Branden Fitelson has written an interesting paper on ID, in which he looks at a number of different questions related to ID.

Fitelson appeals to the transition from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics in the early part of the 20th century in order to illuminate certain parts of the current ID debate. Unfortunately, Fitelson's story of this transition isn't quite accurate. He paints a picture of various anomalies building up in scientific theories until the pressure is so great that the theories literally explode and fall apart.

The way science evolves is (typically or often) by the development of new, more predictively accurate and explanatory theories which supercede old theories. What happened with Einstein and Newton had happened before with Newton and Kepler, and before that with Kepler and Copernicus, etc. When Newton's theory superceded Kepler's, new evidence had surfaced that favored Newton over Kepler, and eventually enough such "anomalies" were discovered until Kepler's theory was "rejected" and Newton's "accepted". Moreover, Newton's theory explains why Kepler's theory is as accurate as it is in its intended domain of application. Nonetheless, later on, Newton's theory was itself "rejected" in favor of Einstein's still better theory. And, since then, Einstein's theory has been "accepted" by the scientific community.

But it isn't clear that science does (typically or often) develop this way. In his excellent paper, "The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes," Imre Lakatos points out that anomalies are often not seen as problematic for a theory like Kepler's or Newton's until after it has been rejected for a new theory.

Kepler's ellipses were generally admitted as crucial evidence for Newton and against Descartes only about one hundred years after Newton's claim. The anomalous behaviour of Mercury's perihelion was known for decades as one of the many yet unsolved difficulties in Newton's programme; but only the fact that Einstein's theory explained it better transformed a dull anomaly into a brilliant 'refutation' of Newton's research programme. Young claimed that his double-slit experiment of 1802 was a crucial experiment between the corpuscular and the wave programmes of optics; but his claim was only acknowledged much later, after Fresnel developed the wave programme much further 'progressively' and it became clear that the Newtonians could not match its heuristic power.

In other words, when anomalies turn up in a research program, they are usually regarded as "puzzles" to be solved, rather than anomalies that count as evidence against the research program. If, in the future, the research program is replaced with a better one, it is only then that anomalies such as Mercury's perihelion are viewed as evidence against the research program. Indeed, Einstein's development of general relativity theory had nothing to do with Mercury's orbit. Rather, as Lakatos points out, it was the result of a "creative shift" in his special relativity research program. I think Fitelson would actually agree with what I've said here, given the quotes he puts around words like "anomalies," "rejected," "accepted," etc.

Fitelson points out that in a world in which Einstein's theories never took hold, it would be unclear as to whether the Newtonian program would still be the reigning theory in physics. This is true. But assuming Newtonian physics was still in charge, it would also be unclear as to how the various anomalies would be regarded. History suggests that the ones that haven't been explained would be regarded as puzzles still to be solved under Newtonian physics and not as problems for Newtonian physics.

We could similarly perform a thought experiment and look, say, 100 years into the future, imagining two different scenarios. In the first, evolutionary theory is still the queen of the biological sciences and it has smashed ID under its foot long, long ago. In this imaginary world, all those anomalies and problems that current IDists like to point to would be written off as either "solved," "still a puzzle to be solved," or "never a problem in the first place."

In the second, ID is the working theory in the biological sciences. It is accepted by nearly all scientists and has been confirmed time after time through experiments and observations. It makes predictions, has testable hypothesis, and everything else a good theory should. In this imaginary world, all those anomalies and problems that current IDists like to point to would be written in textbooks as crucial anomalies that led to the downfall of evolutionary theory.

The current situation is a mixture of the two, with IDists pointing to anomalies as problems for evolutionary theory and evolutionary theorists saying that those are merely puzzles yet to be solved or not even problems at all.

This suggests a few things. First, it is very possible that those who think ID is bunk won't "see" the problems IDists are pointing out until IDists come up with "progressive research program" (as Lakatos would put it). Second, it might be productive if evolutionary theorists looked at these anomalies "through the eyes" of ID. Progress in science very often comes not by way of new experiments or observations, but by way of new ways of thinking about things or "creative shifts."

This entry was posted on Monday, January 30th, 2006 at 2:16 am and is filed under Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. The trackback link is: http://telicthoughts.com/anomalies-and-id/trackback/