Jerry Coyne:

Is intelligent design (ID) merely a sophisticated form of biblical creationism, as most biologists claim, or is it science – an alternative to Darwinism that deserves discussion in the science classroom?

Okay class, it's time to put our critical thinking caps on:

As you can see, you must be especially careful any time an argument seems to be presenting you with only two options. Yet the way such attempts at persuasion are worded, we often feel compelled to respond in those terms. Imagine someone asking, "Are you with us or against us?" You might be tricked into deciding between those two options, but the best response would be to say, "Wait a minute! Those are not the only two possibilities."

Gee, now was that hard?

[HT to Mung]

Zeke, the Mighty Hunter. Zeke, the Terrible. How many mornings have I found the leavings of his nightly hunts in gory little piles on the porch? Mice, beware!

But the rabbits, it's clear, have nothing to fear.

ID critic, John Brockman, informs us of the following:

Moreover, the intelligent-design (ID) movement imperils American global dominance in science and in so doing presents the gravest of threats to the American economy, which is driven by advances in science and in the technology derived therefrom.

This, of course, is propaganda and crack-pottery. Let's see what a real threat looks like.
Read the rest of this entry »

Let me quote a portion from Barrow and Tipler's book, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle:

Kant's notion of teleology had an enormous influence on the work of German biologists in the first half of the nineteenth century. Like Kant, for the most part these biologists did not regard teleology and mechanism as polar opposites, but rather as explanatory modes complementary to each other. Mechanism was expected to provide a completely accurate picture of life at the chemical level, without the need to invoke 'vital forces.' Indeed, Kant and many of the German biologists were strongly committed to the idea that all objects in Nature, be they organic or inorganic, are completely controlled by mechanical physical laws. These scientists had no objection to the idea that living beings are brought into existence by the mechanical action of physical laws. What they objected to was the possibility of constructing a scientific theory, based on mechanism alone, which described that coming into being, and that could completely describe the organization of life. . . . In Kant's view, a mechanical explanation"¦could be given only when there is a clear separation between cause and effect. In living beings, causes and effects are inextricably mixed. . . . ultimate biological explanations require a special non-mechanical notion of causality – teleology – in which each part is simultaneously cause and effect. Parts related to the whole in this way transcend mechanical causality.

And:

The limitation of explanation in terms of mechanical causality can perhaps be best understood by comparing a living being to a computer. As Michael Polanyi has pointed out the internal workings of the computer can of course be completely understood in terms of physical laws. What cannot be so explained is the computer's program. To explain the program requires reference to the purpose of the program, that is, to teleology. Even the evolution of a deterministic Universe cannot be completely understood in terms of the differential equations which govern evolution. The boundary conditions of the differential equations must also be specified. These boundary conditions are not determined by the laws of physics which are differential equations.

Now consider the words of Phillips and Quake:

Understanding collective effects in the cell will require merging two philosophical viewpoints. The first is that life is like a computer program: An infrastructure of machines carries out arbitrary instructions that are encoded into DNA software. The second viewpoint is purely physical: Life arises from a mixing together of chemicals that follow basic physical principles to self-assemble into an organism. Presumably, the repertoire of available behaviors is more limited in the latter. The two viewpoints are complementary, not incompatible: Either one could best describe cell behavior, depending on the particular situation.

Complementary, not incompatible.

Information theory, along with cybernetics, have significantly shaped and influenced the study of molecular biology. As a result, it should be no surprise that something like "˜intelligent design' would eventually emerge. That is, as the models and metaphors began to generate a track record of success, sooner or later teleologists would take note and begin to question whether the success was indebted to a deeper reality.

Anyway, there is a little piece of historical trivia that helps us see how easy it would be to transition from the application of information theory to biology to something like intelligent design.
Read the rest of this entry »

Discuss whatever you want. If you need some inspiration, here's a few discussable topics:

An article in Physics Today, titled "The Biological Frontier of Physics". From the article:

Molecular machines are the basis of life. DNA, a long molecule that encodes the blueprints to create an organism, may be life's information storage medium, but it needs a bevy of machines to read and translate that information into action. The cell's nanometer-scale machines are mostly protein molecules, although a few are made from RNA, and they are capable of surprisingly complex manipulations. They perform almost all the important active tasks in the cell: metabolism, reproduction, response to changes in the environment, and so forth. They are incredibly sophisticated, and they, not their manmade counterparts, represent the pinnacle of nanotechnology.

At the University of Montana, Dr. Dane Scott, director for The Center for Ethics, is teaching the eight-day course "Ethics, Education and the Evolution Debate", which promises to "clarify the confusion surrounding the long debate over teaching evolution by recognizing that this debate is fundamentally ethical, not exclusively scientific or religious." Critics of the current approach to teaching evolution "believe it promotes an atheistic, materialist philosophy", whereas those defending the current approach "believe that teaching intelligent design theory and its criticisms of evolutionary theory amount to state sponsorship of religion and undermine science education."

It seems there's a wave of new books warning us of the Coming Theocracy. Among them are American Theocracy by Kevin Phillips, Kingdom Coming by Michelle Goldberg, and finally Intelligent Thought, the John Brockman-edited volume on why the intelligent design movement is "the gravest of threats to the American economy". Mind you, I haven't read any of these books, so reviews and recommendations are welcome.

Contrary to popular opinoin, the question of whether the chicken or the egg came first is a vibrant field of ongoing research. John Hawks reports on the newest developments and adds some facts of his own. I'm not big on "teaching the controversy", but here, I'm willing to make an exception.

Krauze offers a very nice blog about the other opponents of ID. The critics and the creationists share a vested interest "“ keeping ID as closely tied to biblical teaching as possible. The creationists insist on this because, for them, ID should be part of their ministry. The critics insist on this because, for them, ID needs to be viewed as part of the creationists'ministry. Yet as I pointed out over six years ago, the ID people (creationist or not) tapped into a broad stream of thought that extends 2500 years! Over the last century or so, that stream has been diverted under the ground – largely hidden was confused for dry hole. But the ID people broke ground to release it for whatever reason (it doesn't matter), enabled by the fact that scientists before them had spent a few decades softening that ground. Right now, it bubbles and spurts through the surface, where the critics are running about trying to patch things up as they go. Yet the major thrust of the stream still lies and moves underground, continuing to push upward. In time, the stream will break out and pour out full force onto the surface. Just watch. The creationists are beginning to worry that they can't control this ancient river and thus are increasingly joining the critics in criticizing ID (look for more of this in the post-wedge world). And critics might unconsciously share this fear. Either that, or they have seriously miscalculated and underestimated.

Science has front-loaded the resurrection of the Stream.

I just stumbled over an old article, titled "The Other ID Opponents". It seems that intelligent design critics are getting some strange bedfellows: Young-earth creationists! Yes, the people who're supposedly using intelligent design as their trojan horse are openly criticizing it: "The most recent attack on Genesis, one that to AiG's [Answers in Genesis] dismay is accepted and promoted by evangelicals, is Intelligent Design."

"I don't think the ID movement would be where it is even now if it was not for the general creation movement," says Ken Ham, president of AiG. "They're riding on the coattails of the creation movement."

This is probably true in the sense that many people buying books and in other ways creating a market for intelligent design could just as well have been buying books on creationism. However, by divorcing itself from defending a particular Biblical account, intelligent design has also accomplished things that creationism could never have accomplished. For example, it is a fact that without intelligent design, there would be no "Krauze". There wouldn't be any front-loading either. And knowing what I do about my fellow bloggers, I doubt that there would be a "Telic Thoughts".

Read the rest of this entry »

This Friday's quote comes from the article, "The Mother of All Problems" by molecular biologist Franklin Harold, webbed on Steve Jones' website.

Living things are so much part of everyday experience that we scarcely realize how strange they are, and how sharply they differ from inanimate objects. All organisms, from bacteria to humans, are exceedingly intricate molecular systems that have the unique capacity to make themselves. On the level of the individual, each one grows and reproduces its own kind. Collectively, on a timescale of millennia, they continuously make themselves over, adapting to changes in their external and internal environments. Nothing else in the known universe has such powers. Living things obey all the laws of chemistry and physics, and we have learned an enormous amount about the molecular mechanisms that underlie all biological operations. We know much less about how these components and processes are organized in space, and almost nothing about their origin when the world was young. Our knowledge is vast, but our understanding is partial and full of gaps; for all its familiarity and ubiquity, life remains fundamentally mysterious.

Those interested in reading more from Harold should check out his brilliant book, The Way of the Cell.

From the dictionary:

naturalism
n 1: the doctrine that the world can be understood in scientific terms without recourse to spiritual or supernatural explanations.

But when that is converted into the method of science (methodological naturalism) it turns into: Science must not invoke spiritual or supernatural explanations.

Does it strike anyone else as strange that science is being religiously defined?

Comparing "aperiodic crystals" to standard crystals, Erwin Schrodinger once wrote, "The difference in structure is the same kind as that between ordinary wallpaper in which the same pattern is repeated again and again in regular periodicity and a masterpiece of embroidery, say a Raphael tapestry, which shows no dull repetition, but an elaborate, coherent, meaningful design traced by the great master."