Intelligent Design Ruled "Not Science"

blane.bramble writes "The Register is reporting that the UK government has stated there is no place in the science curriculum for Intelligent Design and that it can not be taught as science. 'The Government is aware that a number of concerns have been raised in the media and elsewhere as to whether creationism and intelligent design have a place in science lessons. The Government is clear that creationism and intelligent design are not part of the science National Curriculum programs of study and should not be taught as science.'"

Comments

Re:How about in the US?

[Hungus]

Not going to happen: Opinion polls suggest 43 per cent of Americans believe God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years. Only 14 per cent believe humans evolved without divine involvement.

Re:Yeah, but ...

[WilliamSChips]

Go learn what a scientific theory is and then we can talk.

Re:How about in the US?

[Actually, I do RTFA]

The idiots in Kansas who got intelligent design into schools were voted out. (Although I think it took a few years.) So the system works, just slowly.

Re:Yeah, but ...

[MightyMartian]

Isn't evolution *also* pretty much just a theory at this point, like Intelligent Design?

When one conflates two different usages of the word "theory", one can come up with idiotic statements like this one. The common vernacular meaning of theory is pretty much "any ol' idea I can think up". The scientific formulation is significantly more rigorous, so that ID and evolution, while in the common vernacular, are both theories, when it comes to the scientific notion of a theory, no, they are not equivalent.

Re:When they can explain...

[Skreems]

The difference is, Intelligent Design teaches specifically that certain structures found in biological systems are too complex to have come about through macro evolution. They point to things as varied as the eye, flagella on bacterium, and a number of other things which they call "irreducibly complex", meaning that they would have no function if broken apart, and so supposedly cannot have an evolutionary pathway leading to their creation. ID has nothing to do with explaining the origins of the universe. It's an attempt to prove the involvement of a deity in the development of life on Earth.

Re:How about in the US?

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone already did: Judge John E. Jones III.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitzmiller_v._Dover_A rea_School_District

Just Science

[Wellington Grey]

While this is indeed a win, the watering down of the sciences in the UK is horrifying. I've written an article about the physics exams to try and bring some attention to this topic. On the biology side, I was shocked by the most recent GCSE paper on which the last question described an experiment on lab animals and the effect exposure of a hormone had on them. The students where then asked: ''How does this experiment contradict the theory of evolution.'' Also they are asked questions like ''Who would oppose contraception'' and they get a mark for writing ''Certain religious groups.'' It's really sad.

Ok, I'll step through this.

[jd]

First, you assume that there was ever a time when there was a nothing. The big bang is the point at which time comes into being, so there is nothing preceding it, so there is no time of nothing into which the something arrived. Thus, your whole thing of what was there before there was a time for there to be anything there doesn't mean anything. There has to be a time before there can be a something (or a nothing) to exist in it. Phew. Having got the trivial bit out the way, I'll get into the more complicated part.

Part, the second: Physics doesn't permit a nothing to exist. There is no such thing in science as "nothing". There are no "perfect vaccuum"s, except in adverts. There is a quantum foam, which consists of pairs of virtual particles whose sum total of mass and energy is zero. This is not a cheat, it is an inevitable consequence of the inescapable laws of thermodynamics which underly ALL other laws of the Universe. Besides, there's a possibility it has been observed in experiments on the Casmir Effect.

Now we get to the third part. Relativity requires that space/time curve under gravity. If you backtrack time towards the Big Bang, time bends inwards. The closer you get, the slower time subjectively is. You can never reach time zero. It's flat. The gradient is zero. There is no point from which the Big Bang erupted. Time is parabolic that early on. If there is no origin, then there is no need to explain what happened then. (This was why Professor Hawking was nervous about talking to the late Pope John Paul II - the Pope said it was ok to explore the universe, just not talk about how it originated. Hawking's talk earlier that day had shown that there was no origin to talk about.)

Next, we get to part four. Testability. The Big Bang is a verifiable hypothesis - we can create the conditions needed to create a virtual energy density necessary to inflate a bubble universe, and that has been known for many decades now. I'm not saying anything new here. Creationism and Intelligent Design is unverifiable, short of God appearing on Larry King Live, and strangely I don't see the Creationists begging Him/Her to do so. Odd, that.

(I have nothing against faith, but many who claim to have faith have nothing of the sort and I do have a great many problems with abuse of faith.)

And in other news.......

[axia777]

The Sky is Blue and Pie tastes good. Thank you Government of the UK even though I live in backwards America. Thank you for point out the obviousness of sections of OUR Governments stupidity. I hope all the Intelligent Design people back off here in America now. Yah right and next pigs will fly out of my ass....

No Before the Big Bang

[bill_mcgonigle]

What was there before the Big Bang is unknown

The statement doesn't really make sense. There was no length before the big bang, there was no width, or depth (dimensions 1-3), and there was no time (dimension #4). To ask the question requires time to exist when it didn't.

Fortunately we don't need to invoke God for every scenario where quantum reality is non-intuitive to beings whose ancestors were being chased around by dinosaurs for snackage just a cosmic handful of years ago.

Re:Both are theories

[MightyMartian]

And now we're going to have Kuhn thrown in our face. ID is not a theory, save in the vernacular definition of the word. Even Michael Behe, one of its formulators, was forced to admit it during the Dover Trial. The very few predictions that it has made have been falsified, and it is in fact used by no one in actual fields that rely upon learning about the actions of intelligent agents. You can take science or leave it if you like, but don't pretend that Intelligent Design is a scientific theory. It, in fact, rejects key lines of research that real fields of inquiry into intelligent agents attempt to answer. It explicitely refuses to answer who the Designer is, where the Designer is or was, how the Designer went about producing the designs, or even, in fact, what was designed. Now you can go around trumpeting Kuhn all you want, but any line of inquiry that explicitely refuses to answer specific questions that naturally come from investigation into the hypothesis sure doesn't sound like a useful way to gain knowledge to me.

Oh, and explain why anyone should give a damn what Kuhn says?

Re:Both are theories

[Rycross]

Intelligent Design is not a theory in the scientific meaning of the word. A scientific theory is the best explanation that fits the evidence available, and is falsifiable. What that means is that if new evidence comes to light that disproves it, then the scientific theory can be replaced with a new theory, or modified to fit the new evidence.

Intelligent Design does not meet the requirements of a scientific theory, because it is not falsifiable. Please stop claiming that evolution is a theory using the layman's definition of the term. Also, please do not claim that intelligent design is a theory unless you have a falsifiable model which fits all the evidence in place.

Re:How about in the US?

[robably]

Will someone in the US government please do the same?

Well, the reason this came up in the UK just now is because it's a response to this "e-petition" on the Downing Street web site, which only 1505 people signed, including me. To be fair, not many people know about the online petition system - it's been going for less than a year and the only time it is mentioned in the media is in passing in stories like this one. It's a system set up and run by the government, anyone can start a petition, and the site is clear and mercifully free of jargon.

Perhaps what you need to push for in the US is a similar system. Even if the only response from the government is to give a statement clarifying a point or saying it's not their job to do anything about it, it often gets in the news and that's a result.

PS. The software for the petition site is open source (see the bottom of the page).

Re:When they can explain...

[edbaskerville]

Here's the original paper.

Re:Cheap Smear

[Hatta]

This is not an example of actual evolution - there was no change to the gene pool. This is, however, like the industrial era moths, an excellent example of natural selection.

Evolution is any change in the relative frequencies of alleles in the gene pool. Natural selection is the process which drives that change.

Re:So...

[thelexx]

"...has their 'science' cured cancer yet?"

No, and neither has library science.

"Religion is for people who want to believe in fairy tales, live in trees, eat berries and die of the first trivial infection, anything else is hypocritical."

Buddhism is not a religion. It's a philosophy based on reason and experience. Which is why most Buddhists, most notably the Dalai Lama, embrace the findings of science. EVEN if they have to revise long-held thinking on something. I don't have the exact quote but I remember reading about the DL visiting some research laboratory and making a comment to that effect.

"Meanwhile, those of us in the real world will use science to improve our lives."

Which is what most, if not all given the chance, philosophical Buddhists do every day. Those practicing folk-Buddhism intertwined with local religions, superstitious traditions, ancestor worship, etc, such as in Laos and Cambodia, maybe not so much. They've got bigger problems though. Like getting clean water and food.

Bloody hell it's hard to know where to start you are so ill-informed.

Re:Hah.

[plunge]

"And even he recognized, for example (to use a beaten-to death example, at that!), that the eye was very complex and his theory did not account for it at that time."

Why do critics constantly bring this up, when all it does is display their own ignorance about Darwin? Darwin noted the complexity of the eye and how it SEEMED to refute his ideas, and THEN he DID go on to show how his theory could not only account for it, but that the remnants of many of the necessary transitional stages existed in existent life. Right or wrong, he did NOT think it was "too complex for his theory at the time."

That people think so and claim so is a telltale sign that they've only ever read the creationist quote mine, where they quote Darwin saying that the eye seems confoundingly complex... but then fail to continue the quote or note that he RIGHT AFTERWARDS discusses why theis perception is mistaken.

Re:Hah.

[SatanicPuppy]

I highly recommend reading the transcripts of Kitzmiller v Dover. It is the whole debate couched in the form of a political drama, with top notch experts on both sides.

There was not one single objection raised by the pro-ID defendant that was not utterly crushed by scientific evidence.

There is not one single ID argument that doesn't reduce to the argument from ignorance...I cited it so often, it used to be my .sig, before I moved on to other fallacies...Here it is one more time.

Argumentum ad Ignorantiam:
Fallacy of taking a statement not provably false and implying that it is therefore true

Irreducible Complexity basically states, "I don't know what is smaller than this, so it's irreducible, and therefore proof for the existence of god." It's a huge fallacy.

Anyway, read Kitzmiller. A lot of the standard ID irreducibles are reduced in there, and the judge is a character.

Re:Hah.

[Enlightenment]

See, the question "Does evolution occur?" is a very different question from "How does evolution occur?" You're trying to provide evidence that Darwin didn't have enough information, or the right background, from which to answer the second one. The first one requires only an awareness of the mechanics of heredity and the will to examine a lot of phenotypes. Genetics doesn't need to come into it.

Re:So...

[Linux_ho]

So for 2000 years, who was ahead of the game, the ones tied to the limits of their scientific knowledge, or the practitioner?

Scientific method: a body of techniques for investigating phenomena and acquiring new knowledge, as well as for correcting and integrating previous knowledge. It is based on gathering observable, empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning, the collection of data through observation and experimentation, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses.

You might say that a real scientist is always a practitioner. What you think you know based on what you heard from someone else (even someone with a reputation as a "scientist") is in some part based on faith. As you put it, "tied to the limits of their scientific knowledge." Faith in science, yes, but still faith, until you have verified it yourself.

The proper scientific attitude is "I don't know, let's check this out for ourselves, what happens when we do this?" which is, coincidentally (?) also the proper attitude recommended by Buddhist teachers. In the Kalama sutra, the Buddha said:

• Do not accept anything on mere hearsay (ie, thinking that thus have we heard it for a long time).
• Do not accept anything by mere tradition (ie, thinking that it has been handed down thus through many generations).
• Do not accept anything on account of rumours (ie, by believing what others say without any investigation).
• Do not accept anything just because it accords with your scriptures.
• Do not accept anything by mere supposition.
• Do not accept anything by mere inference.
• Do not accept anything by merely considering the appearances.
• Do not accept anything merely because it agrees with your preconceived notions.
• Do not accept anything merely because it seems acceptable (ie, should be accepted).
• Do not accept anything thinking that the teacher is respected by us (and that therefore it is right to accept his word.)

But when you know for yourselves - these things are immoral, these things are blameworthy, these things are censured by the wise, these things, when performed and undertaken, conduce to ruin and sorrow - then reject them. When you know for yourselves - these things are moral, these things are blameless, these things are praised by the wise, these things, when performed and undertaken, conduce to well-being and happiness - then live and act accordingly."

I always thought it was really interesting to see a 2600 year old tradition which teaches, "don't accept something just because it's in the scriptures -- check it out for yourself!"

Re:Hah.

[WilliamSChips]

Evolution says nothing about abiogenesis. All it says is what happened after the abiogenesis. Same with the Big Bang--all it says is what happens after the universe is created.

Re:Hah.

[henrygb]

Follow the links and you can find out that religious education is a statutory subject in English schools. So teaching about ID is quite possible, just not in science lessons.

Re:Sorry, there is no god.

[SETIGuy]

he only exists in your mind

Im assuming that such an objective, clear-headed individual such as yourself as some empirical evidence of that?

Yes, the same evidence that we all have. The same huge lack of evidence we have for the existence of ghosts, unicorns, pixies, leprochans, fire-breathing dragons, and invisible elephants under our chairs producing intestinal gases. There is insufficient evidence to believe in any of them, much like there is neither evidence of nor a purpose to believing in a creator god. And despite what some people will tell you, total lack of evidence for the existence of something, despite 10,000 years of continual searching, is pretty good evidence that the thing does not exist.

The reason I ask is because (and I speak as one of those unwashed masses I think your post was aimed at), all of the scientific theories Ive heard for the origins of the universe sound just about as implausible as the idea that a god of some sort created everything.

Sorry, there is one huge thing that makes any theory of the formation of the universe that doesn't rely on a creator infinitely more plausible than any theory involving a creator. A theory of the formation of the universe sans creator only needs to explain the existence and formation of the universe. A theory that includes a creator needs to explain both the existence and formation of the universe AND the existence and formation of a creator prior to the formation of the universe.

Re:How about in the US?

[CompMD]

I don't know what Kansas you're talking about, but the Kansas that I live in never had anyone "who got intelligent design into schools." We had a few Board of Education members that insisted upon stating that evolution was only a theory, and that there are other possible explanations for life. They also wanted stickers in biology textbooks warning students that the topic of evolution was discussed, and that they should keep an open mind to alternate theories. It was the implication of intelligent design as science that was troubling. Never was it pushed into schools. The constituents of these board members saw the potential for all kinds of issues that were inappropriate for a science classroom and rightfully voted out the troublesome board members.

Everyone who doesn't live in Kansas thinks that a few crackpots tried shoving ID down children's throats, despite the opposition of thousands of Kansans. In reality, a few crackpots tried getting their collective foot in the door to do this later on, and were successfully stopped.

Re:Hah.

[SatanicPuppy]

If there is an actual provable god, then that would be constant and consistent. That's the whole point of proof.

Listing a few tautologies that have nothing to do with anything is hardly going to persuade me that Occam is right, when we haven't even finished asking the question yet.

Re:Hah.

[DeadChobi]

Let's assume that the universe is vast enough to be considered approximately infinite in size. Then let's assume that the probability of our existance is very small, such that it's infinitesimal. Then, by the Law of Large Numbers a sufficiently large sample of planets(the universe, it's infinite remember?) should contain at least one with us on it.

This proof relegates god to the role of the die.

Re:Both are theories

[jjohnson]

By the way, you get Kuhn wrong. Kuhn did not prove that acceptance of the dominant paradigm is equivalent to faith. Faith and scientific belief are qualitatively different. Faithful belief is fundamentally unconditional, while scientific/rational belief is fundamentally conditional. All Kuhn did was demonstrate that the conditional acceptance of the dominant paradigm is beyond question for the purposes of doing "normal science"--that is, science that is premised upon the (conditional) correctness of the current paradigm.

Re:Hah.

[Hyperspite]

So... the ability to abstract is important why? Because it generates the warm fuzzies we all die for?

Re:ID

[bentcd]

This didactic line of argument itself suggests that a theory that may actually be true (and true theories aren't disprovable either) then it isn't science either. The most interesting observation would be that there may exist theories that are true, but which are not scientific theories. As an example: "God makes light curve around heavy objects because he likes the nice shiny patterns". Even if this were in actual fact true, it wouldn't be a scientific theory because there would be no way to disprove it if it were false.

Conversely, the theories that are most easily disprovable are most likely to turn to be false. This is an erroneous assumption. In fact, the truth is almost the opposite. The theory that is easily falsifiable but which has not yet been proven false is the theory that is most likely to be correct.

I recognize I am using 'disprovable' in a more literal sense than you mean. More interestingly, you appear to be using it in the sense that science is not. When science demands from a theory that it be disprovable, it has a very particular definition of disprovable in mind. It does not mean that the theory must have already been proven to be false, nor does it mean that the theory must, in actual fact, be proven false in the future. It means that it must be possible to prove that the theory is false in the event that it actually is false. In the event that the theory is true, it must still be possible, in principle, to prove it false but, of course, you can't do it in practice because the theory isn't false.

However, even more broadly, ID is disprovable if you can prove that another theory (like DE) actually occured. Scientific theories cannot be proven so this is an impossible test. It is for this very reason that one of the main tests for a scientific theory is whether or not it can be disproven - we must have some means by which to discard the theory and get on to the next, better one at some point. A non-disprovable theory will never be discarded (there are simply no criteria for doing it) and so we cannot have them around since it would gridlock any future development in the field.

Re:is this news?

[mlush]

if we spend our time to discredit the ID theory, even if we are successful, another superstitious theory will come along to capture the minds of the scientifically illiterate. The solution is not to attack individual crackpot theories, but to attempt to teach the public to recognise all of them with critical thinking and with as much scientific knowledge we can pass to them. Only by educating the public we can get rid of crackpots.

Oddly enough this is exactly what the ID lobby want to do, except they want to proselytize (as outlined by their 'Wedge strategy' .

ID is not just a crackpot theory, ID is part of a political agenda invented after the 'creationist lobby' lost Edwards v. Aguillard to Quote wikipedia Wikipedia

The overall goal of the intelligent design movement is to "overthrow materialism" and atheism. They believe that society has suffered "devastating cultural consequences" from adopting materialism and that science is the cause of this decay into materialism since science seeks only natural explanations. Science is therefore atheistic, they claim. They believe that the theory of evolution implies that humans have no spiritual nature, no moral purpose, and no intrinsic meaning. The movement's proponents seek to "defeat [the] materialist world view" represented by the theory of evolution in favor of "a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions".

Anyway publicially debating the crackpots is quite a good way of spreading critical thinking and scientific knowledge to a public who to be honest don't really care.

Re:ID

[Copid]

No, if you did find fossils of that you would simply adjust the theory of Evolution because you can't BUY that there was any other possibile explanation.

Wow, way to indict people for something they haven't done yet. It would be interesting for you to suggest the possible alteration to evolutionary theory that would keep it alive in any recognizable way after that particular observation.

Just like you said.

I predict there are fossils all over the place demonstating the gradual change from pre-human to human. Oh - that prediction failed? Hello punctuated equalibrium.

You are aware that the fossils do show a relatively "gradual" change over time, yes? Just not uniform change, which is what punctuated equilibrium deals with. If you think about it in terms of the stability of a system, it actually makes quite a lot of sense.