The debate from the science side can get a bit strident at times, it is true, but that is largely because the side of nonsense has been putting forth the same arguments since (and indeed before) Darwin's day. One can understand the irritation of the practicing biologists and geologists that 80 years after the Scopes Monkey Trial, the Creationists can put the same arguments out yet again under a new name, and try to force their nonsense back into schools.
A scientific theory must be predictive - you must be able to use it to make predictions (whether these are positive or negative). It must be explicative - it must explain some natural phenomenon. It must be falsifiable - there must be some experiment or observation (and one that is actually possible to perform) that can prove that it is incorrect.
Evolutionary Theory fulfils all of these requirements. That doesn't necessarily mean that it is right. (It is right, of course, but it is the never-ending avalanche of confirming evidence that tells us this.) What it means is that it is a valid scientific theory.
Intelligent Design doesn't even begin to fulfil any of these requirements. That means it is not science. It's as simple as that; it's not science. That doesn't mean that it's necessarily wrong, just that it's a load of supernatural claptrap. It could in fact be correct, and it would still be a load of supernatural claptrap.
ID is not science, by the very definition of what science is. So teaching ID in the science classroom is fraud.
And it's nonsense. It says nothing, does nothing, makes no claims, except that "Evolution is wrong". Evolution can be shown to be wrong, but the IDists (and their predecessors the Creation Scientists and their predecessors the Creationists) can't do this because there is no evidence whatsoever that Evolution is wrong. And absolute mountains of evidence that Evolution is correct.
You might as well teach homeopathy in medical school, phlogiston in chemistry and the flat-earth theory in geography. In fact, all of these are more worthwhile than ID because they can - and have - been proven false.
ID can never be proven false, and that is why it is totally worthless. You can never know if it is true or false. The whole point of science is about exactly that, of winnowing the seeds of truth from the chaff of nonsense. With ID, you simply cannot do that:
That's exactly the point. Evolutionary Theory
explain (or at the least, be compatible with) every significant dimension of evolution, or it is
. There's no point of having a theory if it doesn't explain its subject matter, and there's no point in having a theory if you can't know whether it is right or not.
Go ahead and teach ID as religion or philosophy, but it is not science, nor can it ever be.
1
I'm a fruitbat? And here all this time I was thinking I'm a hominid! And no wonder I have back problems, I'm supposed to sleep hanging by my feet!
Honestly, the main reason that evolution will never catch on among religious fanatics is because the Bible is written on about a second grade level, (not counting all the polysyllabic names, though hyphenated for ease, and leaving out the blood, gore, incest, etc.), while reading Origin is like trying to plow granite. One holy work speaks to ignorance, superstition, and fear, which means that it appeals to about 95% of humanity, while the other speaks to reason, logic, and understanding, which is why 95% of humanity reject it as the work of the Devil.
Posted by: Improbulus Maximus at Thursday, October 13 2005 11:15 AM (0yYS2)
2
I think that's overstating the case a bit. A lot, in fact. The
basics of evolution are straightforward enough - once you accept the concept of deep time. And we
know that the world is billions of years old.
It's only the Young Earth Creationists who are truly hopeless. They really do belong with the Flat Earthers and other nuts.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, October 13 2005 01:38 PM (QriEg)
3
It's kinda like those people who still believe we never landed on the moon. Despite all the evidence in the world, they just retreat to the same old tired arguments.
I like how the articles begins with "Finally, a skeptic has come to terms with reality...". That's a kicker.
Posted by: andyuts at Friday, October 14 2005 12:03 AM (FVdKE)
4
Wait... when did we land on the moon?
Posted by: Wonderduck at Friday, October 14 2005 01:15 AM (mAAjO)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, October 14 2005 03:04 AM (QriEg)
6
It's quite true that ID is not predictive, explanatory, or falsifiable, as it stands. This is because ID, as it stands, is not a theory or hypothesis -- it's an objection, an attempt to refute a theory. It resembles, that is, Einstein's thought experiments, which he constructed to refute quantum mechanics. Popper's criterion for valid scientific theories does not apply to objections; Einstein's thought experiments were "unfalsifiable", but that wasn't a reason to dismiss them.
ID arguments, in fact, all have the form of a thought experiment: a biological system is exhibited, then the expected time required for that system to be reached by random mutations is calculated, and it proves to be longer than the known lifetime of the Earth -- from which, if the calculations are right, it follows that the mutations leading to that system weren't random. The trouble is that the calculations aren't right; but as with Einstein's thought experiments, the errors in ID arguments are not simple, or scientifically uninteresting. Michael Behe's argument, for example, would be very much worth teaching, and refuting, in a high school science class.
I strongly suspect, however, that you, Pixy, aren't thinking of the arguments when you call ID "unscientific". You mean, rather, the conclusion: if ID is correct the material world cannot be wholly and correctly understood as an independent thing, yet "science" must so understand it. Therefore ID cannot be "science", even if it happens to be true; and this is your chief reason why it is almost certainly not true. The only possible remark to this is, that it is not by any stretch a refutation of ID. It is nothing more than a restatement of your personal faith in materialism.
The proper response to ID is not dismissing it as "unscientific", but giving it the same critical hearing as its proponents give to evolution.
Posted by: Michael Brazier at Friday, October 14 2005 05:05 AM (O9L11)
7
Oh good grief.
Look, ID is superstitious nonsense. There is not the slightest shred of evidence to support it. The only claims it can make against evolution is that the fossil record isn't complete, that we don't understand every step of every evolutionary pathway of every subsystem of every species.
ID, in turn, offers nothing whatsoever.
Which is the same as what the anti-materialists offer.
Sure, materialism is an assumption. But if you make that assumption, you get to build science, and science
works. No other ontological assumption can do that. They are all, in every real sense, useless.
And the IDists aren't presenting ID as an objection, they're presenting it as an alternative scientific theory. It isn't, and they are aware of that, which means that it is fraud.
What's more, the argument you present, which is indeed a common one from ID (and Creation Science and Creationism) shows a complete ingorance of Evolutionary Theory. Evolution
is not random. Mutations are random. Natural selection isn't. So the calculations are completely meaningless. This has been pointed out any number of times, and I believe it was pointed out to you directly on a previous thread.
The proper response to ID is not dismissing it as "unscientific", but giving it the same critical hearing as its proponents give to evolution.
We gave ID a critical hearing. It is, as I stated, superstitious claptrap, which would be utterly useless even if it were true, and which is supported by no evidence whatsoever.
Again, we can't prove that materialism is true. What has been proven is that it is useful, and that
nothing else is.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, October 14 2005 06:23 AM (QriEg)
8
And one more time: ID is presented as a scientific theory. It is not. Therefore, dismissing it as not being science is
entirely to the point.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, October 14 2005 06:25 AM (QriEg)
9
In support of ID, and inspired by the quotes in this post, I am proposing the AF theory. Yes, that's right,
Atheist Fundamentalism. We need to get back to the roots of atheism, the knowledge that there is no supernatural being whether he's in charge of it all or not. Frankly this neomodern atheism which states that "there's nobody in charge of it all and if there was it wouldn't be a supernatural being because there aren't any" smacks of atheistic heresy to mine ears.
Posted by: Jim at Friday, October 14 2005 07:28 AM (oqu5j)
10
"The proper response to ID is not dismissing it as "unscientific", but giving it the same critical hearing as its proponents give to evolution."
Oh you mean to shriek hysterically that it's the work of the Devil? How about we burn a few people at the stake, (metaphorically, of course), and accuse them of being Satanists? They seem to like that tactic. Religion has always been wrong on every matter when it comes to understanding nature. Always, every time. For starters the book of Genesis makes about a half-dozen mistakes in the first couple of pages, not to mention later transgressions of the Catholic Church, who almost burned Galileo for a heretic simply because he refute Ptolemy's cosmology. If it were up to religion, the earth would still be flat and the center of the universe, and we'd still be burning people as witches. The history of religion is one of murder and the repression of free thought, and nothing has changed but the names.
Posted by: Improbulus Maximus at Friday, October 14 2005 09:35 AM (0yYS2)
11
What's more, the argument you present, which is indeed a common one from ID (and Creation Science and Creationism) shows a complete ingorance of Evolutionary Theory. Evolution is not random. Mutations are random. Natural selection isn't. So the calculations are completely meaningless. This has been pointed out any number of times, and I believe it was pointed out to you directly on a previous thread.
No, I haven't discussed this with you before. If I had, you would have known what Michael Behe's argument is, since the core of his argument is a situation in which natural selection is not supposed to occur, by standard evolutionary logic.
The biological systems in question are composed of several distinct proteins (encoded in different genes) such that, if any one of them is removed, the whole system fails. Natural selection will act to preserve such systems once they exist; but natural selection cannot generate such systems. (Indeed, natural selection never generates any gene; that's what mutation is for.) So Behe's argument is, natural selection won't preserve the components of these systems independently -- each component, separated from the rest, is a neutral gene. And the odds that several neutral mutations will all occur within a single population, and be propagated into one organism, thus completing the system, are extremely low; low enough that the expected time for the happy event can easily exceed the lifetime of the Earth.
Now I've already said there's an error in this argument. But it's not failing to take natural selection into account. Standard evolutionary theory states that the incidence of neutral mutations within a population fluctuates at random, and the ages of species are estimated with the help of this rule. I leave finding the error as a exercise, for the moment ...
Posted by: Michael Brazier at Friday, October 14 2005 09:35 PM (8LTnv)
12
Sure, materialism is an assumption. But if you make that assumption, you get to build science, and science works. No other ontological assumption can do that.
Wrong. The Christian assumption, that the cosmos is the creation of a rational God, entails that the cosmos is intelligible, that study of the cosmos by rational beings is not futile. Materialism doesn't entail this: for a materialist, there is no reason to expect the cosmos to be intelligible. A materialist who knew nothing of scientific enquiry would, I believe, never invent it. (And the historical record supports this: the founders of science were theists, not materialists.)
Have you ever read Eugene Wigner's essay "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences"? There, Wigner makes it clear just how surprising it is that the cosmos is intelligible.
Posted by: Michael Brazier at Friday, October 14 2005 10:09 PM (8LTnv)
13
The biological systems in question are composed of several distinct proteins (encoded in different genes) such that, if any one of them is removed, the whole system fails.
Which is completely irrelevant, because evolution isn't
supposed to work backwards. So the entire argument is nonsense.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, October 14 2005 11:25 PM (QriEg)
14
The Christian assumption, that the cosmos is the creation of a rational God, entails that the cosmos is intelligible, that study of the cosmos by rational beings is not futile.
That doesn't actually mean anything.
Materialism doesn't entail this: for a materialist, there is no reason to expect the cosmos to be intelligible.
Which is irrelevant. All that materialism tells us is that all material events have material causes.
And that is both necessary and sufficient to build science.
Your "Christian assumption" is neither.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, October 14 2005 11:29 PM (QriEg)
15
I'm starting to wonder if you have any idea what evolution is, or science, for that matter.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, October 14 2005 11:30 PM (QriEg)
16
... evolution isn't supposed to work backwards. So the entire argument is nonsense.
Behe's argument makes no use of the idea that "evolution is supposed to work backwards". Try again, please.
All that materialism tells us is that all material events have material causes. And that is both necessary and sufficient to build science.
Would you agree that David Hume was a materialist? Because he is famous for denying the validity of science: "when we look about us towards external objects, and consider the operation of causes, we are never able, in a single instance, to discover any power or necessary connexion; any quality; which binds the effect to the cause, and renders the one an infallible consequence of the other. We only find, that the one does actually, in fact, follow the other ..."
Posted by: Michael Brazier at Saturday, October 15 2005 01:11 AM (8LTnv)
17
Behe's argument makes no use of the idea that "evolution is supposed to work backwards".
Okay, my comment was a bit oblique. To make it clearer to you: Evolution can reduce the complexity of systems as well as increase it. So you have a system that breaks if you take away one protein? So what? It could just as easily have evolved by
reducing the number of proteins involved to the current state. Behe is trying to push evolution backwards up the wrong path, finds it doesn't work, and complains that evolution is wrong, when the fault lies in his own understanding.
Would you agree that David Hume was a materialist?
I give no thought to David Hume whatsoever. And having read that quote, I can only point out that it is entirely irrelevant to science.
In fact, I'm not at all convinced that it is actually meaningful. The only way you can connect a cause to an effect is via an intermediate cause. What does Hume expect to find? Magic fairies?
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, October 15 2005 01:32 AM (QriEg)
18
So you have a system that breaks if you take away one protein? So what? It could just as easily have evolved by reducing the number of proteins involved to the current state. Behe is trying to push evolution backwards up the wrong path ...
No. Behe did not say that, nor did I. I'll repeat: Behe's argument is, natural selection won't preserve the components of these systems independently -- each component, separated from the rest, is a neutral gene. And the odds that several neutral mutations will all occur within a single population, and be propagated into one organism, thus completing the system, are extremely low; low enough that the expected time for the happy event can easily exceed the lifetime of the Earth.
More concretely, suppose a system of 4 enzymes ABCD, for which any subset does nothing -- ABC, ABD, ACD, and BCD are all useless. Once any organism has ABCD, natural selection favors that organism over other members of its population, and the system becomes common. But (according to Behe) A, B, C, and D, separately, give no advantage to an organism; therefore natural selection does not affect their frequency in a population. So the probability that any one organism will end up with ABCD, all at once, is extremely low.
I trust you see now why the suggestion that ABCD is simplified from a larger system, say ABCDE, doesn't help matters. A system of 5 components is even less likely than one of 4. Even supposing that E is a substitute for D leaves the system's likelihood at the same order of magnitude; ABCE is no more probable than ABCD.
I give no thought to David Hume whatsoever. And having read that quote, I can only point out that it is entirely irrelevant to science. In fact, I'm not at all convinced that it is actually meaningful. The only way you can connect a cause to an effect is via an intermediate cause. What does Hume expect to find? Magic fairies?
Actually, Hume was saying that the ordinary concept of causation is an appeal to magic fairies, and that there is no real connection from a cause to its effect. Scientific theories, on Hume's account, are merely summaries of patterns we find in history. We ascribe predictive power to them only because we assume, prior to all observation, a "law of uniformity". This assumption cannot be rationally justified, but everyone believes it because it works well in practice.
You see, I hope, that denying the reality of causal links is going to affect scientific enquiry if the enquirers can be induced to believe it?
Posted by: Michael Brazier at Saturday, October 15 2005 05:16 AM (NoQkX)
19
Scientific theories, on Hume's account, are merely summaries of patterns we find in history.
Not summaries of patterns, but mathematical models of patterns, which is an entirely different thing.
We ascribe predictive power to them only because we assume, prior to all observation, a "law of uniformity".
Okey dokey. The "law of uniformity" is a worthwhile point to raise.
This assumption cannot be rationally justified
Doesn't need to be. If it could be rationally justified, it wouldn't be an assumption.
but everyone believes it because it works well in practice.
Yes. Because it does. In fact, it works
unfailingly.
You see, I hope, that denying the reality of causal links is going to affect scientific enquiry if the enquirers can be induced to believe it?
Nope.
Doesn't matter.
What matters is what works.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, October 15 2005 05:23 AM (QriEg)
20
You see, here is, once again, where materialism and science have it all over idealsim, dualism, Intelligent Design and other miscellaneous bullshit.
Science
works.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, October 15 2005 05:26 AM (QriEg)
21
Oh, and as for Behe -
BEF might be useful. As might ABEF. And ABDEF. And ABCDEF. And then you lose the E, and then the F.
Single mutations, each neutral or beneficial, and you end up with a system that looks astronomically unlikely -
if you know absolutely nothing about genetics.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, October 15 2005 05:35 AM (QriEg)
22
"ID arguments, in fact, all have the form of a thought experiment: a biological system is exhibited, then the expected time required for that system to be reached by random mutations is calculated, and it proves to be longer than the known lifetime of the Earth -- from which, if the calculations are right, it follows that the mutations leading to that system weren't random."
Someone needs to look up the definition of "random" again... The whole point of it being random, is that just because statistics say that an occurance is likely to happen at a certain point, doesn't mean that it HAS to have happened then.
Pixy - thanks for posting your original article, I am getting so tired of the "evangelical" person at work rambling on and on about how evolution is flawed... Articles like this help me keep my sanity. Now to figure out an anonymous way to give this article to him...
Posted by: John Ballentine at Saturday, October 15 2005 09:19 AM (lQRkC)
23
Oh pixy, isn't this just the hugest waste of time?
ID is not science, because it doesn't have all the accessories of a science. It needs technical journals, textbooks, core classes, department chairs, graduate students and research assistants. There needs to be an institute of ID at a major secular university.
Who could teach it in high schools? Where is the ID 101 for prospective high school educators?
Attacking evolution does nothing for ID as science. The Discovery Institute should endow a few university chairs instead of ginning up propaganda for school boards and funding lawsuits.
Take a page from the quantum theorists. We just had thought experiments in the science of the very small, because we didn't know to measure the tiny. Yet now quantum mechanics is taught in (at least, our local) college curriculum for prospective highschool educators. If ID is a science, it should be able to stand or fall on its own merits within academe.
What GW did was wrong. GW (the state) suggested that ID (pseudo-science) should be taught in schools. That makes it into a Lysenkoism.
Posted by: matoko kusanagi at Thursday, October 20 2005 01:22 PM (d1AM5)
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