Posted on 05/25/2005 3:41:22 AM PDT by billorites
Science feeds on mystery. As my colleague Matt Ridley has put it: “Most scientists are bored by what they have already discovered. It is ignorance that drives them on.” Science mines ignorance. Mystery — that which we don’t yet know; that which we don’t yet understand — is the mother lode that scientists seek out. Mystics exult in mystery and want it to stay mysterious. Scientists exult in mystery for a very different reason: it gives them something to do.
Admissions of ignorance and mystification are vital to good science. It is therefore galling, to say the least, when enemies of science turn those constructive admissions around and abuse them for political advantage. Worse, it threatens the enterprise of science itself. This is exactly the effect that creationism or “intelligent design theory” (ID) is having, especially because its propagandists are slick, superficially plausible and, above all, well financed. ID, by the way, is not a new form of creationism. It simply is creationism disguised, for political reasons, under a new name.
It isn’t even safe for a scientist to express temporary doubt as a rhetorical device before going on to dispel it.
“To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.” You will find this sentence of Charles Darwin quoted again and again by creationists. They never quote what follows. Darwin immediately went on to confound his initial incredulity. Others have built on his foundation, and the eye is today a showpiece of the gradual, cumulative evolution of an almost perfect illusion of design. The relevant chapter of my Climbing Mount Improbable is called “The fortyfold Path to Enlightenment” in honour of the fact that, far from being difficult to evolve, the eye has evolved at least 40 times independently around the animal kingdom.
The distinguished Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin is widely quoted as saying that organisms “appear to have been carefully and artfully designed”. Again, this was a rhetorical preliminary to explaining how the powerful illusion of design actually comes about by natural selection. The isolated quotation strips out the implied emphasis on “appear to”, leaving exactly what a simple-mindedly pious audience — in Kansas, for instance — wants to hear.
The deceitful misquoting of scientists to suit an anti-scientific agenda ranks among the many unchristian habits of fundamentalist authors. But such Telling Lies for God (the book title of the splendidly pugnacious Australian geologist Ian Plimer) is not the most serious problem. There is a more important point to be made, and it goes right to the philosophical heart of creationism.
The standard methodology of creationists is to find some phenomenon in nature which Darwinism cannot readily explain. Darwin said: “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.” Creationists mine ignorance and uncertainty in order to abuse his challenge. “Bet you can’t tell me how the elbow joint of the lesser spotted weasel frog evolved by slow gradual degrees?” If the scientist fails to give an immediate and comprehensive answer, a default conclusion is drawn: “Right, then, the alternative theory; ‘intelligent design’ wins by default.”
Notice the biased logic: if theory A fails in some particular, theory B must be right! Notice, too, how the creationist ploy undermines the scientist’s rejoicing in uncertainty. Today’s scientist in America dare not say: “Hm, interesting point. I wonder how the weasel frog’s ancestors did evolve their elbow joint. I’ll have to go to the university library and take a look.” No, the moment a scientist said something like that the default conclusion would become a headline in a creationist pamphlet: “Weasel frog could only have been designed by God.”
I once introduced a chapter on the so-called Cambrian Explosion with the words: “It is as though the fossils were planted there without any evolutionary history.” Again, this was a rhetorical overture, intended to whet the reader’s appetite for the explanation. Inevitably, my remark was gleefully quoted out of context. Creationists adore “gaps” in the fossil record.
Many evolutionary transitions are elegantly documented by more or less continuous series of changing intermediate fossils. Some are not, and these are the famous “gaps”. Michael Shermer has wittily pointed out that if a new fossil discovery neatly bisects a “gap”, the creationist will declare that there are now two gaps! Note yet again the use of a default. If there are no fossils to document a postulated evolutionary transition, the assumption is that there was no evolutionary transition: God must have intervened.
The creationists’ fondness for “gaps” in the fossil record is a metaphor for their love of gaps in knowledge generally. Gaps, by default, are filled by God. You don’t know how the nerve impulse works? Good! You don’t understand how memories are laid down in the brain? Excellent! Is photosynthesis a bafflingly complex process? Wonderful! Please don’t go to work on the problem, just give up, and appeal to God. Dear scientist, don’t work on your mysteries. Bring us your mysteries for we can use them. Don’t squander precious ignorance by researching it away. Ignorance is God’s gift to Kansas.
Richard Dawkins, FRS, is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, at Oxford University. His latest book is The Ancestor’s Tale
"Are you asking if there's any reason, beyond accidental, for the association of specific codes with particular amino acids? There are some speculative ideas floating around about this, but little experimental evidence."
Yes, that is precisely what I'm asking - do you happen to know what any of these speculations involve?
Post-event editing cannot be ruled out in any prophetic situation. You accept that did not happen in the Bible's case, though much of it predates its actually being written down (sometime during the Babylonian exile), giving the authors plenty of leeway at creative editing. Yet you do not accept it in similar situations with other religions.
This is part of what drives me mad about 'the debate'. Both sides consistenly obscure the distinction between the three meanings of 'evolution' I mentioned in my semi-defense of Behe. The first (allele and phenotype dynamics) is simply an observable fact; the second (common descent) is plainly a solid falsifiable (a single organism with a different system of codons would suffice) scientific theory and every observation to date supports it; the last (neo-Darwinism) is the one I'm not even sure manages to be a theory (though once one vacates 'random variation' the way the definition at http://evonet.sdsc.edu/evoscisociety/what_is_evolution.htm does) and leaves natural selection as a tautology (rather than 'so formulat[ing it] as to be far from tautological') which seems to be the tendancy, lest a falsification of a particular such formulation give aid and comfort to religious obscurantists, it's a 'fact' too (but not a very interesting one), provided one drops the insistence on its completeness and sufficiency as an explanation.
Bite me.
I see you have a grasp of this argument that nearly equals your grasp of Galileo's political acumen. The proponent I spoke of argued, as I said, that the 500, not the Apostles, were mysteriously put to death by a conspiracy of some sort.
So what about the previous claim that many of them were secretly tracked down and tortured then murdered by some mysterious cabal?
Examples?
Common descent is not what it used to be. It is no longer thought by the mainstream of biological science that a single organism gave rise to all life. Which, by the way, if so, casts a serious measure of doubt on the single-system-of-codon falsification notion.
I thought you were Marilyn Monroe?
Ultimately, one would like to see a path from organism A to organism B by mutation and natural selection, with every step in between a viable organism. I'm confident eventually we will be able to reconstruct such a pathway, though we simply don't have the experimental capability of doing it yet.
I always thought Pharaoh's dream falls into this category. The Egyptians never recorded seven years of feast followed by seven years of famine. Of course, if the whole thing were written down many centuries after the fact, no one would have to bother with such piddly little details.
"Freepers don't fear the Crevos... You know that trolling is a creationist game..."
"Don't be like they are... (don't fear the crevos...)"
(Help me out here Junior.)
ah, no. Too much Discovery Channel, not enough Cell and Molecular Biology.
Remember though, Dawkins isn't someone to take seriously on evolution.
Oh dear. You think Leviticus and the Gospel of St. Matthew are consistent?
(with apologies to Blue Oyster Cult)
Darwin's time has come
Evolution now is gone
Creos don't like the theory
We're certain it's just plain wrong.
They can be like we are
Come on creos ... It's just a theory
No need to listen ... It's just a theory
Darwin's on the outs ... It's just a theory
All his links are missin'...
S. J. Gould is done
P.E. now is gone
Behe, Miller, Hovind
Will now tell us how it's done
Behe, Miller, Hovind...
Americans believe the creos ... Behe, Miller, Hovind
Americans believe the creos ... Tell us how it's done
And more are joining us everyday ... You can be like we are
Come on creos ... It's just a theory
No need to listen ... It's just a theory
Darwin's on the outs ... It's just a theory
All his links are missin'...
Evolutionary biology
Was here but now it's gone
We'll replace it with ID
Regardless if it's really wrong
We regard it as a kind of tool
It's just a wedge to get God in school
To see how many we can fool
Saying, "join the creos..."
Come on creos ... And then they came
Flocked in droves ... We ain't no slime
Turned the clock backward in time
You'll become like we are
No need for research
You'll become like we are
Come on creos ... It's just a theory
...and so a tradition was born....
Why not?
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