Posted on 10/25/2005 5:33:33 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
Because the scientific community is a monolith, impenetrable and often hostile to new theories, intelligent design proponents have to turn to the public schools to recruit support, a witness said Monday.
Testifying on behalf of the Dover Area School District in U.S. Middle District Court, philosophy of science expert Steve Fuller said intelligent design "can't spontaneously generate a following" because the scientific community shuts the door on radical views.
A sociology professor from the University of Warwick in England, Fuller said, "How do you expect any minority view to get a toe hold in science? You basically get new recruits."
As Dover's attorney Patrick Gillen questioned him, Fuller talked of intelligent design as being a possible scientific-revolution in waiting in which it challenges the "dominant paradigm" of evolutionary theory.
While he stopped short of calling for such a revolution, Fuller spoke of science's broad acceptance of "neo-Darwinian synthesis" — the unifying concepts of Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection and Gregor Mendel's theory of genetics — being a problem for competing ideas.
In the First Amendment trial, Fuller is the second expert witness to take the stand on behalf of the defense. At issue is a statement read to Dover high school biology students in which they are told that intelligent design is an alternative to evolutionary theory.
In often rapid-fire delivery that at times taxed the court reporter's stenographic skills, Fuller said intelligent design is a scientific theory that should be taught in school.
But during cross-examination, he said intelligent design — the idea that the complexity of life requires a designer — is "too young" to have developed rigorous testable formulas and sits on the fringe of science.
He suggested that perhaps scientists should have an "affirmative action" plan to help emerging ideas compete against the "dominant paradigms" of mainstream science.
The pool of peer reviewers is smaller than it has been because, as scientific research gets more and more specialized, there are fewer people in that specialty and even fewer of them are willing to peer review pieces, Fuller said. Consequently, grant money also goes to fewer researchers, he said.
"People don't want to judge the validity of a scientific theory based on who is talking about it and promoting it."
Later, outside the courthouse, Fuller said that public school science class is an appropriate setting for intelligent design in order to keep it from being "marginalized in cult status."
"I don't know where you think future scientists come from," he said.
But Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, disagreed, saying the purpose of public school education is to educate students, "not feed some theoretical pipeline."
And Nick Matzke, a spokesman for the pro-evolutionary science organization, said students need to learn established theories first before they can begin to question them.
"If a scientist was to overturn evolution they would first have to learn about it," he said. "It would have to be a revolution from within."
As a philosopher, Fuller testified he remains open to all new views, even though he maintains that at the moment, evolutionary theory is a better explanation of the biological world.
"I want to see where intelligent design is going to go," Fuller said.
Fuller also said that while intelligent design's roots are religious, so are the roots of most scientific ideas, pointing to Isaac Newton's desire to understand the natural world through God's eyes.
But there remains prejudice against intelligent design, he said.
Fuller told the court that one of the problems of science is with the very definition of "scientific theory," which is the idea of well substantiated explanations that unify a broad range of observations. He said by requiring a theory to be "well substantiated," it makes it almost impossible for an idea to be accepted scientifically. But Fuller was actually proposing the definition for hypothesis — an untested idea that is the first step toward a theory.
"Does a theory have to be well established to be scientific?" he said. "That means the dominant theory would always be."
I assume you are sugesting that belief in evolutionary theory and belief in God are incompatible. Many micro-biological scientists presently believe in God. Pope Pius believed in both God and evolutionary theory. Are you smarter than Pope Pius?
"Cult" is exactly the word for it.
The argument is rather silly, but not totally bogus, as the case of string theory shows.
My recollection is that string theory was welcomed as the solution to the problem in Feynmannology--that the two 'four point functions', one with a
Feynmann diagram that looked like a Y joined to an upside-down Y, and the
other which looked like that rotated 90 degrees had to count as the same
rather than different--and so rapidly became dominant that it, DESPITE NOT YIELDING A TESTABLE PREDICTION FOR 40 YEARS, now is an impediment to any new ideas breaking out or being funded. I challenge you to find an American university where the physics department offers enough graduate courses to form the basis for a research program in theoretical particle physics on any ground other than string theory (or its even more nebulous daughter "M-theory"). The only real competition comes from European mathematics departments where Connes' recovery of the standard model from non-commutative geometry is actually studied.
I fear that in the case of evolutionary biology, where not only critics, but many defenders of the neo-Darwinian synthesis, have strong extra-scientific commitments (Dawkins, for whom the neo-Darwinian synthesis plainly functions as an atheistic creation-myth as well as a scientific theory, springs readily to mind), the rigidity and hostility to competing theories is even worse. (The incident in which the discovery of an effect of reverse-transciptase on DNA governing immune function in some organism, I forget which, was shouted down as "Lamarkianism" shows that the viciousness of the defense of the regnant view is not confined to defense against religious obscurantists.)
However, applying the argument about the impenetrability of scientific conscensus (whether right or wrong--there have been cases of the later) to K-12 education is flat silly. How about instead a requirement that all graduate programs in the sciences hire a contrarian to critique the dominant
view of their community?
Oh, hints to ID types: ditch the a priori probability estimates (good try, Dembski, phrasing a test for design as a hypothesis test is good, but even
with the strictness orders of magnitude stronger than in standard hypothesis testing in the biological and social sciences, since the probability estimates are baseless--just like the evolutionists' occasional claims of 'inevitability given enough time'--it doesn't make the cut), ditch 'irreducible complexity', or at very least rename it (only completely random sequences are irreducibly complex in the Kolomogorov sense).
If you want a testable theory of ID, how about making a pack of testable predictions based on the assumption that intelligently designed genomes exhibit the information theoretic properties of well-written computer programs--parsimony, except when functional redundancy is beneficial; data compressibility (reducible complexity in the information theoretic sense!). . .?
Operationalize those in testable way and there you go: a scientific theory, possibly false, but a scientific theory.
(As crevo thread readers know, I'm an equal opportunity pest. Today I'm feeling grouchier about ID than about neo-Darwinism.)
Some people believe in evolution and some go with God creating the earth and some have other ideas, but what
if we allowed them all to be accepted as scientists
instead of trying to demean them as being something else.
I'm for freedom here, not for dogmatic evolution.
I sure hope you have backups of your memory stick. I've had two fail completely.
Issac Newton believed in God and he believed science explored and discovered the mechanics set in motion by God. He had observations and he derived rules describing the regularities in the observations.
Now, just as soon as ID has observations and rules describing the regularities in those observations -- in other words, as soon as ID can predict something -- it can join the world of Newton and science.
You actually want a scientific discipline which embraces all alternatives no matter how unsupported? Even the mutually exclusive ones? Sounds like a touchy-feely liberal self-esteem idea to me.
We could call it chaos theory, but it wouldn't be that organized. ;-)
Obviously scientists are created by cop shows with sociologists in them.
I'll be interested to see this cross, though it must surely be significant that Thomas More had to go to a second rate university in a foreign country to find someone who would give utterance to such balderdash.
9. Intelligent Design -- 1802-20000000000. from publication of paley's Natural Theology to publication of first experimental results.
I do. I keep copies on both my home machine and my work machine (in a folder that is backed up every night. However, the latest version's on my Data Traveller. If I lose that I lose three days worth of info.
Getting evidence would be too much to ask? Oh, that's right! You can't get evidence if your theory predicts everything, handles everything, and says nothing about what to expect.
I keep diagnostic utilities on mine for situations where a PC I'm working on can't get to the internet. I've need it twice in the last year, and both times it's failed when I needed it. When I don't really need it it works fine.
Easy. Look at the genetics of a population, then put them under selective pressure. See how well the selected group responds compared to the unselected control group. Then determine what genetic changes the selected population underwent in response to the selective pressure.
This was done to select for starvation resistance in fruit flies, and the selected population could 90% survive a starvation stress that would kill 90% of the unselected flies because all the genes for storage of lipids into the larvae were selected for in the experimental population. This is evolution through selective pressure.
No need to look at fossils.
Thanks for the ping!
This guy is a laugh a minute. The way to scientific acceptance is to get into the public schools FIRST and THEN come up with a research program 10-15 years down the road?
Some people think everything is about religion and done the way religion works. This guy thinks everything is about political movements and done the way political movements are done.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.