Transterrestrial Musings

Comments

Excellent post.

Posted by John Farrell at December 27, 2004 06:26 PM

I have a two kids in public school in Pennsylvania. One is in fifth grade, the other is in kindergarten, so this is no laughing matter to me.

Should my district offer ID as part of the science curriculum, I will have no choice but to send my kids to their science class dressed as Moses ... maybe Elijah.

Posted by Behe-heheh at December 27, 2004 06:30 PM

How science works is by putting forth theories that are disprovable, not ones that are provable. When all other theories have been disproven, those still standing are the ones adopted by most scientists.

Excellent point. Now how is Darwinian theories of evolution "disprovable?" I've been asking people all day how Darwinism is falsifiable and no one seems to have an answer.

Posted by Joe Carter at December 27, 2004 06:32 PM

Right. ID is a rediscovery of the silly attempts by past philosophers to prove the existence of God. Haven't we been through that?

Here's the ID syllogism:

1) Gee, this universe is amazing!
2) This can't be an accident!
3) Somebody must be behind this!

To which logicians reply:

1) Define "amazing".

Some (usually dim-witted) people seem honestly to believe in this ID crap, and that's why it isn't dismissed as crap as quickly as it should be.

Posted by Just Some Guy at December 27, 2004 06:37 PM

I second Joe Carter's question. Can you "postulate an experiment that one could perform, even in thought, that would show it[evolution] to be false"? If not, isn't the entire point of this post... well, pointless?

Posted by Matt Knowles at December 27, 2004 06:43 PM

I would certainly hope that students are being taught about the holes in Darwin's evolutionary theory (although it wouldn't surprise me in the least if they weren't). But that doesn't mean a religious postulation should be adopted in its place! I am not anti-religion but as you say, this is not a "scientific theory" and therefore has no place in a science class. I like the idea of teaching it in a comparative religions class. (If the concept of a "logic" class were available I could see it being taught there too - to show the difference between faith and logical deduction)

I think the real problem is the public schools trying to suppress the teaching of ID totally. That's just as bad as teaching it in the wrong place in the curriculum.

Posted by Teresa at December 27, 2004 06:46 PM

Yes, evolution is falsifiable. If there were no clear relationship between DNA of morphologically related species, that would be evidence against. If a mammal were found in a precambrian dig, that would be evidence against. Such evidence doesn't exist.

Posted by Rand Simberg at December 27, 2004 06:47 PM

I second one of Just Some Guy's points as well, that attempts to prove the existence of God are silly. But, I wonder, has he ever thought to count the number of (usually dim-witted) people who seem to believe that the theory of evolution *disproves* the existence of God?

When people are attacked, they will eventually dig in and defend their position, often in places inexplicable to a casual observer. I am a firm believer in the separation of Church and State, but I can't help but feel at times as if there is a real force trying to make all statesmen actively deny God...

Posted by Matt Knowles at December 27, 2004 06:51 PM

Sorry, can't help throwing my 2 cents in again... Would Mr. Simberg care to stake his reputation on his statement that a mammal found in a precambrian dig would falsify evolutionary theory? Or does he agree that it is more likely that such information would be accepted as fact, and evolutionary theory kept largely intact would simply absorb this new data?

Posted by Matt Knowles at December 27, 2004 06:55 PM

I think the problem is that neither ID (which is not the same, strictly speaking, as creationism) nor neo-Darwinism (the kind believed in now) is falsifiable. Moreover, "evolution" itself seems often to take on the characteristics of a deus ex machina. Darwinian theory certaily seems as dependent on miracles as any religion. The theory postulates gradual change by accretion over long periods of time. The evidence suggests long periods of time with no change at all, punctuated -- to use Stephen Jay Gould's term -- by relatively short periods during which t many changes suddenly -- and quite aganst the odds -- take place. I do agree that ID doesn't belong in a science class -- it posits a metaphysical answer to a scientifc question, which of course is no answer at all. But I suspect Darwinism does the same.

Posted by Frank Wilson at December 27, 2004 06:55 PM

You can also potentially disprove evolution by examining the "source code" of life- DNA.

If evolution is true the modifications will be via random mutations- then you can detect that statistically.

Also if there is a parent creature 'A' that evolved into creatures 'B' and 'C'; and B and C share a complex gene that essentially could not have evolved by chance in both, and they have no later common ancestor than A then that would be pretty strong evidence for a creator, and not random mutations in each.

Posted by Ian Woollard at December 27, 2004 06:59 PM

ID posits a starting point from which evolutionary forces take over; evolution itself has trouble persuasively explaining life from non-life. I don't see how, if you're going to address the arc of the development of life, you don't establish the starting points: inorganic matter, vs. some intelligently-designed building block of life.

link

Posted by Spear Shaker at December 27, 2004 07:03 PM

In response to Joe & Matt's question:

Suppose someone finds a new animal & does DNA analysis. Evolution says comparison to known animals will show that the new animal shares a common ancestor with an existing animal. If DNA analysis shows otherwise, evolution is disproved.

Or, suppose the new animal appears to share recent common ancestors with two different known animals, even though the two known animals are only distantly related. (Think of a branching evolutionary tree, where two branches converge again.) Again, evolution would be disproved.

Or, if anyone ever demonstrated spontaneous generation (e.g. maggots arising de novo from rotten meat), evolution would be disproved.

Posted by qetzal at December 27, 2004 07:04 PM

We don't do Darwin. When Darwin came up with his idea of natural selection and speciation, he didn't have any idea how information was passed down from generation to generation. We now do. Looking at DAn, amino acid sequences, three dimentional crystal structures of proteins acroos different species (as I have been doing for the last few month on the cytochrome oxidase), shows quite clearly that we have evolved. If you look at the human (and other) genome you can see psudo-genes and ghost DNA sequences from our past. If you don't believe me, try this, look up the amino acid (or the mitochondrial DNA)sequence of subunit II of human cytochrome c oxidase. The put that sequence into a a search of the Human Genome. You find a degenerate subunit II sequence in Human nuclear DNA (the ORF is called OTTHUMP00000016748).

So, at some time in our past, mitochondrial DNA has transfered into to our nuclear DNA. This is not the work of an Intelligent designer. Finding errors demonstrates no design.

Posted by DocMartyn at December 27, 2004 07:14 PM

qetzal: Suppose someone finds a new animal & does DNA analysis. Evolution says comparison to known animals will show that the new animal shares a common ancestor with an existing animal. If DNA analysis shows otherwise, evolution is disproved.

While I don’t have a problem with evolution, the idea of a “common ancestor” seems rather hard to fit into the theory. Unless we know how life originated how do we know how many “common ancestors” there are? If DNA arose from inert matter then it is possible that the process could have occurred several (or a million) times in different locations.

Getting back to your example we couldn’t say that natural selection was “disproven” because we can’t know if this particular creature was a descent of some peculiar strand of DNA that was slightly different than the others.

But isn’t our genetic material similar to both chimps and cabbages? How do we know what is important and what is not in our genes?

Also, I think if such an example were found it would simply be shoehorned into the theory rather than used as a means of falsification.

Posted by Joe Carter at December 27, 2004 07:14 PM

In response to qetzal...

If someone found a new animal and DNA analysis failed to show that this new animal shares a common ancestor with a known existing animal, do you really believe evolution would be disproved? Or do you believe scientists would reasonably assume that either they didn't know all the possible animals it could be related to, or even that a minor assumption based on the theory of evolution was false even as they held on to the greater body of the theory?

Posted by Matt Knowles at December 27, 2004 07:17 PM

Another vote for Joe Carter's point. I'll put some more teeth in it.

Falsificationism as a so-called "criterion of demarcation" of science from non-science is no longer taken seriously by philosophers of science.

Most contemporary philosophers of science, following Popper's disciple Lakatos, admit that a certain "hard core" of a theory remains immune to evidential falsification.

Other more radical yet highly respectable philosophers of science such as Paul Feyerabend think the search for a criterion of demarcation is futile.

Freud's theory, long thought "non-falsifiable" by philosophers of science, was given a new and highly plausible reconstruction as perfectly scientific by cognitive scientist/philosopher of science Clark Glymour.

In short, the argument against ID based on falsificationism is horribly out of date.

Good job Joe Clark and Matt Knowles.

Posted by Anonymous Coward at December 27, 2004 07:18 PM

DocMartyn: Finding errors demonstrates no design.

So if we look at the code behind my buggy Windows XP and find errors are we to conclude that it wasn’t the product of a designer?

Posted by Joe Carter at December 27, 2004 07:21 PM

Rand,

How much molecular biology do you know? The "central dogma of molecular biology" is DNA to RNA to protein. Now, think about it for a second. How do you "evolve" such a system? To go from RNA to protein you need a ribosome (place where the "translation" takes place), and you need t-RNA (transfer RNA, which connect to a single type of amino acid at one "end", and provide a 3 codon code at the other "end"). The ribosome has to be able to dock t-RNA with RNA, so that the right amino acid is added at the right spot.

Oh, and you have to have RNA that "code" for a specific protein, using a code for which all the necessary t-RNA already exist. t-RNA are useless without the ribosome and RNA with that code, but the RNA is also useless without the ribosome and the t-RNA. (Yes, there are RNA that have protein-like activity. But I've never heard anyone claim that m-RNA (the kind that code for proteins) have any special enzymatic activity, let alone that they have the activity that they code for, or that the three letter codons match the function of their corresponding amino acids.)

The idea that all this just happened to come together by random chance, despite none (well, perhaps the ribosome had some other use) of it having any use until it was all in place, strikes me as a FAR more "magical" belief system than anything proposed by the ID people.

The problem that I have with evolution is that IT is based on faith, not science. What's worse, it's a faith that is anti-scientific. It's a faith that is hostile to facts, and reason.

When was the last time you heard scientists discussing the evolution of DNA to RNA to Protein, and how it could possibly have come about?

When was the last time you heard a scientist point out that the story of the moths that changed color was NOT an example of "evolution" (when the pollution went away, the moth population quickly reverted to being mainly lightly colored. So much for long term change).

The there is sequence alignment. DNA and protein sequences do not diverge across species in a tree pattern. The official explanation, developed by Linus Pauling, is the "molecular clock" hypothesis, which has at its basis the assumption that for any given protein / stretch of DNA, its mutation rate per unit time is the same for all species.

All species.

That includes humans, yeast, bacteria, and sharks. Yep, despite the fact that supposedly sharks haven't changed for 100 million years, their proteins and DNA have mutated as much as the line of beings that culminated in humans.

Yeast, with sexual reproduction and generation times of under a day, and humans, with generation times of 15 - 25 years, both see their genomes mutate the same amount (per thousand base pairs) every thousand years.

Why do they claim to believe such ludicrous ideas? Because to believe otherwise they would first have to admit that the data does not conform with their beliefs, and their beliefs are more important to them than reality.

The reality is we have no good scientific explanation for how we've come into existence. All current attempts to explain where we came from rely on faith. If "scientists" would admit that, I would regain the respect for them I had back when I was ignorant. Unfortunately, I don't see that happening any time soon.

Posted by Greg D at December 27, 2004 07:23 PM

Joe, are you trying to suggest that the denizens of Redmond are omniscient, or that God makes as many mistakes as Microsoft? :)

Errors would seem to argue against all-knowing design, though.

Posted by Brett A. Thomas at December 27, 2004 07:34 PM

Brett Joe, are you trying to suggest that the denizens of Redmond are omniscient, …

Omniscent? No. Omnipotent? Well, they're close...

…or that God makes as many mistakes as Microsoft? :)

Errors would seem to argue against all-knowing design, though.

Perhaps it would. But characteristics of the designer are outside the realm of scientific inquiry. We can’t simply dismiss the possibility of a designer, though, simply because we don’t think a designer would work in a particular way.

Posted by at December 27, 2004 07:42 PM

We can’t simply dismiss the possibility of a designer, though, simply because we don’t think a designer would work in a particular way.

No, but from a scientific and logical standpoint, we can dismiss the possibility of a designer if we can't come up with any experiment that would rule him (or her, or it) out. And we can think a flawed designer, that would design flawed things, reason to think a designer more unlikely.

Posted by Rand Simberg at December 27, 2004 07:49 PM

A designer who creates a system that eventually exhibits "flaws" is not necessarily a "flawed" designer.

Posted by Thought at December 27, 2004 07:57 PM

Falsificationism as a so-called "criterion of demarcation" of science from non-science is no longer taken seriously by philosophers of science.

Which is why it rarely pays to listen to philosophers. 99% of the time they're talking through their arses.

Would Mr. Simberg care to stake his reputation on his statement that a mammal found in a precambrian dig would falsify evolutionary theory? Or does he agree that it is more likely that such information would be accepted as fact, and evolutionary theory kept largely intact would simply absorb this new data?

The evidence for evolution as a fact, and the support for the Theory of Evolution, is overwhelming. Nonetheless, such a find would blow a hole in Evolutionary Theory big enough to drive a truck through. According to Evolutionary Theory, you absolutely cannot get mammals in pre-Cambrian strata. Can't happen.

Now, if we did find such a fossil, we'd know that the theory was seriously flawed. But it would still be out best explanation for 99.999999% of the data. With only one such fossil, we'd have no way of constructing a new theory, so we'd have to proceed with the existing one, all the while knowing it was wrong.

That's not uncommon. We know that neither Relativity nor Quantum Mechanics provides an accurate picture of the behaviour of the Universe at all scales. We're working on that. Both theories are wrong; we know that. But they remain immensely useful when applied appropriately.

The problem with ID is that it's not science. It has nothing whatsoever to do with science. It's a myth. It might even be correct, though that's extremely doubtful. But it is impossible to determine, because it doesn't actually tell us anything.

ID posits a starting point from which evolutionary forces take over; evolution itself has trouble persuasively explaining life from non-life.

Evolution doesn't cover the subject at all. Evolution is about how new species arise; it has nothing whatsoever to do with how life began in the first place. It doesn't have "trouble persuasively explaining life from non-life"; it doesn't discuss the matter at all.

Posted by Pixy Misa at December 27, 2004 08:01 PM

A designer who creates a system that eventually exhibits "flaws" is not necessarily a "flawed" designer.

Well, it's certainly not an omniscient one, for whatever that's worth...

But once one has a designer who designs flawed things, then one starts to defy Occam's Razor. If one thinks that the principle of parsimony has no value, then once again, one is placing one's theories outside the realm of science as we understand it in the twenty-first century.

Posted by Rand Simberg at December 27, 2004 08:03 PM

Science can only explain "how"...it cannot necessarily explain "why"...

Thus science can perhaps take us back all to the origin of the universe, but it cannot explain the ultimate root of our origin...

Posted by Thought at December 27, 2004 08:06 PM

Science can only explain "how"...it cannot necessarily explain "why"...

So?

Posted by Pixy Misa at December 27, 2004 08:09 PM

Or to expand on that: You're assumung there is a "why".

Posted by Pixy Misa at December 27, 2004 08:10 PM

A designer who designs a system that eventually exhibits flaws may still indeed be omniscient; you are making assumptions about the designer.

Posted by Another Thought at December 27, 2004 08:13 PM

_____Note to Rand:______

Occam used a Norelco.

________________________

Posted by Behe-heheh at December 27, 2004 08:14 PM

Or to expand on that: You're assumung there is a "why".

You are correct; however, it is also an assumption that there is no "why"...

In short, one can neither prove nor disprove either supposition...

Posted by Thought at December 27, 2004 08:15 PM

Anonymous Coward writes: "Falsificationism as a so-called "criterion of demarcation" of science from non-science is no longer taken seriously by philosophers of science".

By some philosophers of science. That is, those who take relativism to extremes, maintaining that since scientists are human and imperfect, science is no different from superstition/religion/prejudice, and that there is really no line dividing rational from irrational.

Which just goes to show that virtually every wacky idea conceivable has been propounded by one philosopher or another over the millennia.

Meanwhile, the scientific method marches on, proving itself time and again in unanswerable fashion by giving answers that work.

Posted by Empiricist at December 27, 2004 08:17 PM

You are correct; however, it is also an assumption that there is no "why"...

Sure, but science makes no such assumption.

There's no evidence that there is a "why". Science doesn't bother with things we have no evidence for.

Posted by Pixy Misa at December 27, 2004 08:20 PM

Rand No, but from a scientific and logical standpoint, we can dismiss the possibility of a designer if we can't come up with any experiment that would rule him (or her, or it) out.

We could come up with an experiment to rule it out. All it would require is for us to check for evidence of design. If no design exists in nature then there is no need to invoke a designer. The problem comes with making an a priori assumption that nothing in universe (outside of human artifacts) is a product of design.

Posted by Joe Carter at December 27, 2004 08:20 PM

Empiricist -

Right. Now, if the philosphers were trying to say something about how scientists behave, individually, then they might have something. But that says nothing at all about the scientific method.

Which just goes to show that virtually every wacky idea conceivable has been propounded by one philosopher or another over the millennia.

Worse than that. Since philosophy is not falsifiable, those wacky ideas never go away! No matter how bizarre and nonsensical, you will still find someone propounding it today.

Posted by Pixy Misa at December 27, 2004 08:24 PM

Greg D.

Excellent comment. You make some salient points.

Posted by Pajamahadin at December 27, 2004 08:26 PM

This has been covered in your comments but...

Darwin was a brilliant scientific mind, but his work is about The Origin of the Species, not the origin of life. Evolution through natural selection is an elegant theory that models the development of new species very well, however it is less than complete over longer time spans.

- It's easy to conceptualise small evolutionary adaptions (bigger beak, smaller wings - that sort of thing). But random mutation and natural selection are a less convincing model for major evolutionary leaps, for example the sudden appearance of a feature like wings, which offer no selective advantage until fully developed.

Of course, this doesn't prove ID, but Darwinists would be more honest to declare 'large grey area here'.

- And, as also stated above, the Theory of Evolution does nothing whatsoever to explain the origins of life itself, and in fact never even attempted to. There are some imaginative and appealing theories around, but little or no evidence to support or refute any of them.

It defies the law of entropy that such a sophisticated and complex system as DNA and cellular life could appear randomly, and there is little or no evidence for intermediate steps. Whatever forces are/were involved, the origin of life is a huge and wonderful mystery.

As an Australian I have no knowledge of the Theory of Intelligent Design, but high school students - religious and otherwise - would be well served if they were taught that there is a great deal of uncertainty in both these areas.

Posted by Kip Watson at December 27, 2004 08:27 PM

No, but from a scientific and logical standpoint, we can dismiss the possibility of a designer if we can't come up with any experiment that would rule him (or her, or it) out.

We could come up with an experiment to rule it out – we could actually check for design. If no design exists in nature then there is no need to invoke a designer. The problem comes with making an a priori assumption that nothing in universe (outside of human artifacts) is a product of design.

Posted by Joe Carter at December 27, 2004 08:32 PM

Thomas Kuhn’s influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions argued that scientists work within a conceptual paradigm that determines the way in which they view the world. Scientists will go to great length to defend their paradigm against falsification, by the addition of ad hoc hypotheses to existing theories. Changing one's 'paradigm' is not easy, and only through some pain and angst does science (at the level of the individual scientist) change paradigms.

Some falsificationists saw Kuhn’s work as a vindication, since it showed that science progressed by rejecting inadequate theories. More commonly, it has been seen as showing that sociological factors, rather than adherence to a strict, logically obligatory method, play the determining role in deciding which scientific theory is accepted. This was seen as a profound threat to those who seek to show that science has a special authority in virtue of the methods that it employs.

Posted by Thought at December 27, 2004 08:35 PM

Paul Feyerabend examined the history of science with a more critical eye, and ultimately rejected any prescriptive methodology at all. He went beyond Lakatos’ argument for ad hoc hypothesis, to say that science would not have progressed without making use of any and all available methods to support new theories. He rejected any reliance on a scientific method, along with any special authority for science that might derive from such a method. Rather, he claimed, ironically, that if one is keen to have a universally valid methodological rule, anything goes would be the only candidate. For Feyerabend, any special status that science might have derives from the social and physical value of the results of science rather than its method.

Although falsifiability does provide a way to replace invalid inductive thinking with deductive, falsifiable reasoning, it appeared to Feyerabend that doing so is neither necessary for, nor conducive to, scientific progress.

Posted by Thought at December 27, 2004 08:36 PM

Sorry, but that is complete and utter baloney.

The law of entropy (the second law of thermodynamics) has nothing at all to say on the subject. It is completely irrelevant. It's a physical law, that states that the level of entropy in a closed system always increases.

1. The Earth is not a closed system.
2. Even if it were, it wouldn't matter. There is absolutely no reason why ever more complex life cannot evolve while entropy increases. Entropy is a question of the distribution of heat, not some metaphor for a world sliding into chaos.
3. No-one ever suggested that cellular life appeared randomly, and there are plenty of intermediate steps we can see even today.

Posted by Pixy Misa at December 27, 2004 08:39 PM

Mr. Carter,

Most people don't take their schooling seriously so they never get to the point where they would be able to both correct you and answer your question.

Evolution is a fact that has been established by geologists, palentologists, and the like.

The Theory of Natural Selection was at one time a hypothesis that was produced to explain how (the fact of) evolution occured. There are other hypotheses create to explain evolution such as lamarkianism, mutationism and saltationism that have been falsified.

In science a hypothesis is an educated guess at how something works that is falsifiable. Hypotheses that are mature in the sense that all attempts to falsify them have failed are called theories.

Darwin's theory of natural selection is falsifiable at many levels. It made predictions about the nature by which genetics should work in order for natural selection to operate. No one knew genetics at the time but Darwins theory required genetics to operate a certain way for natural selection to be the proper explanation of the fact of evolution.

As an example, natural selection requires that heritability not act like the mixing of paints, instead it requires particulate heritability. Further it requires some source of changes to the heritable material.

Darwin's theory would have been falsified for instance if it was found that Lamarcks theories were instead correct. If for instance we were able to stretch the necks of horses over a period of several generations and then the offspring were born naturally with longer necks then natural selection would not be able to explain that.

Deduction from Darwin's theories makes other predictions. For instance, since man is an animal like any other one would expect that he had evolved by natural selection also. So it would be expected that there should be intermediate forms between man and his ancestors in the fossil record. At the time of Darwin no such fossils had been found or were even thought to be looked for. Natural selection predicted that if we look for them we would probably find them. Well guess what, that prediction worked out on the side of natural selection.

Biologists also can make empircal predictions of what would be more advantagous characteristics under certain circumstances. They can then test populations under such circumstances to see if natural selection acts to change the frequency of genes in the predicted direction.

Natural selection deductively predicts that the evolution that is observed in the fossil record should have a certain structure. It should have a certain nesting characteristic that looks like a bush going back in time. This also has proven to be true. If you found a human fossil that was two billion years old that would pretty much put a nail in the coffin of the theory of natural selection.

One can deduce from natural selection that the current species on the planet should be able to also be organized into classifications that nest in a certain way, and their genetics must match. If we found that human DNA matched a fishes DNA more than a chimps then that would not be explanable under Darwin's theory.

There are many other areas in which Darwin's theory will deduce facts that can be tested to disprove the theory. The theory has passed all tests thrown at it so far. Not only is it falsifiable but it is as well tested as the best scientific theories of any discipline.

Posted by Brian Macker at December 27, 2004 08:45 PM

I tried to post a comment, but it failed due to some bug or the other in the MT system. I've blogged it over here, and I analogize DNA/Evolution to binary/Software Design.

In a nutshell, I think trying to analyse ourselves and our universe is made even more fascinating once one understands the parallels between DNA-based organisms and Binary Code-based computer programs.

Posted by Jonathan at December 27, 2004 08:58 PM

The ID/crationist problem with science is simple...
Genesis.
Arguments about process and reason are immaterial. The goal is to preserve Genesis, the basis of all Judeo-Christian doctrine, at any cost.

Posted by DougM at December 27, 2004 09:00 PM

We should all do well to not make science into a god.

Science has brought us some amazing discovering and technologies, but ultimately science is a flawed product of a flawed human race.

Scientists, no matter how they try to pretend to be like Mr. Spock, are ultimately human and prone to the same human fallibilities and influences as anyone else.

And for all that science has given us answers to, there are many areas of life where something other than science is called for.

Posted by Thought at December 27, 2004 09:08 PM

The reason ID is not disprovable is that that it is the premise on which the meta-structure of rationality (provability) is grounded.
To disprove the possibility of "provability" would be a self-contradiction (the very logic by which you would prove that there is no provability would prove that there IS provability--since otherwise you could prove nothing at all, not even that nothing is provable).

In a purely random universe, the concept of provability is meaningless.

How did Darwin arrive at the theory of natural selection? Because he argued that it is a more rational explanation of the evidence of many species, differing from closely related species, than the alternative explanation of "special creation" (the idea that God created every single species uniquely and specifically as we know it today). But this assumes that the universe is rational. And what is the source of this rationality?

There is an order which is ASSUMED, GIVEN in the very logic of our understanding the universe (including our understanding of the origin of life, of the physical universe itself).

We have known this since Aristotle; Aquinas argued it, Paley argued it. Popular philosophical mythology has it that Hume refuted Paley. The only problem with that is that Paley came after Hume, and specifically addressed Hume's arguments, and in my judgment, decisively refuted them. So quit blaming it on the fundamentalists.

Posted by David Layman at December 27, 2004 09:13 PM

I've already commented at some length on this topic in my own blog. In response to Joe Carter's challenge, I refer any interested parties to the file, 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution. This is a collection of some 2½ dozen observations that are completely consistent with the notion that all life on this planet is descended from one (or a very few) common ancestor.

Two points: Firstly, there are alternative explanations for each of these 2½ dozen observations, but darn few theories that are consistent with all of them.

Secondly, contrary observations (falsifications of the theory) can easily be imagined for every single one of thse observations. Any single one would cause serious problems for the notion of evolution.

Posted by Karl at December 27, 2004 09:16 PM

Teresa,

You state, "I would certainly hope that students are being taught about the holes in Darwin's evolutionary theory".

Science doesn't deal in "holes". Either you have evidence that disproves the theory of evolution or you don't.

I.D. isn't a proper scientific hypothesis as stated nicely in the origin post.

Posted by Brian Macker at December 27, 2004 09:18 PM

One final thought... Science is incapable of proving or disproving the existence of God. The point I'd like to leave everyone with, and one that is evident from the many attemps in these comments to find some way of disproving ID, is that religion is under attack by a segment of the scientific community, and the religious community is striking back.

Personally, I believe the truth is grander than any of us can possibly imagine, and that any "proofs" we offer with our remarkably infinitessimal knowledge pale in comparison to the theoretical Intelligence which *may* have designed life and the universe.

If you want people to quit pushing ID in public schools, quit pushing "science as refutation of religion."

Posted by Matt Knowles at December 27, 2004 09:20 PM

Actually, DougM, you are incorrect.

The goal, insofar as I see it, is to find some way of allowing a competing viewpoint to the teaching that if evolutionary theory is true then it must also follow that there is no God, or that Genesis is incorrect.

Those who do believe in God have gotten pretty darned tired of hearing how evolutionary theory deisproves the existence of God. It doesn't, in any way. That question is completely out of the purview of science and, to the very best of my knowledge, always will be.

But still today we have children being taught in science class that evolution occurred without any guiding hand whatsoever. Now that may or may not be true, but it's certainly not something that belongs in a science class.

Posted by Jimmie at December 27, 2004 09:20 PM

Thought:

From what you've said, Kuhn and Feyerabend were studying how scientists behave, and have nothing to say on the subject of the scientific method.

And we already know how scientists behave: They behave like people. So these philosophers of yours offer us no insight at all.

Posted by Pixy Misa at December 27, 2004 09:23 PM

Science is incapable of proving or disproving the existence of God. The point I'd like to leave everyone with, and one that is evident from the many attemps in these comments to find some way of disproving ID, is that religion is under attack by a segment of the scientific community, and the religious community is striking back.

The whole problem with ID is that it's designed so as to be unfalsifiable. As I said earlier, it's a myth. It might even be true, but there is no way to find out.

It's not science, and it has no place in science education. Teach it from the pulpit if you like, but keep it out of the schools.

Posted by Pixy Misa at December 27, 2004 09:28 PM

That is exactly what belongs in a science class. EXACTLY.

Now, stating that evolution "disproves God" is wrong. But presenting evolution without the mention of God is precisely correct.

That is science. And ID is not science, no matter how you dress it up.

Posted by Pixy Misa at December 27, 2004 09:31 PM

The reason ID is not disprovable is that that it is the premise on which the meta-structure of rationality (provability) is grounded.

No. The reason ID is not disprovable is that it does not make a statement about our Universe. Since we can only observe our Universe, there is no way to assess the claims of ID at all.

Posted by Pixy Misa at December 27, 2004 09:32 PM

Pixy Misa writes:

"The law of entropy (the second law of thermodynamics) has nothing at all to say on the subject. It is completely irrelevant. It's a physical law, that states that the level of entropy in a closed system always increases."

If I may pick a nit, entropy always increases in ISOLATED systems, that is, systems which can exchange neither energy or matter with their surroundings. Since no realizable boundary between a system and its surroundings can be made perfectly insulating and impermeable, the only truly isolated system we know of is the Universe itself, based on the reasonable assumption that there is nothing outside it (if "outside" has any meaning in that use) to serve as surroundings.

Up until 04 October 1957, Earth was a closed system, for all practical purposes, exchanging energy with its surroundings but not matter (neglecting the constant drizzle of micrometeors and the occasional big meteor). As the Earth is not an isolated system, it's not subject to the requirement that its entropy (a measure of randomness and disorder, very roughly speaking) increase. Its entropy could very well decrease, under the right conditions.

And as for open systems, ones that exchange both matter and energy with their surroundings, their entropy really isn't restricted at all, within practical limits. It can go up, or it can go down-- it all depends on how the system is operated.

And taking human well-being as a proxy for the Earth's entropy (prosperity being analogous to low entropy or less disorder, and poverty being analogous to high entropy or more disorder), well, since 1957, the sky's the limit. Open systems can grow arbitrarily, and the door to the Universe is wide open.

Sorry, Rand, I didn't mean this to become a plug for Jerry Pournelle's books..... ^_^;;

Posted by Hale Adams at December 27, 2004 09:34 PM

Hale -

I never heard that distinction in my physics classes. I don't think the distinction is really valid, given mass/energy equivalence.

It just bugs me when people bring up the 2nd law as an argument against evolution. There is an argument based on the energy requirements for abiogenesis, but it's a technical and numeric one and involves a detailed knowledge of chemical processes, and that's not what you get in this sort of debate, alas.

Posted by Pixy Misa at December 27, 2004 09:45 PM

Kip,

Although I don't disagree with the possibility of ID (not that it should be taught as science) I would ask those who support this notion to please stop using "entropy" as an argument. The second law of thermodynamics states "No process is possible in which the sole result is the transfer of energy from a cooler to a hotter body". That's it. It doesn't mean that complex structures can't arise from a disordered state. If one doubts this, than look at a snowflake. It's a complex structure arising from a simple one without the need for ID or magic space unicorns.

This is why science and religion are two different beasts. In science, words have specific meanings. You can't shout "entropy" to make your point unless you know the exact definition of the word and why it doesn't apply to evolutionary biology. Not fully understanding the terminology should be reason enough not to try to use it as an argument. I don't mean this to be insulting, but it really does your cause no good even if it sounds "scientific" enough to impress the masses.

Posted by G. Bob at December 27, 2004 09:49 PM

No, but from a scientific and logical standpoint, we can dismiss the possibility of a designer if we can't come up with any experiment that would rule him (or her, or it) out.

This simply doesn't follow. You can demonstrate the untestability of the Designer hypothesis, perhaps. However, the lack of scientific testability does not demonstrate the absence of said Designer, only that such a Designer would have to exist outside the realm of physical reality defined by the collection of disprovable assertions. (Put another way, such a Designer would have to exist outside the realm of science itself.) Indeed, there are plenty of untestable assumptions even in science itself (we call them axioms), so the mere fact of untestability should not be considered derogatory in and of itself.

Don't expect science to ever be able to tackle ontological questions such as "why are we here?" or "where did we come from?" Since such questions necessarily fall outside the realm of the rationally explainable, so even arguing favorability on the basis of Occam's Razor is itself a logical fallacy: This is because you are assuming a rational explanation to something who'se explanation is inherently irrational from the scientific perspective.

Posted by Carrick Talmadge at December 27, 2004 09:54 PM

Carrick:

Rand was being very precise in his language. We can't disprove the existence of a Designer, but we can dismiss the question because it is untestable.

Science deals with what is testable, with the physical Universe. If the Designer is outside that, it is not a question for science.

This is because you are assuming a rational explanation to something who'se explanation is inherently irrational from the scientific perspective.

No. It's because we don't see a coherent question being asked.

Posted by Pixy Misa at December 27, 2004 10:01 PM

Matt,

Religion is not "under attack" by science. Science is rather upfront in saying that there are no answers we can provide to prove or disprove God. Now, if your religion relys purely upon a set of facts that can be disproven, than I can see how you would perceive science as being an enemy. That still doesn't give a right to cause harm to the public education system just because your faith can't be reconciled with scientific inquiry.

It's not anti-religion. Those who are against the teaching of creation in school would be just as adamant against the teaching of holistic medicine, crystal readings or tarot cards. I have no problem with religion playing a role in public life, but I would caution against forcing science to fit your beliefs. It could just as easily be forced someday to fit another belief system different from yours.

Posted by G. Bob at December 27, 2004 10:04 PM

Much of what we believe comes down to whom we trust. Few of us have the education or expertise, for example, to investigate for ourselves the fundamental physical and mathematical basis of quantum theory. So, we have to “trust” those who tell us it is true.

Science has generally been trustworthy and the scientific method has proven to be one of the most beneficial forms of thought in the history of mankind. But though I trust science, I do not trust it blindly.

For science is practiced by humans and oftentimes humans have an agenda. So we end up with nonsense like catastrophic, human-induced Global Warming which wears all the trappings of science but betrays itself by the selective nature of its evidence and the ignoring of all else that does not fit it’s preconceived notions (such as the lack of lower-atmospheric warming, prior CO2 levels, or variations in solar output).

About the theory of evolution, I cannot resist paraphrasing Ronald Reagan. What is an evolutionist? Someone who has read The Origin of the Species. What is an anti-evolutionist? Someone who “understands” The Origin of the Species.

Like Marx’s theory of a scientific history marching toward a utopian, egalitarian future, Darwin’s theory gave the same 19th century mind a vision of biological history marching ever forward, ever more advanced. They are compelling notions. But are they true? Whom do you trust?

There is no time and space in a forum like this to settle a question the has haunted mankind for eons. Where did we come from? How did we get here? The questions are vast, as is the field of inquiry. No one man can encompass it all. Whether abiogenesis, molecular genetics, fossils and and geological column, or the mathematics of selection-cost in gene substitution within populations, the issues are complex to say the least.

But in spite of all this complexity, there are some issues that can help illustrate the problem more simply. Information theory, for example. The rise in the 20th century of telecommunications and computer technology showed us the nature of information, how to represent it, transmit it, receive it, and compress it.

The development of a biological organism requires a vast amount of information, as does the maintaining of its life. Where did that information come from? Computer science should have shown us that information does not arise spontaneously or randomly. Do not confuse this with the notion of order. Order can sometimes spontaneously arise out of disorder, such as the formation of a crystal from an amorphous physical state, but no information has been created. Order is not the same as complexity.

As a holder of science degrees, undergraduate and graduate (and not a bible-thumping fundamentalist) I have examined these issues (and more) to the best of my ability and come to the conclusion that the theory of evolution is untenable on it’s scientific merits.

Disagree? Fine. But I encourage all to look at “all” the evidence. Still disagree? Still fine. If you don’t want to believe in creation, then don’t, but try to find a better and more scientific theory than a 19th century fantasy cloaked with the methods and instruments of science.

Posted by Danzer at December 27, 2004 10:10 PM

An interesting book that deals with the DNA/RNA problem and the inorganic/organic boundary is Vital Dust. The author is very careful not to make the "what it will be good for in the future" mistake and discusses the process from a "how it works now" perspective.

Posted by mrsizer at December 27, 2004 10:16 PM

For those interested, the comments by "Thought" about Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend are simply excerpts from the Wikipedia entry on falsifiability.

Posted by Tim at December 27, 2004 10:17 PM

As an account of the historical origin of the human race, or pretty much anything else, evolution is just as non-disprovable, non-scientific, as the most fundamentalist creationism. The past is gone, and non-testable. All that one can do (scientifically) is to observe (and test) the present, and then to use those observations in an attempt to explain evidence of the past. But that does not make anyones explanation of the past "scientific." This is the crux of the issue - the pretense that because evolution can be demonstrated in very limited ways in the present, that it is scientific to extrapolate it over unknown thousands or millions of years.

(For the record, I do not find the evidence for ID any more persuasive than that for evolution.)

Posted by Herb Sorensen at December 27, 2004 10:17 PM

All of this "philosophy of science" business is a red herring. Science is about asking questions. One of the questions that science asks is "How did this system that we're studying come to be?" When the system in question is all life on earth, or even the entire universe, why should we not consider all possible answers?

One wonders how opponents of intelligent design would treat the following situation. Suppose some biologists are investigating a forest and they notice what appears to be "Tom loves Sally" scratched into a tree. Not a single biologist who would think even for a second that the marking was a natural phenomena. They would instantly conclude that some human being carved these markings into a tree, even though it is quite possible that the markings "Tom loves Sally" did arise naturally; there is a nonzero probability that such a thing could occur without human interference (though the probability is extremely remote).

Proponents of the various forms of intelligent design essentially argue nothing other than that the universe or life is similar to the "Tom loves Sally" marking. No one would credibly argue that a "Tom loves Sally" marking came to be without an intelligent actor behind it, yet such an opinion is hardly "unscientific."

Posted by Todd at December 27, 2004 10:24 PM

Please visit this link for one take on the mathmetical probability of evolution occurring.

I wouldn't trust these odds but then again I don't belong to the Church of Evolution.

Posted by John at December 27, 2004 10:44 PM

Joe,

A good way to disprove evolution would be if DNA evidence did not correspond to the evolutionary model: accretion of complexity.

So far DNA supports evolution.

--==--

What one might look for directly are human remains (or others) from a time period in which evolution says they ought not exist.

Of course since the intelligent designer can do anything one might counter argue that the designer took his time. And did stuff sequentially. From the simplest to the most complicated. However, since evolution also is supposed to work that way you are left with a choice: a natural explanation (evolution) or a supernatural one (intelligent design).

Which one would science prefer?

Posted by M. Simon at December 27, 2004 10:51 PM

The idea that the past is not testable is non-sense.

Forensic science is exactly about testing the past by finding traces of the past and then trying to figure out how the traces might have gotten where they were found.

Evolution is tested in just that way.

Posted by M. Simon at December 27, 2004 11:01 PM

Danzer - Sorry, the information argument doesn't hold either. It comes from a deep misunderstanding of both information theory and evolution. It has no more relevance to the subject than the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which is to say, none at all.

The Talk.Origins Archive has several articles on this subject. Just searching for "information" should find them.

Herb - Wrong, wrong, completely wrong. The Theory of Evolution makes very specific statements about what can happen in the evolutionary process and how. Although it is difficult to run experiments, it is indeed falsifiable through observation. You seem to be confusing the Theory of Evolution with the Fact of Evolution. The Theory is scientific and falsifiable. The Fact is just data.

Todd - Science is about asking questions. One of the questions that science asks is "How did this system that we're studying come to be?"

No it isn't. Science studies the Universe, right back to its beginning. How it came to be is not a question that can be asked of or answered by Science, because it is outside the Universe, and so outside of anything that can be studied or tested.

Yes, unscientific is exactly what it is.

Can we test it? No.

Does it make a statement about the Universe? No.

Therefore, not science.

John - That article on the Creation Science site (Dr Dino) is complete nonsense. It tries to argue against the possibility of a work cell self-organising by random chance - something no-one ever suggested had happened. The rest of the site is of similar quality.

Posted by Pixy Misa at December 27, 2004 11:10 PM

(That should have read "working cell", but you get the idea.)

Posted by Pixy Misa at December 27, 2004 11:13 PM

Danzer,

If you were more familiar with Shannon you would know that information comes from the flow of energy. In fact Shannon showed that information is quantized. And that every bit had a minimum of energy associated with it.

Thus the Egyptians worship of the Sun as the source of all life was closer to the mark than they knew.

Ethically Christianity in its current form is probably better than the Divine Right of Kings devolving from the Sun God. As an explanation of man on earth I say: Ra Ra Ra.

Posted by M. Simon at December 27, 2004 11:13 PM

A few points:

1) On a personal level as a Christian; the wonder and complexity of the Universe, derived as it is from such simple building blocks, always leaves me with a deep spiritual feeling. And I can't help but think that those who look at the Universe and see only godless materialism are closed minded fools. Which I believe (in response to the other comment) can be summed up as 'I know you are but what am I?' :-)

2) Snowflakes - that's really clutching at straws. Sure, a snowflake is a beautiful structure, but as snowflakes fall they don't assemble to form huge and complex self replicating snow machines. They form a featureless mass of snow then melt. I've seen a lot of scientists point to proteins and suchlike and say 'behold the origin of life', when really life is a vast gulf beyond a few proteins, interstellar dust crystals or whatever.

3) Snowflakes, Galaxies and all complex and beautiful structures that we understand form according to various interesting and often wonderful processes. Falling back on 'randomness' just sounds to me like 'we don't know'.

There's a huge amount that's not understood about life and evolution, I wish you'd admit it, and not feel threatened because others use their religious beliefs to fill in the gaps. Just admit what you don't know and keep working to make those gaps smaller.

4) Most importantly - although science has never been free from politics - science and science teaching these days seem to come with ever-increasing amounts of obnoxious political baggage.

The wonders of science can be as meaningful to Christian as to an atheist (see point 1). Galileo died a long time ago, and this current backlash has mainly been caused by politics masquerading as science, so instead of wasting time criticising Christians for intruding into their arena, scientists could solve this problem by returning to the principles of honesty and objectivity, and leave politics for when they are wearing their 'other hat'.

Posted by kipwatson at December 27, 2004 11:28 PM

kipwatson,

You like Einstein don't like the fact that randomness may be an inherent building block of the universe.

That does not mean it isn't.

In fact quantum theory which we find quite sound to any level of accuracy we have been able to test it at so far has at its core "uncertainty" or randomness.

We have been unable to break this randomness. It is at the core of the quantum computers (still a dream) and quantum cryptography (currently a fact).

I do not see why an ethical system needs to be dependent on the nature of the universe.

Or to put it in a possibly clearer form: my God is more powerful than your puny god. My God designed a universe in which life was inherent in the mechanism. Your god is still fooling around trying to get it right.

My God designed a universe in which the natural flows of energy creates life.

Your guy had to work on the project to make things go hisway. And yet he still has to tinker to get stuff right.

Why you have such a stupid and low power god. Mine anticipated everything. Yours still has to produce special miracles to get stuff right. All the time he has to make adjustments. What's a matter? He can't get it right the first time? That don't sound so omnipotent or all knowing to me.

Posted by M. Simon at December 27, 2004 11:43 PM

M. Simon,

On the one hand your reply was just silly, seeing as it bore no relation to anything that I had written, other than the use of the word 'random' (although in a completely different context).

On the other hand, though, it was quite illustrative, seeing as how it was nothing but a string of anti-Christian remarks stitched together with a bare minimum of rudimentary and unconnected scientific 'extracts'.

You're not a science teacher by any chance are you?

Posted by kipwatson at December 27, 2004 11:54 PM

There's a huge amount that's not understood about life and evolution

Agreed.

I wish you'd admit it

We do admit it, freely and openly.

and not feel threatened because others use their religious beliefs to fill in the gaps.

You are welcome to personally use your religious beliefs to fill the gaps. But that doesn't change the fact that they are religious beliefs.

What we object to is people claiming these beliefs are science and trying to have them taught as such.

Just admit what you don't know and keep working to make those gaps smaller.

That is exactly what Science does and what it has always done.

Posted by Pixy Misa at December 27, 2004 11:59 PM

My personal belief is that the main flaw in the ID folk's way of thinking is that they assume that things as they are "Just Had To Be and Therefore Proves God Exists".

That fact that we are here and now and things are as they are proves nothing. And that is the part that I believe they cannot deal with. I find it ironic that they have to put limitiations on God to justify their own beliefs.

I suspect that if the comet did not hit and the Velicaraptors had made it, they would be having the same argument.

Just my 2 cents worth.

Posted by Michael at December 28, 2004 04:50 AM

I too think that ID would be a subject best kept to philosophy. A number of basic tenants of science are off shoots of religious doctrines in the past. There are parts of the bible that tell people it is there duty to understand God. If God is the Universe then the bible is instructing us to understand him, to learn about him, to put him in a context that we can assimilate. Its these ideas that have persuaded a number of very intelligent people in the past to formulate and mature what eventually become the modern scientific method. It is really only a very recent 'evolution' of the scientific methodology that has allowed it to shift over and begin to supersede religion. But without religion there would not have been any science as we know it.

Posted by Josh "Hefty" Reiter at December 28, 2004 05:38 AM

I was wondering when the first Hovind link would show up. Well done John! You win the anti-prize.

Posted by asg at December 28, 2004 06:40 AM

Michael,
ID folks don't assume that things had to be the way they are. They could have been very different, but then we wouldn't be here to discuss it. The fact that we are continginent beings (we didn't have to exist) and also that we are curious beings, it causes us to ask "why are we here?" Given that the universe had a being, and that it is fine-tuned to be able to support life, it is not a hugh inference that Someone was behind the whole thing. It's not a proof, it's an inference.

Posted by J. Lorenz at December 28, 2004 06:40 AM

Here's the ID syllogism:

1) Gee, this universe is amazing!
2) This can't be an accident!
3) Somebody must be behind this!

To which logicians reply:

1) Define "amazing".

Some (usually dim-witted) people seem honestly to believe in this ID crap, and that's why it isn't dismissed as crap as quickly as it should be.

--------------
Okay, try this syllogism.

1) I flipped a coin 100 times, and it came up heads 100 times.
2) This can't be an accident.
3) The coin must be two-headed.

Statisticians use a "t-test" to test hypotheses. In the case of the coin, it works like this. One can easily compute the probability that 100 flips of a fair coin would yield 100 heads. This probability is about 10^-30. So one would probably conclude that the coin is not fair.

Back to the origin of species: if one knew how frequently mutations happened in the past and what the likely effects of these mutations were, one could (theoretically) compute the likelihood that random mutations would lead to the development of humans. However, the frequency of significant mutations is so small, the development of new species so complex, and the time scale so vast to make such a calculation highly suspect. So for all practical purposes, both macroevolution (the truth of the hypothesis) and ID (the denial of the hypothesis) are both "untestable".

Posted by Edward Lee at December 28, 2004 06:47 AM

Edward -

Statistical methods aren't the only test for evolutionary theory. But there is no test for ID, not even in principle.

That's why evolution is science and ID isn't.

Posted by Pixy Misa at December 28, 2004 07:07 AM

Matt Knowles, of course you're right that evolution doesn't preclude the existence of God. I haven't encountered anyone who says otherwise, but that's just my experience.

I think faith means believing in something despite sufficient evidence.

Edward Lee, how does the Kool-Aid taste?

Posted by Just Some Guy at December 28, 2004 07:10 AM

Uh, I meant to say "I think faith means believing in something despite insufficient evidence."

Posted by Just Some Guy at December 28, 2004 07:11 AM

Pretty poor definition of faith.
Faith is believing in things that we have sufficient reason to believe, but can't prove absolutely. I have faith that the chair I'm sitting in will support me. I can't metaphysically prove it. I put my faith in it that it will because I have sufficient reason to beleive that it will. I can't prove absolutely that O.J. killed Nicole, but I have sufficient reasons to beleive that he did. We all beleive things, somethings more than others, that cannot be proven. We all have faith.

Posted by J. Lorenz at December 28, 2004 07:20 AM

G. Bob, I am completely comfortable with science. I have no desire to see ID taught in science classes. I am adamantly opposed to prayer in school. My religious beliefs are beyond any science to prove or disprove, and that leads to the main point I've been trying to make.

It is the attacks, yes attacks, by those who try to use science to disprove the existence of God that has caused many people to behave irrationally. Before you begin to sputter, I am not one of those people. I hear someone make a scientific observation and conclude "ergo, no designer" and I simply shrug off their naivete.

I am in no way making an argument to include ID in science classes when I attempt to offer insight into the thinking of those who do.

>>>

So, at some time in our past, mitochondrial DNA has transfered into to our nuclear DNA. This is not the work of an Intelligent designer. Finding errors demonstrates no design. - DocMartyn

from a scientific and logical standpoint, we can dismiss the possibility of a designer if we can't come up with any experiment that would rule him (or her, or it) out. And we can think a flawed designer, that would design flawed things, reason to think a designer more unlikely. - Rand Simberg

Posted by at December 28, 2004 07:25 AM

The major western religions and the scientific community are hardly at loggerheads over evolution, or any other scientific theory. The Roman Catholic Church endorsed evolutionary theory decades ago. All the mainline Protestant churches, to my knowledge, endorse evolutionary theory. I'm not aware of any Jewish organizations that oppose evolutionary theory. To create a binary choice between Christian faith and evolutionary theory is a false dilemma.

The ID theorists -- Demski, Behe, etc. -- are doing two things. First, they are attempting to falsify evolutionary theory (or at least parts of it -- I know Behe accepts evolutionary theory in large part) as it is presently prsesented, a perfectly legitimate scientific enterprise. As a scientific theory -- actually, just the inference to the best explanation -- evolutionary theory is subject to the rigors of falsification. The ID theorists have raised challenges to the theory in efforts to falsify it: They claim that some biological structures (such as the bacterial flagellum) cannot be explained by the incrementalism of Darwinian evolutionary theory (that's their claim). That's a purely scientific question, and the scientists can argue about it.

Demski goes further and applies information theory to argue that natural selection could not create the amount of complex information stored and transmitted by various genomes. This too is a scientific question, and the theorists can argue about it.

The second thing they do (ID theorist, that is) is claim, that, if there falsification is successful, the nature of the falsification suggests "intelligent design." They don't identify a "designer," or a mechanism of design.

However, even if their claims are correct, I wonder if there are other explanations other than Intelligent Design for the phenomena we observe. I suspect there are, and other more creative explanations will emerge over the coming decades.

Just an aside: Christianity and western science share a common understanding of all fundamental questions about the world; that is, they have a shared ontology (with the possible exception of origins, either of the universe or of life). Otherwise, they are in perfect harmony.

However, another part of our intellectual community doesn't share this ontology -- the postmodernists (or whatever you wish to call them). Postmodernists are of course inspired by Kuhn, Lakatos, and Feyerbrand, but they go much further, claiming the scientific method itself is a sham (e.g., Sandra Harding or Donna Harraway or Bloor), a patriarchal, logocentric construction of western rationalism, without ontological foundation.

If there is a fundamental divide in fundamentals, it isn't between Christians and scientists, it's between "postmodernists" and western science.

Posted by MD at December 28, 2004 07:29 AM

Thanks, Rand, for posting this, though it dismays me to see how poorly the purpose and methodology of scientific research are being conveyed to society. (It also amused me to hear that falsifibility has been rejected as a valid principle by "philosophers of science". Why didn't these guys come around our office and let us know?)

Scientists are human, but it is not our human prejudices that cause us to hold onto evolutionary theory, it is the fact that it is the best theory out there to explain the observations. (I am also amused by the idea that evolution is not a scientific theory because it can't be tested as all the subjects are long dead. I'm an astronomer, and while it's true that we can't set up our own experiments, we receive a wealth of data nonetheless. Guess it's not worth looking at, as we're looking at light emitted from their sources up to 15 billion years ago!)

I would love for students to be better taught how science works and how theories themselves evolve or are rejected, but ID is a poor teacher in this respect. ID advocates cherry-pick open questions in the field of evolutionary biology and uses these as evidence that evolution is fatally flawed and only maintained for religious reasons, as it were. Poppycock! ID does not offer an alternative theory that can be tested. No ID advocate has published an experimental paper comparing a hypothesis with observations. Is it any surprise that scientists do not take ID seriously as science, but take it very seriously as a worrisome cultural phenomenon?

Let me give you an example from my field, an example that is less charged with religious fervor. Observations of very distant supernovae (exploding stars) recently demonstrated that the universe is not only expanding, it's accelerating. The observations were, because they challenged current cosmological theories, scrutinized heavily and sceptically. So far, the result has stood up and accordingly, we have had to revise our theory of cosmology to the point of introducing a fudge factor to the models which we call dark energy. We don't know what dark energy is. For that matter, we still don't know what dark matter is, though we've seen evidence of its presence for decades. So why don't we throw the Big Bang and expanding universe theories out the door? The reason is that there are scores of observations out there that demonstrate that the universe is expanding and cooling, that it has evolved from a fairly homogeneous structure to the stars, galaxies, and clusters we see today, and that it began in a single event. Scientists will all admit that our understanding of cosmology remains incomplete, but no scientist would subsequently argue that this implies that we should teach young students that a static universe is a valid alternative to the preferred model of scientists.

Posted by C.S. Froning at December 28, 2004 07:40 AM

Just to clarify,

I do not believe that ID should be used to counter evolutionary theory, nor do I believe that either theory is capable of answering the question of whether or not God exists.

I do believe that it is naive to expect that a group of people will quietly sit back and listen to respected scientists and thinkers, like our honored host, use scientific observations as evidence that God does not exist, without posing their own pseudo-scientific theories to explain how He could exist.

Posted by Matt Knowles at December 28, 2004 07:53 AM

C.S. Froning
There is a difference between evolution and astronomy. In astronomy you are watching the events as they unfold. Because of the limitation on the speed of light, astronomy is like watching events on tape delay. That is not the case with evolution.

Posted by J. Lorenz at December 28, 2004 07:57 AM

If by "honored host" you refer to me, I have never expressed an opinion on the existence or non-existence of God, because I have none. Neither have I attempted to prove same using evolutionary (or any other scientific) theory, so take your strawmen elsewhere.

My point is that we should keep the religion of science pure, and not confuse or sully it with other belief systems. This has nothing to do with truth--just categories.

Posted by Rand Simberg at December 28, 2004 08:21 AM

People are entitled to believe whatever they want, but there are objective criteria for what belongs in a public school science curriculum. To begin with, school science texts should reflect the current consensus of scientific thought. As a practical matter, this is often done at the state level, where an advisory board made up of qualified scientists will review, weigh in on, and approve the curricula for each grade or age group. These qualified scientists rely on their own expertise, and also on their understanding of current scientific thinking as reflected in the scientific journals and current research. If such a process is applied, evolution makes it through the door and creationism, aka, intelligent design, does not.

The people trying to introduce intelligent design into the public school classroom are trying to do this through various end runs that try to avoid the normal scientific vetting process of research done through refereed journals and other means where other scientists can try to replicate results.

Hugh Hewitt’s slip of the pen, “I do believe in Intelligent Design --in Christianity, actually—“ tells me everything I need to know about the proponents of intelligent design. Their real agenda is not science education, but religious indoctrination. They are welcome to do that in their own churches, of course, but not in the public schools that I help fund.

Have Hewitt and the others never absorbed what Thomas Aquinas concluded almost 800 years ago—that science and faith are two separate spheres? And that scientific findings should in no way shake my faith? Or, are they more cynical than this? Are they using the complexities and ambiguities of science to incite fear and anger?

Posted by Bill Trippe at December 28, 2004 08:42 AM

Incorrect, J. Lorenz, we have biochemical, geological, paleotonlogical and genetic evidence. Vast swathes of it.

And not a single drop of anything that supports creationist ideas.

Posted by Morgoth at December 28, 2004 08:48 AM

Wonderful post. But are we really surprised that they want Intelligent Design taught in the science classroom? Let's face it - these people don't like science.

The same people who want Inteligent Design taught are the same people who are afraid to teach about birth control, believe that the Virgin Mary can be seen in a grilled cheese sandwich, and want to make it illegal to buy contraception from your local pharmacy.

Isn't there another word for these people?

Luddites.

Posted by Downtown Lad at December 28, 2004 08:50 AM

Statistical methods aren't the only test for evolutionary theory.

If the claim to be tested is that humans evolved through a long series of *random* mutations, then a statistical test is absolutely necessary.

Posted by Edward Lee at December 28, 2004 09:00 AM

A note from another philosopher:
It seems to me that the idea of evolution as used in this discussion is an equivocation. The idea of evolution as scientific theory and as evolution as a metaphysic are being confused.

ID is a metaphysic, and as such is not falsifiable in the scientific sense. Religion is a metaphysic and not a science, so there are those who confuse ID and religion because they both speak to the "larger issues." Religious persons are just as guilty of this confusion as non-religious persons.

But what many defenders of the science of evolution ignore, (and what grates on so many of the religionists) is that evolution can be a materialist metaphysic. As Sagan once noted, "The universe is all there is, all there ever was, and all there will ever be." Sing it and put an "AMEN" on the end and you will see that it is not science anymore, it is a belief. As a metaphysic, it is not observable, falsifiable, or testable. How could one test “all there could ever be?”

You want to defend evolution as a scientific methodology to describe our understanding of living things? Ok. You want it to be the only explanation for things, things it cannot know or scientifically test? Then you are as guilty as the most rabid fundamental creationist for forcing your worldview on others in the guise of science.

P.S. How many irrational events create a rational one? To assume that a materialist evolution is rational, one must assume that rationality must arise from the non-rational. This is not about apparent order; it is about making judgments about rationality based on what is admittedly a non-rational foundation and then haughtily (hypocritically?) dismissing others for being irrational for accepting religious (non-rational) precepts.

Posted by Bill from Louisville at December 28, 2004 09:01 AM

Downtown,

If you want to see people who don't like science, read Andrew Robbins or Sandra Harding.

The people you criticize love science; that's why they want inclusion in the science curriculum. To them, Science carries moral and epistemological weight. This isn't the case with everyone, like hundreds of humanities professors in our universities (and who teach tens of thousands of our young people every year about the "fictions" and "oppressions" of western science).

Posted by MD at December 28, 2004 09:06 AM

> And we can think a flawed designer, that would design flawed things, reason to think a designer more unlikely. - Rand Simberg

It's the whole "reason to think a designer more unlikely" that led me to believe that you think the scientific observation, that things are designed flawed, is *evidence* that a designer is unlikely.

Where's my strawman?

I do NOT want ID taught in public schools. I just don't want it taken for granted that relgious belief is "foolish" in the face of science.

Posted by at December 28, 2004 09:06 AM

It's the whole "reason to think a designer more unlikely" that led me to believe that you think the scientific observation, that things are designed flawed, is *evidence* that a designer is unlikely.

It is.

Where's my strawman?

In misinterpreting my comment to imply that I said that this is proof that there is no God. When I say "no designer," I mean that life was created based on natural laws, and that if there is a God, He did so by setting the process in motion with the creation of those natural laws, not that He supervised the actual design of each creature.

While some, such as Dawkins, are almost militantly atheistic and attempt to use science as a bludgeon against their theist foes, I do not. I make no claims about the truth, or whether there is or is not a God. I only claim that invoking Him to explain the tree of life isn't science.

Posted by Rand Simberg at December 28, 2004 09:15 AM

I respect your distinction, but I beg to differ.

As you and I and others have stated here repeatedly, ID is not a scientific theory. When you use scientific observations to try to disprove (or provide evidence against) ID, your efforts can only be construed as an attempt to invalidate a faith, not critique a scientific theory.

It is attempts like this to use scientific method to invalidate articles of faith that is causing more obtuse Christians than myself to dig in their heels and try to force things like ID into the classroom.

If you and others would accept that ID, like religion, is a matter of faith, and would refrain from trying to "disprove" it, you would find less resistance from reasonable people when you say that it is not a valid scientific theory.

My resistance is based solely on the perception that you and others *do* use scientific observations to try to paint matters of faith as foolishness. The observation that things are designed with flaws only proves there is not a designer who is omnipotent and intended to make flawless creations. It in no way supports the contention that there is "no designer" unless you go on to put that designer in a box. Of course, the designer could have intended his creation to be flawed, etc.

All of that is *not* scientific discussion.

It shouldn't be in a science classroom.

But when respected thinkers (and I mean that sincerely) insist on trying to provide scientific evidence to refute articles of faith, one must expect people of faith to attempt to interject articles of faith into the scientific discussion.

Posted by Matt Knowles at December 28, 2004 09:38 AM

Joe Carter,

"DocMartyn: Finding errors demonstrates no design."

"So if we look at the code behind my buggy Windows XP and find errors are we to conclude that it wasn’t the product of a designer?"

That's a great point. In fact, many of the original "scientists" investigated creation because they wanted to find out more about the Creator. Reading the "book of life" was a way of reading the mind of it's Author.

Everyone's DNA code is indeed very buggy, full of unused "junk DNA." And with lots of "defects" that cause horrible things like cystic fibrosis.

If such code were indeed created specifically by a designer, it suggests that the designer was cruel or incompetent or both (no reflection, of course, on our friends in Redmond, who are necessarily ignorant of many of the million squared things that can happen with millions of lines of code).

Posted by Roger Sweeny at December 28, 2004 09:46 AM

Greg D.

You are absolutely correct that scientists don't have a good explanation how life began, or how many of the complex cellular procedures came to be.

However, in regards to the moths, you have been fooled by the technical meaning that population geneticists ascribe to the word evolution. It simply means "change in gene frequency." It does not mean what most people mean by evolution: a qualitative change that creates something new and is irreversible.

To a population geneticist, the increased frequency of dark colored moths when pollution increased was evolution, as was the decrease in frequency when pollution decreased. The peppered moth may well be an example of natural selection changing the frequencies of varieties within a species (micro-micro-evolution?). It is, of course, not an example of a new species.

Posted by Roger Sweeny at December 28, 2004 09:47 AM

If you and others would accept that ID, like religion, is a matter of faith,

Of course I accept that. It's entirely my point.

>and would refrain from trying to "disprove" it,

I am only attempting to "disprove it" within the realm of science, not the broader truth.

>you would find less resistance from reasonable people when you say that it is not a valid scientific theory.

Somehow, I doubt that, based on the fact that my comments have already been misinterpreted numerous times in this very thread, because so many people of faith seem to have a chip on their shoulder.

My resistance is based solely on the perception that you and others *do* use scientific observations to try to paint matters of faith as foolishness.

I have never said, or even implied that matters of faith are foolish, or the holders of them fools. If you believe that I have, please provide a quote. I have great respect for people of faith, and I wouldn't even deign to say that their beliefs aren't true, because I have no idea whether they are or not, and won't before die (though I suspect that I won't find out even then). My point is that their beliefs are not science, and shouldn't be promulgated in science classes, not that they're not valid.

As I hinted in my post, most of these problems would go away if we didn't have a publicly-funded school system, and parents had more choice as to how to educate their children.

Posted by Rand Simberg at December 28, 2004 09:48 AM

Herb Sorenson,

We cannot perform experiments in the past and we cannot make observations in the past. But we can gather evidence left by the past. And we can make predictions about what new evidence will tell us. If the predictions come true, we are more likely to believe the theory they came from.

So someone who believes in evolution might predict that rocks further down will be older and that they will show certain isotope frequencies indicative of old age. She might also predict that rocks aged 65 - 225 million years ago will show remains of dinosaurs, and that they would never never never never show remains of humans or "modern mammals." All these predictions are testable. And so far at least they have worked out.

Posted by Roger Sweeny at December 28, 2004 09:48 AM

And if the sudden (geologically speaking) appearance of life is not what we expect from the theory or the sudden appearance of most of the major phyla in the Cambrian is not what we expect of the theory, do we throw the theory out? Not entirely, but why can’t I infer intelligent causation for these events? Why should intelligent causation be excluded from science? How is an inference to intelligence an invalid category?

Posted by J. Lorenz at December 28, 2004 10:05 AM

The idea that complexity equals conscious design can be shown false just when applied to completely human-made items.

Consider that the famous observation from economics that no single human being processes all the information needed to manufacture a Number 2 pencil from scratch. The industrial engineer who creates the pencil assembling machine knows nothing about about forestry and milling or the mining or creating or graphite. In fact, there is a near infinite regress of detail for every stage or component that goes into the production of the pencil. At each stage of the process each special-ist just blindly accepts the end results of another special-ist work.

Moreover, each real world technological item has a history that stretching over many generations and linked to all the the other technological items in existence. At no time did one human mind comprehend the totality of the pencil and plan it's future. The real world pencil you hold in your hand is the result of myriad unconscious interactions of many conscience minds.

Advocates of ID have the presumption exactly backwards. They assume that complexity is ipso facto evidence of conscience action whereas in the real, observable world, complexity is ipso facto evidence of unconscious action. Conscious design represents the most simplistic elements the observable world not the most complex.

Posted by Shannon Love at December 28, 2004 10:15 AM

Greg D:

I do not think that the evolution of the DNA -> RNA -> Protein system is any more (or less) farfetched than the evolution of any coherent system. Evolution attempts to provide an 'invisible hand' explanation as to how these systems came about: as such, people tend to find it a much more satisfying explanation than merely saying, Well, God had this whole coherent system in his mind, then he created it. Explanations that do not assume prior knowledge of the system in question have a great deal more explanatory power -- which is why evolutionary theory has proven much more useful, both scientifically and medically, than has religious belief.

So, your question is, specifically, how did the cell's transcription and translation machinery come to exist in its current form. One thing which should give you pause in asserting that this system could not have evolved on its own is that the system is not the same from organism to organism. Look up the differences between transcription initiation in eukaryotes versus prokaryotes, for a simple example: the system is, not surprisingly, considerably more complex in eukaryotes. So if the system can evolve in that sense -- it can become more complicated -- is it really that infeasible that the system itself could have come into being from something previously _less_ complicated? I would tend to think no.

This is, of course, no