The immediate purpose of this post is tell search engines where to point when they’re asked about intelligent design. Steve Smith of the National Center for Science Education (a great organization, devoted to defending the teaching of evolution in schools) has sent around an email mentioning a surge of interest in the subject, seen for example in the list of top searches on Technorati (right now it’s the most popular search). So he suggests that people with a web page point to this article on Intelligent Design at the NCSE website; we physicists here at CV are happy to help out, as we know that we’re next once the forces of pseudo-science finish off our friends in the squishy sciences.
It’s an embarassment that something as empty as intelligent design gets taken at all seriously by so many people. Here’s an important feature of real scientists: they don’t try to win acceptance for their ideas by forcing people to teach them in high schools. They publish papers, give seminars, argue with other scientists at conferences. IDers don’t do this, because they have nothing scientific to offer. They don’t explain anything, they don’t make predictions, they don’t advance our understanding of the workings of nature. It’s religio-political dogma, so of course they pick battles with school boards instead of scientists.
In the discussion about the post on doctors below, some commenters pointed out that doctors aren’t really scientists at all. But the point was never that doctors are scientists; it was simply that they were people who went to college, where presumably they even took some biology courses. How is it possible for people to go through college and come out not appreciating enough about how science works that they can’t appreciate the metaphysical distinction between science and propaganda?
But much of this is our fault, where by “us” I refer to college science professors. We do an awful job at teaching science to non-scientists. I presume (and would love to hear otherwise if I’m wrong) that most U.S. colleges ask their students to take about one year’s worth of natural science (either physics, biology, astronomy, or chemistry) in order to graduate. But more often than not these courses don’t teach what they should. For some reason or another, we most often create intro courses for non-scientists by taking our intro courses for science majors and removing the hard parts. This is completely the wrong paradigm. What we should be doing is taking an entire professional scientific education (undergrad and grad school, including research) and squeeze the most important parts into courses for non-scientists. If someone only takes one physics course in college, they should certainly hear at least something about relativity and quantum mechanics. If someone takes only one biology course, they should certainly hear at least something about evolution and genetics. Instead we (often, anyway) bore them to death with inclined planes and memorizing anatomical parts. (Truth in advertising compels me to mention that, as an astronomy major, I made it through college without taking any courses in either biology or chemistry.)
And, most importantly of all: they should absolutely learn something about the practice of science. They should have some introduction to how theories are really proposed, experiments are performed, and choices are made between competing models. They should be told something about the criteria by which scientists choose one idea over another. It should be impressed upon them that science is a perpetually unfinished subject, where the real fun is at the edges of our ignorance where we don’t know all the answers — but that there are also well-established results that we have established beyond reasonable doubt, at least within their well-understood domains of validity.
Wouldn’t you like to take a science course like that? I don’t know, maybe my experiences have been atypical and there are a lot of people teaching courses in just that way. If so, let me know.
I rest my case.
I did not make up the “cow’s fart” story. It’s true. Just do a google search using these key words combined: “cow”, “Global warming”, “methane”, and you see quite a few.
When experts are telling you that farts from cows are contributing “significantly” to global warming, do you need any further discussion. Do you still retain any respect for such scientists?
And yes there is a “consensus” on craps like this in the orthodox research community.
Quantoken
“Cow farts” ?
What’s most amusing, here, is that you don’t even know which end of the cow the methane comes from.
Whatever …
(Why am I breaking one of the cardinal rules of blogdom?)
Jaques:
I am not quite sure I figured out which end of the cows fart. But I am definite sure I got it wrong about you when I used common sense. My advice is you should probably fart less and save the world from global warming!
Come on respect your own intelligence a little bit please! Don’t let me ridicule you like that! It’s so silly that it is not even funny any more.
The CNN link is here:
http://archives.cnn.com/2000/NATURE/07/21/cow.methane.enn/
Quantoken
Aaron: tres’ Usenet, but funny nonetheless.
Gavin, I am actually not that pessimistic because I also think it’s extremely unlikely that the scientific community (as opposed to specific scientists) will start attacking religion in general. It’s just not going to happen; they may be a minority, but too many good scientists are themselves religious, and most nonreligious scientists (even outside of the US) don’t perceive trying to destroy religion as something they do while wearing their scientist hats.
I’m not a huge fan of Gould’s “nonoverlapping magisteria” notion, partly because I’m nonreligious myself and partly because in practice religions don’t keep very well to their supposed magisterium. But the metaphysical component of most major religions is not something that is really scientifically attackable, since it can always retreat to making non-empirical claims. A scientist who continued to go after it into that terrain attempting to continue to use scientific arguments would be bound to fail. The best the scientist can say as a scientist is that it’s not science. This isn’t just a political compromise, it’s prudent methodology.
Lubos has a weakness for crackpot causes. See for example his defense of the Bogdanovs. I was actually rather surprised to find him on the right side of the ID debate (assuming he still is).
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Quantoken:
Your expose about the greenhouse effect is probably too naive.
Water vapor in the troposphere, unlike the better-known greenhouse gases such as CO2, is essentially passive in terms of climate: the residence time for water vapor in the atmosphere is short (about a week) so perturbations to water vapor rapidly re-equilibriate. In contrast, the lifetimes of CO2, methane, etc, are long (hundreds of years) and hence perturbations remain. Thus, in response to a temperature perturbation caused by enhanced CO2, water vapor would increase, resulting in a (limited) positive feedback and higher temperatures. In response to a perturbation from enhanced water vapor, the atmosphere would re-equilibriate due to clouds causing reflective cooling and water-removing rain. The contrails of high-flying aircraft sometimes form high clouds which seem to slightly alter the local weather. [From wikipedia on “The Greenhouse Effect”]
The emergence of “Intelligent Design (ID)” is maybe another Jungian “Schatten” (shadow) which rised up from the unconscious, and which dialectically mirrors the limitations and the “dark” effects of the present scientific dogmas.
The crisis is all too obvious.
In mathematics, most propositions are true but cannot be proved in any sufficiently complex logical system, although many mathematicians firmly believe that “truly relevant theorems” always have an accessible proof. Strikingly, the foundations of modern mathemtics remain undecided (What is the continuum hypothesis? What is the Riemann hypothesis? What are L-functions? What is “set”?)
In computer science, the majority of algorithms compute non-recursive functions non-effectively, although only effective algorithms are practically computable thus far.
In physics, 95% of the energy and mass in the Universe remain unknown, although many physicists continue to believe that dark matter and dark energy are concepts of 19th and 20th century physics.
In biology, and five decades after the formulation of the “central dogma”, the latter has in fact become a central enigma (while being a dilemma concurrently): e.g., up to 97% of the mammalian genome is without sense to us (in a quick act of dispair, some scientists have called it “junk DNA”), protein translation and folding is a big problem as it ever was, and epi-genetics is about to change the laws of reproduction, heredity and evolution as we know it. And the theory of evolution itself, although often successful locally, fails to explain the origins and the purpose of life.
There are more Jungian shadows in other disciplines(neuroscience vs consciousness, for instance), and together with the often deadly and bizarre outgrowths of modern scientific endevour (60 years after Trinity, Hiroshima and Nagasaki), scientists should be humble enough to realize that the last 2000 years of scientific exploration have not been the path to human glory. It is then difficult to embrace for some conservative characters, but well understandable otherwise, that a societal and inescapable counterculture to mainstream science must emerge in direct consequence, as in fact does ID.
Facing the immediate challenges for the human race, science must recreate itself again–as it did more than 2000 years ago–if both want to survive. Hopefully, then, unscientific countercultures will catalyze the unfolding of a truly philanthropic science before it is too late.
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While I would agree with you that it is silly to force the creationist ideal to be taught in public school systems and to spend so much time arguing about it, and I also disagree that Darwin’s idiocy should be the ONLY thing that they are taught.
I don’t have a problem with other people beleiving in evolution. I don’t have a problem with learning about it. Nor am I one to force my beliefs on others. I do, however, resent it when evolution is taught as the only intellegent option, and that everyone who beleives in an intellegent creator is being stupid.
You say might say that creationist have no solid evidence that we can present to support our theory. I would like to point out that evolutionists don’t either. Random chance is not any more acceptable as a theory on paper than the words “then somehow a miracle happened” would be in the middle of a mathematical proof on my final exam. There is a reason for everything.
The entire universe IS a miracle, whether attributed to a God or to dice. The functionality of a single bacteria, let alone innumerable superior beings, still perplexes the most exalted scientists of our time. To attribute, not only the perfect environment to flourish, but to have such beauty and perfect ratios of life-sustaining nessesities and convenient bodily functions to nothing but the luckiest of chance is, in my mind, a riduciously flawed thought process.
Yes, if an infinite amount of monkeys pounded on an infinite number of keyboards for an indefinite amount of time, eventually one of them would happen to type out the entire book of Genesis, or if that analogy offends you, next week’s issue of the New York Times. HOWEVER, while the universe is very very big, it is not infinitely massive, and the celestial laws that govern our universe don’t pound on keyboards to create planets and their occupants.
No, I do not beleive we are the offspring of fish and monkeys. To suggest such seems to me a blatant betrayal of the incredable gift to logical reasoning that we have been given.
Not everyone who believes in an intelligent creator is stupid — it’s a belief without evidence, though, and they have to hold it on this rather optimistic idea called “faith”. It isn’t a sound foundation for rational thought, but heck, there are some smart people around who can cope despite the handicap.
However, people who whine that there is no evidence for evolution, that it is a theory based on chance, that they don’t like the idea that they are the offspring of fish and monkeys, clearly do not understand the theory they are criticizing. When they go on and on about it, compounding their ignorance with a damnably willful, arrogant refusal to learn…well, those people are stupid.
And the ones who rant about how they really are intelligent while consistently and repeatedly spelling it “intellegent”…they’re pathetically funny, too.