Victor,
Wells himself has responded to Gishlick at:
http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=1320
There are other relevant papers at Wells' personal site:
http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=submitSearchQu
ery&query=Jonathan%20Wells&orderBy=date&orderDir=DESC&searchBy=author&se
archType=all
What NCSE does not admit is the horrible job the textbooks have done of
mentioning the limitations of the examples they cite, thus giving the
student the impression of far greater certainty than is warranted by the
evidence.
Angus
11 comments:
I like Dr. Menuge's answer. He is close to finding the line between science and philosophy. Perhaps his background in the philosophy of science has trained him to know the difference between fact, hypothesis and inference. My frustration with science is the inferences that are made or suggested. They leap easily from fact to fancy.
Excuse me Ahab, but I fail to see what Dr. Menuge's opinions, or lack of same, on the age of the earth, have to do with the statements he actually makes here. To me that is an irrelevant argument, one that you seem to make very often. I present the question, posed by Wells, as to whether or not overblown claims are being written into biology text based on the so-called "icons" of evolution. That's the issue at hand. What I noticed about this was that the Discovery Institute wasn't primarily looking to get ID taught in the public schools; what it seemed primarily concerned about was the way in which overblown claims were made based on these episodes which, he at least claims, don't really support evolution in the way the textbooks suggest that they support evolution. You point me to some rebuttals against Wells claims, well and good, but suggest that this is the final word on the matter when there's an ongoing debate on the matter. Then you point to passages in Wells that say that he considers evolution to be atheistic, claims I would not make, but it was not those claims of Wells that I was concerned about. Then I present some comments by Menuge, and instead of responding to what Menuge says, you bring up his Kansas testimony with respect to the age of the earth. Even if his testimony was completely misguided, that's beside the point.
P. Z. Meyers says ID is creationism. He said it right here on this blog. It's a clear and obvious fact that the issues ID poses are different from the issues that creationism poses. The worldwide Noachian flood is a relevant issue when you're talking about creationism, it is irrelvant when you are dealing with ID. Regardless of what their "real agenda" (and I am tired of hearing about people's real agendas in place of considering their actual arguments)is, the issues they raise are different and the claims are different. To me that leads to the massive confusion of issues that makes the question of design and evolution an extremely difficult one for me to get a handle on. He refuses to make simple distinctions that I know prefectly well how to draw.
Thanks to the academic hardball tactics that are used on anyone who so much as smells like a creationist to the evolutionary establishment, I can't figure out whether the scientific consensus they claim is really there, or whether there are all sorts of biologists out there with serious doubts about the strong Darwinist claims but who are afraid of losing their jobs if they speak out.
You have responded to claims made by Menuge by bringing up something Mengue said elsewhere which makes him appear to you to be a quack, ignoring what he actually said. It sounds like the only people you would consider to be authoritative on this subject would be card-carrying Darwinists. (No true scientist, after all, accepts intelligent design). And if I looked hard enough, I might be able to find a few that have a problem with the way some of the "icons" are used to support Darwinism.
Victor,
In your comment you wrote:
"I can't figure out whether the scientific consensus they claim is really there, or whether there are all sorts of biologists out there with serious doubts about the strong Darwinist claims but who are afraid of losing their jobs if they speak out."
I speak from a position on what I’d guess to be a middle rung of the scientific ladder (I’m a psotdoc). I have absolutely no fear of being fired for my views, and if I was to be let go (and chose not to sue), I’d probably just take some time off and then get a better paying job in industry. I am here because I enjoy the research. As an aside, with the tenure system, firing academics based on their personal views is difficult to do. If you combine the fact there are many highly opinionated, well funded and tenured biologists all over the country with the fact that the current administration in Washington is sympathetic to the ID movement, you’d think if there was this mass of doubters, now would be the time to rise up… there is no uprising because this mass of doubters does not exist, there is no conspiracy of silence.
As far as the icons of evolution are concerned, I can not defend such things as the use of the peppered moths or Haeckel’s embryos. What I can do is say that a poor choice of diagram combined with the unfortunate need to boil down complex information to fit it onto a few pages of an introductory text book does not invalidate the evidence from entire fields of science in support of evolution.
I think my response will be unsatisfying to you if I don’t give more detail, but I simply do not have the time right now. This lack of time might be a better explanation of the silence you hear (don’t hear?) from the biological community. There is no controversy and we are all busy.
If I sound dismissive, think about it this way. Imagine if I emailed you tomorrow and told you outright that I thought your credentials as a philosopher were worth nothing unless you posted on your blog a long exposition on the importance of theory X, and that you that you really needed to do it today dagnabit!!! Well you probably would not even take the time to write me back to tell me to go to hell, but I am sure you’d think it. You know theory X is completely out dated. It was clearly refuted more than 50 years ago by Y using the Z principle. You might even think that it is not such a bad idea to remind everyone of why X is wrong and if I had not rubbed you the wrong way you might even have considered doing it. But you are a little rusty on the Z principle and in order to fully refute the X theory you’ll of course need to go back an fully research it and you know others have written on it since Y died (sigh) so it’ll be a lot of work for you. And of course it’s your blog and you are going to write on topics that interest you, not me.
I wrote this quickly and I hope it all makes sense
Best
Andrew
I just reread my post and want to make it clear that I am not saying that there is no controversy within evolutionary theory, rather that the issues raised by Wells et al. are not where it’s at. Ahab is right, where there is uncertainty, the discussion is occurring in the peer reviewed literature. For example we still not certain how mutation rates, causing primarily deleterious effects, could ever be high enough to allow positive mutations to arise and then proliferate in a population. These problems date back as far as 1937 when Haldane raised them in a paper in the American Naturalist (71:337-349). For an overview of the forces selecting against high mutation rates see here. Look here and here and are examples of attempts to develop models to overcome these challenges.x
"Basically, Intelligent Design is the idea that life on earth is too complex to have evolved without a guiding hand.
"We're not saying it's god, just someone with the basic skill set to create an entire universe."
Jon Steward, the Daily Show
amstar has hit the nail on the head.
I decided to stop participating in these discussions because they are so time-consuming. In particular, one person's (representative) blithely dismissive responses to my posts in which I actually tried to take the time to explain a couple of things made me realize that it isn't worth the energy.
When they come to my local school boards, though, I will be ready.
Thanks, Ahab. Your posts are always fun to read. I haven't done population genetics in quite a while (almost a decade), so I might pick it up too.
So much science, so little time.
I would add to the list of distinctions between Intelligent Design Theory (IDT) and Creationism (C)(understood as young earth creationism) two further points, both of which, I think, clearly demonstrate the conceptual independence of the former from the latter.
First, IDT, as I understand it, does not intrinsically reject evolution, taken as a descriptive hypothesis about the lineage of organisms on Earth. One could in principle accept the thesis of common descent and hold that there is good evidence for intelligent design - in fact, I believe that is Michael Behe's position (or at least was at the time of Darwin's Black Box). That X can be designed by S even if Y is the proximate efficient cause of X is something regularly recognized in the case of human design, and some, perhaps many, perhaps most ID theorists would say the same of the world's design. The young earth creationist, on the other hand, would not consider evolution as even a descriptive thesis, so that's a major difference between the two points of view.
Second, it seems to me that C is more closely tied to science in its proclamations than IDT. I don't mean by this that it is better science, good science or to make an evaluative claim in general. Rather, my point is that C makes claims of a more empirically immediate sort than IDT: dinosaurs and humans co-existed, a worldwide flood explains geological strata, we can make inferences about mutation rates by examining the biological diversity that has occurred since the time of the Noahic flood, etc.
IDT, on the other hand, is something more like a philosophical hypothesis, or perhaps a meta-scientific framework. It's hard to cash IDT out in terms of concrete empirical predictions, and I'm not sure that it should. What it does claim is that design can be detected under certain conditions, and then looks to discover where those conditions have occurred.
Finally, a "bonus": while the John Stewart joke is amusing, the IDT's designer need not have the skill set to create the entire universe. Hume and Plato were able to conceive of designers that, while immensely powerful and impressive, fell short of the God of traditional Western monotheism. Further, even if we suppose the designer is also the creator and has the traditional "omni-" attributes, this being still doesn't need to be the God of any particular sect.
IDT could be true while YEC is false, and YEC could be true while IDT is false. (The latter could occur at least two different ways. First, while it could be that the world has been designed by a deity, William Dembski's design filter might be a conceptually flawed way of detecting design. Second, YEC might be true, but its truth cannot be detected by Dembski's design filter.)
In short, the two are distinct in method, in how they interact with evolution (taken as a descriptive thesis, not as a metaphysical thesis), in their predictions, in their empirical claims (and the lack thereof), in their religious implications and in their truth conditions.
They simply are not the same thing.
Hi Ahab,
I didn't say, imply, or mean to suggest that IDT lacks any connection with the empirical realm. Behe's contributions to IDT, whether successful or not, are certainly empirically-based.
Rather, my point in the passage you've cited was that IDT won't make - and to my mind, isn't intended to make - specific empirical predictions. Even if there are certain irreducibly complex systems that can only be explained, ultimately, by a designer, IDT doesn't tell us in advance that this, that or the other thing will be (a) irreducibly complex or (b) that this particular irreducibly complex feature could not plausibly come about by law and/or chance alone.
So I don't think IDT should be construed as a scientific theory striving to discover new empirical details about the world; rather, it strives to interpret those details in a mathematical framework.
Brief addendum: the number of IDT theorists who also believe in a young Earth is wholly irrelevant, both because there are plenty of IDT friends and sympathizers who accept an ancient universe and even what young-Earthers call macro-evolution, and also because a theory's truth and the theorist's motives are logically independent.
Ahab: I explicitly stated that IDT isn't, in my view, a scientific theory, so to draw the conclusion that it's a useless scientific theory seems a bit perverse. It might be a scientific research program, or a philosophical/meta-scientific framework, but it's not the sort of theory that makes precise empirical predictions. It's not that it should, but because it's lame, fails to. Rather, it's not supposed to in the first place.
The "evolutionary" story about IDT sprouting from YEC is question-begging: its conclusions are different, its positive arguments and starting points are different, its methodology is different, its relationship to theology is different, and its players are different. Other than that, they're indistinguishable. (Maybe.)
Finally, even if your last comment is correct, it ignores the large number of IDT supporters and sympathizers who don't hold to a young Earth and do accept universal common descent. It further ignores the independence of their positions, qua IDT advocates, from what they hold qua friends of YEC.
Hi Ahab,
Yes, some ID theorists would call it a science. And I agree with them (maybe) - if they mean by that term a scientific framework or something like that. But until the predictions start rolling in, I'm more inclined to think of it in a different way.
Does that make it useless? Well, useless for what? It's obviously very useful for generating arguments on both sides! More seriously, it's useful, if it works, because it offers some reason to believe there's a designer. That strikes me as significant, even if it doesn't by itself tell me where (if anywhere) to worship and even if it doesn't increase our knowledge of biology.
I think one reason some people think ID claims to be science is that some of its adherents criticize evolutionary theory, or at least claims made on behalf of evolutionary theory. It seems to me, however, that when they do this, they aren't really doing it qua ID advocates. Young earth creationists, old earth creationists, and even atheists could make many if not all of the same points. Not everything that's part of the "wedge" is part of ID proper.
P.S. I'm familiar with Johnson's, Dembski's, Behe's and Wells' writings. I read their books pretty regularly through about 2000 (as well as various critics like Miller, Sober & Fitelson and sympathetic critics like Ratzsch). My comments represent my understanding of how their positive theory is best categorized, at least for the moment. I agree that each may characterize IDT differently.
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