At one point in the Town Hall Center for Civic Life debate between Stephen Meyer and Peter Ward, Dr. Ward asked the audience if anyone had changed their mind. The audience appeared to be silent. Now one shouldn't make to much of the silence but judging from the pronounced applause in response to certain arguments there were "choirs" from both sides present. However, the silence does raise an interesting question regarding the demographics and rhetorical aspects of the ID/Darwinism debate. Clearly there are enthusiastic choirs out there on both sides of the issue. Now it is unlikely that many people will switch choirs in response to the debate, but that still leaves an awful lot of people out there who are following what's going but haven't yet joined a choir. Two questions then arise. Are the choirs on both sides enough to resolve the cultural issues involved in the debate? Judging from the efforts on both sides to recruit outsiders into their camp, the answer is no. The other question is who are these groups outside the choir and how can they be persuaded?

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Google has an interesting system now that shows trends of searches for key words. Check this one out. Looks like interest in Darwinism has stayed pretty steady but ID had a big jump around the Dover trial. Also since then it doesn't appear that ID has dropped back to its earlier levels. And under regions just look at the disparity in some of the European countries.

How can one evaluate the claims of intelligent design? Of course, one way is through some sort of method for acquiring and interpreting empirical observations. However, there is another method that for many people is a reasonable approach and often compelling as long as the empirical approach does not dispell it. That is by analogy.

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Over at Science & Theology News, Matt Donnelly says

There is a sense within the science-and-religion community that the debate over intelligent design has run out of gas. This isn't necessarily because of a lack of interesting topics that could be discussed, but because the usual suspects on all sides of the debate have begun to get noticeably repetitive.

For anyone who has hung around the ID/Darwinism debate for very long it certainly should be apparent that there is a lot of repetition in arguments. Since this type of repetition has been going on for years, I'm not sure it would be a fair inference that the debate is running out of steam. However, I do think that all this rehashing of ideas and arguments presents a rather unique phenomenon in culture. It would be hard to find a contentious concept or issue in scientific exploration that has had such broad exposure. Normally scientific controversies rattle around in academia and the scientific community without much notice by the wider populace. Perhaps this is for good reason because critical struggles over paradigms usually manifest themselves in a dialog among specialists. This is, however, not true for the intelligent design debate. For instance, if one monitors news items covering intelligent design in the media via a Google news search rarely does a day go by without some news media outlet offering a story or commentary on the debate. Whether it is the trial in Dover, a course offering at a university, essays on web sites, or interviews and debates on television there is a steady throng of exposure to the propositions/arguments/evidence etc. concerning ID and Darwinism. Then there are the discussion boards and blogs where both the old guard and a constant stream of new debaters do battle over the issues.

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I'm sure it is a very complicated process that determines how scientists know when to quit a particular theory. Theories don't die easily because scientists often have a lot invested in them. As Quine-Duhem showed (a fun example) it's not a simple matter to falsify a theory. As they suggest, it's easy to contrive adjuncts to the existing theory to prolong its life. However, at some point the contrivances become so mountainous that something happens. Scientists become disenchanted with it. One has to wonder if this is beginning to happening with the Darwinian theory of evolution.

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There have been several threads on front-loading lately so I thought I'd offer one from an engineering perspective. Front-loading is not a term used in engineering, but there is a correlate in planning for future designs.

Probably the first aspect of front-loading comes in under the category of architecture. Typically things like modularization, scalability, standardization, utilizing interfaces, and the like fall under this category. The purpose of architecting a solution is to plan for both the current design and future designs. If an architecture is poorly conceived at the onset of a design, the design may at some point find itself "in a box" where it can proceed no further and redesign is required. Also since most designs never remain static over their life, a good architecture provides for easy changes to improve design performance or add new features.

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Here's a thought experiment. Suppose there is an alternate universe where there is also a trial in Dover, PA. However, in this universe a few things are different.

In this universe this is how evolution is currently taught in high school biology classes:

Evolution means change over time. Observation suggests that life has evolved with some form of common descent. It also suggests that change occurs because of mutations in the genome where the environment has some effect on what gets passed on from one generation to the next.

Except for materials on fossils and genetics, that's it.

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Categorization seems to be an important cognitive mechanism. It enables us to deal with the complexities of life by putting things in buckets that represent what Wittgenstein called "family resemblances". Family resemblances have properties (albeit blurry) that provide a ready made way to relate to new cognitive input. Wittgenstein's family resemblances were, however, not isolationist. He recognized that they can overlap and interact with each other. [This has been confirmed by neuroscience explorations of neural networks] On the other hand, there also seems to be a human inclination to go beyond a family resemblance type of categorization to a more stark form, demarcation. Demarcation(from the dictionary): 1. The setting or marking of boundaries or limits. 2. A separation; a distinction: a line of demarcation between two rock strata. It's not hard to find examples of this: mind/body, science/non-science, science/religion, objective/subjective, synthetic/analytic, fact/value, theory/implications, etc.

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One of the first things you learn as a design engineer is that every design decision you make constrains those that follow. Every design has a set of constraints within which the design can occur. Space, power, temperature, pressure, chemical environment, cost, etc. are just a few of the possibilities.

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Over at the Christian Science Monitor, philosopher Alexander George offers an interesting oped concerning the intelligent design debate and what should and should not be taught in science classes. While he agrees with the verdict in the Dover case that ID should not be taught in science classes, he does so for different reasons than those most often touted by intelligent design critics, that ID is not science.

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Having participated in the ID/Evolution debate for some time now, I have often wondered about the psychological factors that have led to and are driving this controversy. No one can deny that there are strong personalities involved and that emotions and passions can be high. Are scientific controversies like that surrounding ID necessary? Must they eventually spill over into personal attacks, and the ad hominem and irrational arguments that we often see? Must individuals find themselves relegated to the quagmire of battle while the real work of scientific research may be neglected.

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The other day I was watching the wonderful movie about the bacterial flagellum put out by the Nanotechnology Researchers Network Center of Japan and as a machine designer I began to ponder what would be involved in designing such a wondrous machine. I've designed many machines over my career, and as I watched how this machine worked and is assembled, I was struck by the tremendous number of analyses and decisions that would have to be made to design it. Of course, in the back of my mind I'm asking is it possible that all the choices necessary for this device to work could have come about by chance or is a design inference unavoidable?

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Philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt has recently written a very interesting and popular book called On Bullshit. It's only 67 pages but perhaps it can provide some insight into a problem that Dilbert Cartoonist, Scott Adams laments about of the difficulty for the unbiased curious public to come to understand ID/Darwinist positions. He states:

I've been doing lots of reading on the subject, trying to gather comic fodder. I fully expected to validate my preconceived notion that the Darwinists had a mountain of credible evidence and the Intelligent Design folks were creationist kooks disguising themselves as scientists. That's the way the media paints it. I had no reason to believe otherwise. The truth is a lot more interesting. Allow me to set you straight. (Note: I'm not a believer in Intelligent Design, Creationism, Darwinism, free will, non-monetary compensation, or anything else I can't eat if I try hard enough.)

First of all, you'd be hard pressed to find a useful debate about Darwinism and Intelligent Design, of the sort that you could use to form your own opinion. I can't find one, and I've looked. What you have instead is each side misrepresenting the other's position and then making a good argument for why the misrepresentation is wrong. (If you don't believe me, just watch the comments I get to this post.)

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Throughout history theistic adherents have stepped up to answer the criticisms lodged against their beliefs. To their credit they, for the most part, have done so because they take criticisms seriously whether they are internal or external criticisms. To do otherwise would relegate theistic belief to what many would find untenable, a fideism, a reliance on faith alone without regard to reason, philosophy, or science. Today is no different. Theists are finding an ever more ubiquitous challenge to their beliefs coming particularly from the scientific community. The charge of fideism remains as strong as ever.

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One of the strategies of ID critics seems to be an attempt to convince theists that a Darwinian form of evolution is fully compatible with their belief system. There are many examples of this in books and on the web: here, here, here, and particularly here. Now the focus of this blog is not normally on theology, but since theology is being used as an argument it bears a closer look. Is Darwinian evolution compatible with mainstream theism? Do the ID critics present a fair and complete argument for this supposed compatibility or is the case incomplete and possibly misleading? These are the questions I would like to pursue. First a bit on theism in general.

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