Do you want confirmed examples of Natural Selection or example of alleged IC that have been falsified?
Who’s preventing students from doing so? Students are not prohibited from asking questions, and science does not prohibit challenges to the status quo. We’re only talking about whether it should be permissable either to teach religious beliefs as science, or to lie about scientific facts.
They laughed at Galileo. They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at Bozo the Clown.
Sorry, but comparing Intelligent Design proponents to Galileo is pretty silly. Galileo was formally interrogated by the Inquisition, and had his work banned by Pope Urban VIII. No one is banning the publications of the Discovery Institute. We simply do not want to see it included in science curriculums, the same way we don’t want to see Last Thursdayism included in science curriculums (hey, it just interprets the evidence differently).
That IS pretty sad, but not for the reason you think.
The former. The latter has already been cited.
I meant questioning as a process. No one persecuted Galileo for asking questions. It was not that he said, “Tell me, Holy Father, how the orbit of Mars makes sense.” It was that he was told what to study, what was true, what the consensus would allow and would not.
While that may indeed be what you are talking about, it is not what I’m talking about. Characterizing the ID position with gratuitously inflammatory rhetoric merely damages the legitimacy of your own argument.
You are a careless reader. I never compared ID proponents to Galileo. I compared students who wish to study ID, but are forbidden from doing so, to Galileo. A student ought not to be a proponent of anything until he has examined as many alternatives as he can.
Again, we should start another thread. Final “warning”: I won’t comment beyond this post on the subject, to avoid perpetuating what is already an egregious hijack.
There appear to be a nearly infinite number of possible “Calabi-Yau” spaces, and no predictive way to “choose” which ones are the right ones. The idea that a choosing principle will arise is nothing but a dream. In fact, the idea that the “real” string theory (so-called M Theory) will be discovered is nothing but a dream. Thus far, it doesn’t exist. The estimates of what it would take to probe string-scale physics range from the benchtop, to your hypothetical Solar-System-sized accelerator, to something as big as the Universe itself. Stringy-type theorists have actually made a number of predictions about, for instance, the behavior of gravity on small scales, should the extra dimensions be of probeable size. All evidence (and some of it now is extremely good) shows quite conclusively that Newton’s inverse-square law holds to even the nano scale. Did anyone blink an eye to consider what this said about the existence of extra spatial dimensions? No. Will they when the next prediction is falsified? No. Because a String theory could literally be formulated to predict almost anything about gravity at whatever scale you like, and given its fecundity, one simply needs to adopt yet another formulation when the previous is disproven. Unless I am horribly misinformed, there is, in principle, no end to it. String Theorists do not need evidence. In fact, they operate entirely in spite of it presently.
How many times in history have people, lacking evidiential support for their ideas, made seemingly-reasonable extrapolations that wound up being completely, totally wrong? And how many times have we been rescued by actually observing something that caused a paradigm shift? How vast is the gulf of energy scales between what we can currently probe, and the Plank Scale? What is the likelyhood that we will discover something we never anticipated between what we can do now, and a hundred years from now? A thousand?
Are there not worthy subjects to consider presently? Has quantum field theory and General Relativity, despite their mutual incompatibility, failed to provide enough intellectual challenge to inspire work on testable problems in the average human lifespan? Has cosmology not give us enough interesting new surprises? Is neutrino mass and dark energy not interesting? Is the Higgs Mechanism really so boring it’s not worth cleaning up? And if there is no Higgs? We will know in a few years, after all. Is QCD not still analytically intractable at low energy scales? But is lattice QCD just too pedestrian when you can tilt at quantum gravity windmills without recourse to experiment? Do quantum computers and the weird implications of of quantum mechanics yet to be fully calculated or tested so bore as to be the pursuit of lesser minds? Are not turbulence, other forms of chaos, artificial intelligence, or the science of emergent systems like, possibly, the mind, are none of these perfectly testable fields at all areas where our very best physicists might not make fruitful contributions? Hell, biologists like me suck at math, and the physics-capable will wipe the floor with our puny asses should they put their minds to biology.
Somehow “the only game in town” is String Theory. Color me baffled.
Just as silly a comparison. Show me the Inquisition that is interrogating students who dare to read Discovery Institute publications. Show me the Pope that is banning the publications of anyone, student or otherwise, who wishes to promote ID. No one is forbidding anyone from studying ID, on their own damned time.
So what? The goal of a science curriculum is not to produce “proponents” of anything.
I doubt that Bush is uneducated about evolution, which makes his statement even less justifiiable.
Ok, here’s an observable example of natural selection…frogs eat flies.
Nobody is telling students what to study or prohibiting them from pursing whatever BS “alternatives” they want. We’re talking about requiring that science teachers teach science, just like we require that history teachers teach history instead of the Silmarillion. That doesn’t mean students (or anyone else) is prohibited from reading Tolkien on their own or even believing it as an “alternative” history.
Lib, there is nothing either inflammatory nor gratuitous about calling ID a religious belief, nor is it illegitimate to say that its proponents lie about facts. They are notorious for it.
No one is preventing students from studying ID. But ID is not science, and should not be taught in science class. Let’s not confuse the central statement of ID (there exists an intelligent designer), which is not science and for which there is no scientific evidence, with one of its tenets (irreducible complexity) which has not been proven true and which in fact has been proven false.
Liberal, consider this:
For the theory of Darwinian Evolution to be correct, certain things must be true. E.g., species must pass on traits to their off-spring, there must sometimes be new traits introduced in the offspring, certain traits must give a better or worse chance of reproducing, etc. All of these are falsifiable claims, and disproving any of them would disprove Darwinian Evolution.
On the other hand, there is no way to falsify the claim “there is an intelligent designer”, since the designer could have designed a system that could also have arisen without a designer. Likewise the claim “life as it exists on Earth today could not have possibly come about without an intelligent designer” is not falsifiable, since you’d have to demonstrate that every single component of every organism could have arisen through some other mechanism (be it Darwinian evolution or whatever), which is an impossibly huge task. As long as there remains anything that hasn’t been demonstrated to be achievable by evolution, ID proponents can claim that this is the thing which God had to create.
So while the claim “Darwinian evolution occurs” or the claim “Darwinian evolution is the predominant mechanism by which life has developed” are falsifiable, the claims “there is an intelligent designer”, or “intelligent design has occured”, or “an intelligent designer is necessary to explain the development of life” are not.
Now if on the other hand someone were to say life as it exists today couldn’t possibly have come to be without Darwinian evolution, that would be as unfalsifiable as claiming it couldn’t possibly have come to be without an intelligent designer.
But claiming Darwinian evolution is what actually happened is a falsifiable scientific theory. Claiming intelligent design is what actually happened is not.
I think “there is an intelligent designer” might be falsifiable so long as some effort to identify and describe that designer is made. “Intelligent design has occurred”, a simple truth statement, might also be falsifiable in each particular instance. It so happens that such claims have been made, and falsified. “Intelligent design is necessary to explain the development of life” is an hypothesis at best, and is probably not any more testable than claims about how, exactly, life on Earth did arise. It’s something we most certainly will never be able to observe directly, so we’ll have to formulate hypotheses about scenerios and mechanisms, and do experiments to see if those are plausible and likely. Maybe, with sufficient knowledge, we’ll be able to make testable predictions about a variety of observables in the geologic record, or some other hallmarks of that pre-biotic condition that would have been preserved throught the ages, and then the science of life’s origins will have perhaps achieved the level of theory.
Unfortunately, there’s no way to make anything of ID’s insistence on the necessity of an intelligent designer. They don’t say the remotest thing about this creator, and hence make no claims that can be falsified. If they say the creator is God, unless they concoct a new creation myth with some specifics in it, then that’s also, by defnition, and ufalsifiable statement. At best, IDers might propose some sort of hypothesis if they would simply deign to offer up some idea of what this designer might be on about. I see no way whatsoever for ID to achieve the status of theory, since it tells us nothing about intelligent designers, not enough for even a single predictive hypothesis to be made, much less a theoretical framework.
Yes, Intelligent Design are the Swift Boat Liars of biology.
Intelligent Designers:
“Sure, evolution is a theory that explains a LOT of things, and has TONS of evidence backing it up, but it doesn’t explain EVERYTHING, therefore it’s no different than Intelligent Design, which is a theory that explains a FEW things and has a LITTLE evidence (sort of) backing it up. Therefore both should be given equal weight in the classroom.”
Swift Boat Liars:
Sure, John Kerry served on the Swift Boats in Vietnam and was injured in combat there. But he might not have been as injured as he said he was, or served as long as we thought he should have, so he’s just the same as George W. Bush, who proudly defended the Texas coast from the Viet Cong, when he wasn’t AWOL. Therefore both men’s service records are the same."
Jeebus, the lies that are in circulation nowadays …
You know, Loopydude, I really would enjoy seeing a further discussion of string theory in a different thread, if you’re willing to start one. (I’d start one myself, but it seems like your feelings on the subject are stronger than mine.)
I thought the same as the OP as i skimmed the newstory. The perfect opportunity to set the hoi polloi straight wasted.
I can’t really get too worked up in any case. My take is that this is just a sop to the religious right. Just like his Terri Schiavo shenannigans, this is a beau geste which costs him nothing, and makes the RR think “Gee, he really is on our side after all!” If any school district is dumb enough to take this on (and I’m sure there will be), he’s a winner. If not, well, that’s Democracy for ya. The guy can’t lose. Grandstanding, pure and simple. I wonder who told him to take this position…
You make the mistake in thinking I have the least interest in debating with you.
I do not.*
I posted that link for the interest of others in searching for helpful arguments in the larger debate of ID and creationism versus science. www.talkorigins.org is an excellent resource for a mainstream, scientific response to the debate.
I didn’t know Neaderthals were well-read, used computers, and knew where to go to find good resources on human origins. I also didn’t know they had enough self-respect to know debating with you is usually not worth the time. These things one learns!
*Basically, I think you’re an intellectual bully. Your interest in being pompous, snarky, and throwing around pseudo-erudition (and, I admit, occasional real erudition) generally outweighs your interest in understanding and genuinely engaging with differing points of view. Your link to google is an excellent case in point. So, no thanks, I’ll go debate someone else. By the way, you did notice that this is the B.B.Q. Pit, not GD, right?
I wholly agree. Is he scoring points with his fundamentalist base, or does he really mean it? Which is worse?
Could be he’s limiting disaffection of the religious right after the Frist defection.
Clearly, you haven’t seen the latest Geico commercials.
(No, I have nothing productive to add to this thread. Why do you ask?)