I review Jesus Camp here. Surprisingly (to me, at least) there wasn't any mention of ID in the movie (IIRC, the directors briefly mentioned it in the commentary). As I mention in the post, I felt that most of the things in the movie were highly politicized by the directors. This is unfortunate because, as with the politicization of ID, it tends to obscure the real issues.

On that note, I thank Ed Brayton for pointing to this statement about ID by the Templeton Foundation. I pretty much agree with everything they say. For quite a while here at Telic Thoughts, we've made the distinction between ID the (political and cultural) movement and ID the idea. This is just a guess, but I think that if somebody came to the Templeton Foundation with a solid research proposal for ID (the idea, of course), they would probably get funding. The statement is a pretty clear condemnation of ID the movement and I don't think they've given up on ID the idea. One clue to this is that the statement only talks about biological ID, which has been the most politicized version of ID. The only real politicization that has occurred with cosmological ID has centered around Guillermo Gonzalez and this politicization came from the ID critics. The politicization of biological ID has, unfortunately, mostly been driven by the ID movement, which is why the Templeton Foundation rightly condemned this behavior.

I wrote a post a couple years ago on the topics in the title and I thought I'd repost it here in light of all the discussion on the topic.

In my last post, I talked about how the nature of science is to make abstractions. That is, when scientists try to make general theories about something they strip the phenomenon of all its "unnecessary" qualities and properties and only look at the relevant ones. For example, if I want to come up with a general theory of projectile motion, I don't have much need for information about what my projectile is made of or how much it costs or what color it is. Very often, I won't even care what shape my projectile is (I'll just assume it to be a point-mass). All I'll be concerned about is the initial velocity of the projectile, it's mass, the force of gravity at my experiment location, its initial angle of motion, and the height it falls. In all likelihood, I'll make a further abstraction of the motion into vertical and horizontal components of motion and look at those separately. And I haven't even begun to mention things like the legal properties of the projectile (maybe it's a hollow-point bullet and not legal in some places) or the biological properties of the projectile (maybe it's a human cannonball).

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In my last post I gave Michael Behe's definition of design: "a purposeful arrangement of parts." After he writes this he goes on to say that using this definition, everything could be designed. He says that the problem, then, is to reliably detect design. How do we do this?

"For discrete physical systems - if there is not a gradual route to their production - design is evident when a number of separate interacting components are ordered in such a way as to accomplish a function beyond the individual components. The greater the specificity of the interacting components required to produce the function, the greater is our confidence in the conclusion of design." (Darwin's Black Box, p. 194)

He then goes on to give a number of examples, from Scrabble to boobie traps to art. He then says that in order to reach a conclusion of design for an artificial system, "there must be an identifiable function of the system." One of his examples, though - steel rods on another planet - suggests, if not directly, that this isn't quite correct.

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In this post I would like to explore some of the implications of evolutionary algorithms (EA's) and what they can (and can't) tell us about design. While I think what I say is relevant to all EA's, I am going to focus specifically on the Avida software program. I'm doing this for a number of reasons - the software and documentation are available online, Avida is often used in debates about design and evolution, and Robert Pennock made some claims about Avida during the Dover trial that I want to explore.

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Here is an article by Dawkins where he writes about the execution of Saddam Hussein (HT: Chris at Mixing Memory). In it, Dawkins writes that the execution of Hussein was an act of vandalism.
Richard Dawkins wrote:

"Hussein is not in the same league as Hitler, but, nevertheless, in a small way his execution represents a wanton and vandalistic destruction of important research data." (my emphasis)

As Chris points out, this is scientism run rampant. Note that Dawkins' concern isn't the "destruction of a human life," it is the "destruction of important research data." To Dawkins, Saddam Hussein's worth, if he had any, was that of a lab rat, not of a human being.

But the more important thing to point out is that Dawkins still, as far as I know, hasn't spoken out yet on some very real vandalism that has occurred on his own campus, Oxford University. We've written quite a bit about the ALF here at TT, if only to point out the inconsistencies that people like Dawkins have with regard to what they view as real "threats" to science. Surely the vandalism and scare-mongering tactics of groups like the ALF are at least as dangerous to science as ID is. I admit that it is very possible that Dawkins is afraid to speak out against the ALF, given the threats they have made against everybody associated with Oxford. I wouldn't blame him if that were the case. But there are real threats and there is threatiness and the fact that Dawkins can speak out against ID without fear of his life suggests that ID falls in the latter category.

I've attempted to be charitable to Dawkins before and I will attempt to do so again. I still think that, on matters of religion, Dawkins is the atheist equivalent of Pat Robertson, BTW. Afterall, the idea that God was angry with the homosexuals and feminists and that is why he allowed 9/11/01 to happen was an attempt to raise the consciousness of the American public. When people hear the word "gay" Robertson wants it to sounds like a fingernail scraping on a blackboard, lest there be more terrorist attacks.

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Popper was very clear that his motivation for his interest in the demarcation problem was not truth. Below the fold, I quote some text from Popper's book Conjectures and Refutations.

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When people like me say that science can't be described by strict rules, it can be tempting to think we're just like hippies, saying "Screw you and your 'rules' man!" I'm here to say not to worry. I have no desire to start a free love orgy between quantum mechanics and astrology (and perhaps a little homeopathic medicine).

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Josh at Thoughts from Kansas mentioned my recent post on demarcation on his blog. He gives a quote from a recent paper:

The nature of "˜truth' is a recurring concern to postmodernists, who generally purport that there are no truths but multiple realities and that understandings of the human condition are dynamic and diverse.

And then Josh writes that this is how I think of science. The post he quotes from has nothing to do with that, though. I wasn't talking about what was true and what wasn't true - I was talking about what the motivations for the demarcation problem are.
Josh writes,

The possibility that government funding goes to science for exactly the reason that science is different from non-science seems not to have even occurred to macht. That science is a way of distinguishing truth from non-truth is precisely why we try to isolate what makes science work, and why we fund and teach the process that does exactly that, and why we oppose teaching or funding things that do not follow those methods but which purport to do so.

I actually I did consider that - and I rejected it. Distinguishing truth from non-truth is a different project from distinguishing science from non-science. Scientific theories can be false and non-science can be true. As I said in my post,

Calling a theory "science" does more for the theory than just saying "The theory is rational" or "The theory is well supported." This is why IDists want their theory to be called "science." And this is also why Popper didn't want Marxism to be called "science." Consider that some of the most ardent critics of ID wouldn't care if ID was taught in the philosophy classroom, but if it is taught in the science classroom - well, there would be hell to pay. Even if ID were the most well argued, rational theory in the universe, in many people's eyes calling it "science" would be a step up from calling it "philosophy."

I have absolutely no problem with trying to answer the question of what is good science and what is bad science. But it is false to think that this is the same as trying to answer the question of what is true and what is false. If your concern is that we fund and teach those things that are true, then the demarcation problem is not where you should be looking.

I just ran across this post that asks Michael Behe about his stance on astrology. The anti-ID side got a lot of good PR when they declared that Behe thought astrology was science, as if he thought it should be taught in the classroom. This was obviously false, though, for anybody who read the actual transcript of what Behe said and for those who knew the first thing about the history of science. A long time ago - long before the Dover trial - I quoted a section of David Lindberg's The Beginnings of Western Science. Lindberg writes:

The history of astrology has suffered from a tendency among historians to judge the practice of astrology harshly, as an example of primitive, irrational, or superstitious ideas, promoted by fools and charlatans. There were charlatans, of course, as medieval critics themselves never tired of pointing out. But medieval astrology also had a serious scholarly side, and we must not allow our attitude toward it to be colored by the low regard in which astrology is held today. Medieval scholars judged astrological theory and practice by medieval criteria of rationality and by the contemporary evidence to which they had access; and it is only as we do the same that we can hope to understand the importance and the changing fortunes of astrology during the Middle Ages. …

You can click on the link above to read more of the quote and to find out the reasons why historians today thought astrology had a "serious scholarly side." You'll see that there were empirical reasons to accept astrology, as well as philosophical and religious ones. You'll also see that the main problem with astrology at the time had nothing to do with observations or tests. The main objection, at the time, was the philosophical consequences of accepting astrology (i.e., people didn't like the fact that it implied determinism).
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