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Najakcharmer -> RE: God, Darwin, and Kansas (8/4/2006 9:27:50 PM)
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An essay I found on Intelligent Design:
The U.S. is afflicted with a species of idiot who have decided that thinking interferes with bible-thumping and must therefore be banned. To be more specific, they've decided that biological evolution is directly opposed to their narrow-minded reading of the Abrahamic creation myths and is therefore a great evil to be fought.
(John Calvert, managing director of the Intelligent Design Network: "Evolution demolishes any rational basis for theistic belief." Phillip Johnson, founder of the ID movement: "Liberal [accepting evolution] Christians are worse than atheists because they hide their naturalism behind a veneer of religion." Gee, I've never heard Pope Pius XII's religion called a "veneer" before. I don't often hear John Paul II called "liberal", either.)
Now, the hard-core delusionals can't be helped except with sufficient doses of Haldol, but they've managed to generate enough double-talk to confuse some more sane people. This has led to an impressive outpouring of biology blogs, but there are a few points that aren't being refuted effectively. And letting your opponent control the language you're arguing with is a recipe for disaster.
First of all, there's the argument that "There's a controversy. Teach the controversy." There's a POLITICAL controversy. And it might be a perfectly suitable subject for civics class. There's no SCIENTIFIC controversy, and nothing to teach in science class.
Which leads to the major point: what is science? How is my faith in science different from a religious faith? How can I say that Intelligent Design is unscientific? And I really think the evolution advocates are failing to answer these clearly.
The answer, you see, is simple, and doesn't rely on circular arguments about "scientists" or "scientific method". The answer is:
Science is making correct predictions.
Some predictions are accurate to umpteen decimal places. We call these "hard sciences", of which physics is the leading example. Some are fairly fuzzy relationships (A tends to cause B). We call these "soft sciences".
Science is made up of *theories*. ("Conjecture" and "Hypothesis" are both just different words for the same thing. There are people who will explain the difference between scarlet, vermillion, and crimson, but basically there's all just red.)
The more *frequently* and *specifically* a theory makes predictions, the more *useful* it is (assuming it's right). To test a scientific theory is to test its predictions. Illustrating this is why science classes do experiments. Testing can take the form of an active experiment, or making new observations (as in astronomy). Either way, a good theory will tell you what you're going to see *before* you look.
A would-be "theory" that does not make testable predictions is not science. If the predictions are so vague that they cannot fail to be true, then the theory actually says nothing at all. Despite being always "right" by its own logic, it cannot be objectively judged right or wrong. It can be called "not falsifiable", or more simply, "useless".
Scientists object to Intelligent Design because it is useless in this way. It makes no testable predictions, so it's not even in the realm of science. Even calling it "bad science" is giving it more credit than it deserves. It is, in the words of Wolfgang Pauli, 'not even wrong".
It is often easier to discuss the relationship of theory and observation in the sense of theory "explaining" the observation, which is widely done, but that is only a secondary goal of science. Merely explaining prior observations is used to demonstrate that a theory is not obviously wrong, and is the usual first step in evaluating some new idea before going to the trouble of a formal test, but the real test of a theory is prediction.
The recent discovery of Tiktaalik roseae is an example of a prediction of evolution (and geology and plate tectonics) coming spectacularly true. An intermediate form between fish and land animals was predictedin late Devonian rock, 360 to 380 million years old, so a couple of paleontologists went looking for exposed Devonian rock that hadn't been picked over already. It was a pain to get to, but they found exactly what was predicted: half-evolved legs. (And some new information, like the eyes, neck, jaw, and ribs.)
Drug trials are a classic example of testing prediction. They attempt to eliminate the placebo effect and various other confounding factors and see of the drugs have the predicted effects.
A theory doesn't even have to be 100% right to be good science. Scientists use simple but less accurate techniques all the time then they don't need the highest levels of precision. Classical mechanics and geometric optics are both known to be inaccurate. But they're still accurate enough, in well-understood circumstances, to make *useful* predictions.
Science is a collection of ways to make useful predictions *that work*. My faith in it is based on the fact that scientific predictions are tested over and over again, until they're as predictable as the sun rising in the east, and I can relax in the darkness, confident that dawn will come on schedule. This is not faith in the absence of proof, but faith because further proof is superfluous.
The "scientific method" and peer-reviewed publications are ways of developing and testing predictions that have been found to be effective, but they're not central. Indeed, whether a theory explains something in terms of atoms and molecules or angels and demons is ultimately irrelevant. "Natural", "supernatural", "material", or "spiritual", science reduces them all to a single test: "do the predictions work?"
Now, for science that should be taught in primary and secondary schools, we have several filters:
- Non-science is not taught in science class.
- Wrong science is not taught, except as an example of better predictions displacing an earlier theory (Ptolemaic vs. Copernican astronomy, Galileo's experiments with gravity, Newtonian gravitation vs. epicycles, Thomson's "plum pudding" model of the atom, etc.) Students are generally not tested on such things because this is a science class, not a history of science class.
- Uncertain or controversial science (as opposed to generally accepted science) is not gone into in any detail. Leading-edge research is important, but if it's going to change soon, that's in the realm of post secondary education. Chomsky's universal grammar, non-black hole ultradense astronomical objects, etc.
- Finally, generally-accepted science is prioritized based on difficulty and usefulness in general education. Reynolds and Richardson numbers are essential and well-established aerodynamics, but many people can live happy and productive lives never knowing about them.
Evolution, being an often-tested and never-disproved theory that is the foundation of all of biology, is useful as general knowledge. And it's falsifiable. Some Intelligent Design advocates have at least pointed out some of the more readily disprovable predictions of evolution.
Their examples of disproof, however, fail to support Intelligent Design for two important reasons. First, on examination, evolution's predictions are not disproved. In every case, either evolution is misinterpreted and false predictions are attributed to it, or observations are misreported.
Rebutting these arguments in detail is an augean task that is being done very well by many people, who I thank.
Second, even an incontrovertible disproof of evolution would not inherently support any particular alternative theory. This is the "contrived dualism" that Judge Jones dismissed in the Kitzmiller v. Dover decision. Only if the disproving observation matched the predictions of an alternative could the alternative be considered supported.
When comparing two theories, you seek circumstances where they make conflicting predictions. Then you observe those circumstances and see which theory's predictions match the observations. The central problem of experimental design is to produce the clearest possible difference between predicted outcomes (benefit) for the the least investment in the experiment (cost).
And, while scientists are not above personal egos, they do make a very serious effort to seek out falsifying observations. That's how progress is made. Far from trying to squelch unexpected evidence, there are formal mechanisms for rewarding people who correct existing theories. The most famous involves a trip to Stockholm where the King of Sweden hands you the Nobel Prize.
You know, like Barbara McClintock got in 1983 for disproving the conventional wisdom about how genes were expressed? (Nobel Prizes are admittedly rare in biology, because it's not a category. Her work was so significant they awarded it under the "Physiology and Medicine" category. But there are other awards.)
The reason that you do not see serious searching for counterexamples to evolution (as a whole; there are details under active investigation) is that scientists have universally concluded that there are none to be found; if they want a ticket to Stockholm, there is more fruitful ground to search. There are still many research projects in biology that might stumble acros such evidence if it exists.
When Intelligent Design makes a testable prediction that conflicts with evolution, but not with pre-existing observations, then it is ready to be debated as a theory. When that prediction is tested and found to be correct, it is then worth further research. When, through enough tests to preclude the possibility of error, its predictions are found to be more accurate than those of evolution, it will become generally accepted science.
Until then, it has no place in public school science education.
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