Re: ID at NRO

>On Wed, 9 Feb 2005 19:49:55 -0600, Bill Dozier <wddozier@mac.com> wrote:
>> There's been much discussion of ID over at National Review Online (they
>> don't like it much; the latest issue had a critique by John Derbyshire
>> that I haven't read yet). Here's a concise take-down by Jonah Goldberg:
>>
>> http://www.nationalreview.com/thecorner/05_02_06_corner-
>> archive.asp#055799
>>
>

I thought John Derbyshire's comments were worthwhile as well. He is
responding to the e-mails that he got in response to his article in
NR.

INTELLIGENT DESIGN ROUND-UP [John Derbyshire]
Just a round-up of points from the ID folder.
First, a general remark. I like a good knock-down argument as much as
the next person, but I must say, ID-ers are low-grade opponents, at
least if a bulk of my e-mails are any indication. They are still
banging away with the arguments I first heard when the whole thing
first surfaced 10-15 yrs ago. "What use is half an eye?" "The odds
against this are a trillion to one!" etc. etc. There is nothing new
here. I understand why biologists get angry and frustrated with
ID-ers. All the ID arguments have been patiently refuted many times
over. The ID-ers response is to come back with... the same arguments.
Anyway, here are a few of the commonest things I hear.

(1) "The fossil record is incomplete." Well, duh. Fossilization only
happens under extraordinary circumstances. The chance that any
particular organism -- me, for instance -- will be recovered as a
fossil eons hence is microscopically small. To add to the
incompleteness, soft body parts hardly ever get fossilized. We are
working from a pretty scanty data set here. Hard to see how it could
be otherwise.

(2) "...Therefore you have no right to go constructing theories,
given that the data set is so sparse." Scientists build theories from
much worse data sets than this. Try stopping them. The forthcoming (I
think) issue of National Review contains a review by me of Simon
Singh's new book THE BIG BANG, about the history of scientific
cosmology. The data set in cosmology is so hard to gather that even
very basic questions like "is the overall structure of the universe
static or dynamic?" were not resolved until very recently. Science
does what it can with the data it can gather. A good scientific
theory fits the data better than a poor theory. ("God makes it
happen!" is, by the way, not a scientific theory, though it may be a
metaphysical one.)

(3) "Evolution isn't scientific because you can't test it in a lab."
For heaven's sake. That criterion would invalidate most of science.
The theory of continental drift, for example -- how are you going to
get Eurasia in through the lab door? We have excellent theories to
account for the behavior of stars, but you can't put a star in your
lab, nor even duplicate star-stuff in small quantitites. As I said,
this is low-grade argumentation. (And, see below, we are actually
quite close to a point where we CAN do evolution in the lab.)

(4) "Organizational complexity cannot arise from simplicity by
natural processes." How do you know it can't? It is true that the
genesis of organizational complexity is not currently well
understood; but to leap from that to telling me we shall NEVER be
able to find a natural-law explanation for it is just dogma. At any
point in history, all sorts of thing are not well understood. Science
is "open," working from the ground assumption that natural phenomena
have natural explanations that can be formulated mathematically. To
declare that such and such a phenomenon will NEVER yield to this kind
of inquiry is absurd, not to mention offensively arrogant. Perhaps,
indeed, it won't; perhaps some phenomena that science assumes to be
natural -- the phenomenon of human consciousness, for instance -- may
turn out to be not susceptible to the scientific method. I would not
myself rule that out. However, to say you KNOW this, because... you
just KNOW, is silly. Remember Comte, who in 1842 declared that "We
can never know anything of the chemical or mineralogical structure"
of the stars. He was hardly cold in his grave before the spectrograph
was invented, and now we know all about that structure.

And as a matter of fact some interesting work is being done on the
origins of organizational complexity by computer scientists. There is
a good article about this in the current (Feb 05) issue of DISCOVER
magazine. Basically, we simulate evolution using little computer
viruses, setting them up so that they can do simple arithmetic
operations, "feeding" them numbers, establishing rules for
reproduction, mutation, cooperation, and resource competition, and
letting them run for a few ten thousand generations (which takes only
a few minutes). The results are surprising. Complex arithmetic
algorithms, with as many as 19 steps, each of which has to be in
exactly the right place in relation to others, crop up out of
nowhere.... and actually crop up more frequently if you tighten up
the "food supply"!

(5) "There is no such thing as half an eye/wing/lung etc." Yes there
is, all over the place, as biologists have been pointing out till
they are blue in the face. The common scallop has little
light-sensitive patches all round its mouth, for instance. An entire
menagerie of animals -- frogs, squirrels, even snakes -- has
rudimentary gliding webs of various levels of sophistication -- half
wings.

(6) "Evidence of design is all around us. How can you not see it?"
You might just as well, with equiponderant plausibility, say the
opposite thing: "Evidence of perfect cold randomness is all around
us..." Consider the recent terrible tsunami in south Asia, for
instance, in connection with which, several people HAVE said the
latter thing. These matters are in the eye of the beholder. I myself
feel that there IS design in the cosmos at some level, but certainly
not at the "God of the Gaps" level promoted by ID-ers. In any case,
statements like those I just made (BOTH OF THEM) are not scientific,
since they generate no hypotheses that can be mathematically modeled.
They are expressions of instinctual feeling, like the one I myself
just made. Essentially, I think, they are expressions of personal
temperament. Nothing wrong with that, but it ain't science.

(7) "The odds against the universe being the way it is are trillions
trillions trillions to one!" So they are. The odds of ANY particular
event are exceedingly small. SOMETHING has to happen, though. I met
my wife in a remote town in northeast China. What, from the point of
view of my working-class English mother contemplating me as a
newborn, were the odds of THAT? I was bound to marry somebody,
though. The odds of it being any particular person -- let alone a
person on the other side of the world -- were infinitesimal... but
SOMETHING HAS TO HAPPEN.

I am selling this point short. It is, in fact, the only one that I
find at all interesting. WHY does something have to happen? Or, as
Stephen Hawking put it: Why is there something rather than nothing?
Scientists like their theories to be parsimonious -- to explain the
data as succinctly as possible. Well, the most parsimonious state of
affairs is... utter nothingness. So why isn't the universe like THAT?
Now there's a metaphysical question worth pondering. That,
personally, is the zone where I go looking for God, when I feel that
impertinent. The notion of the ID-ers, that you can find Him by
staring hard at the gaps in our current scientific understanding,
seems to me to be a sort of comic-book metaphysics, betraying a dire
lack of imagination, and an utter waste of time.
Received on Fri Feb 11 20:38:56 2005