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."
Your analysis is completely confused. String theory does NOT dominate particle theory, it has not been around for 40 years.
I'm afraid your statement about Feynman diagrams doesn't sound familiar.
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.
That's mostly it. Once ID can be used to make predictions of the natural world, predictions that can be tested and verified (like evolution's predictions have been tested and verified). ID also needs to be observable, as evolution is. There's also the issue of falsibility - any scientific theory needs to have some potential evidence that would prove it wrong.
The problem comes when advocates of ID think they have some right to skip that step, calling it "science" when it fails the most basic tests.
Until meets those criteria, ID is not worthy of sharing a stage with any legitimate scientific theory. Then and only then will it have any place in schools outside of theology classes.
Perhaps when ID rises to the level of an hypothesis, it can generate a following.
However, would could imagine that while 2+2=4 and 2*2=4 that (2+i)+(2-i)=4 but that (2+i)*(2-i)=5, if that's not irreducibly complex.
Yeah, it's totally unfair that science should care about little things like "evidence." What about the Creationists' feelings? Don't those count as evidence?
You said: The same as
2 plus 2 =5 "can't spontaneously generate a following" because the scientific community shuts the door on radical views.
***
Very true. Just as 10 plus 10 can never equal 100. Reject any theory that says so. Gotta be radical. Throw those idiots out. Oh...wait.... what if we are in base 2? Sometimes we need to expand our thinking. Even if the theory being tendered isn't acceptable, it can lead to other concepts that are worth exploring.
You forgot the "/sarcasm" tag. People will get the wrong idea.... ;-)
Great idea, but why stop there? If we would only grant medical degrees to all Americans, then there would always be a doctor around in an emergency! Of course the quality of the care might diminish a bit, but that's not important, right?
Straight down the toilet once everyone realizes what a complete sham the whole thing is.
Free your mind and learn something about evolution (and science in general).
I'd like to see the evidence that there are no invisible pink unicorns in the universe. Surely in a debate, both sides are expected to support their points of view.
Evidence for His Noodliness the FSM is evidence that all false gods are false. (BTW, evidence for His Noodliness is everywhere.) Conversely, evidence the false gods are false is everywhere, and that's evidence for His Noodliness. QED.
Because science is about finding explanations, not asserting that explanations cannot be found.
How about ID coming up with a falsifiable test that doesn't rely on gaps in another theory? One that isn't really a test of the ToE and claim that if evolution can't explain it then ID wins by default?
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