechanism of evolution was proposed, and there was substantial evidence that it was responsible for the apparent design of lifeforms, the hypothesis that God did it was as good as any other.
5. I have not read that book, so I cannot provide an intelligent answer to this question. My apologies.
6. None of them, obviously. Nor should your child be prevented, by court order, from exposure to any of the related beliefs discussed above (evolution, intelligent design, Flying Spaghetti Monsters, aliens, etc.). You're free to teach your children that 2+2=5 or to send them to a religious institution or private school that does. That doesn't mean that public schools should teach that 2+2=5 in math class.
2) Any observed universe must be such that intelligent life could evolve. Further, no matter how unlikely such evolution is, it will be observed to have occurred.
P.S. I recommend The Anthropic Cosmological Principle for more detail.
3) Unknown to me.
4) SETI is firmly grounded in the scientific tradition of observation. Positive or negative results will be useful data. There is no fundamental reason that theories must proceed observation (and in fact, some of the most important modern theories followed observations, such as quantum theory). I would say it is quite different from Dembski because it is not "asking questions", it is obtaining observational data.
5) Having not read the book, I have no comment on this.
6) I don't know.
2) It's a tautology; since carbon-based life has evolved, the Universe must be such that carbon-based life can evolve.
3) I stopped beating my wife yesterday, why do you ask?
I'll reframe your question in a way which isn't deliberately insulting. Why am I so strongly against it? Because my opinion, formed through my own investigation and not through taking anyone's word for it it, is that ID is not a scientific endeavor. You yourself define it as 'twaddle'; I object to attempts to dilute the already weak process of teaching young people in this country scientific thinking with twaddle.
4) I don't think the *mechanics* of what SETI is doing are unscientific - there's nothing wrong with gathering data - but yes, I do think that if they ever discover 'evidence of intelligent life' in the form of seemingly non-random patterns of data, a lot of the same criticisms leveled at ID will be leveled at those conclusions.
5) I haven't read it so I can't directly address your question. However, I'm a little dubious of the implied claim that anyone has ever said that reading 'Of Pandas And People' would render a child unable to understand photosynthesis, meitosis, or genetics (my wife's bruises are healing nicely, thanks). I do think that introducing this book does have the potential to confuse students about how science works. If nothing else, it seems to be teaching them that scientific theory development works by taking ideas roundly rejected by the scientific community and subjecting them to a second round of review by ninth graders.
6) Personally, although I think the whole thing is profoundly stupid, I'm uncertain about the court orders. I prefer public exposure and the resulting ridicule as a way of deterring school boards from making this kind of decision.
The ID line fails to be 'science' because it isn't falsifiable. If you cannot say 'this is how you prove me wrong' in a doable way, you aren't doing science. If you can't make a prediction which separates your hypothesis from competing hypotheses, and which experiment can find to be right, or wrong, you aren't doing science. If you don't run the experiment, you aren't doing science. Merely hypothesizing isn't science - you also have to draw predictions from these hypotheses, test them by experiment - natural or otherwise, and then others must be able to replicate your experiments. You cannot do science without the experiments, and you cannot gain acceptance without successful experimentation.
Unless you can exhaust all possible alternative theories, you cannot point to the failures of others as evidence for your own hypothesis. Proof by exhaustion is difficult and tedious even in mathematics, where the assumptions are known and mostly uniform. In a real world of science where the postulates are unknown and disagreed on, proof by exhaustion is in practice impossible. Pointing out the flaws in evolution do absolutely nothing to advance the idea of ID as science in scientific terms, only in rhetorical and political terms.
People didn't finally accept Einstein because his math made sense, they accepted him because his theories predicted then-unknown things which proved to be true. What is taught in primary science classroom should be science, and primarily generally accepted science, at that. Before having testable hypotheses which proved correct, Einstein wouldn't have belonged in a classroom any more than ID does now.
1-2) Anthropic principles - I'll 'go with' the idea that any theory of the universe we come up with must allow the realization of carbon based life, for the same reason that any complete theory of physics must allow for the development of protons - a theory which doesn't at least grossly correspond to reality is useless. The stronger versions are foolish - there is no reason to suspect that there don't, or can't, exist 'other' universes outside of our own which consist entirely of neutrinos or whatever. Wherever ours came from, there could be others. A universe may only be OBSERVED if its development leads to the development of life - there is no 'observed' without 'observers'. That doesn't mean that things can't happen without observation. If a tree falls in a forest, it still causes ripples of compression to propogate through air, whether there is a chipmunk or not to understand those ripples as 'sound'.
3) Physical Science is naturalist - it is predicated, explicitly, on the idea that everything observable has a natural and (at least idirectly) observable cause - that there are no extrauniversal, nonobservable phenomena - though their could be intrauniversal things we can't see, yet. ID is obviously not like this. Putting ID in science class is like putting grammar in mathematics class. If it doesn't fit, you must, uh, quit.
The difference can be clarified by putting this question: If it were determined that the best theory is to say that this universe was created by an intelligence, what is the next step? The scientific response is to ask - what is the nature and origin of that intelligence? what is the nature and origin of the verse it inhabits? ID returns with, essentially, religion.
When you stop using naturalism as an explanation, it is no longer physical science(the type of 'science' in the 'science' classroom, it is theology, and belongs in a theology classroom. (Theology could be considered as, at least ideally, the 'science' of religion. Studying the mind is 'psychology' and thus doesn't belong in the biology or 'life science' class. Studying protozoa is 'biology' and doesn't belong in the physics classroom. And studying the supernatural isn't physics, biology, chemistry, astronomy, geology, etc. and doesn't belong in the physical science classroom.
4) We have uncontrovertable evidence of the existence of intelligent life in the universe. SETI is merely an attempt to find a second realization of this phenomenon. We know our methods for SETI aren't sufficient to find 'ourselves' at more than about 20 LY range, so the lack of success at finding other life is neither surprising nor discouraging. I think the current SETI is mostly a waste of time and effort, and until it is successful it is a waste of time to spend more than a few minutes of sidebar on it in a classroom as an example of current bleeding-edge research, but it IS scientific - it is, in fact, testing predictions derived from hypotheses. We have no such evidence for an intelligent 'designer'. We ourselves cannot 'create' life without using as the building blocks existing lifeforms, and we have no evidence that anyone else can.
William Dembski is many things, but a scientist he is not. Look at his degrees - divinity, mathematics, philosophy, but no science. (Math ain't science. Math is a tool in a toolbox. It can be used as a tool in creating hypotheses, it can be used as a tool in analysing results. Without context it is useless. That 2+2=4 in base 10 is all well and good, but it doesn't mean anything until we say 2...what?)
5) Irrelevant. Reading Moby Dick in biology class wouldn't prevent your kid from understanding genetics, photosynthesis, or meiosis either, except to the extent that time spent on that tome is time not spent on those topics. It still doesn't belong there. It belongs in English class. It COULD prevent your kid from understanding evolution, because ID proponents so often misrepresent evolutionary theories.
6) None of them - if you want to raise them with your kids, have at.
Vis a vis raising these topics in a science classroom in a public school - what classroom? Psychology, life science, general physical science? What we call 'science' education at the primary/secondary level is actually restricted to physical science. Economics doesn't belong there. Neither does psychology. Neither does linguistics. All are 'sciences' - they are 'social sciences'. Theology, of which ID is a theorem, is a third animal, which could be called 'supernatural sciences' or 'metaphysics'.
As for the presence of supernatural science in the classroom - 'Congress shall make no law regarding the establishment of religion', a principle which has been extended to the states, of which public schools are a part. Religion can be defined in these terms as 'what you believe' about SS - it is in the most scientific terms the 'theories' of theology. If you draw ANY conclusions in your study of 'theology', you are taking on a religion. If you teach these conclusions in a class, you are establishing them as the religion of that class. Thus, you are, at a small level, 'establishing' religion. If you draw no conclusions, you, again, aren't doing any kind of science. (Imagine teaching copernicus while trying to 'balance' 'Earth is the center' with 'Earth orbits sun' and not drawing conclusions.) This is an argument of law, not reason, because my premises are too far from those of an ID advocate for us to discuss anything 'reasonably'. My reasoned argument is that the primary and secondary classroom should be devoted to 'canon' - well accepted science, ss, and math, widely regarded literature, generally accepted grammar and spelling. No quack science, no Harry Potter, no Ebonics. ID isn't in that category. Some Bible is fine - if it is taught as an example of pursuasive literature or fiction and analyzed in those terms.
(E.g. Job. How does the language of Job lend credibility to the story? Would it be as credible if argued in English at a fifth grade level? Is the 'god' character's behavior consistent with other presentations in the same literature? How do Job's assumptions about his relationship to god advance the plot? What are the contradictions in the behaviors of the protagonists? What conclusions is the author trying to lead the reader to? What changes in behavior by protagonists which are in character for that protagonist might have lead to other conclusions? What other conclusions can be drawn, other than the author's? You can do all of this without drawing conclusions about the ultimate truth of any of this, and thus without 'establishment'. If the teacher teaches any of it as 'truth', it is establishment.)
(Yes, I know this is reaching a bit. Yes, I believe the 'under God' has no business in a Pledge made lawful by Congress. Neither do I think the invocation at the beginning of Congress or the Court is legal. No I don't support Newdow, I think Newdow is a fool - if he wins, someone will just amend the Constitution with an amendment I'd just as soon not see passed. See 'gay marriage' and 'overreach'.)
Finally, all of this conversation about putting ID in the 'science' classroom is premature. Until ID generates some testable predictions which are shown to be true, none of it has moved beyond speculative hypothesis. Egon Spengler had hypotheses, but they didn't belong in any classroom until he had actually captured some ghosts and presented some replicable results. Placing untested hypotheses in science classrooms makes a mockery of real science.
You threw down the gauntlet, and some of us have picked it up.
Now what?
To me these are all obvious indications of descent with modification. I mean, you would have to be willfully blind or hopelessly ignorant not to see them. The DNA evidence is arguably the most conclusive. Homeobox (Hox) genes identical to ours, which help determine body structure, are found not only in other mammals but in the lowest forms of multicellular life. That Darwin managed to concoct his theory simply through the observation of morphology without modern molecular biology at his disposal (or indeed any idea how traits were inherited) is indisputable evidence of his genius.
To look at the human body and say "it was obviously designed" (with the subtext, as is ALWAYS the case since at root this is implicitly a religious argument, that the designer was omnipotent and omniscient, or at least WAY smarter than we are because we sure don't know how to make bodies from scratch) is to ignore the many kludges in the system. Any modern engineer could design a better body. And in a century or so we'll probably be able to build it. If we can do better than God, then what's so special about God?
As Scott Adams wrote in "The Religion Wars" -- If God is so smart, why do we fart?
Moreover, evolution "hangs together." It ties in with other things we know about the universe, other fields of science. You can say "well, if we evolved from apes, then we should be able to find a gene or set of genes for characteristic X that both apes and men have" and what do you know, assuming you can find the genes for the characteristic (not always easy, but that's not because they don't exist, it's because it's a HARD problem we've only begun to solve) -- well, there they are. All of modern biology and medicine reinforces evolutionary theory because it wouldn't even exist without it.
Given the fact that we can observe evolution in action as well as its results, it seems reasonable that, on a long enough time scale, it is also the mechanism behind speciation and as a result is the cause of the variety of life we see on this planet. I mean, we can never prove it, because we don't have a time machine and nobody lives long enough to observe speciation (which is the reason why the guy offering $250K for any evidence of evolution creating a new species is a crank -- in any case there are already fairly compelling examples he could draw from). Any alternative hypothesis has to be more reasonable than a simple extension of what we already know happens and it has to explain things better than evolution does -- the predictions it makes must be more useful. But intelligent design makes no predictions.
To come in and say "evolution is wrong, life was designed" you have to ignore pretty much all of the last fifty years or so of science. I find willful ignorance offensive. I find the advocacy of willful ignorance dangerous. I find the willingness of otherwise sane and intelligent people to allow such danger into our schools frightening, because these kids are the ones who are going to be the doctors and scientists responsible for my health in my old age, and I don't want them ignorant!
Advocates of "intelligent design" don't want kids to debate the theory in school. We don't have kids debate the heliocentric theory, with one group taking the position of Galileo and another group persecuting the first as the Catholic church did. To stage a debate implies that there is still scientific controversy on the matter, and that is the real goal -- to make students believe that both hypotheses are equally valid, equally supported by evidence, when this is not the case at all. It's like saying that tomorrow, I could either be hit by a meteor, or I could not be hit by a meteor -- two alternatives, so fifty-fifty chance, right? It's the same thing couched in somewhat more sophisticated language. They're trying to put intelligent design on the same level as evolution, and they're trying to do it not by making ID a good scientific theory but through political maneuvering.
By the way, I got to the second page of "Of Pandas and People" before I encountered an outright falsehood: "According to today's view, matter has within itself a tendency toward self-organization leading to life." I can believe some scientists hold this as a hypothesis, but it certainly is not the mainstream view. (And if it were, science would not be content to say "matter self-organizes," it would be obsessed with why and how, rather than settling for "God did it.")
The book (or at least the excerpt available on Amazon) also completely glosses over notions of probability and the extremely long timescales over which life arose. If there's only a one in a gazillion chance of some unusual event happening -- such as the generation of a self-replicating molecule -- but you have a gazillion molecules in the primordial soup for a million years, it's almost certain to happen -- and more than once. These timescales are so far outside our usual experience they are hard to intuit or even fathom, so glossing over the issue without even an attempt to explain it amounts to dishonesty. (The index also does not contain an entry for "time.") There was a perfect opportunity to bring it up but the author failed to do so. Anyone who has read Dawkins would be familiar with the argument, and anyone writing a book about the origin of life would certainly have read Dawkins, so I can only assume that this was left out intentionally. There's not even a hand-waving dismissal -- it's as if the author doesn't think it's important, when in fact it is crucial to the understanding of the theory of evolution, and to offer an alternative to evolution you need to address it.
I can't be certain that this book (like "intelligent design" itself) is exactly the kind of pseudoscientific rubbish that uneducated people such as high school students would find plausible because they can easily grasp and imagine it, while evolutionary theory is more difficult -- but it doesn't look promising. The argument of ID seems to be "you can't imagine how this could happen, can you? so it couldn't have" -- but most people aren't very imaginative at all (although of course, they have been told they are, again and again, to reinforce their self esteem). Even the title, a nod to Gould's "The Panda's Thumb," can be seen (okay, uncharitably) as an attempt to give the book an aura of legitimacy it has not earned.
In short -- no sir, I don't like it.
You are correct, they would. [pdf warning]
"Mathematics is not a science" -- there are quite a few mathematicians in the National Academy of Sciences who would be surprised to hear this, and quite a few physicists, molecular biologists, astronomers, and other scientists who've worked directly with mathematicians who would be similarly shocked to hear it.
"The anthropic principles are not science." Physicists, particularly cosmologists, would be surprised to hear this, since they came up with both. Plus, most of the descriptions given by respondents have been wrong. Here's a pretty good overview of the anthropic principle(s). Nevertheless I find it telling, this absolute insistence that these are not scientific questions.
"Ebonics" is a "quack science" -- It is likely that not a single linguist on this planet would agree with this statement. Perhaps linguistics is not a science either.
We do seem to have a general admission: nothing about presenting this material for discussion in any classroom would prevent any child from being able to understand the scientific method, how to construct a falsifiable experiment, or to understand any of the fundamentals of the biological sciences such as genetics, photosynthesis, and the normal things that any child being taught elementary biology is taught.
I would also agree that science education is terrible in this country--and I think the entire problem with it is summed up ably by this statement:
"...primary and secondary classroom should be devoted to 'canon' - well accepted science, ss, and math...."
God I would have hated to have this person as my science teacher in K-12. In fact I encountered many like him, and I hated the guts of each and every one of them.
A friend of mine who teaches biology at a major university recently noted the difference he sees between his students today and those he saw 35 years ago when he first began teaching. The students are somewhat brighter today, and are far more eager to get good grades. But the vast majority of them now focus intensely on regurgitating the contents of textbooks and dutifully repeating whatever their teachers say. This is his grad students he's talking about, as well as undergrads. He finds it depressing because 30 or 40 years ago, it was common for students to challenge him, to ask him difficult questions, to think for themselves and think on their feet, and this mentality appears to be all but dead today.
I think it probably has less to do with what we spend on science education, and far more to do with how we teach it--teaching it as "canon" pretty much describes the whole problem in one word for me.
Chapter 1 of Of Pandas and People is available free, which is why I linked it. Here it is again.
I'm not answering any other questions because I asked for responses to my specific questions and not anything else. If you want to bring up other issues, request that I start a new thread. I'm looking for answers to my specific six questions.
An interesting observation. I've never been to Japan, but from what I understand, regurgitating textbook knowledge is exactly what's looked for &questioning the teacher is somewhat taboo, yet they do rather well in the sciences by common report.
Guess what I'm asking is: Is the teacher depressed because teaching is not interesting to him if he isn't challenged? Is it a cultural limitation [or strength] of ours that we demand questioning &mostly reward that?
Maybe the cultural differences shape what kind of sciences we're good at. Japan, it seems, does very well with technology, while we do somewhat better with basic science...
[Yeah... off-topic. Sorry]
I do not agree that presenting this material in the classroom would have no effect on children's learning about the scientific method. I do agree that nothing about presenting this material would prevent a child from understanding photosynthesis.
The answers so far have been pretty good, yet you dismiss them rather easily by writing about the sad state of science teaching in American schools.
Don't confuse the two issues. Just because science is taught badly doesn't mean that Intelligent Design will make things better.
Stick to the 6 questions.
Firstly, mathematics may or may not be a science depending on what you mean by the term. Unlike the physical sciences, it does not rely on observation and experiment. It happens to share with science the primary goal of getting things *right* (although, for mathematicians, that means logically right, and for physical scientists, it means correctly describing the universe we inhabit), and it is an extremely useful tool in the sciences. Some consider it a science, some consider it its own animal. It's not uncontroversially either science or not science.
The anthropic principles are not science. The weak one is strictly a logical statement (and hence a tautology), the strong one is metaphysics. Neither is subject to refutation by experiment.
Ebonics isn't a science, linguistics is. It is, as you say, however, a perfectly good linguistic object of study, even if the name is silly -- what's wrong with "Black English"?
You're right that science education is dismal in this nation, although I'd disagree with you as to the primary cause. Lowest-common denominator curricula and excessive interest in the biographies of scientists rather than their work are real culprits.
1&2 best expressed by piet hein
the universe may
be as great as they say
but it wouldn't be missed
if it didn't exist
3 TIMSS (trends in international math and science study) says american students have been catching up with the best of their international peers from 95 -03. why toss them several steps backwards now?
4. SETI looks for physical proof of life on other planets. Dembski looks to imploy faulty logic "if A then B" implies "not B then not A" to "prove" an unfalsifiable 'hypothesis'.
5. it wouldn't prevent them from understanding any of it but it would strongly suggest there was no need or purpose to understanding any of it.
6. don't shield any of them but don't introduce them in a science class. why so? see 3.
dale
"Oh, I should mention, Of Pandas and People is a text book for primary bio-sciences education that self-proclaimed defenders of science are seeking to have banned from Dover, Pennsylvania science classrooms on First Amendment grounds."
this is completely irrelevant. the people trying to get it banned are just some parents, which is why they are "self-proclaimed" and not "proclaimed" defenders of science. and the first amendment grounds is clearly the wrong way for skeptics of ID to fight this fight. but either way, regardless of who is doing what for what reason regarding intelligent design in the classroom in PA has nothing to do at all with the six questions you asked, two of which contain the fallacy of the excluded middle.
and dean, as a matter of fact, mathematics is not strictly a science. that doesn't mean mathematicians can't be scientists, or that scientists can't be mathematicians, but they are separate categories. mathematics is not tied to any given reality, but the generally accepted definition of science is that it must be based on pyhsical phenomena (i.e.: our observable universe).
and the anthropic principles are also not scientific theories, but merely conjectures made by people who happen to be scientists. not everything that comes out of a scientist's mouth is ipso facto science. the principles state that based on the fact that carbon based life forms exist in this universe, then this universe is uniquely amicable to carbon-based life. as has been argued elsewhere, this is argumentum ad ignorantiam. that non-carbon-based life has not been observed to exist in this universe does not mean that it does not exist. nor does the presence of carbon-based life in this universe imply that this is the only universe that has carbon-based life, or even that this universe's set of fundamental constants are the optimum for carbon-based life.
as to your biologist friend, i would venture that perhaps the reason he think his students were more creative or challenging in their questioning 30 years ago is because he now has 30 years of challenging-question-answering under his belt, and thus the "challenging" questions students are likely to ask in his course have mostly all been asked, and he now has the answers at his fingertips. so, from his perspective, they are asking easy questions. but perhaps the first time those questions were raised, say when he first started out 30 or 40 years ago, he was stumped.
pandas and people is unrelated to empiricism, falsifiability, photosynthesis, et al., so i'm not sure what this question is getting at. it's like asking: "what makes you think C++ would prevent my child from understanding gravity?"
Back to my answers:
3. Design inference doesn't frighten me - if I might be vain enough to assert that I am an "intelligent and thoughtful person". It's bad information, and I don't want my child taught bad information for the same reason that I don't want him taught Aristotilian cosmology or Lamarkian evolution.
4. The SETI project is based on a hypothesis that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe, and that life can be detected using current technology. So far SETI has proven that life does not exist.
5. After reading Chapter 1 of Pandas &People, I'm left shaking my head at the leap of the author: complex systems cannot come about naturally, therefore they must have been made.
6. None.
The linked material (is that the whole first chapter?) looks reasonable to me on a quick scan. It's mostly about problems with abiogenesis theories.
I'm assuming that OPAP relies on 'specified complexity' in asserting that intelligent design can be tested using the scientific method. There are, like, a zillion critiques of how Dembski is using this concept, but here's a good one:
http://www.talkreason.org/articles/eandsdembski.pdf
If specified complexity cannot be reliably identified and used to correctly predict intelligent intervention, ID cannot be tested using the scientific method. My reading on the subject indicates that that's pretty widely agreed to be the case (I'd be interested in hearing about anyone who is sympathetic to this concept who is not an ID proponent). Therefore, it purports to be teaching about the scientific method, while giving what is in fact an example of what not to do. To the extent the whole issue is understood at all by the student, if it teaches him that the scientific method applies here, it's wrong. Which seems, well, bad.
If my assumption that OPAP relies on SC for ID's 'testability' is wrong, let me know.
1) The Strong Anthropic principle essentially asserts that the universe must be constructed in such a way that intelligent life will eventually come into existence.
2) The Weak Anthropic principle is that any observed universe must be constructed in such a way that it might evolve, even if it might be improbable.
This page has a lot of information on it.
3) I think there's nothing that should frighten them but that they very clearly do act frightened (Elizabeth Reid's objections notwithstanding). It seems to be a fear that we're going to turn back to the dark ages and embrace irrational things (e.g. "flying spaghetti monsters") if we allow free inquiry on these questions in the science classsroom.
4) SETI is clearly science, because it is perfectly acceptable through many areas of science to use empirical data and to draw inferences when a complete data set is not available. If SETI is not science, then neither are most of the fields of archaeology, paleontology, forensic science, or cryptography. A lot of what pathologists do would have to be rejected as science, too.
5) There is no part of this book--at least the first chapter--that would harm any child's science education in any way. It has some inaccuracies, most of which appear to be simply from being a little outdated. It's got far fewer inaccuracies than the biology texts I studied in High School and Junior High, that's for sure. I think contemplation of the questions it raises would greatly improve the thinking skills of young children interested in science, not because of the "falsehoods" it contains but because of the valid objections it raises.
6) None of them would. Banning these from my child's classroom in the name of the first amendment does far more harm than good.
Now, to answer other challenges: ID should certainly be discussed in philosophy, just like the anthropic principle should be discussed in philosophy classes as well as classes on theoretical physics and cosmology. Philosophical questions are part of science and always have been. The ID people raise valid objections and draw some inferences. This should be fair game for discussion in the science classroom since science is central to the discussion. The notion that we're going to have religion or philosophy teachers whipping out biology texts and explaining what they think is wrong with them would be outrageous.
they very clearly do act frightened (Elizabeth Reid's objections notwithstanding)
Can you substantiate this?
I am old enough to remember when the theory of warm-blooded dinosaurs was a minority opinion, and I witnessed it become the majority opinion--one which, by the way, to this day still has detractors among paleontologists. The history of science is replete with such things, which is why empiricism and falsifiability are such critically important concepts: debate on most questions continues until verifiable empirical proof settles the question.
I read in Time magazine yesterday a guy who claimed that Intelligent Design is a "stalking horse" for religion. That sounds like a fear to me. If it's not a fear, what is it?
I've read repeatedly from the anti-ID people that this whole question threatens to throw us back to the dark ages where unreason ruled and science was subjugated to religious thought. I've also had anti-ID people quite pedantically assert that ID is nothing but "God in the gaps" thinking and that if we allow it to be contemplated in science classrooms, we will be teaching children that if we don't understand something it means God did it, which is not just a non-sequitur, it's pretty obviously a fear-based non-sequitur in my eyes.
I guess if you view fear as the basis for all attempts to avoid an undesirable outcome, you're right. I think this dilutes the word 'fear' to meaninglessness. By that standard, the prospect that my milk might go bad scares me as demonstrated by my care in putting it back in the fridge.
And about Dembski... would it improve the quality of scientific education if all minority views held by just a few scientists got their own textbooks?
Many scientists also exhibit similar behavior regarding global warming. But on the other hand, many religious people get all knackered up over evolution, so I'm not sure what that gets you.
ID is bad information which excludes it in my view. Will the Dark Ages return? I hope not because sackcloth makes me itch.
So if the universe is intelligently designed, what about RVMan's suggestion that it isn't perfect? After all I'm going bald yet can't breath underwater because I lack gills. And what's the deal with leaving a ticking timebomb inside of me: my appendix! Do you know how many people die a year from ruptured appendices?
So if you want to entertain "intelligent design", I think you should also consider "stupid design".
As for minority views: I think it would improve all science textbooks at just about every level to note the existence of significant minority opinions held by qualified scientists. I can't think of anything that would better improve the general public's understanding of what science is and isn't. I would applaud it, wildly.
it won't harm his ability to understand how science works but it will harm his desire to understand how science works because ID says the existance of a designer precludes understanding.
dale
Guns are obviously intelligently designed, but just try going on a gun lover's forum and ask them about stupid design features. Just be prepared for the tidal wave you receive.
In light of all the stupid shit that gun designers pull, I guess they just appeared randomly.
BK
Sorry for being off-topic, I really don't care much is ID is taught in schools one way or the other. All I can really hope for is an honest presentation of evolution. That it is not fact, just the best theory we have right now. It predicts data not observed to date and doesn't predict data that is observed, but it does a better job predicting more observed data than anything else so far.
I'm sorry, where does ID say that? Could you provide a citation?
It's possible some of ID's opponents fear it, although again, you've offered no support for that beyond your say-so (and a half-claim that I fear it myself no matter what I say). However, I submit that by substituting 'why do intelligent and thoughtful people object to this so strongly' for 'why does it frighten them so much', you would be characterizing the totality of the opposition more accurately. I can tell you why I opppose it strongly; I can't tell you why I fear it so much, because I don't. Find someone who says he's frightened, and ask him.
The problem with saying we'll "note the existence of significant minority opinions held by qualified scientists" is that it doesn't end the quarrel. Who decides what is a significant minority opinion, and how many qualified scientists need to hold it (and who decides who is qualified)? The objection to ID by the scientific community rests exactly on the question of whether this minority opinion is worth anything. I can't think of another major 'scientific controversy' where one of the positions is held to be not just wrong but intellectually incoherent by the vast majority of scientists in the relevant field, that anyone's proposing we put in science textbooks.
Actually, the timescales are not your friend. I've pointed out elsewhere that Dembski deals with that issue quite convincingly, as does Stuart Kauffman, not an ID advocate. Also, so does Johnjoe McFadden in his book Quantum Evolution, another non-IDer.
The odds aren't one in gazillion, with a gazillion chances or more to succeed. That is merely part of the modern creation myth called Darwinism, that we inculcate our students in.
I would say that a reasonable person would label that description as "fear".
I think you're right. I just don't think that her emotions should be extrapolated to everyone who opposes ID. (Dean, maybe she'd like to answer that question?)
Let me turn your question around. If you accept the existence of a designer, what is left to understand?
Dale
Dean and I have both observed strong emotion from members of the anti-ID crowd. He calls it fear. I figure some is fear, some is anger, some is hate, but whatever it is, it is strong. You may not feel fear, anger or strong emotion. Others do. I, for example, do, but from the other side. I call mine anger. I don't think Dean extrapolated this strong emotion to everyone.
Yours,
Wince
1. I ain't sure. I suspect it means that humans are the center of universe and are here for a purpose
2.I ain't sure. I suspect it means that humans are meaningless creatures, without purpose. Birth, copulation, death -- nothing more.
3. It frightens them, becaue they have become ivory tower utopians, and now they (reluctantly) face a challenge to their authority.
4. SETI is based on sound scientific principles. There may or may not be life outside of this planet. How should we go about trying to confirm this? I dunno, but it is a good question, and I guess the brainiacs in charge, believe that if life exists elsewhere, the footprints can be detected by radio waves or sumptin' like them.
5. Their ain't nuthin' wrong with the first chapter I read -- except that it cuts against the normal grain you'd expect to read if you were inculcated with the standard evolutionist mantra that I was.
6. None. We should allow kids to read this. If they become smarter and get better jobs, so be it. If they become dumber, and don't do so well, it will likely fade away. I like flexibility and experimentation at the local lever. Sheesh, can public schools get any worse?
Barnes, H.
p.s. Let me close with my standard comment. ID seems more like philosophy of science, than science.
An interesting notion, but it doesn't make any sense. My question was merely to ask for evidence for something you claimed. I didn't make the complimentary claim, so there isn't anything to turn around.
But proceeding from there, the implication in your response is that ID really doesn't say it.
About what? If you just wish to understand whether the process is, at its heart, materialist or teleological, either answer could be said to leave you with nothing "left to understand". If you are interested in the details, there are apparently many, no matter which side you choose to align yourself with.
So getting back to your initial claim, it isn't ID "saying" that at all, but you saying that about the prospect of an ID world, because of your philosophical dispostion.
Okay. I can accept that philosophical disposition will influence perception. But I'd still like to know what there is to understand in the details, that is testable using scientific principles, if you accept the existence of a designer?
I'm not denying there's strong emotion; I feel some myself (I would characterize it as 'frustration' primarily but maybe anger is closer). I'm not saying that everyone has to be dispassionate to be taken seriously or anything.
I react negatively when Dean says, "What are you guys afraid of?" because it seems to imply that the anti-ID majority recognizes, secretly, that the ID proponents are right... or at least on the right track... and quick, we have to suppress this information because otherwise we will be shown up as fools and charlatans who have been hiding and denying the TRUTH! In other words, our objections prove our fear, and our fear proves that deep down we know we're wrong!
I guess if it's understood that fear of an idea doesn't imply a hidden belief that it's correct, only a belief that it's harmful, I'll stop bringing this up.
WAP is the notion that limited biolife is a carbon based phenomena based on chemical complexities with no inherent purpose but to resolve the equations in the primordial stew and its by-products.
Design inference challenges entrenched scientists that have decided that the meal is the menu, and the restruaunt is no longer serving items on the real menu. This is definitely not an acceptable aim as the business of education in science is not to memorize the Krebs cycle or evolutionary doctrine but <i>to employ itself in the education of the intellect of the student to reason well in all matters, to reach out towards truth. </i>
SETI is beyond my ken at the moment.
Chapter 1: Pandas and People is about as benign as it can get.
None of Dean’s questions need be shielded from his or anyone else’s children.
Fear of ID. Yeah it causes really, really bad stuff. Probably global warming, tsunami's in science departments like world-wide.
Reminds me of a Christmas/New Years season a while back. I'm in line directly behind a woman who wants stamps for her greeting cards. The postal worker gives her some of these classic rennaisance painting stamps of Madonna and Child. The lady went completely berserk: "we don't need any freaking religion stuff."
#3 - I don't know.
#4 - The SETI project is a weird cross of science and faith. It's a place where rational analysis of data gets intertwined with crop circle anecdotes. I wasn't able to easily find the questions Dembski is asking, but I presume they have to do with probabilities of outcome. If that is true, then at least SETI has some chance of providing verifiable evidence of their effort. Unless they don't and then absence of evidence won't qualify as evidence of absence so the search will just go on forever.
#5 - I haven't read the first chapter of "Of Pandas and People" so I have no idea.
#6 - I wouldn't want court orders shielding my children from any of the questions, but just for the sake of argument, at what age would you think the court order would become invalid?
Moonbat idiots.
How about this read? A certain vocal segment of the scientific community is afraid that the hoi polloi is going to insist on having their way, and that this will impact the community's funds, prestige, and oh yeah, the pursuit of science?
And some people choose to spread lies rather than confront honestly. Last time I got into this one, I found to my shock, that some people, whom I would have thought to be good conservatives were not above lying. Thankfully, it was not here, but it turned me off commenting for a while, I think. This type of despicable behavior is far more damaging than ID could be.
The real problem is that this segment is anti-democratic. In this case, who determines what minority scientist gets the nod to be included in the schoolbooks...why the elected representatives of the people do! Any other answer is anti-democratic, and downright dangerous.
Could they be wrong? Why yes they could. I wasn't aware scientists spoke ex cathedra; schoolboards and scientists in my view are often wrong. It comes from being human. This hankering for a more efficient system where the "right" answer gets forced on the people reminds me of some of the critiques of democracy...its inefficient, and the people are stupid. Hmm, well, I say, the elites are often disconnected from reality by their gobs of money, and if you want to change America's essentials, just go.
Why am I having to say this stuff that should be completely obvious? Vox populi vox dei. I blame the lack of a good history education. Money needs to be diverted from teaching science and spent on history until people stop supporting tyranny.
Lets make it a court order...No more money will be spent on any scientific grant until all scientists affirm their willingness to submit to the law, and renounce legal coups.
More seriously, as to why humanity isn't perfect. Its a finite universe. You'd complain if you got all you asked for, but didn't have the ability to teleport from one star to another. Eventually you run up against the limits of your finiteness, and you'd complain as you juggled stars. Because there would still be limits.
And remember, Christianity gave birth to Science. Science was born in a world considered to be created by God, and yet somehow it not only survived, but it thrived. Actually, I think it may be faltering a bit in a world without God. A deconstructed world is not a very friendly place for Science I'd guess. I think you can choose to have God and his Order, or you can choose to have a Celestial Chaos as the foundation of your society. And Chaos does not give birth to Science, nor does it protect Science.
Eric
As large as this thread is, you probably won't see this comment, but I'll post it anyway.
It's also probably a really silly question to ask and based on the answers above it is way below the usual level of debate on your site, but I am just wondering.
When ID people use the "logic" that the level of complexity and harmony in living beings can only be explained by design, because random chance could not do such a thing, what do they say when you ask who designed God? Isn't God, by definition, the most complex and harmonious entity in existence? Wouldn't that mean that ID logic itself would say that God must have had a designer? Then don't you get right into the "turtles all the way down" argument?
Like I said, probably way too simple for this crowd, but I've always wondered how they react to this.
If it helps, Elizabeth, I admit to having fears too. I fear the quashing of dissent in science. I fear the quashing of inquisitiveness in young minds. I fear using the blunt instrument of the courts to impose what is and is not acceptable to explore in the classroom. I am appalled at what is clearly, to my mind, censorship in the name of the first amendment.
At the famed Scopes Monkey Trial, Clarence Darrow argued, "If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools, and the next year you can make it a crime to teach it in the hustings or in the churches."
Change "evolution" to "intelligent design" and tell me how that statement reads any different. The anti-ID people are trying to criminalize the teaching of what is at worst a thought provoking but likely false theory. That scares the crap out of me far more than any would-be "damage" from exposing the kids to this debate.
Michael Balter, a contributor to Science, the world's most prestigious scientific journal, said it best here: Intelligent Design: Let's have a debate!
"If you accept the existence of a designer, what is left to understand?"
Dale's a smart guy who works at a medical school, but I have to say, this very question tells me that something's very wrong with science teaching these days. It's not just Dale who says this, for this thinking seems implicit in everyone who claims that this is a dangerous and harmful line of inquiry: that all thought will stop if we accept its premise.
Indeed, I've been endlessly lectured on other blogs by folks like Richard Bennett, Steve Verdon, and PZ Myers, amongst others, on how this is dangerous "god in the gaps" thinking where we declare that anything we don't understand is a miracle from God. That is total horse shit and not what the ID people are saying at all. I know because unlike a lot of people, I actually spend time reading their stuff.
Let me answer the question though: if you accept the possibility of a designer, the number of questions after that are endless--and as it turns out, most of them (not all, but most) are the same as if you don't. But it comes to simply this:
How did the engineer accomplish it?
Throughout most of the history of science, the vast majority of scientists, including such exalted figures as Isaac Newton and many many others, all simply just assumed that what they were doing was exploring God's handiwork and discovering how He accomplished things.
It didn't stop them from asking questions, did it? So why would it stop anyone from asking questions today?
The entire presumption that this is a way of shutting down inquiry is a non-sequitur. In fact it opens new areas of inquiry, and furthermore, it can serve as a useful foil to those who reject the idea of a cosmic engineer. It appears to me that all spending time on the ID question does is spur greater intellectual rigor.
Indeed, it is the anti-ID people who are trying to shut down inquiry from all I see. "The question is settled, anyone who still questions it is a psuedoscientist and a flake and a nutjob who must be kept away from our children at all costs lest their brains be corrupted by an excess of curiosity."
That's what I see.
I should note something: when I started this I thought this was a harmless bit of twaddle and banning it by court fiat was a very, very bad idea. That was as far as I went until I looked further into it. The more I read, the more I think these guys are fully credentialed scientists who have published some peer reviewed work, and who admit that what they're doing is in its infancy and that they are indeed a minority voice. But they do appear to have something valuable to say. They might even provide useful insights for researchers. And they can certainly serve as a useful foil for teaching.
I must admit, the vehemence with which they are so thoroughly demonized and so frequently misquoted that got me curious to read more. Dembski's Dover Expert Witness Report and rebuttal pretty well changed my mind.
Well, that the 400 scientists from around the world who signed the petition expressing skepticism of the idea that random mutation and natural selection can fully explain life's diversity.
The personal abuse I've taken from some of ID's more vocal critics also played into my curiosity, I must admit. Not in this discussion but stuff I've gotten from Steve Verdon, Richard Bennett, and other bloggers has been rather annoying. I admit to being stubborn in that way--if you tell me a line of inquiry is dangerous and what position I "must" take I will probably dig in my heels, hit the books, and study even further. Just by being abusive toward me, some of the anti-ID people have caused me to read more of the ID people's materials... and what I found was far from dangerous, some of it was thought-provoking and interesting. Whoops.
Dembski is a mathematician who's done work in theoretical physics. His primary interest is in the field of probability, and how you may look at an event or series of events and try to determine whether they came about through random chance or through some intelligent causality.
What if it turns out life was created by being from another dimension? Or time travellers? Or some force like the Monolith in Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Oddyssey?
In the field of forensics police scientists can often determine whether someone was murdered or died of natural causes, without knowing who did it and purely through inference. The entire field of paleontology would collapse if we denied that inference is a part of science.
Given everything we know about the current state of the universe, there is absolutely no process we know of that can spontaneously create a simple single-celled organism--the odds of it happening even once in the entire universe is so low as to be practically zero, even given billions of years and the entire size of the universe. The anti-ID people say, "well, it's something we just don't understand yet." The ID people say, "it's someone or several someones we don't know about yet." "Let's figure out more so we can understand better" is the next logical step in either case.
When you look at most of what's being done in the biological sciences today, can you name even one field that would collapse if Darwin's theory turned out to have problems? If so, what would that be? What area of medical research would be harmed if it turned out that a flying spaghetti monster had designed the platypus? I suggest you'll find almost no research that would be harmed by it.
But I say it could influence their research. Because at some point they might ask, "hmm, okay, if we have evidence of an engineer here, that might give us some insights to what we're doing in this other area." Maybe not, but it's certainly possible.
Okay, this is getting downright loathsome. Religion does NOT color one's ability to understand the scientific method of observation. If it did so my grandfather would have never recieved his degrees in Biology and Botany. It is reprehensible that self-styled 'learned' people would stoop so low as to bring into question someone's ability to rationally observe and comment upon nature, or humanity.
It is repugnant that I, and my family (both my children and my predecessors) are being labeled and tarred as 'god' addicts that can't observe anything rationally because we have a belief in a supreme being.
If religion, the belief in a higher being, or any form of drawing inferences from the available data one can observe, would destroy one's ability to use scientific principle, my children would be too dumb, too 'god fearing', to idiotic to understand the way the body works, or a plant works, or how to conduct an experiment. To claim such shows nothing but gross contempt and abuse of those that won't 'tow the line' that you're trying to feed them.
You should all be ashamed of yourselves and your 'knowledge' that would place you and your ilk on a pedastal while in effect spitting on and crapping on those that don't agree with you. You have a form of verbal and mental problem, it is your belief that YOU are the supreme being in relation to those that have any form of belief in a higher power.
I'd have never aced Chemistry, Earth Science, or Biology if my mental fog of belief made the scientific method uncontemplateable. I'm perfectly capable of making a falsefiable experiment, and I can do it without bad mothing and degrading those that don't believe in a God and feel threatened to their core by those that do.
You really are a bunch of sad little spoilt brats playing with your toys. Can't share for fear anyone will listen to someone other than your own self-appointed supremecy. Sad, pitiful little way to life your lives, terrified children will be able to view both and make their own decissions...which won't follow your self proclaimed "RIGHT" answers.
I pity you all for your hatered, and for your sense of supremacy over your fellow man. Must get lonely up there among the Gods you don't believe in...
I did vote for Bredesen, but then the previous Republican governor was a massive crook, and he wanted to create a new tax!!
Rhianna is quite on target. Is she a Democrat? I couldn't say, but even a Democrat is occasionally correct.
I'd like to note that I learned about physics for the anthropic principle from physicists, without prior knowledge that it has religious implications. What I discovered was a bunch of honest and consistent evidence that it's actually a thermodynamic principle that has everything to do with energy-efficiency in flat but expanding universe:
1) What is the Strong Anthropic Principle? And what does it mean to you?
It means that the forces are configured in a manner so as to produce increasingly efficient forms of dissipative structures that are capable of making real, massive particles from vacuum energy.
That's the difference between a flat universe and a wide-open universe, the time that it takes for the second law of thermodynamics to take its entropic toll is restricted by the anthropic principle so that expansion process is economically maximized to the most-even distribution of energy possible via a "near"-flat universal configuration, (**inherent design**) and so the anthropic principle is no "coincidence" at all, it defines the only possible configuration, per the principle of least action.
Black holes and Supernovae are the only two other knowns sources for the creation of real particles from **negative vaccum energy**... but they are less energy-efficient at it, "pound-for-pound", so to speak, which is why intelligent life arises after enough time has passed. Our contribution to the evolutionary process is critical, since it only requires the creation of a few particles per year, per galaxy, to maintain the overall flat geometry of an expanding universe, where a flat universe is restricted to dissipate energy with the greatest efficiency.
2) What is the Weak Anthropic Principle? And what does it mean to you?
The weak anthropic principle defines where life will occur in our universe via habitable "sites" where life can arise and evolve. The thermodynamic need for it indicates that life will be as common as the need requires.
That makes it a "biocentric" principle... so the implications of the principle which derive that we occupy a "preferred place and time"... will then include all banded spiral galaxies that exist on the same evolutioary plane as us, (in the same lateral layer, age-wise).
3) What is it about the question of design inference that should frighten intelligent and thoughtful people so much that they should support banning it from the nation's K-12 science classrooms?
They know what's behind it.
4) To what extent is the SETI project based on scientfic principles, in your mind? Furthermore, in what empirically-definable way is it different from the questions that mathematician William Dembski is asking?
Neither Dembski, Behe, nor the rest of the DI's finest differentiate natural "goal-oriented" design from intelligent design, which represents an unfounded and unscientific leap of faith when they assume the claim that evidence for "purposeful" design in nature constitutes evidence for intelligent design.
Given that the anthropic principle is actually a biocentric thermodynamic principle, a testable prediction falls out which says that Seti will blow the doors wide open to a whole level of similar beings across a fine "plane" of our universe, and this will happen at about the same time everywhere across the universe, (as radio transmissions are restricted by the speed of light), for the same reasons, since life elswhere should be at approximately the same level of technological development as us, for the reasons previously given.
This represents a form of "universal consciousness", in terms of "self-awareness".
"The Awakening"... *que erie music*
5) After reading Chapter 1 of Of Pandas and People, I find myself wondering: what precise parts of it would cause my child to be unable to understand the basic scientific method, unable to comprehend empiricism, unable to comprehend falsifiability, and unable to understand such basic scientific concepts as photosynthesis, meitosis, or genetics? Can you tell me which parts of it would?
Claims that goal-oriented design in nature are evidence intelligent design are completely unwarrented without direct proof that an intelligent agent was involved, and without proof the claim is directed toward an unjustified cause, since natural design is the default scientific conclusion until you prove otherwise.
6) Which of the above questions should be shielded from my children for their own good by court order? Why so?
There's a real problem here because evobiologists also wrongly *believe* that evidence for goal oriented design in nature constitutes evidence for god.
How did the engineer accomplish it?
If most of the questions are the same, then the existence or non-existence of a designer becomes irrelevent. So what I would like to know is what do you see as the biggest difference in the questions?
Dale
I'll tackle what bugs me about #3: if life was designe[d], the designer was incompetent. Wouldn't it be more efficient to make the Earth completely flat and give us all wheels?
Because we'd all roll off the planet into outer space!
Wouldn't it be better to run the nerves from the retina BEHIND the eyeball (thus making our eyesight more acute and avoiding the blind spot and the mental hack necessary to make us unaware of it)?
LOL. If our eyesight was too acute, then God couldn't allow us to have beer. Imagine the trauma of waking up with the wrong person after a night of excessive drinking. It was either allow beer and degrade eyesight quality, or improve human eyesight and eliminate beer. I proclaim the Creator's wisdom.
One prediction the ID theorists make is that there will likely be nothing which is truly functionless at the molecular level, i.e. no such thing as "junk" DNA, and if you can't find a purpose for something you're probably not looking hard enough. William Dembski quotes noted paleontologist and National Academy of Sciences member Lynn Margulis as saying:
"[If] some natural biological process, as yet undiscovered, yields the organisms we have without relying solely on conventional natural selection operating on random variation,…then Darwin et al. have found a mechanism that works in simple cases (which it certainly does!) but misses more important mechanisms of evolutionary change and adaptation. The search for the missing mechanisms can only be helped by people like you asking tough questions. Keep at it!"
Nobel laureate Robert Laughlin went further. He said:
"Much of present-day biological knowledge is ideological. A key symptom of ideological thinking is the explanation that has no implications and cannot be tested. I call such logical dead ends antitheories because they have exactly the opposite effect of real theories: they stop thinking rather than stimulate it. Evolution by natural selection, for instance, which Charles Darwin originally conceived as a great theory, has lately come to function more as an antitheory, called upon to cover up embarrassingb experimental shortcomings and legitimize findings that are at best questionable and at worst not even wrong. Your protein defies the laws of mass action? Evolution did it! Your complicated mess of chemical reactions turns into a chicken? Evolution! The human brain works on logical principles no computer can emulate? Evolution is the cause!"
In short, that evolution has become the catch-all explanation for anything and everything not understood, and that's lazy. It's also frequently been allowed to become non-falsifiable--i.e. no better than saying "God did it!"
Look, they got over 400 scientists to sign this petition expressing skepticism of conventional wisdom on Darwin, including evolutionary biologists, biochemists, moledular biologists, mathematicians, theoretical physcists, and more. Can we please at least stop pretending that these folks don't have some potentially valuable insights?
Moreover, do I have to agree with them to think that they shouldn't be treated like pariahs?
I'm certainly interested in learning more about the anthropic principle, especially the rather bold predictions being made. They're certainly appealing.
I'm not sure I follow all your logic, nor the sinister "they know what's behind it" remark, which just sounds like more of the fearmongering we've seen so much of surrounding this issue. It also strikes me that some of what you're up to with anthropic principle study would mesh rather well with what the ID people are at least attempting to do--I note once again that Dembski's work is as a mathematician, that he's done postdoctoral work in theoretical physics, and that that most of his study is concentrated around the idea that you can take events that seem random and mathematically show intelligent purpose behind them instead. He's produced some work in that regard in the peer reviewed literature.
It may be that there's a useful debate to be had there. My only concern is the crushing of the spirit of free inquiry, embracing paranoid conspiracy theories to justify censoring classroom discussions, and the trashing of careers of scientists who hold dissenting views, all of which I consider unhealthy.
One prediction the ID theorists make is that there will likely be nothing which is truly functionless at the molecular level, i.e. no such thing as "junk" DNA
I read that in Dembski's work, and frankly I don't understand how that prediction is derived from the premise. We design automobiles and there are lots of attributes of automobiles that have no function other than to appeal to our senses. Do we know that the Designer has no aesthetic goals, and would we know them if we saw them? What if 'junk DNA' is the molecular equivalent of tailfins or racing stripes or those hubcaps that keep spinning when the car is stopped? (And how in the Designer's name is this falsifiable? If failure to find a function for something is just a sign that you haven't looked hard enough or accumulated enough information, how can you ever declare something non-functional and falsify the prediction? You can't, that's how.)
I will also note that the petition you've linked does not represent an endorsement for intelligent design; it expresses skepticism about Darwinian evolution. I have absolutely no objection to any textbook or science course noting things which are unexplained by current evolutionary theory. Is there a similar petition signed in support of the usefulness and validity of intelligent design?
As for the petition: you're absolutely right that it does not endorse ID explicitely, although it was distributed by the Discovery Institute and everyone signing it had to know exactly who that was. They're quite up front about it and of course they also note in their own descriptions of the petition that some of the signers are not ID theorists but some are.
What this points to is what Lynn Margulis and Robert Laughlin were quoted as saying above: Darwin has become so sacrosanct it is treated as a religion and a non-falsifiable catch-all for explaining anything not understood. Dembski will tell you openly that there are more challenges to the conventional view of Darwin than ID, that ID is only one of them (and will also say, frankly, that ID probably shouldn't be in K-12 science classrooms right now, but that banning it by court order would be worse).
Not to follow up to myself, but...
I've always thought that if I were on the ID team, THAT would be what I'd press for, a thorough and intensive discussion in science textbooks of predictions of evolutionary theory which have not been borne out and which currently have no good alternative explanation, just-so stories, and so on. Maybe press for thought experiments on how evolutionary theory could be falsified. It'd be almost impossible for anyone to object to as long as it was kept completely factual and would be a crack in what ID'ers apparently see as the blank wall of evolutionary theory. I think everyone would benefit from that, I'd be all for it personally.
One word: Ritalin.
I've never seen those explanations of WAP and SAP before.
I'm not sure I can agree with your WAP argument:
so the implications of the principle which derive that we occupy a "preferred place and time"... will then include all banded spiral galaxies that exist on the same evolutioary plane as us, (in the same lateral layer, age-wise)
As with most tautologies, people tend to underestimate the power of the WAP - especially in a flat, infinite universe, which the evidence is tending more and more to point to. WAP is so powerful that it does not matter how improbable life actually is in any of those spiral arms. Even if only one banded spiral galaxy in 10 ^ 1000 could actually evolve intelligent life by this time, WAP says "Well, here we are, no matter how improbably. Deal with it." It is not possible to draw any probabilistic conclusions using WAP.
Children are not tabula rasa. They have a natural inquisiteveness that should be nurtured and sharpened whenever possible. This is why I also bristle at the whole "the kids will be confused by this" mentality. Ah bullshit, they're smarter than most people think, and inquisitiveness should be encouraged.
My feelings on this probably have their roots in my own childhood, where I was warned away from reading about certain subjects that were supposedly "too advanced" for me, and from discovering through my own reading that some of what was in my textbooks was wrong. I knew about warm-blooded dinosaurs before my teachers did, for example.
I also have a visceral loathing for teachers who pronounce on any subject in science as if it is Ex Cathedra. I had more than one run in with people like that growing up, and I still recognize them as an adult. I fear that such people have no idea what real science is all about--free and open debate, falsifiable hypotheses and predictions, and empirical results. And when you don't have all of that because you can't, you draw the best inferences you have from the data you have, all the while acknowledging what you don't know and what's only a guess.
You make a great point about "junk" DNA.
How do they know it's junk? How do they differentiate between "junk" DNA and functional DNA?
These are the same people who predicted 100,000 genes, before undertaking the human genome project, but found only 30,000.
Typical, arrogant science geeks -- they have not ascertained the function or purpose of the certain segments of the DNA chain, so they deem it "junk". Why not just, humbly, say, "We don't know what these nucleotides do. We don't know if they are contain functional genes or not." It would be much more sensible and accurate and scientific, then simply labeling as "junk" that which they don't understand.
That's why people mistrust scientists. They make the same mistakes over and over and over again.
Barnes, Hank
I completely agree with everything you just wrote, so I don't really think we're that far apart in a lot of ways.
Establishments can be closed-minded and protective of their 'special' knowledge, and pretty snotty to challengers at the gate. Scientists who fought tooth and nail to get their ideas recognized can be incredibly dismissive of the new ideas of others. It sucks, and as a reasoning species we have to keep a watch on that tendency. I will note, though, that a lot of ideas that initially got a WTF? from the scientific community took hold fairly rapidly once people had a chance to think about them.
I think where we part ways is that once I've done whatever amount of investigation I'm going to do, and decided that a particular challenge is without merit, I'm far, far less willing than you seem to be to go out of my way to give its proponents money and publicity and classroom space, just so we can have a challenge out there. Dissent, whether political or scientific, isn't intrinsically worthwhile. It's worthwhile to the extent that it's intelligent and pointed, offers alternatives, makes a difference, lays out the choices more clearly and tells us how we can choose between them. If a challenge fails those tests, I'm just not that interested in continuing to nurture it on the off chance that a pony is hiding in there somewhere
I am, by the way, all in favor of teaching the limitations of scientific theories in class. In fact, this was done routinely in my high school and in college. Many of those limitations/"problems" have since actually been resolved, as science does not stand still. Others have not. Maybe your experience was different; you are ten years older than I am. But I was taught very well by my middle class public schooling in Chicago suburbia, and it was in fact that teaching that led me to a scientific career.
ID proponents *invent* "problems" in evolutionary theory, rather than address limitations of the theory that hardcore evolutionists will readily acknowledge. The IDers do this because they do not seek honest dialouge, they seek disinformation and have an agenda. If they had a real point, then they should have been able to make their case without deception. That they can't is telling.
For the record, I believe in Intelligent Design.
I'm certainly interested in learning more about the anthropic principle, especially the rather bold predictions being made. They're certainly appealing.
Hi Dean, I should warn you that this is an "entropic" interpretation, which is different from the tautologous form.
I'm not sure I follow all your logic, nor the sinister "they know what's behind it" remark, which just sounds like more of the fearmongering we've seen so much of surrounding this issue.
There is no doubt about "what's behind it", but the fact of the matter is that you're right, it shouldn't matter if you're wearing a cross if you're holding science in your hand.
If you really want to know how I feel about this, then go here
It also strikes me that some of what you're up to with anthropic principle study would mesh rather well with what the ID people are at least attempting to do—
We are in agreement that there is "purpose" in nature, much to the chagrin of many a good neo-darwinian. I have extremely strong feelings about this that have a tendency to get out of hand when willful ignorance rears its ugly head, so I'm trying to be as diplomatic about this as possible.
I note once again that Dembski's work is as a mathematician, that he's done postdoctoral work in theoretical physics, and that that most of his study is concentrated around the idea that you can take events that seem random and mathematically show intelligent purpose behind them instead. He's produced some work in that regard in the peer reviewed literature.
Yes, but my point is that Dembski does not differentiate non-random events that show purpose, from those that show intelligence. They assume without good reason that one is evidence for the other, which is wrong, but the get away with it due to the reactionary "fearmongering" that shores up the walls of the "slippery-slope".
Your point is valid, in other words, but that doesn't remove the dishonesty behind IDists motivations.
It may be that there's a useful debate to be had there. My only concern is the crushing of the spirit of free inquiry, embracing paranoid conspiracy theories to justify censoring classroom discussions, and the trashing of careers of scientists who hold dissenting views, all of which I consider unhealthy.
Free inquiry comes from honest observations that people attempt to quantify, not from a pre-existing agenda that people attempt to rationalize with reality. The motives of the members of the Discovery Institute are dishonest in this sense.
~
TallDave said:
I've never seen those explanations of WAP and SAP before.
Dave, this is a new "entropic" interpretation, and I am the nobody originator, so that doesn't surprise me that you've never heard of it, although it doesn't make me wrong eithere, as the physics speaks for itself without the need or appeals to higher authority.
I'm not sure I can agree with your WAP argument:
Rick wrote:
so the implications of the principle which derive that we occupy a "preferred place and time"... will then include all banded spiral galaxies that exist on the same evolutioary plane as us, (in the same lateral layer, age-wise)
Dave also said:
As with most tautologies, people tend to underestimate the power of the WAP - especially in a flat, infinite universe, which the evidence is tending more and more to point to.
This version of the principle isn't tautologous, since it identifies good reason for the physics to be the way that it is, especially in a flat, **finite** bound universe.
http://www.arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0508047/
http://www.arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0508047
WAP is so powerful that it does not matter how improbable life actually is in any of those spiral arms. Even if only one banded spiral galaxy in 10 ^ 1000 could actually evolve intelligent life by this time, WAP says "Well, here we are, no matter how improbably. Deal with it." It is not possible to draw any probabilistic conclusions using WAP.
You might want to check out my website, probabilities have nothing to do with this:
www.anthropic-principle.ORG
On the other hand I am more cautious than you in dismissing whole lines of inquiry simply because they're not popular at the moment. A case in point because I happen to be close to it at the moment is the subject of aneuploidy and cancer. For over 35 years, almost all cancer research has been gone to viruses and on so-called oncogenes as the presumed cause of cancer. Tens of billions and probably close to as many man-hours have been poured into them, producing surprisingly little. Meanwhile, over a hundred years ago it was proposed that chromosomal abnormalities known as aneuploidy might be the true cause of cancer. The theory fell out of favor until an obscure professor at Berkeley wrote a series of papers in the 1980s showing the many, many flaws in the oncogene and virus theories of cancer, poking hole after hole in them, and proposing aneuploidy as a mechanism that needed to be looked at instead. The old stallions in the field dismissed the papers, but the young ones, the grad students and new PhDs, were far less dismissive.
Now just in recent months articles have been appearing in Science and Nature not only remarking upon the aneuploidy phenomenon, but giving it serious respect and suggesting that it may be the center of cancer research in the coming years.
This guy's been treated to shabbily by his colleagues over the last 15 years, to a truly offensive degree. Now there's a very good chance we'll see his name of the Nobel rosters within the next decade.
Aziz: What I see of the ID people is that they appear to be a handful of radicals who've published a number of papers on non-ID topics who've managed to get a tiny handful of things published that focus on the area of design. They claim what they're doing is in its infancy in trying to establish a new framework. If the accusation is that they're being dishonest, I'd like to see that stick with some hard facts.
I'm willing to ask some hard and specific questions of these folks--I imagine they'd take my emails.
Note tha