Show Me the Science: “Is ‘intelligent design’ a legitimate school of scientific thought? Is there something to it, or have these people been taken in by one of the most ingenious hoaxes in the history of science? Wouldn’t such a hoax be impossible? No. Here’s how it has been done.”
Excellent, excellent, excellent.
Not related to this post, but did you see you’re quoted/cited in the Times again today? This time in the business section story about getting rid of AOL accounts.
I actually saw the article online, clicked on it, and was surprised to see a quote from my blog, along with attribution. It’s amazing what a journalist can do with Google these days!
Seriously, though, pretty cool, and even cooler that my quote inspired the name of the article.
No, it was actually a lousy piece. Here’s why:
It’s not true that Intelligent Design has “nothing.” What it has, from a scientific standpoint, is quite flawed, but take the ID concept of irreduceable complexity. Evolutionary biologists have a different way of explaining how all these various components came into cooperative existence, but this article would suggest that ID has no basis whatsoever in fact.
But that’s very wrong; Intelligent Design draws unscientific conclusions from scientific fact and theory. That’s an important distinction, and it’s the reason Intelligent Design does not belong in a science class, because the existence, origin and intent of the Designer is something that is at this time not testable, falsifiable or reproduceable in any sense. And in this sense, “unscientific” is not pejorative, merely semantic. Intelligent Design is an enormous leap away from Creationism, which was the denial of observable fact.
Additionally, the writer falls victim to two fatal lines of thought. One is the theologically unsound and surpassingly arrogant mindset that there couldn’t be an “intelligent” designer because human intelligence detects so many “inefficiencies” in nature. “If I were God, I would have done it this way.” That’s preposterous. I don’t care how smart anyone is, no one is omnipotent. There is structure and purpose in things beyond human conceptual capacity, and the judgment of any scientist who would suggest otherwise should be soundly questioned.
Second, the writer has a classically hypocritical viewpoint that evolution is apparently finished. He criticises the eye, for example, for these supposed inefficiencies. But if you accept evolution, then it’s an ongoing process. Anyone who really understood the concept of evolution would know better than to second guess what is clearly a work in progress. Perhaps the fact that right now our eyes have this unusual wiring system and our retinas are “upside down” will, in future generations, enable our descendants to have visual abilities that we haven’t even dreamt of…mechanisms that wouldn’t be possible if our eye were currently constructed some other way.
I admit that the people pushing Intelligent Design a) have an unsound, unhealthy, anti-American agenda for the most part, and b) don’t understand what Intelligent Design OUGHT to be. But the furor right now is caused not by people of faith, but by knee-jerk radical secularist theophobes whose worldviews are so threatened by the possibility of the divine that they rush to slander all people of faith as agenda-driven anti-science ideologues.
The furor is a reaction to those who want to teach Intelligent Design in schools. Who are these “knee-jerk radical secularist theophobes” of whom you speak?
Anyway, to be nitpicky, Dennett didn’t say that Intelligent Design has “nothing.” He said:
He’s talking about science. And as you yourself say, “Intelligent Design draws unscientific conclusions from scientific fact and theory.” Scientifically speaking, that sounds like “nothing” to me.
I see some validity in your first point, that there could be supposed inefficiencies in nature that might actually have a purpose unknown to us. But this doesn’t provide any more proof of ID or provide any less proof of outcome-blind evolution. Still, Dennett could have made his point about scientific testability without including it.
I’m not sure I get your second point, which seems future-based, and is therefore irrelevant to evolution, which merely builds on what has come before.
None of this should obscure the main point of his article, which is that the ID movement has provided no scientific experiment or testable hypothesis to compete with outcome-blind evolution. ID is based on nothing but faith, and while faith might be respectable, it ain’t science. You thankfully agree that ID isn’t science and therefore shouldn’t be taught in schools. If only everyone else in the ID movement felt the same.
I’m not sure I get your second point, which seems future-based, and is therefore irrelevant to evolution, which merely builds on what has come before.
You’re kidding, right? If evolution builds on what comes before, then what is now is prelude to what is next. Therefore, criticising our present stage of evolution as indicative of a not-very-intelligent designer, as so many have done shows a profound misunderstanding of the process and zero foresight. Sure, talking about the future is conjecture, but it’s a worthier conversation than concluding that we have flaws in our design.
The fact that it’s conjecture is precisely why it can’t be used to bolster an argument. How can you use evidence that doesn’t exist? And even if your conjecture did come true, I posit that it would still merely be due to outcome-blind evolution.
It’s clear that you and I will continue to disagree on this. But as long as we can agree to continue watching Friday night sci-fi together, that’s okay.
by knee-jerk radical secularist theophobes whose worldviews are so threatened by the possibility of the divine that they rush to slander all people of faith as agenda-driven anti-science ideologues
Well, you’ve certainly taken the high road, then?
Can I put “knee-jerk radical secularist theophobe” on a t-shirt and wear it to the next AAAS meeting?
I have to say, I have a completely different sense of where the furor lies, as a relative insider in the scientific community. I find it disconcerting low little furor we muster when confronted with the ideology of intelligent. To the vast majority of practicing scientists, intelligent design as a rebuttal of evolution is so transparently flawed that they have a hard time understanding how it might possibly have traction among non-scientists.