This item from America’s satirical Onion site is too funny for words. Would advocates of “intelligent design” get the joke?
|
|||||
|
We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people. Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house] Authors
Arts, Tech & CultureCivil LibertiesCommentary
EconomicsSamizdatistas |
13 comments to New gravity theory explained |
Who Are We?The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling. We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe. CategoriesArchivesFeed This PageLink Icons   |
|||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||
I think at this point it is important to draw people’s attention to the campaign for equal treatment of another theory of the origins of life (an indeed gravity) in America’s public schools.
For an another very funny poke at Intelligent Design from a different angle, check out this article about the Wrathful Dispersion theory of historical linguistics.
I have to say that most of the “arguments” against ID seem as equally unscientific as the arguments for.
There was a Horizon programme on this a few weeks ago – and Dawkins (and others) dismissed the “irreducible complexity” example of the 43 intricately combined components of the spindle & bearing that supports the spinning tail of a bacterium, by saying that it was “possible to break it down to a simplified 21 (?) part spindle/bearing, so ID’s all proved false, ha, ha, ha”.
But all that they proved was that it could be broken down to two irreducibly complex machines – the simplified bearing and the rest of the bits that only have meaning in the context of the rest of the assembly.
Assertions that it all happened by chance aren’t at all scientific, and all seem to be voiced by a crowd of (not always mildly) conceited self-appointed intellectuals indulging in bouts of self-congratulatory ridicule of others, instead of rational step-by-step construction from first principles.
Let it be stated for the billionth time that the problem is no which theory is valid, but that you have a centralized governmental control over education.
Which theory of origins is not the greatest conflict from this setup.
I would tend to rank the poor resulting education higher, but that’s just me 🙂
But of course physics is just about a mathematical description, and only barely touches on origins. I know plenty of Ph.D. physicists, and most of them love the shirt that says “And God said… [list of Maxwell’s equations], and there was light!” I don’t think they’d really care either if people said that the gravitational constant is what it is because God made it that way.
And of course it wasn’t so long ago that Big Bang Theory was attacked for being pseudo-religious creationism, either. Some naturalists continue to do so. That it was invented basically by a Belgian priest and the Catholic Church and Pope Pius XII was a big proponent hurt it in the minds of some as well.
Evolutionists get into trouble because people like Dawkins run around insisting that evolution disproves the existence of God. Science is when people stick to describing what happens. When the evolutionary biologists play at theology and philosophy, is it any wonder that others play at being biologists?
I personally find some of the ways in which Dawkins and others attack religion to be rude and smug in the extreme, but I can partly sympathise with Dawkins given the sheer dishonesty of some ID campaigners and their attempt to dignify their religious convictions with the mantle of science.
Well said. In fact, I took the liberty of linking to this thread in an email so a friend of mine I argue with about ID regularly can have a look.
I agree – science is describing what happens. I would add – and also predicting what will happen. Theology is a totally separate field, and Biology has no more to say about it than Linguistics does about Architecture.
The whole ID “debate” is a giant yawn. The only piece of it that matters a whit is that it would be inaccurate to teach our children that there is any such “debate” actually going on – becuase in scientific circles there isn’t at all: evolution is the going theory and only the tiniest of percentages supports ID.
However, I disagree a bit that it’s only because of Dawkins and those like him that the evangelicals get all riled up about evolution. In fact, the only interesting part of this debate for me is trying to figure why they do get so riled up. The Big Bang is a case in point. There are tons of other scientific theories that don’t seem to bother them – so why Evolution? It strikes a psychological nerve somehow. I suspect it’s because the Big Bang has an air of majesty and cosmic mystery around it, whereas Evolution is all about slow, mundane change and sex and animals and mud. They like flash and pomp and single instants. Can’t deal with incremental processes. They’d protest the Big Bang with more gusto, in other words, except that they secretly kinda like it. Or that’s my theory.
Almost, but no cigar. They didn’t break it down into two “irreducibly complex (IC) machines”. They didn’t stand around proclaiming “we now have two IC machines”, because no mainstream scientist accepts IDC as valid. So in fact they created two intermediate steps, which means they falsified ID.
All aspects of the flagellal motor have been found in coopted form in many places in the animal kingdom. In some cases, it’s been found working away while missing many different components. This scientific work hadn’t been done at the time IDC was first touted, but science has since shown that the various parts are used in other different and similar functions in nature. This machine is not just limited to propulsion, in fact. Science has shown that you can rip out parts of the flagellum, and it still operates. It therefore is *not* IC.
IDC (‘Intelligent Design’ Creationism) states that certain structures are too complex to have evolved, meaning that there can be no functional intermediary. That means it’s not possible to break it down into smaller functioning parts, nor remove a part and have the remainder work. If neither the parts nor the incomplete machine are functional, they cannot have evolved, as evolution only favours working devices. Both parts have uses in other functions in nature, both seperately and combined. As stated above, you can actually remove parts of the flagellum, and it still works. But, irrespective of claiming the two machines were IC, the original wasn’t, because it was broken down into two parts both of which were functional (as they have shown to be through research). IDC says this simply cannot be the case. Therefore, IDC was in fact falsified.
Another point is that the two machines left behind are both less complex than the original, meaning they are far less likely to be IC themselves. This is key; they are both less complex than the original, therefore more likely to have been evolved than a more complex part. And the more complex one has already failed the IC test. So if the original fails the test, what are the chances that two simpler machines will pass it? The smaller and smaller they get, the simpler they get – and the easier it is to find multiple functions using it.
Even if IDC was not falsified, it’s been shown that flagellum is a poor example to use these days when talking about IDC. The problem for IDC is that they are fast running out of such “examples” to use, as evolutionary explanations of them are being put forward and tested at an increasing rate.
IDC is losing ground scientifically (if it ever even had any ground), which is why the proponents in the recent Dover case were stuck mainly with religious arguments. And that’s why they lost.
Ron,
Assertions that it all happened by chance aren’t at all scientific, […]
Which makes it a good thing that that is NOT what evolutionists assert. The theory of evolution posits a very simple, very powerful, mechanism of adaptation by selection. It is the opponents of evolution who refuse to look at how things might have developed. Insisting a super-being magicked it all doesn’t even constitute an explanation, because it would explain any state of affairs whatsoever.
I do doubt however, that you will see Evangelicals burning down Universities or calling for Dawkins’ death because they deny that God created all things.
Of course, I take it you have read the words of the leading expert in this field.
How could something which designed the platypus and Barbara Streisand’s nose be described as “intelligent”? This was Stupid Design if you ask me: all power and no brains. Clearly it was not the same ‘something’ that designed cats and Natalie Portman.
Of course, Newton’s theory is blasphemous. If the Holocaust was caused by Charles Darwin, the 911 attack was caused by Isaac Newton. After all, if you can go from “the unfit won’t survive” to “we must make sure the unfit won’t survive” (without analyzing what is meant by unfit), you can go from “things fall down” to “we must make sure things fall down” (without analyzing which things fall down).
By the way, Creationists have been criticizing mainstream linguistics.