Do you dispute the notion that the reception of the story here would have been substantially different if the story, all other things being the same, had the word 'Democrat' rather than 'Republican'?
Perhaps in general, but I think that in this case the Slashdot reaction to government intellectual property policy would trump even its partisanship.
Simple question, then: If the trend that changed the party from what it was to what it is today started nearly 30 years ago, at what point do you decide that the Republicans of today are the actual Republicans and those of yesterday are... well... gone? We're talking about a time frame that exceeds the lifespan of a good chunk of the voting age population. I'm all for looking back on history of lessons, but I'm not exactly thinking about Abraham Lincoln's policies when I go to the voting booth these days.
And what about the many times they interfere with the rights of many?
The "rights" of the many to do what, exactly? So you have a group that protects people from unreasonable searches and restrictions on their speech, but they occasionally make people stop buying religious trinkets with public money. I'd say that on the balance, they're doing a pretty good job of making the US a better place.
They're great when they're doing something you agree with.
That's true of just about every organization. My point is if you don't agree with the majority of what they do, you're probably either not paying attention or you're missing the point of what's important about being American. Or you get all of your news about the ACLU from crackpot sites on the Internet.
You can resent that, but here's a secret: there's a 'sure bet'. Live life as a Christian. If it turns out there's no God, you've lived a good life, the people around you will thank you for it, and you can go to dust in peace. If there is a God, you'll end up in heaven instead of the other place.
Sure, that works as long as it doesn't turn out that God actually hates Christians and will torture you for all eternity for living as one. I have a strategy that makes even more sense: Just worship the nastiest most vengeful god you can think of. You wouldn't want to incur his wrath, now would you?
Instead, how about the gospel in 26 words? "God exists, He loves you, and even though you probably deserve to go to hell, He's willing to let you off if you love Him back."
I prefer the Bill Hicks version: "Eternal suffering awaits anyone who questions God's infinite love."
I agree. Were it not for christianity, we could have stronger, Roman values, and could merely justify the extermination of our enemies because they were weaker.
From the way you shaped your argument and comments you made.
Well, I suppose if we're doing armchair psychoanalysis, I could suggest that you'd rather attribute nefarious motives or personality deficiencies to somebody who disagrees with you than acknowledge the possibility that they might do so for legitimate reasons. But that wouldn't be very nice.
Their claims that the point of evolution being wrong is no different then the claims that ID is wrong.
I'm not claiming that ID is "wrong" so much as that thus far, it amounts to nothing more than "evolutionary theory is wrong." That, in and of itself, is not an invalid position to take. It just isn't a whole new branch of science like the ID proponents are trying to sell it as. If they would go so far as to make a single positive, testable claim, then I'd be the first in line to call it science. As it stands, though, it's still just the null hypothesis. Criticism of a theory is not a theory in and of itself.
If your pissed that actual science will have to be done in order to prove the current scientific model to be the most accurate, then get over it. That is what science is about.
No, I'm simply pissed that we have a group of people pointing to deficiencies in our understanding and calling it a "theory" and then getting angry when people are unimpressed.
The concept of an intelligent design doesn't have to be a spiritual or godly one. It could be almost anything.
That's the problem. The "theory" posits no mechanisms, no creator, no properties of creation, no timeline, nothing. I'll disagree with some scientists and say that ID is, in principle, testable and potentially a scientific hypothesis. In order to make it happen, though, they're going to actually have to make and test some solid claims.
You seem to be focused on the entire creation connection as if it is more important to disclaim any possible connection to a creation then it is to discover the truth. That too is bad science.
You miss my point. There are distinctions to be made between two different claims. The first is that ID is good science being suppressed. The second is that ID should be taught in schools. The fact is that ID (for whatever reason) has produced no meaningful scientific results. That's a strong knock against it when it comes to getting it into a primary school curriculum. Combine that with the fact that the people who are pushing it are clearly pushing it for religious reasons rather than scientific ones, and you have an obvious failure of the Lemon test.
I am not the only person to make the connection between the reluctance of most high-profile ID supporters to make clear statements of their "theories" of ID and the fact that ID only had a fighting chance of getting into schools if they could distance themselves from biblical creationism. Sure, there are probably some people who are honestly trying to formulate a scientific theory of ID. Those people should be addressed when they get there. Until then, the movers and shakers are, by all appearances, a PR operation and not a scientific one.
lol.. Isn't that the point of this movie? When people (real live scientist) want to investigate it an do the work that you are asking for as proof, they are getting fired and blackballed from the field.
Well, the point of the movie is that and, "We're not blaming the Holocaust on Darwin, but Darwin totally caused the Holocaust." Frankly, I'm skeptical of their claims because the concrete examples they've come up with have been bullshit. Sternberg, who Stein calls "The most egregious case," has experienced no more negative repercussions than being scolded by his colleagues for what was an obvious ethical breech in the peer review process. For all the claims of persecution a
It is obvious that you appear threatened by the thought that they could be right which explains your position somewhat.
Why would you say that?
But here is the situation as we have it now, if Evolution is the result of some other natural mechanism, we will never know it because the current debate consists of a "i said so, so this is the way it is".
You clearly don't spend much time following the actual work of evolutionary biologists. There's a lot of discussion and debate on all manner questions about the evolution of complex systems and the origin of life. They're not just hanging around and collecting paychecks while figuring out how to persecute Behe and Dembski. The picture you're drawing of the biological research community is simply not an accurate one.
I don't understand why you are insisting victory by default.
Because the intelligent design camp has made absolutely no positive claims that aren't simply framed as evolutionary theory being wrong. They're merely presenting the false dilemma that if evolutionary theory doesn't explain it, then it must be intelligently designed. If you can suggest a single positive, objectively testable claim that they make, I'm all ears.
But the framing of your questioning tells me that you don't even comprehend then claims being made by the ID camp. How do you pretend to be authoritative enough to speak against it if you won't invest the time and effort to argue against the arguments being made?
I have to tell you that the evolution / creationism (now...err..."intelligent design") debate has been something I've followed closely for years. I'll gladly stack my reading list against yours on this one any day. As far as I can tell, the arguments that are being made generally boil down to personal incredulity or, if we're lucky, mathematical hand-waving with questionable assumptions. I'm going to have to skip over your car analogy as it doesn't make the slightest bit of sense to me.
You see, It isn't that evolution wouldn't happen on it's own or without inteligence assisting it, it's that certain complexed parts of it are too complexed to happen naturally by chance.
I appreciate that. My point is that they're simply asserting it and doing very little in terms of real work to support the point.
As for the winning by default, it is simple, find a way to verify that it could happen without an intelligent assist.
That's a big "it" in this case. The flagellum? The immune system? Blood clotting? There is a nearly infinite supply of examples. And progress is being made. Behe's points on these have been answered with possible theoretical pathways. Does that falsify ID? Certainly not. There are always examples of work not yet done and problems not yet solved, and history has shown that if a pathway is suggested for one feature, the ID crowd simply picks up a new feature to harp on. ID simply lives in those crevices that evolutionary hasn't filled in yet. That's why it's not a proper theory of its own but rather a glorified null hypothesis.
I think you are confused. They have been rejected from schools because of a connection to the cheerleaders on the side lines.
I think that you're the confused one on this point. If you look back on the creationism in schools controversy over the past 30 years or so, you'll find the same players cropping up over and over again. There are certainly some legitimate players who honestly think that ID will move in as a theory, but the real power players who are pushing these things into schools are the cdesign proponentsists who have been around since day one, trying to find a legal way of getting creationism into schools. Replace "God" with "designer"
All proposed ones, whenever proposed, as the processes of science would dictate. Same answer for "how many" times any scientific theory should be tested for proposed atypical contexts.
Personally, I'm not satisfied that all stars glow because of fusion. Until each and every one of them has been tested, I will assume that some of them burn marshmallows. I will take every instance of an astronomer doing something other than testing these things for me as evidence in support of my position. Or, I could *start doing my own damn work* and investigate the topic further myself rather than complain because people are starting to think I'm crank.
Behe is suggesting that something called an irreducibly complex system exists. Many people have discussed reasons to believe that no such system exists. Perhaps if Behe actually explored his topics a little bit rather than simply tossing out examples of things that look complex to him, people would take him more seriously. People have played Behe's whack-a-mole game for years now, and no system has been shown to be irreducibly complex. If you play the game that way, at some point, people are going to stop believing that you have something interesting to say and move on. Declaring victory at that point is just stupid.
Yes, why not? If nothing else, it would add to our understanding of evolution tremendously. Saying science should only investigate some, for a while, seems ludicrous to me.
Why not? Because we could posit an infinite number of such challenges, and because responding to them seems to elicit nothing more than jeers of "Not good enough!" and "Just-so story!" from the challengers. Look, it's not as if evolutionary biologists aren't trying to understand the evolution of complex systems every day with or without Behe's comments from the peanut gallery. My point is this: Every time they find another interesting answer and result, it's a little more evidence that there are no IC systems. At what point does Behe's stuff stop being an interesting critique of evolution and start being philosophical wanking with no real results to back it up? It's certainly not getting any better, because while biologists are working to close those gaps in our understanding, Behe is doing essentially no work actually supporting his hypothesis.
Incidentally, there is no "god of the gaps argument", only Dawkins', and your, irrational failure to understand what a false dichotomy fallacy is, as you propose such a characterization as meaningful.
I have to admit that my jaw practically hit the floor when I heard somebody supporting intelligent design actually accuse somebody of failing to notice a false dichotomy. The whole existence of ID "theory" is a false dichotomy. There is no positive evidence for intelligent design. It exists entirely as, "Evolution can't explain this, therefore intelligent design is true." The fact that nobody has made any positive, testable claims based on ID is evidence to that end. And no, "Your theory doesn't explain this, so my theory wins by default" is *not* a positive, testable claim. That's why we call it god-in-the-gaps. ID simply seeks to occupy the spaces we don't know the answer to yet. Its domain gets smaller and smaller as time goes on, and it will continue to do so until they start actually making some meaningful contributions.
My understanding of the ID is simply that certain complexed structure of life couldn't have randomly happened so it was by design of some intelligent being.
Which, in and of itself, is kind of a silly leap. There could be a natural mechanism other than the ones that we currently believe drive evolution that explains the same thing. ID amounts to "Evolution is wrong, so we win by default" in that case. How on earth did they get to claim the null hypothesis as their own and then try to sell it as some sort of new science?
The point is that they claim X couldn't happen in it's own which is why the design was needed.
Accepting, for the sake of argument, that they do get to occupy the set of "~evolution" and claim victory by default, they'll need to give some compelling arguments as to why evolution couldn't happen on its own. There hasn't been a lot of work done there that doesn't simply boil down to personal incredulity. Why are the current extrapolations invalid?
So I suggest that we spend a little less time rejecting something out of hand because of the cheerleaders in the side lines and explore the possibilities and perhaps the scientific validity of claims. Especially the claims that something couldn't happen naturally without a push from an intelligent being.
I don't think that there's much evidence for the claims being rejected out of hand in the scientific community. There has been a lot of discussion in detail on the topic. They have been rejected out of hand from public schools, but that's because what their claims 1) Don't really amount to science at this point, 2) Have produced no results worthy of peer review, and 3) Tend to be a transparently obvious repackaging of old creationist canards being sold by people who, until recently, were selling biblical creationism.
If, for example, Dembski ever gets around to actually calculating the amount of "complex specified information" in something or Behe suggests a testable mechanism for how this supposed intelligent designer intervened to create the flagellum and produces some surprising results, they'll probably start making some headway with the scientific community. Since they haven't even bothered to go that far, I don't see how they can claim persecution based on the simple fact that they're not being rewarded for work they haven't done and results they haven't produced.
If you could make a career in science by positing vague, untestable hypotheses and then claiming that failures in the work of others supports your own, I suspect that there would be a lot more people lining up for jobs in academia. As it stands, results matter. The persecution card will only get you so far if you don't produce any.
Well, yeah, presuming your conclusion is neat and all...and true, we usually call a moratorium on testing theories in science after about a dozen tries, but perhaps in this particular case we can make an exception.
You didn't answer my question. How many failed attempts to posit an irreducibly complex system should we bother looking into before we start realizing that it's unlikely that any such systems exist? There are substantive arguments against IC in theory, not least of which is the fact that it seems to be nothing more than a simple god-in-the-gaps argument. Should we go through every biological system in existence and posit a theoretical pathway to get there and prove by exhaustion that no such systems exist? Should we read the light spectrum of every star in the visible universe just in case there are some that aren't operating via nuclear fusion, or are only the first hundred billion enough?
I would be much more inclined to see Behe's work as something of substance if he could address some of the logical arguments presented against it in theory rather than throwing out examples of things that aren't fully understood and then declaring victory when no other scientist does his research for him. The ID crowd in general seems to think that by claiming the null hypothesis as their own that they're doing significant work. That's not how it's done.
But that's the point, in this case - there's no objection to evolution, just that that was God's plan all along... being agnostic, I believe if there is a God then you'd think it would have been his plan... or experiment, to see what evolved.
Should physics teachers have to say, "F = ma, and some people believe that F = ma because God willed it to be so"? What's the point of introducing the topic if not to stroke somebody's irrelevant religious insecurities?
I just don't see the big deal... I wouldn't teach it in my classroom (if I were a teacher), but if someone asked "Couldn't God have guided evolution?" I'd say "Sure... he could have, but since we have no scientific facts to prove it one way or another, it's merely conjecture and can't be used as evidence of anything."
I don't think that anybody is advocating smacking down kids who ask the question. I'm simply saying that there's no reason for the instructor or the textbook to bring up such things unnecessarily, especially when those efforts seem devoted specifically to casting doubt on one particular field of study.
I haven't seen the movie, so I don't know if this was the focal point or not.
I have. There's no shortage of it.
But if it was, then it would be fair to say that the movie is trying to draw parallels between scientists who subscribe to Darwinism and the Nazi officials who used Darwinism to justify ethnic cleansing.
Which is sort of why it's a grossly offensive pile of bullshit. That's my point.
Of course, since we know that the Nazis were wrong, it may be an indication that the modern scientists who think along similar lines are also wrong. I really have to see the movie before I can say what is going on here. But you can't apply Goodwin's law to every use of the word Nazi, and it's important to realize that.
No, not exactly. "Scientists are wrong about the correctness of evolutionary theory" does not, in any way, follow from, "Nazis were wrong to commit genocide." There is no meaningful analogy or cause and effect relationship. The reasoning is broken from the outset. It makes no more sense than trying to discredit gravity based on a cult that believes that a moral imperative to drop bricks on babies follows from it.
Godwin's law applies when you make a ridiculous comparison to Nazis in an attempt to discredit somebody. It's spot on in this case.
But if X was used to justify Y, then it may mean that Y follows logically from X, no? That's usually how a justification works.
No, not at all. If the justification is completely broken (evolution => genocide), then the consequent doesn't follow. The fact that one can apply broken logic to true statements to come to a ridiculous conclusion doesn't mean that the ridiculous conclusion follows from those statements. If it did, the holocaust would also have followed logically from Christianity. I wonder how many fans of Expelled would swallow that one.
Further, even if it was the case that evolutionary theory somehow caused the holocaust, it has absolutely no effect on the correctness of the theory or whether or not it makes sense for the scientific community to support it. The atomic bomb followed from relativity. The atomic bomb caused deaths of lots of innocent people. Therefore, we should question the veracity of the theory of relativity? No, that's not right. Therefore, the people who support the theory of relativity are war mongers? No... Therefore the people who crusade against relativity aren't being given a fair shake in academia?
I'm just not seeing it. Given the people behind the film, it's far easier to believe that this is just a naked case of well-poisoning designed to pander to their chosen audience: people with limited critical thinking skills who are unfamiliar with the subject matter.
So how do you prove that something was designed? What kind of evidence would be convincing to you?
Well, Dembski makes quite a lot of noise about "explanatory filters" and "specified complexity" and other such handwavy mathematical nonsense. If he could actually come up with The Dembski Test for Complexity and Design and apply it to some strings of information, my ears would start to perk up. Succeeding in a few double-blind tests for design on known cases would be mighty impressive. Right now, he has lots of proofs with very few definitions. Not a good place to be.
"ID" predicts that a designer created complex organisms with complex components. These components would often bear resemblance to each other, being a "good design".
Why? Why would the designer not make each organism unique with its own special set of components? ID in general says nothing to that effect.
If we want to start characterizing the designer (what are the designer's goals, mechanisms, timelines, etc.), then you'll have yourself something to go forward with. A properly specified designer with some meaningful restrictions on its methods would indeed be a workable scientific hypothesis.
The ID crowd tends to be pretty quiet about the details, though, because for most of them, their hypothesis would slowly turn into the Christian creation myth. If that gets out, you can't just jam it into primary school textbooks. You're stuck actually having to do the research necessary to get it published. Right now, they're stuck keeping it vague enough not to be religion, but that also ends up making it vague enough not to be testable in any meaningful way.
I think you may have missed what the point of the movie was. The point Stein was trying to make is that if researchers try to investigate ID, they are silenced by being "expelled" or what have you. It's rather hard to present tested hypotheses about ID when you are fired for even considering them.
But the movie doesn't really cover any such examples. Further, it would seem that people like Behe, who are working from behind the protective curtain of tenure, would have gotten some meaningful work done. They haven't. Why not?
The idea that suspension of physical laws by divine intervention can invalidate any sort of science isn't really groundbreaking. I'd buy into it more if the theories that restrict themselves to natural causes didn't work so amazingly well. For example, the notable lack of evidence for a worldwide flood could be explained by a miraculous erasure of the evidence (including, apparently, a significant portion of the water, even if it did come from underground), or it could be that there was no worldwide flood.
The most obvious example that I can think of is the first graph on this page. It's a beautifully straight line. Why? It could be a miracle, sure, but why would such a miracle have taken place? If we allow ourselves to believe that, why not simply accept last-Thursdayism and call it a day? On what rational basis can we distinguish between hypotheses that defy reason?
Actually if you watch the film Stein does not necessarily believe in ID. He simple is wondering why so many scientists are so religious about evolution.
Well, that and tarring a perfectly good scientific theory with guilt-by-association tactics and repeated references to the holocaust, but why throw the baby out with the bathwater?
Of couse its only a book, because the scientific journals wouldn't accept it.
Where were they submitted? What were the reasons for rejection? That's the point I'm trying to make. There are lots of claims of persecution and not a lot of evidence that any real work was actually done to get the work published. It's a lot easier to make a bunch of money by playing the victim to the popular press than by taking your rejection letters, improving your work, and laboring in obscurity to get your results into the mainstream like normal scientists to.
That being said, Behe has not managed to respond substantively to some very basic critiques of his idea (above and beyond the fact that it's clearly just the same god-in-the-gaps that has been applied to just about everything else until we figured out the answers).
The first is that irreducibility necessarily assumes that to get to a system with N parts, a part is added to a system with N-1 parts. Behe assumes that if we can enumerate all possible systems with N-1 parts, we can show that a destination with N parts is impossible to reach. He ignores the set of systems with N+1 parts entirely. It's like seeing a climber who has climbed himself down into a trap and claiming that he couldn't possibly be here because there was no way to climb *up* into that position.
The second is the simple fact that Behe goes back and forth between two positions, depending on what part of the argument he's addressing. On its face, irreducible complexity amounts to, "If a system is irreducibly complex, then there is no possible path for evolution to produce it." Then, when somebody posits a theoretical path, he immediately moves to, "Sure, but you didn't prove that it did happen that way. It's a just-so story!" completely ignoring the fact that it devastates his original claim that there is no theoretical way for it to get there.
Third, there are good reasons to believe that there is no way to show definitively that a system is irreducibly complex. It simply amounts to, "We haven't figured it out yet." I will gladly concede that Behe is the Isaac Newton of the branch of "We haven't figured it out yet" science, but that doesn't really get you into the journals with any regularity.
Basically, Behe has raised some interesting questions, but they are in no way devastating or even really able to add something meaningful to the body of knowledge, and he hasn't really done anything to flesh out his work. I would be interested in seeing what form his ideas take that he thinks would be novel and publishable, but I doubt that he has made any such thing public. The fact that he's demonstrably not keeping up with the literature or testing his hypothesis is just icing on the cake.
ID falsification: Refute all proposed irreducibly complex structures, once they are enumerated.
So basically, fill in all the gaps that are currently filled by god-in-the-gaps. How many IC moles need to be whacked before we conclude that the idea of irreducible complexity is flawed at its outset?
The problem with the ID hypothesis is that it amounts to, "Somewhere, at some point in history (or maybe continuously throughout history), some entity of some sort applied some sort of intelligence to life using an undescribed mechanism, changing it in an unspecified way by adding an unmeasurable type of complexity/information to it." Until somebody can make that pile of jelly firm enough to nail to the wall, I don't think that you'll see many people making the attempt.
But as the trailer points out, people have done the research (no idea if its correct) but the second they try to publish it, the Darwinans label them crackpots and shot out: "Its not Darwinism, so its wrong"
Where are the papers? Show us the papers! Until then, it's all just unsubstantiated whining.
Nice ploy. Just move the issue, then. "Oh, you see, that's a separate branch of study." Evolution, without explaining the origin of life, is like buying a half-eaten doughnut.
Does the same failing apply to Newton's work for not explaining the origin of matter?
Godwins is not applicable in this context, because the movie's claim that the Nazis used Darwins theory to justify the extermination of the jews (and other parts of their ugenics program) is true. The theory of evolution was the "rational" and "scientific" basis of ugenics.
Let's take this to be true for the moment. My simple question is, why was this a main focal point for the movie? It seems a rather disparate set of points to be making. The movie supposedly about how ID is not being given a fair shake. Why throw in the additional Nazi references if not simply as an attempt to poison the well? Frankly, it seems to me to be simply another anti-evolution argument meant for those with no intellectual gag-reflex.
Also, it's important to note that there is a huge difference between, "X was used to justify Y," and, "Y follows from X."
At any rate, isn't the whole point of the Ben Stein movie that regardless of the veracity of Brown's statements it'll never get into the "scientific body of knowledge" because the gatekeepers disagree?
It also doesn't help that Brown and company prefer to publish books for the popular press than actually try to get their work through peer review. Not getting into the mainstream of science becomes a rather self-fulfilling prophecy in those cases.
Slashdot Mirror
Simple question, then: If the trend that changed the party from what it was to what it is today started nearly 30 years ago, at what point do you decide that the Republicans of today are the actual Republicans and those of yesterday are... well... gone? We're talking about a time frame that exceeds the lifespan of a good chunk of the voting age population. I'm all for looking back on history of lessons, but I'm not exactly thinking about Abraham Lincoln's policies when I go to the voting booth these days.
That's true of just about every organization. My point is if you don't agree with the majority of what they do, you're probably either not paying attention or you're missing the point of what's important about being American. Or you get all of your news about the ACLU from crackpot sites on the Internet.
Well, I suppose if we're doing armchair psychoanalysis, I could suggest that you'd rather attribute nefarious motives or personality deficiencies to somebody who disagrees with you than acknowledge the possibility that they might do so for legitimate reasons. But that wouldn't be very nice.
I'm not claiming that ID is "wrong" so much as that thus far, it amounts to nothing more than "evolutionary theory is wrong." That, in and of itself, is not an invalid position to take. It just isn't a whole new branch of science like the ID proponents are trying to sell it as. If they would go so far as to make a single positive, testable claim, then I'd be the first in line to call it science. As it stands, though, it's still just the null hypothesis. Criticism of a theory is not a theory in and of itself.
No, I'm simply pissed that we have a group of people pointing to deficiencies in our understanding and calling it a "theory" and then getting angry when people are unimpressed.
That's the problem. The "theory" posits no mechanisms, no creator, no properties of creation, no timeline, nothing. I'll disagree with some scientists and say that ID is, in principle, testable and potentially a scientific hypothesis. In order to make it happen, though, they're going to actually have to make and test some solid claims.
You miss my point. There are distinctions to be made between two different claims. The first is that ID is good science being suppressed. The second is that ID should be taught in schools. The fact is that ID (for whatever reason) has produced no meaningful scientific results. That's a strong knock against it when it comes to getting it into a primary school curriculum. Combine that with the fact that the people who are pushing it are clearly pushing it for religious reasons rather than scientific ones, and you have an obvious failure of the Lemon test.
I am not the only person to make the connection between the reluctance of most high-profile ID supporters to make clear statements of their "theories" of ID and the fact that ID only had a fighting chance of getting into schools if they could distance themselves from biblical creationism. Sure, there are probably some people who are honestly trying to formulate a scientific theory of ID. Those people should be addressed when they get there. Until then, the movers and shakers are, by all appearances, a PR operation and not a scientific one.
Well, the point of the movie is that and, "We're not blaming the Holocaust on Darwin, but Darwin totally caused the Holocaust." Frankly, I'm skeptical of their claims because the concrete examples they've come up with have been bullshit. Sternberg, who Stein calls "The most egregious case," has experienced no more negative repercussions than being scolded by his colleagues for what was an obvious ethical breech in the peer review process. For all the claims of persecution a
Why would you say that?
You clearly don't spend much time following the actual work of evolutionary biologists. There's a lot of discussion and debate on all manner questions about the evolution of complex systems and the origin of life. They're not just hanging around and collecting paychecks while figuring out how to persecute Behe and Dembski. The picture you're drawing of the biological research community is simply not an accurate one.
Because the intelligent design camp has made absolutely no positive claims that aren't simply framed as evolutionary theory being wrong. They're merely presenting the false dilemma that if evolutionary theory doesn't explain it, then it must be intelligently designed. If you can suggest a single positive, objectively testable claim that they make, I'm all ears.
I have to tell you that the evolution / creationism (now...err..."intelligent design") debate has been something I've followed closely for years. I'll gladly stack my reading list against yours on this one any day. As far as I can tell, the arguments that are being made generally boil down to personal incredulity or, if we're lucky, mathematical hand-waving with questionable assumptions. I'm going to have to skip over your car analogy as it doesn't make the slightest bit of sense to me.
I appreciate that. My point is that they're simply asserting it and doing very little in terms of real work to support the point.
That's a big "it" in this case. The flagellum? The immune system? Blood clotting? There is a nearly infinite supply of examples. And progress is being made. Behe's points on these have been answered with possible theoretical pathways. Does that falsify ID? Certainly not. There are always examples of work not yet done and problems not yet solved, and history has shown that if a pathway is suggested for one feature, the ID crowd simply picks up a new feature to harp on. ID simply lives in those crevices that evolutionary hasn't filled in yet. That's why it's not a proper theory of its own but rather a glorified null hypothesis.
I think that you're the confused one on this point. If you look back on the creationism in schools controversy over the past 30 years or so, you'll find the same players cropping up over and over again. There are certainly some legitimate players who honestly think that ID will move in as a theory, but the real power players who are pushing these things into schools are the cdesign proponentsists who have been around since day one, trying to find a legal way of getting creationism into schools. Replace "God" with "designer"
Behe is suggesting that something called an irreducibly complex system exists. Many people have discussed reasons to believe that no such system exists. Perhaps if Behe actually explored his topics a little bit rather than simply tossing out examples of things that look complex to him, people would take him more seriously. People have played Behe's whack-a-mole game for years now, and no system has been shown to be irreducibly complex. If you play the game that way, at some point, people are going to stop believing that you have something interesting to say and move on. Declaring victory at that point is just stupid.
Why not? Because we could posit an infinite number of such challenges, and because responding to them seems to elicit nothing more than jeers of "Not good enough!" and "Just-so story!" from the challengers. Look, it's not as if evolutionary biologists aren't trying to understand the evolution of complex systems every day with or without Behe's comments from the peanut gallery. My point is this: Every time they find another interesting answer and result, it's a little more evidence that there are no IC systems. At what point does Behe's stuff stop being an interesting critique of evolution and start being philosophical wanking with no real results to back it up? It's certainly not getting any better, because while biologists are working to close those gaps in our understanding, Behe is doing essentially no work actually supporting his hypothesis.
I have to admit that my jaw practically hit the floor when I heard somebody supporting intelligent design actually accuse somebody of failing to notice a false dichotomy. The whole existence of ID "theory" is a false dichotomy. There is no positive evidence for intelligent design. It exists entirely as, "Evolution can't explain this, therefore intelligent design is true." The fact that nobody has made any positive, testable claims based on ID is evidence to that end. And no, "Your theory doesn't explain this, so my theory wins by default" is *not* a positive, testable claim. That's why we call it god-in-the-gaps. ID simply seeks to occupy the spaces we don't know the answer to yet. Its domain gets smaller and smaller as time goes on, and it will continue to do so until they start actually making some meaningful contributions.
Accepting, for the sake of argument, that they do get to occupy the set of "~evolution" and claim victory by default, they'll need to give some compelling arguments as to why evolution couldn't happen on its own. There hasn't been a lot of work done there that doesn't simply boil down to personal incredulity. Why are the current extrapolations invalid?
I don't think that there's much evidence for the claims being rejected out of hand in the scientific community. There has been a lot of discussion in detail on the topic. They have been rejected out of hand from public schools, but that's because what their claims 1) Don't really amount to science at this point, 2) Have produced no results worthy of peer review, and 3) Tend to be a transparently obvious repackaging of old creationist canards being sold by people who, until recently, were selling biblical creationism.
If, for example, Dembski ever gets around to actually calculating the amount of "complex specified information" in something or Behe suggests a testable mechanism for how this supposed intelligent designer intervened to create the flagellum and produces some surprising results, they'll probably start making some headway with the scientific community. Since they haven't even bothered to go that far, I don't see how they can claim persecution based on the simple fact that they're not being rewarded for work they haven't done and results they haven't produced.
If you could make a career in science by positing vague, untestable hypotheses and then claiming that failures in the work of others supports your own, I suspect that there would be a lot more people lining up for jobs in academia. As it stands, results matter. The persecution card will only get you so far if you don't produce any.
I would be much more inclined to see Behe's work as something of substance if he could address some of the logical arguments presented against it in theory rather than throwing out examples of things that aren't fully understood and then declaring victory when no other scientist does his research for him. The ID crowd in general seems to think that by claiming the null hypothesis as their own that they're doing significant work. That's not how it's done.
I don't think that anybody is advocating smacking down kids who ask the question. I'm simply saying that there's no reason for the instructor or the textbook to bring up such things unnecessarily, especially when those efforts seem devoted specifically to casting doubt on one particular field of study.
Which is sort of why it's a grossly offensive pile of bullshit. That's my point.
No, not exactly. "Scientists are wrong about the correctness of evolutionary theory" does not, in any way, follow from, "Nazis were wrong to commit genocide." There is no meaningful analogy or cause and effect relationship. The reasoning is broken from the outset. It makes no more sense than trying to discredit gravity based on a cult that believes that a moral imperative to drop bricks on babies follows from it.
Godwin's law applies when you make a ridiculous comparison to Nazis in an attempt to discredit somebody. It's spot on in this case.
No, not at all. If the justification is completely broken (evolution => genocide), then the consequent doesn't follow. The fact that one can apply broken logic to true statements to come to a ridiculous conclusion doesn't mean that the ridiculous conclusion follows from those statements. If it did, the holocaust would also have followed logically from Christianity. I wonder how many fans of Expelled would swallow that one.
Further, even if it was the case that evolutionary theory somehow caused the holocaust, it has absolutely no effect on the correctness of the theory or whether or not it makes sense for the scientific community to support it. The atomic bomb followed from relativity. The atomic bomb caused deaths of lots of innocent people. Therefore, we should question the veracity of the theory of relativity? No, that's not right. Therefore, the people who support the theory of relativity are war mongers? No... Therefore the people who crusade against relativity aren't being given a fair shake in academia?
I'm just not seeing it. Given the people behind the film, it's far easier to believe that this is just a naked case of well-poisoning designed to pander to their chosen audience: people with limited critical thinking skills who are unfamiliar with the subject matter.
If we want to start characterizing the designer (what are the designer's goals, mechanisms, timelines, etc.), then you'll have yourself something to go forward with. A properly specified designer with some meaningful restrictions on its methods would indeed be a workable scientific hypothesis.
The ID crowd tends to be pretty quiet about the details, though, because for most of them, their hypothesis would slowly turn into the Christian creation myth. If that gets out, you can't just jam it into primary school textbooks. You're stuck actually having to do the research necessary to get it published. Right now, they're stuck keeping it vague enough not to be religion, but that also ends up making it vague enough not to be testable in any meaningful way.
The idea that suspension of physical laws by divine intervention can invalidate any sort of science isn't really groundbreaking. I'd buy into it more if the theories that restrict themselves to natural causes didn't work so amazingly well. For example, the notable lack of evidence for a worldwide flood could be explained by a miraculous erasure of the evidence (including, apparently, a significant portion of the water, even if it did come from underground), or it could be that there was no worldwide flood.
The most obvious example that I can think of is the first graph on this page. It's a beautifully straight line. Why? It could be a miracle, sure, but why would such a miracle have taken place? If we allow ourselves to believe that, why not simply accept last-Thursdayism and call it a day? On what rational basis can we distinguish between hypotheses that defy reason?
That being said, Behe has not managed to respond substantively to some very basic critiques of his idea (above and beyond the fact that it's clearly just the same god-in-the-gaps that has been applied to just about everything else until we figured out the answers).
The first is that irreducibility necessarily assumes that to get to a system with N parts, a part is added to a system with N-1 parts. Behe assumes that if we can enumerate all possible systems with N-1 parts, we can show that a destination with N parts is impossible to reach. He ignores the set of systems with N+1 parts entirely. It's like seeing a climber who has climbed himself down into a trap and claiming that he couldn't possibly be here because there was no way to climb *up* into that position.
The second is the simple fact that Behe goes back and forth between two positions, depending on what part of the argument he's addressing. On its face, irreducible complexity amounts to, "If a system is irreducibly complex, then there is no possible path for evolution to produce it." Then, when somebody posits a theoretical path, he immediately moves to, "Sure, but you didn't prove that it did happen that way. It's a just-so story!" completely ignoring the fact that it devastates his original claim that there is no theoretical way for it to get there.
Third, there are good reasons to believe that there is no way to show definitively that a system is irreducibly complex. It simply amounts to, "We haven't figured it out yet." I will gladly concede that Behe is the Isaac Newton of the branch of "We haven't figured it out yet" science, but that doesn't really get you into the journals with any regularity.
Basically, Behe has raised some interesting questions, but they are in no way devastating or even really able to add something meaningful to the body of knowledge, and he hasn't really done anything to flesh out his work. I would be interested in seeing what form his ideas take that he thinks would be novel and publishable, but I doubt that he has made any such thing public. The fact that he's demonstrably not keeping up with the literature or testing his hypothesis is just icing on the cake.
The problem with the ID hypothesis is that it amounts to, "Somewhere, at some point in history (or maybe continuously throughout history), some entity of some sort applied some sort of intelligence to life using an undescribed mechanism, changing it in an unspecified way by adding an unmeasurable type of complexity/information to it." Until somebody can make that pile of jelly firm enough to nail to the wall, I don't think that you'll see many people making the attempt.
Also, it's important to note that there is a huge difference between, "X was used to justify Y," and, "Y follows from X."