Let There Be Life

There was a stand-up comedian with a bit that went more or less like this:

About every 5 years or so I do a bit of reflection on my life, looking back at how I talked, dressed and acted, and invariably I come to the same conclusion: I was a total idiot back then. Really, what was I thinking? After doing this enough times, though, it's occurred to me that most likely I'm being a total idiot right now. This is why older people tend to be so quiet. They've figured this out.

This is how I feel about most scientific theories. From the discoveries of Galileo to the assertions of Heisenberg and beyond, we keep realizing that what we were so certain about a century or even a decade ago was in fact idiotic. Therefore it behooves us to be a bit quiet, or at least modest, in declaring we know this or that to be true.

In the debate on evolution vs. creationism, this advice cuts both ways.

As a theory, creationism has so many holes in it that I can't accept it as science. Even with a bucket of faith, it strikes me that it has to be mostly metaphor. But evolution also leaves more questions unanswered than answered for me. More than anything, it seems that life forms would have needed gazillions of years to "evolve" into the assembly of perfectly in-tune organs and systems represented by humans. Truly, some of the most recent discoveries of cellular activity so boggle the mind they virtually scream for an intelligent designer to explain them. I don't have any answers there, but I don't think creationism does either. So I've been intrigued by the notion of the supposedly straddling theory of "Intelligent Design," but the more I read its advocates try to dress it up, the more I think it's got a long way to go as a theory, if it has any merit at all.

In today's New York Times, Michael J. Behe, a professor of biological sciences at Lehigh University and a senior fellow with the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture (called in some quarters a "conservative Christian thinktank"), offered an explanation and defense of "Intelligent Design." Professor Behe has credentials as solid as most scientists arguing about the topic, from what I can find. And I totally agree with him that those insisting evolution be taught as if Gospel have it wrong.

Still, although he argues in the Times piece that Intelligent Design does not question whether evolution has taken place and asserts that "intelligent design itself says nothing about the religious concept of a creator," in other writings on the social debate, Dr. Behe reveals that he's not totally neutral about the arguments forwarded by what he calls "America's majority creed:"

Most Church/State conflicts are at the very far margins of "establishing a religion"--whether parochial students can ride public school buses, whether a creche can be displayed in a public park, and so on. The evolution conflict is at the heart: An agency of the federal government is attempting to inculcate a religious premise into children using the public schools. The premise--that God would not act in history, would not affect the physical world--isn't an observation of science, but a theological presupposition that stands against Christianity and other religions. Given all the scientific problems with Darwin's theory, it's not surprising that the National academy wants no classroom discussion of its dubious premise. How heartening to see the people of Kansas and other states fighting back.

Personally, I think Professor Behe is playing a game. He wants to insist that "intelligent design itself says nothing about the religious concept of a creator"---leaving the question just who "designed" the mechanisms of life unanswered for now ---but is happy to call the particularly fundamentalist Christian groups fighting to marginalize evolution in public schools "America's majority creed." He offers as typical a few extreme reactions to the progress some fundamentalist Christian groups are making in changing curricula and labels those opposing them as "nonbelievers and adherents to minority faiths [who] hold Christianity in contempt."

As a Christian, I find it ludicrous that accepting Creationism in any meaningful way defines my faith. I totally reject Behe's assertion that I hold Christianity "in contempt" because I can't see how Creationism makes sense.

But back to Professor Behe's argument. In the Times opinion piece, he offers an analogy that I believe could use some work:

The 18th-century clergyman William Paley likened living things to a watch, arguing that the workings of both point to intelligent design. Modern Darwinists disagree with Paley that the perceived design is real, but they do agree that life overwhelms us with the appearance of design.

For example, Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, once wrote that biologists must constantly remind themselves that what they see was not designed but evolved. (Imagine a scientist repeating through clenched teeth: "It wasn't really designed. Not really.")

The resemblance of parts of life to engineered mechanisms like a watch is enormously stronger than what Reverend Paley imagined. In the past 50 years modern science has shown that the cell, the very foundation of life, is run by machines made of molecules. There are little molecular trucks in the cell to ferry supplies, little outboard motors to push a cell through liquid.

In 1998 an issue of the journal Cell was devoted to molecular machines, with articles like "The Cell as a Collection of Protein Machines" and "Mechanical Devices of the Spliceosome: Motors, Clocks, Springs and Things." Referring to his student days in the 1960's, Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy of Sciences, wrote that "the chemistry that makes life possible is much more elaborate and sophisticated than anything we students had ever considered." In fact, Dr. Alberts remarked, the entire cell can be viewed as a factory with an elaborate network of interlocking assembly lines, each of which is composed of a set of large protein machines. He emphasized that the term machine was not some fuzzy analogy; it was meant literally.

But let's pick this analogy apart just a bit, because there are some presumptions within it that expose the limits of Behe's imagination, IMO.

The analogy presumes someone intelligent had to make the first watch. Implied within that is that someone "created" the watch. In other words, from the power of their mind, observations about mechanical laws, and perhaps some trial and error with existing clock mechanisms, our first watchmaker (and let's leave out who that may have been for the sake of this argument) produced the world's very first handheld mechanical timepiece where none had existed before.

But already we have some problems if Behe's analogy is meant to imply that a "Creator" designed life from scratch. What were the precedents for the "Creator" that parallel those at the watchmaker's disposal? Were there lesser "non-life" forms the Creator used for the trial and error part of this process? Was it all just done with the wave of a hand. "Poof...Let there be life?" And what observable laws were there at this point? I know, I know, I'm projecting human limitations onto an omnipotent being, but it's Behe's analogy, not mine.

Also, if the mechanisms of a watch resemble the molecular level workings of a cell, isn't it just as likely the design for the watch came from the biology and not the somehow separate "intelligence" of the watchmaker? Meaning, isn't it possible that that there was nothing mankind could do to prevent "inventing" the watch? That the epiphany that made it possible is merely another evolutionary stage of awareness? Or taking that one step further, is there any difference between the biology and intelligence of the watchmaker? Some folks are now arguing that there is not. Behe's analogy demands that intelligence be distinguishable from the evolution-susceptible biology of the watchmaker, no?

None of which proves or disproves his overarching theories on Intelligent Design, but it does suggest he might want to assert his opinions a bit less offensively, IMO. Because, like any of us, I'm certain that 5 years from now, Behe will look back at this argument and think, "Was I a total idiot, or what?" And like any of us, he'll be right. Both sides of the debate should keep that in mind as they continue to fight the good fight.

Comments

[Jesurgislac]

And I totally agree with him that those insisting evolution be taught as if Gospel have it wrong.

I know of no one who insists that evolution should be taught as if it were four books by evangelists written a couple of thousand years ago. It should be taught as what it is; one of the basics of biological science.

I guess it's being British. I find it very strange that there exist well-educated, intelligent people who think that evolution is just another theory that might someday be discredited. I mean, yes, it's just a "theory": but it's about as likely that it will be discredited someday as it is that Newton's theory of Universal Gravitation will someday be discredited.

In a history class at my school (this would be about 22 years ago now) a boy admitted (er, said proudly) that he believed that Genesis was literally true.

And everyone in the class piled on him. The teacher pulled us off after a little while (I am speaking metaphorically, of course) and stopped a couple of kids who got too personal, but mostly (my memory is) that everyone was just stunned - "You mean you actually believe something that stupid?" until the teacher said "Okay, I think we've established that [boy's name] is a minority of one, let's get back to [what we were studying]."

I hope nothing's changed in the 22 years since that happened. It stuns me still to know that there are US classrooms where it's kids who know that Genesis isn't literally true would be in the minority.

[theophylact]

You'll want to read PZ Myers's http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/behe_jumps_the_shark/>comment on Behe's Op-Ed. It's true that Behe's academic credentials are perfectly adequate; but that doesn't prevent his argument from being totally specious and disingenuous.

[theophylact]

I should add a general principle to "scientific" arguments of this sort: Failure of imagination on your part does not constitute disproof.

[Phil]

More than anything, it seems that life forms would have needed gazillions of years to "evolve" into the assembly of perfectly in-tune organs and systems represented by humans.

"Perfectly in-tune?" But for the mitochondria who live in our cells and the little creatures who live in our lower intestines, we'd all be dead. "It seems" is also not a particularly convincing argument.

[von]

I mean, yes, it's just a "theory": but it's about as likely that it will be discredited someday as it is that Newton's theory of Universal Gravitation will someday be discredited.

Hmm. I thought Newton's theory was discredited (as incomplete, if nothing else) by Einstein, among others.

The criticisms of evolution advanced under the banner of Intelligent Design seem generally quite legitimate -- at least to this layperson. Evolutionary theory appears incomplete in many respects and, by all means, science teachers should point that out. Science, after all, is based upon open criticism and rethinking of established "facts."

The real objection to intelligent design is not that evolution is sancrosanct and no criticisms of it can or shall be heard. The objection is that intelligent design does not merely contain a criticism, it also purports to contain an explanatory theory, which it asks to be treated as a "scientific" theory in the classroom. Intelligent design states that an intelligent designer exists.

The problem is that intelligent design's theory is in no way scientific. It is not testable. It cannot be falsified. One cannot prove or disprove it. (Nor does intelligent design propose ways to do any of the foregoing.) It does not meet the criteria of science.*

In other words, despite the claims of the ID camp, intelligent design is not a "scientific" theory. Accordingly, if words are to continue to have meaning, it's inappropriate to call it science and teach in a "science" classroom.

von

*When the ID camp says it's a "scientific" theory, it's because they either don't know or care about the truthful application of the word "scientific," or they're lying.

[ken]

Your question is interesting. Is the Creator, like Dr Frankenstein, limited in his creation to using only the materials at hand and the 'given' laws of nature?

If, unlike Dr Frankenstein, the Creator was not so limited then why did he come up with such a poor design? I think anyone, even our earliest ancestors, could think of many improvements in the design of the life we are given.

[John Thullen]

If Gospel can be taught as Gospel, why can't the theory of evolution be taught as gospel?

That said, I recognize that the Gospels contain some universal truths. I also recognize that scientific theories are by their nature provisional.

What is God's position on cutting Medicaid's budget? Cite verse and chapter, but I'll only accept Biblical passages with the word "Medicaid" in them. You (the universal, all-knowing you) may also quote passages from Darwin on the survival of the fittest to justify cuts.

I'm a literal sort of guy. God does not parse.

[judson]

Science doesn't have all the answers. It just has most of them.

[double-plus-ungood]

I'm waiting for the theory that life is intelligent design, but the creator is a product of evolution.

I fall between horrified and astounded that this crackpot fantasy pretending to be science is discussed at such length. It's a bit like watching a serious debate about the easter bunny.

[Edward]

I should add a general principle to "scientific" arguments of this sort: Failure of imagination on your part does not constitute disproof.

The failure of imagination charge applied to his analogy, not his theory. I thought that was clear. I can't disprove this theory; I don't think it's disprovable really...but that's another debate.

"It seems" is also not a particularly convincing argument.

Hence the noticable lack of a "PhD in Biology" in my credentials. My point is really only that the design of such systems is mind boggling. I actually believe one day we may have a totally non-theological, comprehensive theory for explaining it all. I just don't think we do yet, and to argue that evolution explains it all seems, well, idiotic.

Finally...what Von wrote.

[Bernard Yomtov]

One problem with the argument that "It's so improbable it can't have been an accident," is that we actually don't know how improbable it is.

We observe only one successful outcome. We have no idea how many gazillion times random arrangements of amino acids or whatever failed to produce life, on Earth or other planets.

If you see a coin come up heads 100 times in a row you may conclude that it is weighted. But suppose a gazillion fair coins are each flipped 100 times. As a matter of probability one of them, at least, will always come up heads. If the setup is that you only see those, then your conclusion is invalid.

[bob mcmanus]

Part of it might be conditioning and training of perceptions. Note that the arguments for ID move toward ever more complex systems. We no longer look at the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls and say "No, No, Nature could not have done such a thing." This was not the case a few thousand years ago."

Another is a resistance to the consequences of probabilty. I am told that if you get 50 random people in a room two of them will have the same birthday. It has been explained to me repeatedly. I still don't believe it.

[Jesurgislac]

Von: Hmm. I thought Newton's theory was discredited (as incomplete, if nothing else) by Einstein, among others.

I used that analogy deliberately. Einstein did not discredit Newton's universal theory of gravitation, but he showed that the universe is more complicated than that. A thinker in three-four centuries time may provide an expansion on Darwin's theory, be a biological equivalent to Einstein, but it is no more likely that evolution will be "discredited" than it is that gravitation has been "discredited". Eppur si muove.

[cleek]

here's why ID fails for me:

a designer competent enough to come up with something as complex as a human, with all of it's hundreds of interrelated and delicately-balanced systems, wouldn't design anything like a human.

humans are subject to countless ailments that are entirely the fault of their design; why would a designer able to design the immunne system make it prone to auto-immune problems, environmental allergies, food allergies, etc ? are grass, tree and dust allergies all part of the Design ? it's "good enough" ? nah, i don't buy it.

secondly, if The Designer designed something as amazingly complex, baroque, fragile and error-prone as the human nervous system, why would he use the same exact system in all other vertebrates ? for that matter, why make all those different vertebrates ? same parts, different configurations, essentially. why use the same basic nervous system design in all the other groups, too ? and like the immune system, the nervous system has many flaws. why share a flawed system across thousands of species ?

is this Designer prone to bouts of lazyness ? "yeah, vertebrate #1232 was pretty good. i think i'll reuse it; for vertbrate #1233, i'll just tweak the DNA to extend the neck and give it spots; and, of course, i'll make it unable to breed with any nearby other vertibrates."

why make 350,000 different species of beetle ?

why make species of plant that can only live in one place ?

why base all life on the same basic building blocks (DNA, etc.) ? surely a Designer capable of coming up with a system based on DNA can come with a system based on something else ?

[hilzoy]

I second the recommendation of PZ Meyers' post on this. I also think that what ID people say about the status of their views as 'theories', and about how scientists think about evolution, is wrong, for reasons that people who, unlike me, are scientists have explained. But briefly: (a) intelligent design is not a 'theory' in the sense in which scientists use that word: a hypothesis that allows you to explain and predict what you find. It is nowhere near precise enough for that. Specifically:

(a) it is not precise enough for proponents of ID to formulate testable hypotheses that they take their theory to imply, and which might confirm or disconfirm their theory.

(b) The reason for this, as best I can tell, is that ID is less a specific testable theory than a sort of fallback position when nothing else seems to work. (Sort of like the view that the strange doings in your house can only be explained as the result of poltergeists: explain any specific strange doing in another way and you have not falsified the poltergeist view, just restricted its application to the (now smaller) set of unexplained things.)

(c) The 'methodological naturalism' that ID people object to is a sort of counterpart to this, not a thesis asserted as a dogma. It says: when we try to explain things, we try to find a naturalistic explanation of them: e.g., to figure out how they could have arisen as a result of previous natural events or processes working under natural laws. The reason for this is not that scientists dogmatically assert that only such explanations are possible; it's that only such explanations work as explanations in the sense in which scientists use that term. When you explain a phenomenon as natural, you advance very specific views about the way in which nature works, views that can be tested and accepted, rejected, or modified as a result. When you explain it as a result of divine intervention, by contrast, you typically do not advance some view about how God invariably acts, which can then be tested against further evidence. You are instead saying either: I have no other explanation, or else: I see the other (naturalistic) explanation, but I think that God is operating through natural laws.

Since divine intervention and intelligent design do not play the same role in a theory as, say, gravity or inertia (testable hypotheses which allow us to make specific predictions against the backdrop of the world as we know it), they are not the sorts of causes scientists are looking for; and the fact that scientists say: we will look for causes that do allow us to make testable predictions, etc., is a methodological point, not a dogmatic assertion of atheism. It just says: this is what we're looking for; and the fact that we're looking for this just reflects the nature of what we do: e.g., we try to find explanations that advance our knowledge and understanding of the phenomena at issue, and that can be tested against further experience.

[hilzoy]

Ah, I see von made my argument earlier and more succinctly ;)

[John Thullen]

It is true that many scientists, by their nature, will look back five years and declare themselves idiots and their theories crap.

But based on long, scientific observations of Behe and ilk, he will not declare himself an idiot, at least not in mere human time. That will be left to us. But I'm agnostic on these questions so I could be wrong.

[Jesurgislac]

why make 350,000 different species of beetle ?

Because God loves beetles?

What I want to know is, does that love extend to Volkswagen Beetles?

Or to Liverpool's Beatles?

[Edward]

a designer competent enough to come up with something as complex as a human, with all of it's hundreds of interrelated and delicately-balanced systems, wouldn't design anything like a human. [etc.]

Now that is a good argument.

[Gromit]

From Behe's essay:

"Which leads to the second claim of the intelligent design argument: the physical marks of design are visible in aspects of biology. This is uncontroversial, too. The 18th-century clergyman William Paley likened living things to a watch, arguing that the workings of both point to intelligent design."

The unseen watchmaker is a deeply flawed metaphor, largely because watches, cogs, gears, and springs are structures we know, culturally, to be man-made. You don't find a watch on the beach and suppose it was made by aliens, or God. You assume it was left there by a careless human. Our only experience with intelligent folk making human beings is through reproduction, which is part and parcel of evolutionary theory.

To call this notion uncontroversial is ludicrous. It seems this Behe guy simply can't recognize a metaphor when it bites him on the ass, and unfortunately for him, scientists speak in metaphors all the time. When a scientist talks about a natural structure being "designed" or serving a "purpose" it does not mean the same thing as when an engineer uses the same words about a man-made structure.

[rilkefan]

"Evolutionary theory appears incomplete in many respects and, by all means, science teachers should point that out."

This is incorrect in my opinion. It's like asking physics teachers to start off their classes by saying, "We don't understand why any of this stuff works at a basic level (a hundred years of physics past what we're learning), but it does." Actually I think evolution is on a much firmer basis in that regard than physics.

"It cannot be falsified."

Not I think entirely accurate - the arguments used to support it can be falsified from a logical point of view - see e.g.
this site, and one could at least in theory produce simulations showing evolution of cellular machinery and one could find evidence of transitional forms demonstrating evolutionary steps producing "irreducible complexity".

Aside from all that, the article was dishonest with its "some scientists" and so forth - if I'd had any respect for Behe before I'd have lost it.

[rilkefan]

And, jeez Edward, is it too late to fix the "their"s?

[Katherine]

(apologies if any of this is repetitive non-responsive to other comments--it took a while to write.)

It's not that I think intelligent design is an idiotic idea. Depending on narrowly how you define it, I believe in it--I believe in God, and I believe God had some hand in creating life, so there you are. I'm sure a lot of people do, given the number of out-and-out creationists in the country. But it's a matter of faith, not science. It is not a hypothesis that can be tested by the scientific method.

The hypothesis, as much as they try to disguise it by referring to a small-d-designer instead of a capital-c-Creator, and arguing that "intelligent design itself says nothing about the religious concept of a creator," is, basically: God exists. They may not use the word "God," they may talk about watchmakers instead, but that's really the core of it.

And when you phrase it that way, you can see: this is not an alternative, testable theory. How would you ever disprove it? Behe argues the amazing complexity of a cell and of the human brain; Kieran Healy argues about impacted wisdom teeth and the appendix. Neither argument is really capable of disproving the other, because it's a theological debate--not far removed from looking at the Banda Aceh tsunami and asking, "how can there be a benevolent Creator?", and looking at the New York skyline, the Canadian rockies or your husband's face, and asking "how can there not be?"

As a theological debate, that's a great basis for discussion. As a scientific argument, it's really lousy. It doesn't start conversations that lead to great new discovery. it ends them. Look at this selection from Behe's piece:

The strong appearance of design allows a disarmingly simple argument: if it looks, walks and quacks like a duck, then, absent compelling evidence to the contrary, we have warrant to conclude it's a duck. Design should not be overlooked simply because it's so obvious.

Still, some critics claim that science by definition can't accept design, while others argue that science should keep looking for another explanation in case one is out there. But we can't settle questions about reality with definitions, nor does it seem useful to search relentlessly for a non-design explanation of Mount Rushmore.

But "searching relentlessly for a non-design explanation of Mount Rushmore" is precisely what science is about. The fact that no explanation we have is satisfactory is not a reason to give up the search, to shrug and say "I guess God must have made it that way."

That's the scientific equivalent of "Because I said so." It's deus ex machina, in the original sense of the term.

This famous Sidney Harris cartoon is the single best indictment of Intelligent Design I've ever seen.

[bob mcmanus]

"you typically do not advance some view about how God invariably acts, which can then be tested against further evidence."

Not quite that simple. Sacrifice the virgin, and the rains come, ending the drought. If the rains don't come, question village studs. Pray to cure your cancer, and if the cancer isn't cured, pray harder.

Not real rigorous, but I saw Marvin Olasky say WWII was God's punishment of America for Woodrow Wilson's unrepentent adultery, as God punished Israel for David/Bathsheba. Saw him say this in the late 90's, in the context of Monica Lewinsky. Sure nuff, 9/11. QED.

[Brian]

Seriously, anyone who thinks the human body is an absolutely perfect design has never been sick or injured, or must be 20 years old. You know that whole medical industry we have? That eats up 100s of billions of dollars a year? It wouldn't exist if we weren't a fragile improvisation "designed" to breed a couple times then die, like every other creature. Or is the "designer" insane, or stupid, or has a weird sense of humor?

Anyway, we're so vertibrate-centric. Judging by the sheer volume of bacteria, beetles, termites, algea, etc., inhabiting the planet, it seem God prefers them to us. We're kind of a sideshow. Someone (Gould I think) said that a hypothetical martian would look at Earth and say it was largely inhabited by microscopic organisms, with a few more complex creatures on the margins.

[Phil]

As an aside, while the provisional nature of scientific progress should always be made clear and obvious, it's possible to overemphasize it as well. Even nearly a century after Einstein, Heisenberg and Bohr, Newtonian physics is still perfectly adequate for sending a probe to Saturn's moons and beyond.

[Edward]

With regard to whether Intelligent Design is a "theory" I'll let Hilzoy's definition stand as proof it's not. I actually knew this already, but didn't focus on it here because I think there's something less "scientific" and more social outweighing that.

With the credentials Dr. Behe has, and given how desparate some otherwise decent folks are to argue away evolution, it's not productive to merely dismiss ID. You'll have too many people involved in making public school decisions simply shut down and insist it's irrelevant when they're asked to consider falsifyable hypotheses and the like. Which is not to ask for dumbing down the debate as much as it is for another approach.

Fundamentalists are not going away. They'll continue to insist the Bible is true as written, continue to pass laws, and continue to teach their children what they believe.

Until there's proof of a theory (and by "proof" I mean evidence they can see it's foolish to dismiss through very basic reasoning [i.e., such as a photo of the Earth from the Moon proving the Earth is round]), they'll cling to their beliefs.

When such evidence is available, they'll have a momentary crisis of faith, work through it, and then carry on believing the rest of the Bible is God's literal truth. Yes, they're wrong, but clearly, just insisting they're wrong hasn't worked very well so far.

Continuing with that approach is like fighting the ocean tide until better, more accessible, less deniable evidence is available.

Fortunately, the ID advocates have the same problem with regards to communication, and that's how to approach this, IMO. You break down their analogies, because those are the most persuasive tools they have. If they're scrambling to develop better analogies, they're not winning converts.

[kenB]

Seriously, anyone who thinks the human body is an absolutely perfect design has never been sick or injured, or must be 20 years old.

Thus this modification to ID theory -- Unintelligent Design: "[A]lthough life was designed by an all-powerful creator, he is in reality pretty dumb and not very good at it."

[ed_finnerty]

If there was an intelligent designer it wouldn't have put stringy things in my banana

[Edward]

rilkefan re: "Their"

how embarrassing...

of course homynyms really need to evolve in our language...it's awful they're's so many of them...

[Sebastian Holsclaw]

I'm torn in this debate. I don't like the stance of the Intelligent Design people, they aren't engaged in science (as hilzoy and von both mention). But I'm not happy with comparisons of the theory of evolution to the theory of gravity either. Newton's theory of gravity even without later elaborations accurately describes a truly huge percentage of the easily observable phenomena. The same cannot be said of the theory of evolution--especially as it applies to life origins. There are a vast number of holes and gaps. There is a huge gap between the organization of amino acids and the formation of complex proteins without other proteins (or even more complex structures) to build them. There is a huge gap in the move from single cell organisms to multi-cell that isn't easily explained by colony hand-waving. There are lots of other big gaps. If the theory of gravitation precisely describes 99% of situations it covers, the theory of evolution precisely describes maybe 40%. It is certainly the best theory available thus-far, but it isn't well settled (in the sense of being particularly stable). So I have no trouble slapping down the Intelligent Design quacks, but I think if we are honest scientifically we can acknowledge that the Theory of Evolution isn't on the same footing as the Theory of Gravitation.

[bob mcmanus]

"The premise--that God would not act in history, would not affect the physical world--isn't an observation of science, but a theological presupposition that stands against Christianity and other religions."

In case anyone thought I was being silly above, the question is fairly serious, and the only reasonable consequence of a full acceptance of evolutionary theory and "Methodological naturalism" is a pretty useless Deism for those who wish to retain a little religion.

[CaseyL]

David Warner, playing Evil in 'Time Bandits,' put it very well, "Look how [God] spends his time! Forty-three species of parrot! Nipples for men! Slugs!! He created slugs. They can't hear! They can't speak! ...I mean, are we not in the hands of a lunatic?"

[liberal japonicus]

a bit of silliness before I say goodnight

of course homynyms really need to evolve in our language...it's awful they're's so many of them..

Sorry, Edward, that should read

Off course, homonyms really kneed two evolve in hour language...its awful there sew many of them...

I would like to see a school of Unintelligent Design, pointing out all of the screwups that were made. Like the aforementioned nipples on men. Why can't I scratch the middle of my back. Male pattern baldness. The list is endless.

[Neolith]

Well, von, hilzoy, and Katherine have already said about everything I can say about the subject. I'll add a few notes:

One of the big problems of ID is that they don't do their work in the realm of peer reviewed research journals or other forums where they can be picked apart. Instead, they publish books aimed at the general population, write editorials in newspapers as above, and do the lecture circuit among creationists. Now, ID proponents will holler "What about Darwin and Origins, huh? HUH?!". And if Darwin had stopped there, I guess the criticism would be more valid. But there is something fundamentally dishonest about the approach of releasing literature aimed at the layperson and then slapping warning stickers on science books that bothers me.

Another thing that bothers me are creationists that imply that if evolution is right, then there is not god. Of course, they are aided and abetted by scientists who push the same logical construct. One thing I'm confident in is that we'll never be able to do more than speculate about what happened before the big bang (Headline tomorrow: Scientists Establish Proof of What Happened Before the Big Bang. D'oh!) and because of this, saying that God created the universe is probably always going to be just as useful an answer as any other, and a natural place for theologians to step in. In a perfect world, religion would respect science's bounds, not create a weak-faith* based "God of the gaps", and science would respect religion's authority, and not set about the impossible task of eliminating God by deduction.

* Disclaimer: I was raised as a fundamentalist christian, and the biggest blow to my faith was uncovering the fundamentally dishonest tactics creationists use in an attempt to discredit evolution (and cosmology, and radiation, and cellular biology, and geology, and physics, and the various other disciplines that give the literal biblical crowd problems, but anyway...) All the more tragic because God and evolution can and do happily co-exist. Indeed, I've since come to the conclusion that a God who has evolution in his toolkit is far more impressive and wise than one who still does assembly line work.

[Neolith]

Sebastian > Perhaps one of the problems that is throwing you is that you are combining the theory of evolution, which does do an impressive job of describing observations made in nature, and the theory of abiogenesis, which states life formed from non-living matter, and hasn't been successfully observed. As I said in my comment, this is a big, big problem. Evolution simply states that life forms change over time, which has been observed, even to the point of speciation among vertabrate life. That is pretty impressive "proof" of evolution.

[Neolith]

In case anyone thought I was being silly above, the question is fairly serious, and the only reasonable consequence of a full acceptance of evolutionary theory and "Methodological naturalism" is a pretty useless Deism for those who wish to retain a little religion.

That is the very definition of a false dichotomy. There are many reasons God may utilize abiogenesis and evolution and yet still involve himself in miracles from time to time. And there are many reasons he may care about his creation and yet still maintain his distance from it. These problems are worked out in theology utilizing reason and faith, and science should just stay the hell out of it. ;-)

[Jesurgislac]

Edward: Yes, they're wrong, but clearly, just insisting they're wrong hasn't worked very well so far.

Well, not in the US. It works fine in the UK. Is there any other country besides the US in which state-funded schools are badgered to teach religion in science classes?

[Edward]

Well, not in the US. It works fine in the UK. Is there any other country besides the US in which state-funded schools are badgered to teach religion in science classes?

Perhaps not among the Democracies, I don't know, but that still argues for another approach, Jes. Piling on the fundamentalists only works if they're so horribly outnumbered they cower.

[Neolith]

Well, not in the US. It works fine in the UK. Is there any other country besides the US in which state-funded schools are badgered to teach religion in science classes?

Among countries with liberal democratic traditions? Probably not, but that's a pretty narrow net to cast. I blame the pilgrams. :-)

[Jesurgislac]

Edward: Piling on the fundamentalists only works if they're so horribly outnumbered they cower.

True, as we see in Saudi Arabia.

It is a kind of problem that it's hard to take seriously from the outside, but I do feel for the children in the US state system who are being forced by religious fundamentalists to have an inferior education to children in other countries.

And presumably, the same is true within the US: in states where religious fundamentalists exist in sufficiently large numbers that they can force the public school system to teach their faith as if it were factually true, the children receive an inferior education to those in states where the religious fundamentalists are in enough of a minority that they can't.

But I thought you were from New York State, Edward? If you were taught that evolution was "just a theory" and that intelligent design was a possible opposition theory, then, well, I fear for the future of science in the US - if no state is allowed to teach science unencumbered by Christianity.

[Dr Pretorius]

Newton's theory of gravity even without later elaborations accurately describes a truly huge percentage of the easily observable phenomena. The same cannot be said of the theory of evolution--especially as it applies to life origins.

What I'm confused about here is the number of people who seem to be saying something like "Ok, sure the ID people are dishonest charlatans illegitimately pushing for nonscientific religious beliefs to be taught in a science class -- but their points against the evolutionary theory are well taken." Now, not to commit a fallacy here, but wouldn't it be wise to check their specific criticisms just to make sure they're not being equally dishonest about those? For example, one could try checking some of the more specific claims made (evolution can't explain the development of the eye, etc) at a site like http://www.talkorigins.org/ just to make sure that the theory of evolution hasn't, in fact, been able to explain it. (In the case mentioned - that of the eye - it has, which has not stopped ID people from using it as a criticism.)

Frankly, in response to the above bit, the Theory of Evolution does describe a frankly staggering number of observations, and is the foundation of modern biology and medicine. Abiogenesis -- as pointed out above -- is something somewhat different, but even as far as it goes there is an awful lot we know about that as well. The comparison between Newtonian physics and the Theory of Evolution is rather a good one, really, given the centrality of both those theories to their respective disciplines.

[Katherine]

If we're going to do disclaimer stickers, what about "science can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God?" I don't know if that passes the Establishment Clause, or whether it's a good idea, but at least it's honest. ("Evolution is a theory, not a fact" is not honest. "Technically true but actively misleading" does not count as honest.)

Wacky question: does Islam have a position on evolution? What do they teach in science classes in Iran and Saudi Arabia? (Are there science classes? I just have no clue at all.) Maybe I'll write to Ayatollah Sistani...

[Katherine]

sorry...

[Jesurgislac]

Katherine: Wacky question: does Islam have a position on evolution?

To the best of my knowledge and belief, Christianity does not have a "position" on evolution, greatly though the wacky fundamentalists would like to think so.

Muslims have, as one would expect, come up with a wide range of reasoning about whether the Quran supports or denies evolution (you can find a range of samples just by googling for them), and individual Muslims doubtless make up their minds for themselves, depending on their level and type of education.

[Slartibartfast]

Sebastian, are we really going to go into this discussion where I point out that we don't really understand what makes gravity works; we just have an equation that describes its effects, again? Newton described Gravitation via a physical law, which is simply an equation. It no more describes the inner workings of gravitation than the blackbody equation describes electromagnetic radiation. Not denigrating Newton; three hundred-odd years later we still don't have much more of an understanding than Newton did. AFAIK, that is.

Oh, and ID is, IMNSHO, utter crap. But if you're interested in just how much is covered by the Theory of Evolution (as opposed to cosmology or abiogenesis), go read the collection of TalkOrigins FAQ, particularly the Evolution as a Theory FAQ. And be sure to follow the linky-thingies. Read as much as you can before you fall asleep, and then tomorrow, pick up where you've left off. If you think you've got some notions regarding Creationism and Intelligent Design, it's best to understand that which you're arguing against.

Just sayin'.

[Blar]

If the theory of gravitation precisely describes 99% of situations it covers, the theory of evolution precisely describes maybe 40%. It is certainly the best theory available thus-far, but it isn't well settled (in the sense of being particularly stable). So I have no trouble slapping down the Intelligent Design quacks, but I think if we are honest scientifically we can acknowledge that the Theory of Evolution isn't on the same footing as the Theory of Gravitation.

I think that you're asking a lot more from the Theory of Evolution than from the Theory of Gravitation. We know that gravity exists, and in simple problems (with only two objects interacting) we can give a precise and correct prediction of what gravity will do. But we don't know exactly how gravity works (is it the warping of spacetime like Einstein said, or does it involve exchanging particles, like the forces that are understood in terms of quantum mechanics?), we can't give a historical explanation of how everything in the universe got to be where it is based on the force of gravity, and even the calculations to predict future locations are intractable when there are three or more interacting objects involved.

Similarly, we know that evolution takes place, we can make fairly accurate predictions of how organisms will evolve in some simple cases (like with bacteria or fruit flies in the laboratory), and we can give a historical explanation of how evolution has led to the forms of life that are currently present on Earth (including humans) that is, I think, more detailed and better understood than cosmological history. We don't completely understand the precise biological mechanisms of evolution (like how genes create organisms), and we don't have a complete understanding of evolutionary history (like how multicellularity evolved).

So, it would be wrong to present the scientific study of evolution as a finished product, with everything important already explained. But it would also be wrong to claim that there was any serious doubt over whether the process of evolution by natural selection was real and important, or to suggest that, whenever there is a step that we don't understand, we should just assume that some intelligent designer took care of it.

[Katherine]

right, sorry Jes. Rephrase: do any prominent Muslim clerics have a position on evolution? Does it contradict their reading of the Koran? What, if anything do schools in Muslim countries say about it?

[Sebastian Holsclaw]

"but their points against the evolutionary theory are well taken." Now, not to commit a fallacy here, but wouldn't it be wise to check their specific criticisms just to make sure they're not being equally dishonest about those? "

Umm, no. I'm not signing off on any particular criticism given by other people, I'd want to research their criticisms first. I'm happy enough with my own. I don't think their points are well taken. I think their points resonate because in fact evolution is not as well understood as gravitation. That's fine, because psychiatry isn't as well understood as gravitation, but that doesn't make it entirely useless either.

[Neolith]

I think their points resonate because in fact evolution is not as well understood as gravitation.

So, are we going to have this discussion? Because once you define both theories, I think that factually you'll find a not dissimilar understanding. Sure, everyone has seen the veritible apple fall from the tree, and not everyone has seen speciation, but some people have, and those people have published their findings in research papers.

[Sebastian Holsclaw]

"not everyone has seen speciation, but some people have, and those people have published their findings in research papers."

The term speciation is quite broad. It encompasses fairly minor changes and incredibly major changes. Very few if any of the more major speciation changes have actually been observed. For instance the speciation of one group of animals into a non-cross-breedable group has been well established and personally observed. The change from fish to mammal (or the reverse) has not.

I'm not defending ID at all. I'm suggesting that some theories are more maturely understood than others. The Theory of Gravity is quite mature. The Theory of Evolution somewhat less so. The current theories in psychiatry even less so. All of those are science, unlike Intelligent Design 'theory'. But noticing that psychiatric theories are not as comprehensive as gravitational theories is a trivial observation. Noticing that the theory of evolution is somewhere in between should be just as understandable.

[rilkefan]

"If the theory of gravitation precisely describes 99% of situations it covers, the theory of evolution precisely describes maybe 40%."

Fortunately I got dragged away and stuffed into a bunny suit and pushed into a cleanroom to look at a vacuum chamber run by a disco-era slow-controls system, or I might have violated the posting rules in response. Slart wrote a better comment than I would have anyway.

[Neolith]

It just seems you're throwing the "mature" label around willy-nilly. Yes, I understand why you do that, after all, if nothing else, gravity has evolution beat by sheer age by hundreds of years. But I don't think the distinction is as large as you think, either.

While no one has seen fish evolve into amphibians or back, once you concede speciation, you look at the fossil record and then at existing hybrids such as lungfish and mud skippers, it starts to become hard for me to see where the sticking point is. What would make a fish becoming an amphibian impossible? Species do change, transitional forms with both lungs and gills, that can walk, crawl, even leap with their fins are observed in the fossil record and in nature. If a bacteria can evolve new protiens that enable to to ingest a deadly poision as food in a few generations, what is not possible? It seems to me, that the only thing left to demand is ever smaller changes in the fossil record, because we're not going to see the kind of macro evolution of multicellular life that you're talking about over human time spans.

Evolution states that life changes, which is a fact. That amphibians evolved from fish is a reasonable conclusion to draw, but not as of yet provably true. Gravity says that objects fall down, which is also a fact. That blackholes exist is a reasonable conclusion to draw, but are still not 100% provably true. Some of the more esoteric applications of gravity and evolution are still pure conjecture, but their basis is equally sound, from where I stand (being held to the surface of the Earth by gravity ;-p)...

[fdl]

non-biologists, even really smart ones, trying to talk intelligently about evolution appears to me, judging from the contents of this thread, a little bit like virgins talking about sex --- full of enthusiasm and full of ignorance.

SH, for example, says that the theory of evolution covers 40% of situations it covers. Now, SH is clearly a smart guy, but what the hell is he talking about? where does this 40% number come from, and what does it mean?

The Panda's Thumb is a blog dedicating to standing up to the kind of imprecise wishful thinking articulated in many posts here. It also links to a number of sources on the vast incredible richness of modern biology. I recommend talkorigins.org, and specifically this link:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/phylo.html

(no, i don't know any html. sorry.)

A few basic thoughts: on the impact of large numbers. No one has any real idea how many species are currently alive, much less how many living organisms, on planet earth today. The amount of reproduction occuring every day is staggering. Even if only a tiny fraction of the new creatures have positive mutations, that number is itself substantial. Also regarding large numbers -- a billion years is a REALLY LONG TIME. During most of human evolution, a generation was probably 15 to 20 years. A few million years gives you a few million generations, lots of time for lots of evolution.

Disproof: evolution is easy to disprove -- just find me one creature not using DNA. (there are some very rare and very primitive creatures whose DNA codes for different proteins than anyone else's.) Or demonstrate that the non-coding sections of anyone's DNA contain a message written by the Designer.

The problem with Design-driven theories is that their supporters are remarkably unwilling to describe the kind of cellular evidence which would prove their theory. Instead we get Mt. Rushmore analogies.

Let's think about why Mt. Rushmore is a bad analogy. Assume, for a second, that a Stephen King flu wipes out all humanity. When aliens come for a visit, orang utans are the most sophisticated tool users around. the alien would think: (a) Mt Rushmore was shaped by natural forces, ie., wind and rain -- yet no place in the universe have natural forces left such clear marks of engineering; (b) given Mt. Rushmore and the Hoover Dam and the empty New York City skyscrapers, a civilization rose and fell. Slice Occam's Razor and the answer is easily (b).

By contrast, cells, organisms, and species are under tremendous pressure to survive. the survival advantages given to a cell having a propeller are huge. Is it possible to describe a pattern of evolutionary changes from what appears to be a predecessor organism, or do we require a Designer?

Despite the fact that purely natural forces are entirely adequate to explain the changes, many people appear to want a Designer.

But the implications of the existence of a Designer are HUGE! where is it? how does it work? why did it do such a poor job? (If there is Design going on, why for example is it the case that ascorbic acid is a vitamin for humans and virtually no other species?) Is there more than one, working in competition? what are its goals? how would we humans try to understand its methodologies, its purposes?

here's a three-part ID research program that IDers seem oddly reluctant to undertake:

1. Design elements. Undertake a rigorous study of those aspects of biology which appear to demonstrate Design. Demonstrate that there is NO possible likely evolutionary path.

2. Means. Undertake a rigorous study of the ways in which Design information could be transmitted. Search for patterns in the way various forms of energy are received on the planet which could be Designing changes in targeted embryos.

3. Goals. Assuming that evolution is supported by Design. Undertake a program of investigating the common types of Design towards developing a theory of the Designer's goals. Use the goal theory to think about how to contact the Designer.

Or, we could just recognize that all this nonsense really is about Faith.

Francis

p.s. SH, i really am interested about your 40% number. please follow up.

[Neolith]

Anyone who has decided that evolution is a fact (and I'm with you on that one) but that feels compelled to talk down to or has to resist the impluse to throttle those that don't needs to re-examine their goals and methods in discussions like these. It happens to the best of us (*cough* Richard Dawkins *cough*) but it never helps to make the other guy feel like he's Chuck Heston from Planet of the Apes.

[Phil]

If we're going to do disclaimer stickers, what about "science can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God?"

I think that we should all start lobbying state boards of education and local school boards to sticker any Bibles in the library with one reading, "The existence of any of the deities posited in this book are a controversial theory, not a fact."

[bob mcmanus]

"There are many reasons God may utilize abiogenesis and evolution and yet still involve himself in miracles from time to time."

If I indulged in a false dichotomy this is a pretty interesting conjunction of possible causal variables for a scientist to accept. Maybe we just footnote all particle physics observations with:"Of course, could have been a miracle involved."

Obviously, as in Edward's quote of Dr Behe, some Christians believe there is a true and significant dichotomy, with implications that go beyond a necessary belief that Joshua stopped the sun. So many people who understand the dangerous implications of Marx's historical materialism seem not to understand the philosophical consequences of accepting a "Methodological naturalism".

"but that feels compelled to talk down to or has to resist the impluse to throttle those that don't"

By saying there is no real conflict in principle between theism and Darwinism you fail to follow your own advice.
The overwhelming all-encompassing presupposition that God need not be taken as a causative factor in the world, save perhaps in a very abstract ethical and spiritual ghetto, is precisely why the ID folk are around.

I have lost these arguments many times before, but I continue with two purposes:1) to have Darwinists, to whom I belong, realize the metaphysical consequences of the belief(not so nice),2) to generate some sympathy or empathy toward those who oppose Darwinism, by showing more is at stake than some vestigial superstitions.

[Sebastian Holsclaw]

Do I really need to say at the start of every comment that I'm not defending ID at all? Not as science, not as interesting, not as useful, not at all.

Sebastian, are we really going to go into this discussion where I point out that we don't really understand what makes gravity works; we just have an equation that describes its effects, again?

I fully understand that. And I'm suggesting that even in the purely descriptive sense gravitational theory explains more comprehensively than evolutionary theory. Just so I understand, are you suggesting that evolutionary theory is advanced to enough to make precise predictions about macro-issues? So you can say to me something akin to 60 years from now Jupiter will be at location X? 200 years from now Saturn will be at location Y? If I shoot a solid of enourmous mass A at the moon it will perturb its orbit by B? I don't think so. I think we are barely, barely, barely at the stage where we can say that changing the following base pair will have effect Z for a super-narrow number of traits. I think for a large number of environmental pressures we can predict that some change or other will occur, but not what change will occur, or how it will occur, or how quickly it will occur. And that isn't exactly the ideal of scientific prediction. It wouldn't be as bad as saying "200 years from now Saturn will be somewhere" but it wouldn't be a lot better than saying "If I hurl a huge mass A at the moon, stuff will happen."

Do we all admit that psychiatry isn't as developed as the theory of gravity? Can we all admit that psychiatry isn't as developed as the theory of evolution? So why is it so hard to admit that evolution isn't as developed as the theory of gravity? It isn't an insult. It is just awareness about the state of knowledge. Maybe it is because gravitational phenomena are easier to fully describe. Nothing wrong with that. I'm on your side.

[von]

Rilkefan --

I'll respectfully disagree on both points.

First, "teaching" evolution's problems, gaps, etc. is not the same thing as "starting out class" with its problems, gaps, etc. I'm in favor of the former; I oppose the latter (as do you).

Second, while irreducible complexity is a wonderful term, it essentially requires one to prove a negative. Thus, I disagree that it's "testable" in any functional sense. (E.g., Evolution could not be responsible for feature X because feature X is too complex. How do you know it's too complex? Because I haven't seen evolution come up with a satisfactory explanation for it yet. How do you know evolution won't come up with a satisfactory answer tommorrow? Well, it's too complex. QED.)

[votermom]

What amazes me about this debate is how defensive creationists seem to be.
You know, if religious truth is so truthful, it will stand up to any amount of scientific scrutiny. Do the so-called defenders of the Bible have so little faith in it that they don't think it can stand up to being put under a microspcope?

[Edward]

But I thought you were from New York State, Edward? If you were taught that evolution was "just a theory" and that intelligent design was a possible opposition theory, then, well, I fear for the future of science in the US

I live in New York now, but grew up in Ohio, where I was taught in school (thankfully) that evolution was science and at home and church that creationism was God's word, being raised in a fundamentalist Christian church. My father wants to believe in Creationism, but just throws up his hands and admits he doesn't know if I mention the holes in it, but that's where my "don't throw out the baby with the bathwater" approach to this issue comes from.

non-biologists, even really smart ones, trying to talk intelligently about evolution appears to me, judging from the contents of this thread, a little bit like virgins talking about sex --- full of enthusiasm and full of ignorance.

You can make this argument for many disciplines, like human sociology (including sexuality) itself, for example, but that doesn't mean well-meaning parents are not going to want a say in how it's taught in their children's schools, which is really what we're discussing here.

[Jesurgislac]

Edward: but that doesn't mean well-meaning parents are not going to want a say in how it's taught in their children's schools, which is really what we're discussing here.

As I understand it, the First Amendment US Constitution is generally interpreted to mean that state schools shall not teach religion to their pupils.

So it's legitimate for state schools to teach that some Christians believe in creationism, but not to teach creationism. Yes?

[Jesurgislac]

After all, if you're going to teach one creation myth in American schools, don't you have to teach them all?

[bob mcmanus]

"What amazes me about this debate is how defensive creationists seem to be."

What amazes me is how empassioned the evolutionists are. As someone who appears to have been born an atheist, I survived an awful lot of indoctrination and peer-pressure, and I can't help but wonder why so many are seem to believe that a few semesters of ID will damage a rational mind for life.

[Jesurgislac]

bob: I can't help but wonder why so many are seem to believe that a few semesters of ID will damage a rational mind for life.

I suppose because it seems unfair to force so many children to have an inferior scientific education because some parents want their religion to be taught in US public schools.

[Neolith]

bob > "If I indulged in a false dichotomy this is a pretty interesting conjunction of possible causal variables for a scientist to accept. Maybe we just footnote all particle physics observations with:"Of course, could have been a miracle involved.""

Of course, I would say that there should be no footnote, just as there need not be one in Genesis that says "Warning: Geology and carbon dating show the above not to be literally true." The scientist need not accept that miracles occur, and the believer need not accept that they do not.

By saying there is no real conflict in principle between theism and Darwinism you fail to follow your own advice.

How so? I sincerely believe it to be true, and manage not to compare those that don't to either rubes or godless heathens. And further, why are ethical and spirtual areas ghettos? That seems an unflattering and unfair description. Hey, I kind of like hanging around them. They offer a hope, and a hope that I freely admit may be illusionary, that I can see my dead grandma again one day. Science cannot hold out that hope, and I'll be damned if I let it tell me that hope does not exist. If I look at it from a purely material standpoint, evolution has seen fit to give me a "memecomplex" called "faith" to survive in this world, and for me, I find it as useful as the opposable thumb it also gave me. Now, some may be ready to get rid of these vestigal traits in this fascinating modern age we all live in, but I'm not.

I find myself in the position of someone who is being demanded that I have my apendix cut from me, when it is giving me no problems whatsoever and for all I know might be benefiting me. Yes, you can show me your apendix scar, and yes, you can try to tell me that it might get infected and kill me one day, but all the same, back away from me with that bloody knife! I guess to further the comparison, that evangelical athiests are like the guys wanting to remove all appendixi, and fundamentalists want everyone to hold on to theirs no matter what the cost. Neither side makes much sense to me.

Wow, that turned out way, way wierder than I meant it to.

[Edward]

I agree that until there's any scientific evidence at all of creationism that teaching it or ID in public schools violates the First Amendment and should not be allowed.

I know that the folks in my circle who want ID taught in schools want it for religious confirmation only.

[Slartibartfast]

I can't help but wonder why so many are seem to believe that a few semesters of ID will damage a rational mind for life.

Throw in some Norse and other flavors of mythology and I think I'd be ok with it. As an elective. As science, though, it's utterly unsupportable. Which is the "defensiveness" you're seeing: it's not a defense of evolutionary theory, but rather a defense of science. If you're going to mangle science beyond all comprehension, you might as well just chuck it.

[bob mcmanus]

"I know that the folks in my circle who want ID taught in schools want it for religious confirmation only."

a better argument than

"suppose because it seems unfair to force so many children to have an inferior scientific education"

For I really have difficulty believing that exposure to ID in schools will lead to weaker and fewer physicists, mathematicians, or even biologists and doctors. Show me some evidence.

What I expect the furor is about is a question of "What will be the prevailing, dominant epistemology." Only this could explain why evolutionists are so frightened. One side understands its motivations better than the other,I think.

As to why it might be important in a practical sense from the ID side, I think many on both sides during the Civil War (maybe even Lincoln) believed that God was providing field support, and may helped motivate them to run toward the picketlines. That resource has become vitiated over the last century or so by a new epistemology, and whether or not that is a good thing, certainly changes the kinds of options we have as a society.

[rilkefan]

von: First, "teaching" evolution's problems, gaps, etc. is not the same thing as "starting out class" with its problems, gaps, etc. I'm in favor of the former; I oppose the latter (as do you).

Unless I'm wrong, evolution does not in fact have "problems, gaps, etc." at the level it is taught in schools (and in my college text you go a long long way and see a lot of demonstrations of the predictive power of the modern consensus before there's any hint of controversy). Certainly what a high schoool biology teacher says has a higher degree of truth than what a high school civics or history or home-ec or English teacher says. I doubt you want English teachers for example to get into prescriptivism vs. descriptivism, given that they barely manage to get students to write grammatical logical essays as is.

[rilkefan]

"For I really have difficulty believing that exposure to ID in schools will lead to weaker and fewer physicists, mathematicians, or even biologists and doctors. Show me some evidence."

There's barely time to teach actual science in school and you're willing to take time for crackpottery that says The stuff you learned last week may be wrong?

Look, there is at least as good evidence that the Holocaust is a hoax as that ID is true - should we devote time in our WWII sections to whoever the !~!$%^ pushes that? Esp. since there are plenty of problems, gaps, etc. in our understanding of the causes and facts and consequences of that war - should we tell students that some people think FDR knew about Pearl Harbor?

[votermom]

Full disclosure: I grew up in a Catholic area and studied in a catholic school up to 6th grade. The Religion teacher taught Creation, the Science teacher taught Evolution. They were both Catholics. The whole class was Catholic.

In high school our (again Catholic) biology teacher gave a lecture on the different types of birth cobntrol, and made the disclaimer that the Church only approved of the Rythm or the Billings-Gate method. I never had any high schol or college science teacher lecture on intelligent design, though I had Philosophy and Theology instructors tackle it.

[cleek]

For I really have difficulty believing that exposure to ID in schools will lead to weaker and fewer physicists, mathematicians, or even biologists and doctors. Show me some evidence.

indeed.

[cleek]

here is an interesting article about "digital evolution". it describes how complex functionality can evolve in digital creatures, in different ways, and even demonstrates "irreducable complexity" (ie. "what good is half an eye" ?)

The researchers set up an experiment to document how one particularly complex operation evolved. The operation, known as equals, consists of comparing pairs of binary numbers, bit by bit, and recording whether each pair of digits is the same. It's a standard operation found in software, but it's not a simple one. The shortest equals program Ofria could write is 19 lines long. The chances that random mutations alone could produce it are about one in a thousand trillion trillion.

To test Darwin's idea that complex systems evolve from simpler precursors, the Avida team set up rewards for simpler operations and bigger rewards for more complex ones. The researchers set up an experiment in which organisms replicate for 16,000generations. They then repeated the experiment 50 times.

Avida beat the odds. In 23 of the 50 trials, evolution produced organisms that could carry out the equals operation. And when the researchers took away rewards for simpler operations, the organisms never evolved an equals program. “When we looked at the 23 tests, they were all done in completely different ways,” adds Ofria. He was reminded of how Darwin pointed out that many evolutionary paths can produce the same complex organ. A fly and an octopus can both produce an image with their eyes, but their eyes are dramatically different from ours. “Darwin was right on that-there are many different ways of evolving the same function,” says Ofria.

you can even get the source code (C++/Python) for this experiement.

[fdl]

Bob: the only fear i see among evolutionists was the recent post on Pharngyla that IDers were winning the war on bringing faith into the science classroom. their comfort level that natural forces are sufficient to explain the variety of life seen on the planet has, if i understand panda's thumb blog, never been stronger.

concerning the larger issue, i have really very little to say to those whose faith is challenged by evolution. Sorry, i guess. but the world is unquestionably a better place because some people have doubted that a particular problem was just God's (or gods's) fault.

ID, right now, is just a hypothesis, unsupported by evidence. Could you imagine just how fascinating it would be to discover that the IDers are CORRECT? It'd be like the world imagined by LeHaye was real! Or perhaps the world imagined by Arthur C. Clarke ("Oh my god, it's full of stars.") [odd that the astronaut would call on god at that moment].

but for right now, they're just guessing. and mostly the guessing is not a serious research program but just a cover for a faith finding it difficult to believe in an interventionist god.

SH: its hard to tell what science fields have the greatest weaknesses. There is a field theory of gravity and a particle theory of all the other fundamental forces. But the two don't work together. Cosmologists have both dark matter and dark energy that they don't understand. Chemistry is a pretty mature field, but biochem. is just getting started. Economists appear to do an ok job of explaining the past, but aren't doing so well on the future. (witness, eg, soc. sec. predictions).

No one, that i can tell, is proposing a theory of IP (intelligent physics) or IE (intelligent economics), at least not seriously. Why pick on biology?

and where does the 40% come from?

Francis

[Jesurgislac]

For I really have difficulty believing that exposure to ID in schools will lead to weaker and fewer physicists, mathematicians, or even biologists and doctors. Show me some evidence.

Why? Surely it's for those who want to teach religion as a scientific fact (in violation, it appears, of the First Amendment) to show that no harm will be caused by doing so?

[Rob]

Edward: But evolution also leaves more questions unanswered than answered for me.
I think that is the essential good thing about science. There are always more questions; progress is thus possible.
Compare this to absolute faith: the answers are there, no further development needed.
That you often raise questions in your posts is one of the things I like about them.
I usually find people with more answers than questions rather scary. It happens a lot in the blog-world (say, Instapundit).
Rob.

[Donald Johnson]

I don't want to be caught in the position of Sebastian, where everyone seems to assume he's on the verge of defending ID. But here it is. I'm not a biologist, but have several shelves of books on evolution and have read most of them and just to make my orthodoxy clear, I think Darwin is probably right. I also think or suspect that on the separate problem of life's origin, it probably has a naturalistic answer (though I think this as much on theological grounds as any other--why would God do such a wonderful job devising this universe and its laws and then find He had to finagle with it to start the evolutionary process? Seems sloppy to me.)

All that said, I sometimes think it's the pro-Darwin side which is insufficiently amazed by the power of natural selection. Picking some arbitrary point in the Cambrian, it's amazing that a few hundred million generations would take you from some fishlike creature to a human or a horse or a hummingbird. Think of all the beneficial changes that had to be selected for in ways that would produce the fantastically complex result. And when you look at the math, as far as I can tell , it's extremely difficult to treat problems involving the multiple fixation of several beneficial mutations, though that may be my amateur status showing. Perhaps I haven't looked at the right books, or the really tough cases are in specialized journals. The creationist types have tried to make a big stink over "Haldane's dilemma" and that is handled at sites like talk origins, but just on an intuitive level it still staggers me what a few hundred million years of random change plus selection can produce. Was there really time for all these different structural and behavioral traits to all evolve together? Incidentally,
there are people like Stuart Kauffman who've argued there is more going on than selection.

On the subject of schools, it's a pity that the debate is so polarized and has come to stand for theocratic fascism vs. communist atheism in many minds. (Not generally both at the same time, of course. Reason vs. fascism, or reason vs. atheism.) I would think the best way to get kids interested in Darwin's astonishing claims would be to talk about what people (including scientists) believed before and then show why the evidence supports natural selection and evolution as opposed to special creation.

I hope I won't be asked to defend ID. I've read Behe and Dembski and think they are dopes.

[Rob]

In addition to my previous post:
I think in science-class teaching to ask questions is more important than to give answers; a theory with holes in it can be good, it is more a process than a finished thing.

[dutchmarbel]

Katherine: Rephrase: do any prominent Muslim clerics have a position on evolution? Does it contradict their reading of the Koran? What, if anything do schools in Muslim countries say about it?

I remember reading an article in my newspaper just a few days ago about muslims studying Medical Biology who want to cast out Darwin, so there is at least ONE stream who will go for ID/Creationism. The staff at university were slightly suprised (also by the choice for this study if that is how you feel) but said that it felt like a blast from the past since strict protestants used to feel the same way a few decades ago.

I went to public schools, and there Darwin is obligatory. Religious schools have the obligatory part too (all schools have to reach the same level and cover more or less the same basic grounds over here) but might add bits in their religious lessons.

[WillieStyle]

Bob wrote:
What I expect the furor is about is a question of "What will be the prevailing, dominant epistemology." Only this could explain why evolutionists are so frightened. One side understands its motivations better than the other,I think.

I don't have my Ph.D. yet so I guess I can't quite call myself a scientist. Yet even I can see the value of having a peer-reviewed body of knowledge that can be called science. The other day, I was trying to solve a photonics problem involving bragg gratings. So I look up some literature and found that Geologists have been solving similar problems for decades using the layer peeling method, which is based on fourier transforms and complex analysis discovered by mathematicians ages ago.

The point is, scientists need to share knowledge. And they need to have a reasonable degree of certainty that the knowledge they share is useful, and not just whatever nonsense was spewed by a fundamentalist Kansas School Board member. That's why we have peer review. And that is why I for one feel we must jealously gaurd what can be called science. Let creationism, ID, new age spiritualism or other such stuff into the body of science (whether in high school or college) and a hundred years from now my great-grand-daughter will be wasting alot of her time trying to find the parts of the scientific record that are useful admist all the garbage.

There are those, I suppose, who don't want ID taught in biology class out of concern for the children of Kansas. I'm not one them. Folks in Kansas can teach their kids that the bible is literarily true for all I care. The way I see it, it's less competition for my kids. Just don't call it science. We already got dibs on that word.

[Andrew Frederiksen]

Sebastian:

Just so I understand, are you suggesting that evolutionary theory is advanced to enough to make precise predictions about macro-issues? So you can say to me something akin to 60 years from now Jupiter will be at location X? 200 years from now Saturn will be at location Y? If I shoot a solid of enourmous mass A at the moon it will perturb its orbit by B? I don't think so.

Yes, but that's due to the difference between a stochastic phenomenon and a deterministic one, not a fundamental difference in how the underlying theory is understood -- you're comparing completely different scales of problem. A better comparison would be, for instance, predicting the configuration of Saturn's rings based on the interactions of several million different-sized chunks of rock and ice.

Donald:

Picking some arbitrary point in the Cambrian, it's amazing that a few hundred million generations would take you from some fishlike creature to a human or a horse or a hummingbird. Think of all the beneficial changes that had to be selected for in ways that would produce the fantastically complex result.

I think the human brain doesn't deal with that kind of time scale well, whatever the pheomenon. Is that level of change harder to picture than, say, that the Trans-Hudson, Wopmay, and Grenville orogens -- all, at one time, Himalayan-scale mountain ranges -- have been worn down by slow erosion to the point where they're just geological groupings visible in the rocks of the Canadian Shield, no higher or lower than anywhere else? Or that the Appalachians, ultimately result from the opening and closing of an ocean that no longer exists?

The reason I object to ID is, well, that it's nonsense, nonsense promulgated ultimately in service of a political goal. It's akin to giving the Tobacco Institute equal time in health class. Kids have been taught all kinds of nonsense over the years, but that doesn't mean we need to start doing it deliberately, just to appease some vocal lobby or other.

[Anarch]

bob mcmanus: For I really have difficulty believing that exposure to ID in schools will lead to weaker and fewer physicists, mathematicians, or even biologists and doctors. Show me some evidence.

The short answer as to why I expect this to happen is simple: if we lower the standards to admit ID as a scientific theory, native curiosity and bloody-mindedness will force the standards to be lowered uniformly. FTL, ether, Objectivist atomic theory... we can't in any honesty rule these out but leave ID in. As a result we'll have to either a) teach our students to have a blind spot for ID, b) teach them that intellectual honesty is overrated, or c) teach them not to think too hard about what things really mean. Any way you look at it, it's gonna get ugly.

This isn't evidence, but it is IMO suggestive enough to warrant not teaching ID as science.

PS: I'd also include circle-squaring (I understand pi!), hardcore finitism (infinity is meaningless!) and other mathematical "arguements" in this category because there's a significant commonality between those making the physical arguments and those making the mathematical ones, even though they're different propositions at a technical level. For examples of what can ensue, see sci.physics for FTL and sci.math for, well, crap.

von: First, "teaching" evolution's problems, gaps, etc. is not the same thing as "starting out class" with its problems, gaps, etc. I'm in favor of the former; I oppose the latter (as do you).

It may be a matter of emphasis, but I think that, at the primary and secondary level, one should do no more than to explain that there is much about evolution we don't yet understand rather than trying to get into a precise accounting of the plausibility/consistency of scientific theories. Epistemological arguments about the precise nature of "scientific theories" are well and good but I'd rather leave those to philosophy or tertiary science classes.

Second, while irreducible complexity is a wonderful term, it essentially requires one to prove a negative. Thus, I disagree that it's "testable" in any functional sense.

This need not be the case if we come up with a definition of "evolution" specific enough to conclude some negative results like, for example, a particular sequence of base pairs that cannot "naturally" evolve.* If we can find such a sequence in nature that would count as confirmatory evidence towards ID.

For example, consider regular languages in computer science: a language is regular iff some deterministic finite automaton (DFA) generates it. [You don't need to know what this means, incidentally.] To prove a language is regular, all you have to do is produce a DFA that works. It's easy. To prove a language isn't regular, however, you have to make use of abstract structure theorems (like Myhill-Nerode) that elucidate limitations on the ways in which regular languages can be generated.**

There are similar negative results for broader classes of languages but they are much, much more difficult, relying on keen abstract insights rather than mere constructions.*** It seems to me that ID attempts to pursue much the same conclusions as these negative existence results -- indeed, there are various notions of "irreducible complexity" in mathematics, e.g. Kolmogorov/Chaitin randomness, that do much the same thing -- without the high-level theoretical understanding that makes these negative results possible.

* Re our earlier discussion: I of course really mean that the model is specific enough to produce these results, but I don't want to get bogged down in technical semantics here.

** For those who have been keeping track of my particular hobby-horses, the key distinction here is that the positive result is an existential ("there is a DFA such that...") while the negative result is a universal ("none of the infinitely many DFAs do this..."), which is the more precise formulation of the "You can't prove a negative" trope. Thing is, you can sometimes prove universals provided you have enough understanding of the problem to make your argument go through (see, e.g., the Myhill-Nerode Theorem), it's just that there's no general technique for doing so.

*** The Halting Problem and Godel's Second Incompleteness Theorem leap to mind as they were recently mentioned here on ObWi.

[Anarch]

Andrew Frederiksen: A better comparison would be, for instance, predicting the configuration of Saturn's rings based on the interactions of several million different-sized chunks of rock and ice.

Is there a chance in hell we could do that with current computing techniques? Applied math, let alone applied math of the central-force variety, was never my strong suit.

[Ginger Yellow]

"If you see a coin come up heads 100 times in a row you may conclude that it is weighted. But suppose a gazillion fair coins are each flipped 100 times. As a matter of probability one of them, at least, will always come up heads. If the setup is that you only see those, then your conclusion is invalid."

You don't need anything like a gazillion coins. You need 2^99. Simply arrange a knockout tournament with 2^100 people, where the person who calls correctly goes through to the next round. The winner will have called correctly 100 times in a row. This system is guaranteed to produce someone who calls correctly 100 times in a row.

[Sebastian Holsclaw]

"If you see a coin come up heads 100 times in a row you may conclude that it is weighted. But suppose a gazillion fair coins are each flipped 100 times. As a matter of probability one of them, at least, will always come up heads. If the setup is that you only see those, then your conclusion is invalid."

Hmm, maybe my terminology isn't correct but I think your conclusion is valid, but wrong.

[Bernard Yomtov]

Ginger,

That sounds right, actually. My only excuse is that I was thinking metaphorically rather than mathematically. Sorry.

Sebastian,

I may have been loose in my terminology. I suppose the distinction between "invalid" and "wrong" in the context of conclusions drawn from empirical data is whether the methods used to evaluate the experimental results are appropriate, correctly applied, and accurate. The logic I describe seems to fail all these tests.

My main point, as I'm sure both you and Ginger understand, is that it is idiotic to determine the likelihood of an event occurring by chance on the basis of one observation of the event's occurrence. Yet that line of reasoning is often used by ID'ers.

[hilzoy]

About the question why we should worry about ID getting into high school curricula: as a bioethicist, I sit around thinking about problems that might at some point become political footballs. An example would be the one I wrote about last week, about injecting human neural stem cells into animals. Rightly or wrongly, I think it's just a matter of time before people get really worried about this (I don't think it will become a huge issue like abortion, but I think it might become a scary small-to-medium-sized issue like, say, cloning.) And I try to think of ways in which I might help, in whatever way is available to me, to make sure that these issues are discussed intelligently, and that people on both sides are clear about the issues, since a lot turns on the decisions we make. (In the example of injecting human neural stem cells into animals, a lot of testing of therapies for neurological diseases.)

In this context it matters a lot how many ordinary Americans have a basic level of scientific literacy. If we make bad decisions, we could either allow stuff to go on that shouldn't, or needlessly delay things that are less problematic than they seem. And to the extent that bio classes are taken up not with actual useful knowledge, but with idiocy, we are that much less likely, as a people, to make good decisions -- where (for now) I am using 'good' to mean: the decisions we (not I) would make were we adequately informed, whether or not I happen to agree with them.

Plus all the usual first amendment concerns.

[dmbeaster]

Evolution and gravity as "developed" sciences.

I would agree that evolution is as basic and as sound a theory as the theory of gravity. But there is something of an apples/oranges comparison here as to which is more "developed."

Evolution is a process, and similar to the theories of star or galaxy formation which explain the processes that results in the current physical nature of those things. It is not of the same character as the theory of gravity or electromagnetism, which explains a directly observable physical event.

No one has seen star or galaxy formation, and one is going to have to wait a very long time to confirm by physical observation the "truth" of our theories of star or galaxy formation. By their nature, they are inferrential from a vast body of data -- just like evolution (which actually is more observable than a lot of astronomical events). This does not make them "less developed."

As for how could there be so much complexity in life, two notions: 1) there has been a few billion years for life on earth to evolve -- that is an unimaginably large number of life events for evolution to work its magic; 2) the evolution of sexual selection as an augmentation of natural selection vastly increased the pace of change, since now organisms are self-selecting for the better features rather than relying on random chance to reinforce good traits.

[Anarch]

Bernard Yomtov: As a matter of probability one of them, at least, will always come up heads.

No: it's very very likely that one will come up heads but it's not certain. 1 - epsilon != 1, at least in mathematics; real-world applications are another matter entirely.

Ginger Yellow: The winner will have called correctly 100 times in a row.

Technical point: that isn't true. You've assumed, without explicitly stating, that exactly half of the people "called" heads and that exactly half "called" tails. [You can argue that the winner "won" a hundred times in a row but that isn't the same thing.] Furthermore, your experiment isn't the same as the one Bernard posited, though I don't know whether it makes a difference for his point: you're describing a kind of conditional probability argument whereas he (seems to be) asserting an independence argument.

[Anarch]

Oh, and this:

hilzoy: In this context it matters a lot how many ordinary Americans have a basic level of scientific literacy.

...is bang on. In fact, I'd broaden it to say that it matters a great deal in a remarkable number of contexts (to name but one: presidential elections) how many ordinary Americans have a basic level of scientific literacy, numeracy, historical awareness and so forth. This is, in fact, one of my substantive rationales for a public education system: if everyone gets a vote, it behooves us to ensure that those voting know what the heck they're voting for.

[J. Michael Neal]

Going way back up the thread:

One problem with the argument that "It's so improbable it can't have been an accident," is that we actually don't know how improbable it is.

There's another problem. If you really think about it, Intelligent Design doesn't actually explain away any of the complexity that makes it seem like life is too improbable to have developed by chance; it just pushes it back a generation and multiplies it. ID relies upon the existence of a being so complex that it can comprehend the entirety of biology. (Throw in physics if you want yourself God.) Where did this complex being come from?

Is it really a more likely explanation that this being evolved on its own? Does the Intelligent Designer need another Intelligent Designer behind it, even more complex? Does it have no origin, and is this an explanation that stands up to more scrutiny?

The idea that complexity requires an Intelligent Designer doesn't even stand up to its own internal logic, let alone outside arguments. Maybe there is a god, but the amount of complexity we see around us doesn't get you there.

[Slartibartfast]

One problem with the argument that "It's so improbable it can't have been an accident," is that we actually don't know how improbable it is.

Now seems about the right time to invent the maximum improbability drive.

Now, what was the probability that I'd have said just that, I wonders? And said it just at that moment?

[rilkefan]

"Now, what was the probability that I'd have said just that, I wonders? And said it just at that moment?"

That would be 1.0 and 1.0. And you should have said, "infinite improbability drive" - well, except that you couldn't.

[rilkefan]

Hey, your own Wiki, Slart.

[dutchmarbel]

2) the evolution of sexual selection as an augmentation of natural selection vastly increased the pace of change, since now organisms are self-selecting for the better features rather than relying on random chance to reinforce good traits.

LOL, I read the other day that intelligence is more likely to be passed on via the mother. I still get the impression that looks are deemed on of the better traits ;-)

Though from a partisan source, this would scare me slightly if I were an American.

[Darth Cuddly]

"a designer competent enough to come up with something as complex as a human, with all of it's hundreds of interrelated and delicately-balanced systems, wouldn't design anything like a human. [etc.]"

OK, but there's a catch. If we've been evolving for hundreds of millions of years, and only the most productive/adaptable mutations are the ones that survived, and we manage to live and prosper all over the planet then wouldn't you have to conclude that the design of the human body coupled with the mind is fairly sound. If so, why would an intelligent designer make something much different?

[Phil]

. . . then wouldn't you have to conclude that the design of the human body coupled with the mind is fairly sound.

No, I'd conclude that what we see in humans right now (and in all their mammalian relations) were the best solutions nature came up with at the time to whatever selection pressures there were at the time.

The existence of autoimmune diseases alone should put to bed any notion of perfectly-designed human bodies.

[Darth Cuddly]

Phil

"...put to bed any notion of perfectly-designed human bodies."

First the notion has to be raised. My point is that the human body, coupled with the mind, works and works quite well. I missed where anybody claimed it was perfect. I sure didn't and to expand the argument, I'm not aware of any religion that does either.

[Bernard Yomtov]

Anarch,

I don't know how to characterize my argument, but it's a fairly simple one. The watchmaker claim is that the complexity of life on Earth is so improbable as a random event that it is more plausible to think that there must be a designer.

This probability estimate implicitly assumes that the experiment was tried once and succeeded. But that's the wrong calculation. What we want is the probability that the event occurred at least once in some number of trials. Since we have no idea how many trials there were we are unable to calculate the relevant probability, which is certainly much larger than the chance of success in a single trial, and conceivably approaches certainty.