Output Stream of Consciousness

Link: http://soundingtrumpet.weblogs.us/2006/03/30/intelligent-design-proponent-coming-to-cornell

I just had to link to the comments over on Sounding the Trumpet because I've been extraordinarily wordy in there, and occasionally lucid

The two interesting personalities over there are 'High School Student' and Wayne Hollyoak. Wish we'd seen more of 'High School Student'; they seemed interesting and willing to throw back questions for a proper response.

Since there's no telling how much longer the thread will be preserved over there (though it has so far), I'll pull out the full excerpts here:

# high school student Says:
April 1st, 2006 at 1:22 am

I’m no scientist or anything but I’ve been taught biology 11 and evolution. I’m going to state two proven laws that contradict evolution from what I have learned

First is the modern cell theory, which states:
1.All organisms are made up of cells.
2. New cells are always produced from pre-existing cells
3. The cell is a structural and functional unit of all living things.
4.The cell contains hereditary information, which is passed on from cell to cell during cell division.
5. All cells are basically the same in chemical composition and metabolic activities.

Evolution is stating is that a cell came from a bunch on non-living chemicals. The cell theory says that new cells always come form pre-existing cells.

Second is the law of thermodynamics Which states that natural process over time go to disorder. Which are obvious as we see People grow older. Also evolution states that overtime the species evolved from this single cell and became better and more complex. Which is the opposite of the Second law of thermodynamics.

Also I can use some simple logical arguments against evolution.
Say your in a junk yard and you see a brand new corvette. Would you think that it just evolved form the parts? Of course not. Obviously some on had created this car. The same thing applies for the earth and everything in it which is millions of times more complicated than that car. Also if you parked that car in a garage for 50 years would you think that it would be shinier or get more horse power and new wheels. Obviously not. If you’ve ever heard of the abiogenisis theory that Aristotle made in order to explain the world around him. He discovered that when you leave a dirty shirt and some old food on the ground, that after a week or two he would come back and see that there where mice and bugs living in it. So he thought that non-living matter turned into living matter. This theory was accepted within the scientific community with out question until the 17th century when some scientist try to disagree with this theory one of them named Francesco Redi but he was unsuccessful. It wasn’t tell 1862 when louis Pastuer disproved abiogenisis with a series of careful experiments. Nowadays we look on that and say how dumb can u be be (not to be mean). But that was there understanding of the world at that time. There’s a famous saying that say’s “The policies of today are the common sense of tomorrow” I’m not sure who said that but I learned in social class when learning about world war 2. So the same saying could be applied to today’s unproven science like the evolution theory which maybe in 10 or 15 years
from now could be seen as illogical and people may laugh and say haha man from monkey. But what I’m trying to say is that we may think were so smart and know everything but in reality we know little because in 50 or a hundred years we could know so much more about everything and people may laugh about our ideas and theories of any kind. Also Darwin living back in the 1800’s he believed that he may have found an answer to the origins of life but he said himself “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.” So someone with less understanding about the world around him, stated that if the world was to complex from what he had understood at the time, then what he understood is that his theory could be abolished if living species were more complicated than what he imagined. Cells and life are far more complex then what he could of imagined. And even us now still don’t fully understand life and how everything works. But in such a big questions like our origin of life and why we are here should not be taken lightly. Because these questions alone define us gives us meaning or purpose. Or if you believe in evolution there is no meaning or purpose in life, no reason to be a good person to , respect others or even yourself because all that we are is animals that came from a bunch of lifeless meaning less chemicals. Is that really what you want to teach the young people of today? That life is meaningless and useless. No wonder why our world is so screwed up. Maybe its from teaching us a meaningless existence or maybe it just the way people are now. But I believe that this life has meaning and purpose. I believe that God created this world (the God of the bible). This world is far too complex for it to be randomly created through a big bang causing so much order with out a guiding hand. I’m not going to preach at you or anything but the origins of life is a big topic that can effect the very way people think about them selves and others.

Several people argued against him on a number of these points, the Second Law of Thermodynamics misconstruction in particular.

# high school student Says:
April 2nd, 2006 at 1:10 am

Ok well i got some of my info wrong but is that all u guys have against my arguments what about the cell theory or some of my logic. I know u guys are smarter and more knowledgeable than me. But do my arguments make sense and provide anything against evolutions thinking or are some of my facts wrong. What do u guys think about what Darwin said. Or the impact of evolution on teens nowadays could that be a reasonable statement or just some dumb idea. Please be honest

...and slightly later...

# high school student Says:
April 2nd, 2006 at 3:47 am

for number 17. ok I read the website but isn’t entropy the amount of randomness in a
system and it says “but sometimes order increases as entropy increases” but that just
contradicted itself because as entropy increases then randomness increases so how is that
causing order.

Natural processes over time go to disorder IN A CLOSED SYSTEM. You need to go to your science teacher and ask for a full refund.

Could we ever have a completely closed system? No, for example hot
liquid in the best thermos eventually cools down. So u see palidor u may think the
systems closed but to what, it can’t be completely to everything.

Ya increases in order are possible, think about that junk yard and think about people going there and building a car from the junk. Ya the order increases but with a hand to guide it.(about the God thing im just stating what I believe how the world was created and try to prove or provide answers that could make it possible, and I realise that you can’t prove Gods existents) Ok you may say about the river increasing entropy but as the rocks tumble on each other the big go to the bottom and the small to the top and yes that does decrease entropy visually. But as they tumble and move the rocks break down and little pieces form into sand and increases in entropy and eventually the rocks break down to tinny pieces. So in the long run entropy increases. Also the website says “You can see order come and go in nature in many different ways. A few examples are snowflakes and other frost crystals, cloud formations, dust devils, ripples in sand dunes, and eddies and whirlpools in streams. See how many other examples you can find.” But has anyone seen it in cells or life itself. I’ve seen order go but not come. Otherwise we would be able to get younger which isn’t happening. We only get older and less new and youthful.

The begining of life is abiogenesis, not evolution, so you shouldn’t attack evolution on that front.

Wasn’t abiogenesis disproved 150 years ago.

But advancing old creationist arguments isn’t the way to go.

don’t a lot of evolutionist advance old evolutionist
agruements. Beside what wrong on improving old ideas in the first place to my
knowledge the evolution theory was made in the 1800’s.

Why attack it at all?

u say why attack it at all
but if the people back in the 1700’s didn’t attack what scientist thought to be real which is the abiogenisis theory (or many others that like scientist thought we could never fly) then us today would still think that food turned into mice and microbes. Science is the search for truth and in order to find truth you may have to go against other peoples ideas or theory’s.

also for the fossil records, how come there aren’t any transitional fossils of monkeys evolving to people or half dog birds. Or a cow horse. And if monkey evolved to man then why are there still monkeys would they have changed to because where most advanced then them and decreased in entropy.

Tedd Herrlich and Rich do a pretty good job debunking things.

I join in a fair bit later:

Ritchie Annand Says:
April 4th, 2006 at 10:45 pm

but if the people back in the 1700’s didn’t attack what scientist thought to be real which is the abiogenisis theory (or many others that like scientist thought we could never fly) then us today would still think that food turned into mice and microbes. Science is the search for truth and in order to find truth you may have to go against other peoples ideas or theory’s.

That one you’ve got a bit mixed up there :) You’re thinking spontaneous generation, not abiogenesis.

Abiogenesis is interesting, and a worthwhile pursuit, but it really is out of the realm of evolutionary theory. We can’t, for example, actually rule out panspermia, the seeding of life from elsewhere, though it’s not up there in likelihood. Evolutionary theory is concerned about what happened from life’s inception up to now (and in future).

also for the fossil records, how come
there aren’t any transitional fossils of monkeys evolving to people or half dog birds. Or a
cow horse. And if monkey evolved to man then why are there still monkeys would they
have changed to because where most advanced then them and decreased in entropy.

There are a lot of transitional fossils (here and here, for example), actually, at least between ‘monkey’ and man. Of course, these are phrasings that are used a lot in anti-evolutionary websites, repeating the same set of untruths, if you look for “transitional, fossils, monkey, man”. If you replace “monkey, man” with “hominids”, you’ll get better information.

In the realm of “dog-birds”, you won’t find them. The split between the bird and mammal branches actually pre-dates the dinosaurs. When species family lines split any distance at all, they split for good.

The “why are there still monkeys?” question sounds like a real objection on the surface, but if you take a closer look at it, it’s not. Evolution is just the larger scale of what happens every day when creatures are born, and it’s seriously like asking “why do you still have cousins?”. Or, a little further out, “why are there both squirrels and chipmunks?”, or “why are there both Asians and Causasians?”. Your family tree can branch, but that doesn’t require that only one set of great-great-great grandchildren are allowed to be around.

Evolutionary theory does not say that we are descended from chimpanzees. Modern-day chimpanzees will never evolve into humans, can never evolve into humans. Neither will any other non-human apes, monkeys, etc. We don’t share any common ancestors with any other living primates until between five to seven million years ago.

*grin* I know you’re getting a lot of the arguments from creationist sites - I remember practically the entire list, and they haven’t corrected it for decades. The second law argument is particularly odd - entropy is a measure of useless energy, energy that you can’t use to do work. “Randomness” is an inaccurate picture. Living processes interfere with the move to higher entropy, harnessing it a little like a dam harnesses the power of a river, even though the water does eventually get to the sea.

I’m pleased to see you’re on here, though. At least you’re out here scrapping where people can fight back and forth instead of just staying safe. Keep up the good work :)

He responds:

# high school student Says:
April 5th, 2006 at 7:35 pm

The “why are there still monkeys?” question sounds like a real objection on the surface, but if you take a closer look at it, it’s not. Evolution is just the larger scale of what happens every day when creatures are born, and it’s seriously like asking “why do you still have cousins?”. Or, a little further out, “why are there both squirrels and chipmunks?”, or “why are there both Asians and Causasians?”. Your family tree can branch, but that doesn’t require that only one set of great-great-great grandchildren are allowed to be around.

ok ya that makes sense but how come the differences between man and animals are so distinct. Like anybody can tell if the creature is man or say, monkey. Also how come theres only one human race. If evolution where true wouldn’t there be more variations in people. “They will maintain that for humans the concept of “race” is meaningless: that there are no biologically significant human group differences, hence no human races.” From http://www.highbeam.com/library/docFree.asp?docid=1G1:115634810&key=0C177A56741C146C1203031B036E06087D07740E727E720A7A0F0B

That one you’ve got a bit mixed up there You’re thinking spontaneous generation, not abiogenesis.

ya I did get that mixed up I meat spontaneous generation

you rock wayne :)

I reply:

# Ritchie Annand Says:
April 6th, 2006 at 12:44 am

ok ya that makes sense but how come the differences between man and animals are so distinct. Like anybody can tell if the creature is man or say, monkey.

Animals are all very different in behaviour and looks. It may be a little gross to think about, but it’s on the inside that animals are amazingly similar, especially the younger they are. There may be differences in sizes and shapes, but the workings, arrangement, etc. are similar. Kidneys, bones, tongue, heart, bladder, immune system. The fact that we can do medical experiments on rats and rabbits and actually have the results mean something is related to this.

Take a look-see for comparative anatomy. Unfortunately, it’s the stuff of comparative anatomy textbooks - they don’t like to give the cool material away, but you can find some (like here).

Something that’s a bit of a segueway into your next questions… there’s a small fraction of genes that’s responsible for most of the outward changes. A lot of the rest is tried and true fundamental genes for things like burning energy and even nerves (it’s pretty freaky that the genes for nerve gaps are still similar between flies and us, so much so that you can even use human genes to repair the corresponding damaged fly genes).

It’s almost an old saw that there’s of all the variation between people, only up to 15% of it is due to race, yet that gives us our obvious differences in hair, general eye colour, skin colour, amount of junk-in-the-trunk…

Also how come theres only one human race. If evolution where true wouldn’t there be more variations in people. “They will maintain that for humans the concept of “race” is meaningless: that there are no biologically significant human group differences, hence no human races.”

Often, when you find this in nature, it means that something nasty and relatively recent happened that reduced the population to a small group. It’s actually pretty impressive that we didn’t go extinct. Estimates are that we went through a severe population bottleneck some 70-75,000 years ago (also here). We haven’t been isolated enough in the approximately 5,000 generations to drift far enough apart save for looks.

Skin color is a pretty strong adaptation in that short a time. We’ve managed to make that a little less important in recent history with supplements, diet and sunscreen, but it would have been important for our outdoor, working lifestyle.

(I think it’s kinda nifty that vitamin D is produced in your skin from cholesterol)

You could always run your own evolution experiment (if you could freeze yourself for the duration) and find some red-haired nerds that look like Pauly Shore who find big feet sexy, and put them on an island, and see what happens :)

Cheers, mate :)

Tedd Herrlich talked about other human races that have gone extinct, as well. High School Student unfortunately doesn't come back to the conversation. It's too bad; they learned a lot just in that short period of time.

I added to the conversation a little later...

# Ritchie Annand Says:
April 9th, 2006 at 11:49 am

Wayne, the only reason Intelligent Design is so under the spotlight in the first place is because they managed to present it to local school boards as a way to sneak creationism into schools while trying to pretend to everyone else that it’s science, and that they skipped not just the “peer review”, but the research itself, and put it directly into schools.

Even if you pretend the ID conjecture is plausible on the surface, the lesson plans they come up with it (especially the ones in Ohio) are the same old bad (especially in that they misrepresent evolution) creationist arguments that you would have seen back in the Arkansas trial re: “creation science”.

The Intelligent Design need to keep doing research before they get close to this point, especially since their research as it stands is pretty poor. I took the time to pore over Dembski’s “No Free Lunch” paper, and the bulk of the paper talks about not being able to get to a specific point A without extra information. Fair enough, though not exactly novel.

It’s at the end of the paper where poor scholarship shows. Dembski’s algorithm assumes a single target point A, and then says that evolutionary theory does as well (the “teleological” argument, that evolution is out to produce you specifically). On that he is wrong. Secondly, his algorithm is constructed in such a way that it would be amazing if your children even had the same number of limbs as you did, since without extra information (which he ascribes to “intelligence”) it’s a random search through all possible life forms every time.

* * *

I’ll have to take a bit of issue with you on science excluding the supernatural “just because”. If the supernatural is observable and imparts a significant bias, whether it be a deity, ghosts, telekinetic powers, what have you, then it can be considered natural. Where astrology falls down is not because it’s not testable, but because its assertion that planets and stars can affect your personality must be taken to mean that it must impart a bias, and bias is statistically measurable. “Better than chance” is the operative phrase.

Not everything that increases our knowledge is science. A lot of it is just… knowledge. If I were teaching learning disabled science students and found that the boys learned better if I use their names in violent examples (”Okay, we’ve got hydrochloric acid - so first you take Brad, and you kill ‘im!”), but that girls don’t, that’s useful knowledge, but it’s not science. I could even spread that to every other teacher on the continent, and it still wouldn’t be science. We’re not doing controls, we’re not trying to find a basis. Finding out that King Rameses ate goose feet as a delicacy increases our knowledge, but it’s still not science.

Sometimes knowledge can inspire science. Sometimes knowledge comes out of science. Knowledge is the “what”, science is the “how” and the “whether”. (Religion can be the “for what purpose”) If I was really hell-bent on finding out why learning disabled boys do so much better with the new Violent Example technique, I’d have to design experiments to make sure that it wasn’t bias of disposition towards boys, that it wasn’t just an illusion… to start with. Maybe it just changes my disposition because it amuses me so, but I’m uncomfortable with violence towards women, so my discomfort shows when I try it with girls, and that’s the actual reason.

If I pass the first few benchmarks, perhaps then it’s time to get brain scans of the students. (Mmmm, brain scans :)

* * *

*laugh* I’ll agree with one thing on your site, though: Big Bang Theory is bogus, and I think your reasoning for it is sound (how’s gravity going to work on a dissipating mass?). I’ve been following it since I was 10. Big Bang and Steady State were still fighting at the time.

It’s been getting worse. The solutions are unstable (we went from constant expansion, to slowing down then accelerating, to just accelerating over the course of the past five years), the stars are too old, COBE’s data came back too smooth for a lumpy universe, etc. Then there’s dark energy. Oh, god. Holding redshift equals velocity as sacrosanct is what led us into this mess.

Hubble’s sometimes credited with the theory, but that’s a bit unfair. 1929 is when they pinpoint his discovery. See what Hubble said in 1942.

I just think the universe is old and “ordinary”.

Cheers :)

Wayne's response:

# Wayne Hollyoak Says:
April 10th, 2006 at 7:07 am

Ritchie,

Lots of good comments:

1. The Dover schoolboard’s approach to including ID could have been different. At the same time, seems that there could have been some attempt to give them some alternatives besides international disgrace and slapping $2mil fees on the schools to pay off their opponents’lawyers and stuff.

But, when you think about it, if it took 2mil to fight them in court, the prosecution must have been pretty uncertain they could win.

2. Haven’t read “No Free Lunch”, yet. I will though.

3. The “supernatural” suggests above natural laws and physics, “paranormal” implies
“low probability events”. Scientists should be free to express their thoughts in these areas, but do so without demanding that others agree.

4. It might be interesting to test whether “learning disabled boys” might do better academically if they could are taught to cope better with fears and inadequacy.

Wayne Hollyoak
www.scifaith.com

My God, I must have had a lot of time to respond this time:

# Ritchie Annand Says:
April 11th, 2006 at 10:03 pm

Hey there, Wayne :)

1. The Dover schoolboard’s approach to including ID could have been different. At the same time, seems that there could have been some attempt to give them some alternatives besides international disgrace and slapping $2mil fees on the schools to pay off their opponents’lawyers and stuff.

It could have been, but the board members had really been on about trying to get creationism into the school, especially Bill Buckingham. They did this despite advice, and drummed the dissenters out of the board, smearing them as atheists (which they were not). Intelligent Design was just for the merest veneer of non-violation of the Constitution.

The plaintiff’s lawyers offered a pre-trial “cease and we’ll stop”, but the board would have none of it, and fought back with pro bono representation. In the defense counsel’s opening statements:

Your Honor, it is our pleasure to appear on behalf of our clients today because I am confident that at the conclusion of these proceedings, you will find that the evidence shows that these citizens seated before you today were engaged in a legitimate exercise of their lawful authority where they enacted a modest change to the biology curriculum for the purpose of enhancing science education, for the evidence will show that the purpose and effect truly at issue in this litigation is the purpose and effect of a curriculum change that was worked out after a process of deliberation involving the board, the administration, the science faculty, and the public.

The Dover board acted dishonorably, and with all the lying in court, getting and then hiding textbook donations in church, video evidence, etc. it became evident that the purpose and the effect was nothing of the sort.

If they picked creation science instead of Intelligent Design, then the status of Intelligent Design would never have been called into question, but since the textbook was Of Pandas and People, and since the board was defending itself on the premise that Intelligent Design was science, and thus they weren’t in violation of the Establishment Clause, Intelligent Design itself had to go on the stand.

The transcripts are pretty long, but pretty fascinating reading. The decision is a fairly effective summary of the twenty-odd days of trial, though it misses the effective flavour of some of the high points (like the “40 days” quote).

There is an “out” for Intelligent Design itself in the decision:

With that said, we do not question that many of the leading advocates of ID have bona fide and deeply held beliefs which drive their scholarly endeavors. Nor do we controvert that ID should continue to be studied, debated, and discussed. As stated, our conclusion today is that it is unconstitutional to teach ID as an alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom.

Basically, if they can keep their act together and find something genuine, there’s nothing to prevent Intelligent Design (if true) from coming to the fore in the future. That said, they’re not remotely ready yet, and people should not be trying to sneak it into schools.

(1. cont’d) But, when you think about it, if it took 2mil to fight them in court, the prosecution must have been pretty uncertain they could win.

The price of some trials, even when you factor in punitive damages, astounds me. Having read the transcripts, they did an amazing job, though I’m still pretty sure I’d balk at the price tag. That said, however, the judgment was said to be reasonable, given the amount of research and representation. From the decision:

Because Plaintiffs seek nominal damages, Plaintiffs shall file with the Court and serve on Defendants, their claim for damages and a verified statement of any fees and/or costs to which they claim entitlement. Defendants shall have the right to object to any such fees and costs to the extent provided in the applicable statutes and court rules

This means that they were not going for punitive damages, just costs. Fortunately (albeit not fortunately enough) for the school board, they settled with the school board for $1,000,011. The $11 part was a bit kitchy - but every defendant got a $1 check. (Perhaps there’s a minimum award rule in cases like these, along the lines of the way you can never bid less than $1 in the Price is Right or sell your home/car for less than $1?)

2. Haven’t read “No Free Lunch”, yet. I will though.

The paper’s a bit thick on the math, which takes some slogging to get through, but you can actually get the meaning from the text itself, because he discusses it a bit.

3. The “supernatural” suggests above natural laws and physics, “paranormal” implies “low probability events”. Scientists should be free to express their thoughts in these areas, but do so without demanding that others agree.

I’m not so sure of those definitions. Paranormal researchers certainly didn’t think that the phenomena (clairvoyance, telekinesis, telepathy) were actually low probability events - they’re more along the lines of events for which there is no known rational explanation. It’s only been after a lot of intense research that the basic consensus is that the phenomena themselves do not actually exist.

Supernatural isn’t really a different term, though it has a slightly different flavour to it (ghosts would be considered both, angels would be “supernatural” in most peoples’ views, spontaneous human combustion would be “paranormal”)

That isn’t to say you couldn’t study either of them. As a matter of fact, they still do. There are plenty of “power of prayer” studies, for example. These can be peer-reviewed. Demonstrating an unexplained bias can lead to interesting things. It has to be replicable, though (which is where cold fusion fell down, for example), and biases in the experiment have to be accounted for (I wouldn’t rely on the Gartner Group for the statistics, for example :) ).

Intelligent Design has a lot of self-published stuff. They don’t have an awful lot of luminaries, though, and even their best scholarship is arguably pretty bad so far. It may be that better intellectuals would actually find something. It may also be, however, that there’s nothing to find.

Scientists should be and are usually free to speculate on any number of things. Lots of them comment on things outside their own domain. The problem isn’t usually “the scientific establishment” in general that violates that freedom, it’s the petty politics in some departments at some colleges and universities that kick out rivals or bow to public pressure.

(Behe still works at Lehigh, as an aside).

4. It might be interesting to test whether “learning disabled boys” might do better academically if they could are taught to cope better with fears and inadequacy.

Some of them grow up like that; attitude has a lot to do with it. A great many learning disabled folks are pretty darned smart - they just can’t stay focused, or can’t translate English back and forth into math, or the spacing and rotation of letters is confused. People with dyslexia are made to feel pretty stupid.

We’ve seen some impressively enlightened learning disabled kids, though, too. Ones whose parents gave them the options, realized what was going on soon, etc. There are some pretty good coping strategies.

A couple of insights I gained from the indirect exposure (my wife taught some of these kids at one point). If you give truly attention-deficit disorder kids caffeine, they calm down. From what I was told, it’s almost like they’re on the bring of falling asleep (without the visible signs), and the jiggling and doing stuff is a way to keep themselves conscious.

There was a pretty interesting video for parents and teachers about what it’s like to be learning disabled. One part, on dyslexia, simulated what it was like to be dyslexic. They changed all the letters around that were rotations of one another (q, p, d, b), and altered the spacing, and had the parents and teachers read out the passage. Afterwards, they were having difficulty (as was I, watching the tape) recalling a lot of detail about the story. You spend so much time decoding that you don’t have a lot to commit to memory, which is why dyslexics appear forgetful when reading. (I’ve studied foreign languages; it’s kind’ve the same thing there :) )

Cheers!

– Ritchie

Wayne responds:

# Wayne Hollyoak Says:
April 21st, 2006 at 8:55 pm

Ritchie,

Thanks for your comments about the trial. It is unfortunate about the WAY the schoolboard tried to get ID included. It’s also unfortunate that the case was made into a political “show of force” on the part of the anti-ID groups. Sticking it to the schoolboard in such a way as to intimidate the rest of the country into their “solo evolution” classroom policy.

I respond to one of his other comments to a later submitter (still with a lot of time or at least intensity on my hands):

# Ritchie Annand Says:
April 27th, 2006 at 11:28 pm

Wayne:

If saying that living things reflect intelligence in all their efficiency and complexity isn’t science, then “science” hasn’t much credibility in the public’s eye.

‘Saying that living things reflect intelligence’ isn’t science, though. It’s an opinion.

I think people perhaps don’t take into account that the ‘Intelligent Design Movement’ started out with some ideas of doing science. It doesn’t take much imagination to think that you might be able to see the Hand of God in things in nature if you just look properly. If you think you should be able to test it, then you can do science. That doesn’t mean that you will actually find what you set out to find, but it can be science.

One has to be honest in one’s efforts, though, of course. This entails a few things:

Peoples’ common-sensical grasp of statistics is bad, and it’s very easy to introduce bias through methods, but there are pretty standard ways of getting around this. You not only don’t do a power of prayer study, for example, and let the people in the prayed-for group know they’re being prayed for, you don’t even let the people running the ‘prayer lab’ know. You also know that if you run the experiment with a very small group, you should expect extraordinary results in a calculable percentage of trials. Studies like this ought to give their p-values and other parameters. This relates to the study of Intelligent Design, since they are making “likelihood” arguments, and ought to be doing this.

You cannot bring unproven laws to the table. One that is used as an axiom in some Intelligent Design work is the “Law of Conservation of Information”. It’s utterly unproven, which is why it grinds “the mainstream”, especially to slap “Law” in front of it under these circumstances. Dembski’s defined it a bit ‘wigglily’ (is there an adverbial form for “wiggle”? :) ) in this case, by making it untestable. “If you see an increase in classical information, it must have come from somewhere. If you don’t see a natural way for it to appear, it must have been supernatural” (if I’m mis-stating his case, definitely feel free to point it out) utterly contravenes the notion of a provable law. There’s nothing in Shannon or Kolmogorov theory to support his fas ex nihilo law.

You also oughtn’t overstate what a negative or positive result means. Many experiments only help decide between a couple of possibilities. You can’t determine “is caffeine bad or good”, but you can determine whether caffeine increases your average heart rate on a day, or increases the maximum, or whether it does neither of these things. Even with a negative result on both, you can’t say “caffeine is good” from a single study, though a lot of the media, and sometimes even limelightophilic researchers, will make this statement or implication.

Finally, you cannot misrepresent what it is that you are proving or disproving with the work. This is what’s the most irksome about some of the Intelligent Designists’ work. The claim that evolutionary theory says X and since we have disproven X, evolutionary theory is wrong is only valid if evolutionary theory says X.

The thing is, if Intelligent Design is correct, there should be no need to misrepresent evolutionary theory.

That’s where we get the impression that even if Intelligent Design started off trying to do their homework, they must have somehow been unable to find whatever they set off to find.

It smacks of sleight of hand.

So what are the ‘Intelligent Designists’ really after, then?

Some literal proof of Genesis? Or is it “nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies” as detailed in the oft-mentioned ‘Wedge Document’?.

What else could it be, given the history and people involved?

If this entire movement was an honest scientific attempt to understand the world, I would be all for it. As it stands, it seems like a bit of a shell game so far.

I don’t pretend to believe for a minute that trying to get Intelligent Design taught in schools has had anything to do with trying to improve the quality of science education. It smacks of an agenda, it smacks of shortcuts, and there hasn’t been a school board targetted yet for reasons of science - so far, it seems that, to a fault, the school boards have been pitched it as a hush-hush constitutionally okay way to sneak some smidge of sectarianism past the First Amendment.

If Intelligent Design advocates with some scientific mojo want to take Intelligent Design hypotheses at face value, use it to do some actual research, and publish both failures (to clarify what isn’t showing up and refine the approaches - it’s easy to underreport these) and successes, I think that would do much to relieve the ‘feuds’ here.

If there’s actually anything to be had, you would find us incredulous at first, but quite frankly, if there’s actual truth to be had, we’ll suck it up, by and large. It’s really not about being dogmatic, it’s about people walking the talk.

I don’t define my whole being by modern-day evolutionary theory. I’ve just done a lot of homework (in the investigative, not the school, sense), and in my current opinion, evolutionary theory is one of the most solid theories-with-a-capital-T out there. Not just for any old pat answers, but because it has been through more crucibles and entire new kinds of potentially-overturning evidence than any other theory I’m aware of, and actually come out the stronger for it. To be trite, it’s been through a great deal of Quality Assurance. Trying to poke holes in something is one of the best ways to ensure that it’s not a load of hokum.

So my bar’s set pretty high. Still, if something else should prove itself actually true, it will be able to leap my bar in a fairly short timeframe.

You’ll find that true of a lot of people you might peg as “zealots”.

Nobody, no conjecture and no hypothesis gets a free pass, though. Nor should they. No “equal time”, no “both sides”, no “court of public opinion”. It feels like evolutionary theory is a diligent student, eking out an A- with a lot of hard work, and the cute girl who hasn’t been here all semester is trying using all tactics available to get the professor not just to give her an “A”, but everyone else an “F”.

That’s the crux of the matter, metaphorically, and the source of the anger, is over honesty and due diligence.

That’s not in the slightest to imply a lack of honesty on your part.

I’m not quite sure what to make of you, but it seems like you may either honestly want to find a scientific proof of Genesis, or just to be able to prove there’s a God there, guiding things along. The issue we have is with the people whose work you may quote, whether directly (if you refer to their works or speech) or indirectly (if you refer to addressed-but-never-repealed arguments that creationists bring forth).

It’s like the folks who show up to the weeping statues. I may not agree with them, but I’ve got to admire the fact that they needed a little bit of extra proof on top of somebody’s say-so.

And with that, after having chewed up way more than my fair share of e-paper, I bid you adieu :)
# Ritchie Annand Says:
April 27th, 2006 at 11:37 pm

It’s like the folks who show up to the weeping statues.

Sorry, Wayne, to clarify, I meant that admiringly of you. It wasn’t meant to refer to the people you quote ;)

A pretty nice response back:

# Wayne Hollyoak Says:
April 28th, 2006 at 6:52 pm

Ritchie,

If there’s actually anything to be had, you would find us incredulous at first, but quite frankly, if there’s actual truth to be had, we’ll suck it up, by and large. It’s really not about being dogmatic, it’s about people walking the talk.

The only reason i entered this discussion was in the hopes that there were some folks like you listening. Much of your last post is good critique in the light of current methods used in “science”. As you say, “doing science”. Your suggestion about “prayer” is off the point, but illustrates a problem with current methods of “doing science”. Dealing with test cases is useful in trying ideas about natural processes.

To test ID, you need to compare living things, their life histories, developmental processes, behavior, etc. with the design and creative abilities of the only other sapient beings we have available to us.
That being man. We attribute this quality we call, “intelligence” to us as the primary trait that sets us apart from other living things. That’s reflected in the many techical achievements. To test the ID theory, all you need to do is compare the level of design mastery exhibited in living things with those of men. If those devised by men are by far more advanced and complex, then it’s fair to suggest that there may be no intelligence behind the design in living things.

It’s also fair to suggest that debunking natural creationism, or evolutionary creationism, that is that nature created itself leaves you with only one other choice. That intelligence was behind it. It was either completely natural, spontaeous, undirected, or not. So, for ID the way of “doing science” needs to be retooled a bit to fairly test and study it.

My website is merely a suggestion of an approach that might be helpful. The examples of domesticated dogs and cats are two cases of interest to me. If’s informal and asks lots of questions rather than publishing results of sophisticated studies and stuff. It’s reasoning that the public can look at and relate to and offer their own thoughts.

Wayne Hollyoak
www.scifaith.com

I reply, at length (of course!)

# Ritchie Annand Says:
April 29th, 2006 at 7:58 pm

To test ID, you need to compare living things, their life histories, developmental processes, behavior, etc. with the design and creative abilities of the only other sapient beings we have available to us. That being man. We attribute this quality we call, “intelligence” to us as the primary trait that sets us apart from other living things. That’s reflected in the many techical achievements. To test the ID theory, all you need to do is compare the level of design mastery exhibited in living things with those of men. If those devised by men are by far more advanced and complex, then it’s fair to suggest that there may be no intelligence behind the design in living things.

There are a lot of difficulties with using those as benchmarks :)

For one, the latter goalposts keep moving. It’s safe to say that man’s ability to design complex things would have been pretty limited millenia ago. To turn the problem around, if man is able to design things more complicated than life in the future, would that suggest that, all of a sudden, there is no longer any intelligence behind the design in living things?

“Intelligence” is a hard concept to pin down just on the complexity of things man makes. Our ability to make complicated things derives from social and cultural “intelligence”. I can make some pretty nifty software, but guaranteed I couldn’t even build a monitor from the ground up with a home-made adze in the middle of a field.

Apart from that, the less flippant objection I have is against the assertion that all you need do is compare the level of design mastery against what man is capable of. That’s untrue. You also need to be able to discount other hypotheses. If it weren’t true, you could well put forward an Intelligent Lightning hypothesis and prove it on day one.

You have to prove that the level of design mastery of nature is either worse or inadequate. Not by fiat or even straight logic (because the axioms are always suspect), but by making predictions. It need not be a prediction of an experiment to try to see if intelligent design happens as you watch (if the “intelligence” cannot be relied upon in an experiment), but it can be applied to relations, genetics, comparative anatomy between current animals, etc.

Behe’s tack on “irreducible complexity” was one of the stronger possibilities to prove intelligent design, if it existed, so it was a good option to look into. He made testable predictions of areas of to-be-discovered information related to the bacterial flagellum, the blood clotting cascade, and the immune system.

His predictions, however, failed. That in itself is not a slam. That’s good science. Of course, he didn’t do the science himself, but he could have.

He was presented with some of the research that had been done since Behe’s Black Box at the trial where he was a witness. What became evident to the judge (and to me, reading the transcripts) in the case was that nothing would be good enough, like Bugs Bunny drawing ever-further lines in the sand for Yosemite Sam, save without ever coming to the cliff.

It’s also fair to suggest that debunking natural creationism, or evolutionary creationism, that is that nature created itself leaves you with only one other choice. That intelligence was behind it. It was either completely natural, spontaeous, undirected, or not. So, for ID the way of “doing science” needs to be retooled a bit to fairly test and study it.

There are other natural possibilities. You don’t necessarily have to exhaust all ‘natural’ avenues to have intelligence become the top explanation, you just need the vast body of evidence actually indicate it.

There are multiple ‘intelligent designer’ possibilities out there, too. Research would put some parameters on the designer, but you can’t rule out Quetzlcoatl or aliens.

It’s also not actually an either/or case. A ‘guiding hand’ would not have to actually do all of the work.

None of these possibilities have been borne out by research yet, though :)

My website is merely a suggestion of an approach that might be helpful. The examples of domesticated dogs and cats are two cases of interest to me. If’s informal and asks lots of questions rather than publishing results of sophisticated studies and stuff. It’s reasoning that the public can look at and relate to and offer their own thoughts.

That’s totally fine, though it won’t lead to a scientific approach or a resolution. You’ll get people jumping on you for your ideas, though, including me. I’m sure my anti-Big Bang rants probably won’t change the face of science, either ;)

I do have issues with a lot of the things on your site, of course, but there’s one I have to pick out that’s a little misrepresentative:

The “scientific establishment” wants to tell us they were killed off by a worldwide ecological disaster such as an asteroid hitting earth. If that’s the case, how did dinosaurs manage to evolve into mammals, birds, whathaveyou if they are so sure dinos were destroyed?

It was a disaster of epic proportions, judging by the diversity of fossils below and above the K-T boundary. The divergence between the mammal line and the bird line would have taken place approximately 310 million years ago, well before the 65 million year ago mark for the Cretaceous disaster, and the split between birds and dinosaurs would have taken place around as early as 145 million years ago.

The big dinos, yeah, they bit it.

The dogs and cats topic is an interesting one.

I actually have my own informal “experiments” I have run on domestication. It’s a bit morbid, mind you, but very illustrative.

We have a snake, Glenn. We feed her mice. One time, the snake escaped from its cage (it was a pretty impressive feat that shan’t be repeated), and hid for over a month. We got some mice in the meantime to ‘tempt’ her back. It didn’t work at first so I got to liking the little critters, and got them a wheel. That commotion brought back the snake, she ate them, and all was back to normal.

My wife got me a few mice extra just from the stock bred for feeding snakes for me to play with. I was enchanted. However, I didn’t separate out the sexes soon enough, and I had babies on my hands. I know it’s a bit morbid, but I was thinking (a) I won’t have to buy any for the snake for a while, and (b) I can run a little experiment.

Essentially, if a mouse jumped, tried to escape, or even worse, bit me for any reason, in with the snake it went. If it was nice to me, I spared it a couple of trespasses. That’s all.

In three generations (and I’m not letting them breed any more), I have some very friendly, extremely non-skittish mice.

I didn’t genetically engineer any of my mice. I didn’t “will them” to become tame, or pray for them to become tame. The mice themselves produced the variety of offspring, and I “selected” them. I just changed the ground rules for their lineages to continue.

Domestication follows the evolutionary scheme pretty well, and achieves results a lot faster. Nature doesn’t really have the selection criteria itself to produce a poodle, just the variation and potential.

Perhaps Behe and co should be looking into Intelligent Selection instead of Intelligent Design? :)

Brad - wow, thanks for the compliment. It always looks like drivel to me when I type it, so I’m glad somebody likes my gas-bagginess *grin*. Who, though, would take an op-ed from us? :)

One last round:

# Wayne Hollyoak Says:
April 30th, 2006 at 2:30 pm

There are a lot of difficulties with using those as benchmarks

Could you name them?

i really don’t think it’d take a rocket scientist. You could use “level of scale”
as a basis. We use coding systems for instance that can pack 2megabits of binary data on a little silicone wafer about the size of a fingernail. How much data can that sized mass of DNA hold?

Or, take one of the smallest insects, a .5mm adult parasitic wasp and compare it to the tiniest flying machines we can make.

How about repoductive efficiency? Hmm, we don’t have any self replicating machines,yet.

You could try navigational ability. Put our best self navigating robots on an open obstical course and see if they can compete with a common whitetail or a coyote on the same course.

Maybe we could try building and underwater vehicle that can with only some fins outswim and manuever a dolphins.

In three generations (and I’m not letting them breed any more), I have some very friendly, extremely non-skittish mice.

Yesterday, i was digging holes and putting up spit-rail fencing in the back yard. There was
an old sheet of particleboard laying on the ground that i needed to move out of the way. As i lifted it up, i discovered a tiny lint lined nest. In it was a very nervous little mouse suckling a half dozen tiny babies. All of a sudden she took off running with all the babies holdin on and she disappeared into the brush. Wanted to give her a little time to get her brood clear of my work. Later on a much larger mouse appeared that was franticly running about the area investigating the hole i had dug and i realized it must be pappa mouse. Here was this mouse that would normally avoid humans at all cost, running out in the open around me while i’m working.

There have been some interesting studies in domestication. A russian study bred wild foxes for 3 criteria that was to emulate domestication practices in general. Seems that it was seratonin production that modulated the “domestication” effect primarily. But, high levels of seratonin had some side effects. The ears became floppy, coat colors changed, stubby legs, they would whine for attention, etc.

Canadian lynx bred for docility and use for fur production began to produce white-paws as they lost their wildness. Rufus also gave similar results.

Wayne Hollyoak
www.scifaith.com

...and a last reply from me...

# Ritchie Annand Says:
May 8th, 2006 at 8:34 pm

Brad:

Ritchie — You’d be surprised who’d take a good editorial piece. You certainly only have to go as far as a Google News search to see the anti-evolution drivel they’ve already printed. This is where I think the scientific establishment is losing the battle — in the press.

We don’t have nearly the same intensity and embattlement north of the border here, at least in the cities. (We did, after all, have a famous case of a Holocaust denier teaching out in the sticks) It is leaking a bit over the border, though, of course. Joe Woodard is the local Herald writer most likely to swallow the ID story hook, line, and stinker (see here)

*laugh* I’m certainly not sure how the Joe Public-to-newspaper article path is followed. Probably missed the window on the particular discovery in question, but if you can direct me to some resources, I can perhaps be a little better prepared next time :)

Wayne:

Could you name them?

That’s what I spent a few paragraphs doing! :)

When you make an analogy between bits of data or complexity of creatures versus machines, you make only the very first steps towards a proper hypothesis.

You grab hold of the analogy and play through its implications. Would the analogy imply human-like powers of invention on a higher scale? Would there be constant “meddling” over time, or would it be a one-time thing? How could you tell the difference between these scenarios? Would the evidence still be around? How could you tell the difference between this process and one borne of nature?

Past that point, you have to start extracting potential means of proof. Part of any sort of peer review is that you don’t get sole say over what the implications of your experiment might be. If you say that you believe this experiment will prove X if Y happens, then Y happens, that means X is true, QED lets you set arbitrarily low standards of proof.

To take that thought to a humorous extreme for a moment, you could say that carbon monoxide is a good sedative for humans, and use as proof of this a lack of movement of mice. Fill the chambers with carbon monoxide, and presto, the mice stop moving. Ergo, carbon monoxide is a good sedative. Peer review would object that in addition to not necessarily being valid for humans per se, that the experiment should distinguish sleep from death, that it says nothing about short-term versus long-term viability of carbon monoxide as a sedative.

You could try navigational ability. Put our best self navigating robots on an open obstical course and see if they can compete with a common whitetail or a coyote on the same course.

That’s once again the beginnings of an inkling of a hypothesis. You could turn the question around and pit coyotes against the Vic-20 on math computation ability. They’re good discussion starting points, perhaps, but they’re pretty far from the goal line. Some of the comparisons are more arbitrary than they might seem.

Behe and Dembski were a lot further along that road, but their experiments, such as they were, turned up nought. Dembski in particular has resorted to dishonesty to try to bluff his proofs past observers. Behe seems to be doing no more than moving goalposts of late. Maybe they looked in the wrong spots? They might appreciate some fresh enthusiasm.

There have been some interesting studies in domestication. A russian study bred wild foxes for 3 criteria that was to emulate domestication practices in general. Seems that it was seratonin production that modulated the “domestication” effect primarily. But, high levels of seratonin had some side effects. The ears became floppy, coat colors changed, stubby legs, they would whine for attention, etc.

I must say, I really want one of those foxes :) We love our odd assortments of animals (mice, button quails, snakes) and plants (tamarind, prairie-winter-hardy cherries, mini-bougainvillea) - I swear we’d have a zoo if we could :)

One detail I left off in my mouse domestication experiments was that in the very last generation, I encountered the very same type of phenomenon. I had some mice appear that were wild-type except for a very domesticated horse-like white star or dot on their foreheads. I was quite surprised!

…

On a slightly different topic, I must say one thing in the instances of school boards getting into bed with intelligent design that is confusing unless there is a creationist agenda behind it is the introduction of the Genesis idea of “kinds” whenever a course syllabus has had the opportunity to present itself. Intelligent design itself should have no problem with vast timescales and even common descent, since there are vast similarities in DNA between creatures, and an intelligent designer would have no problem tweaking to a roadmap.

Are there any Intelligent Design adherents that believe in common descent at all?

...

All in all, I obviously enjoy debates like the one over there, with really no trolls to speak of, and people either being or getting informed.

Fun :)

...and long-winded.