In keeping with my previous militant rantings against creationist crap, here’s a couple of newer links. There was a really good analysis in Esquire about a month ago of the recent religous war on science:
“The rise of Idiot America is essentially a war on expertise.” Yeah.
And since I’ve already crossed the line, I thought this recent breakthrough in genome analysis for narrowing the date window for the human-chimp evolutionary split was cool:
I believe in evolution…but I also believe in creation. so I wonder, why don’t you think that the two can coexist?
Muahahaha…I never said I didn’t think they could co-exist! Here, I clarified my personal stance awhile ago:
ohhh, I didn’t see your old post…I just figured you were completely against creation, because in your first post in this thread you said ‘creationist crap’…thanks for clarifying (:
I’m completely against creation. There’s enough crap on the surface of the earth already, let’s not create any more!
Are you kidding? The vacuum created by the lack of infomercials would lead to the creation of a supermassive black hole! It would surely destroy the solar system.
Back on topic…
http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/12/20/intelligent.design.ap/index.html
Amen.
Read the article. You don’t have to read the whole thing, because it’s really long! But if you read the first half of part one you’ll get the idea what the author means by ‘creationist crap.’
I finally got around to reading that. A fun read and some choice quotes in it.
I liked this one:
But the Green Day American Idiot album is still a sucky album even though it does have a few good lines in it. 
There’s a good reason why I haven’t bought a single mainstream music album in over six years.
I finally read the rest of the article. Excellent! This whole Darwin theory vs. Intelligent Design thing is misunderstood on the most fundamental level. it’s a science class. Don’t teach not-science, and pretend it’s science, in a science class! Why? Because the American populace at large obviously does not have a clear idea of what science is! We have enough of a problem already. If we didn’t, this wouldn’t even be an argument. Any effort to further dissolve the content of a science class should be the legal issue; not even whether it’s church or not.
I liked the article enough to change my signature. I even had to remove my rulebook links to do it. Nobody reads those things anyway. Why read the facts when you can guess, or assert your opinion with authority? 
I’m glad people are finding it stimulating…The article really does hit the nail squarely on the head, and for me was totally worth the time it took to read.
It is a fun article to read, but it misses the head of the nail. He’s just swinging at the low hanging fruit in an entertaining way. It’s easy to make fun of people who posit that humans and dinosaurs roamed the Earth at the same time.
The Esquire isn’t a serious debunking of Intelligent Design. It’s just a debunking of the wacko kooks who try to use pseudo-science to prove that humans and dinos lived happily together.
The more thoughtful challenges to science come from places like the Discovery Institute. They distance themselves from the kooks and make arguments that are more sound (but still pseudo-science). You can’t dismiss the positions put forward by the Discovery Institute by the Esquire article and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. It’s the type of reasoned arguments made by the Discovery Institute that need to be debunked to keep ID and pseudo-science out of the science classes.
Read up on what the Discovery Institute says about Intelligent Design and how they’re framing the arguments. They have articles and policy papers on their web site. That’s where the threat to science is.
I read some of that Discovery Institute stuff while eating lunch. They are very eloquent and I’m much more likely to listen to what they have to say because they know how to communicate. You might say they are politically savvy.
However I still get the impression that their underlying motivation is faith-based. If the basic concept of ID is that the world is too complex and unlikely to not have had some sort of conscious “design” involved, it’s an answer that ignores a big fat question: What designer? My impression is that the answer to this, according to the Discovery Institute, is “the diety of your choice. We are non-denominational.”
In other words, they’re still not fooling me. I still haven’t seen the “science” part of ID. So far everywhere I’ve looked I have only seen disputes of the darwin stuff, which can be done by “regular” scientists (and probably was), and doesn’t require an ID “theorist” to back it or think it up. An an assumption that since it’s too complex, there must be a designer.
Sorry folks, that still ain’t science. Science is, “it’s so complex it seems highly unlikely to have happened spontaneously, but until we learn more, we just don’t know.” I’m still okay with not knowing. I do know that the world is round, it rotates around the sun, and man can fly. Let us always remember the political clout of those people who believed otherwise, even long after it was proven untrue.
So is this whole new “science of intelligent design” think only in the United States? If so, one must ask if it’s a coincidence that it came about in the same country that makes a big point about separating church from state. People who fear the concept of evolution are looking for ways to get “equal editorial time” for non-Darwinian views. In the science classroom. To do it, they are attempting to dress churches up in lab coats.
I believe regulating science through public policy is a much greater threat, but I digress.
Here are some other good sources for the serious consideration of ID theory.
The Design Inference : Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities by William Dembski
Uncommon Descent: The Intelligent Design Weblog of William A. Dembski
Edit: original link changed due to problems
Agreed. People who don’t know what science is should not make science policy.
Thanks! I picked up some information from the reviews on that page. The core “science” part seems to be Dembski’s Explanitory Filter, a mathematical statistics process that is supposed to determine if something is too unlikely to have occurred naturally/randomly/without outside influence.
If that’s the science, I still don’t get it. It would still be science based on an assumption. The assumption is that if things of an extremely low probability occur, they must have intelligence behind them.
And “ingelligent” means God, does it not? If not God (a god, any god), then who or what? It seems any defining of the who or what would have to boil down to God or some form of diety. Back to either a choice of religion, or “I don’t know.”
So I still agree with the judge in Pennsylvania.
A scientific application of Dembski’s Explanitory Filter would separate out occurrances of an extremely unlikely nature, to which we would then try to figure out how this happened. Or in other words, to find out why it looks (or is) intelligent.
To “assume” it is God, or for that matter anything else, is to walk out the door of the science classroom and into a philosophy or religion class.
Science is not void of assumptions. The important thing is that scientists acknowledge their assumptions.
So Dembski’s filter provides a starting point for sorting out various probabilities of biological structures. Now, why should we attribute the most unlikely structures to intelligence? Well, it seems to follow common sense in the same way that an archaeologist assumes that an artifact was designed by intelligence.
I don’t think a scientist has to make any claims about who or what the intelligence is/was. ID theory just provides a different starting point for explaining some biological structures. And if these structures are actually not solely the product of random mutations, then creating scientific models that are at least less dependent upon random variables could possibly yield a more fruitful science.
I am an atheist and a non-scientist so bear with me. The one may betray my bias and the other my ignorance.
To say that an “archaeologist assumes that an artifact was designed by intelligence” is to deliberately pose the question in terms that seem to make it somehow equivalent to what proponents of intelligent design suggest when, in fact, it is not.
Archaeologists know that an artifact was designed by intelligence because they know that it was designed by a human. They know humans to have intelligence and they know humans to exist and to have existed yesterday and the day before yesterday and the day before that.
While perhaps it can be said that by definition an intelligent designer has intelligence, the crucial characteristic of existing can not be asserted of it.