evolution article in wash post
Good article. Addresses some aspects of why the random mutation/natural selection mechanism seems like "not enough" to explain the diversity and complexity of life.
Monday, September 26, 2005
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9 Comments:
Thanks for this link, Jay. It's one of the best written newspaper pieces on this topic I've read yet. Even though I've always found evolution convincing, I'm all for teaching ID in public schools on epistemological grounds. It's just better for the mind to know about alternatives. The last sentence was dead on:
"The question to be answered in Harrisburg is whether Intelligent Design has anything scientific to add for now, or whether it belongs instead in philosophy class."
If there were philosophy classes in the public school system (there ain't are there?) this problem would be solved so easily!
Not sure what you mean by "epistemological grounds" . . . I feel like I *should* know this . . .
I'm absolutely with you, though on reframing this controversy in terms of the lack of a place for philsophical education/questioning in the public school system. That is indeed a huge part of what's responsible for the problem (if not the entirety of it!).
I just meant that my reasons for supporting the teaching of ID in schools are epistemological, i.e., about what knowledge is and ought to be, not about what we in fact know or should believe about evolution.
Quick update. I just read the "Dover Statement" here:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9444600/
My initial reaction is that this sort of hedging is unhealthy. A better approach would be to ban "religious" interpretations of Darwinism. That is, there are a whole lot of processes that ID-theorists and evolution theorists agree about. Sticking to the "filling in the gaps" line, I think both parties should just insist on not teaching things that are not known.
So, for example, it is not known that life arose by accident. I.e., it is not known that Raelians are wrong. Nor is the evolutionary history of every species on earth (including or on) accounted for to the last mutation (or even the first).
That leaves all kinds of room to propose or deny God outside of the classroom. The problem is that evolutionists do sometimes want to insist that life "just happened". They don't know that. It fits their world view. But the opposite fits what is by and large the SAME world view. That's the funny part.
This is already too long. The long and the short of it is that the question of "intelligent design" is interesting to me. Life on Earth may have had a non-accidental (non-evolutionary) origin. THAT idea ought to be discussed in school. But it should not be discussed in science class--for the same reason that we don't discuss Proust in physics class. The teacher ain't equiped for the task.
ID is not a dangerous idea (or no more dangerous than zealous evolutionism). It's one of the things mankind has come with. It has its beauty.
Thanks for the update -- interesting thoughts, and I'll have to spend some more time digesting them.
Right off the bat, though, I wonder about how much sense we can even make about the claims "life arose by accident" and "life didn't arise by accident". It seems to me like another form of Kant's antinomies . . . e.g., about the whether or not the universe has a beginning or has always existed . . .
The problem (or at least a big part of it), I think, is that the "mystery" (human self-)consciousness is, to some degree at least, intertwined with the question of the "mystery" of the origin of life.
Put another way, it quickly becomes a question of trying to grasp human self-consciousness in purely empirical terms, to obtain that elusive bird's-eye-view of ourselves -- a non-sensical endeavor to begin with. Or at least an endeavor which could never possibly be realized to our satisfaction. ("The sensation S boils down to B happening in the brain." Yes, but B's-happening-in-the-brain doesn't explain what it's like for me to have sensation S!)
"...it is not known that Raelians are wrong..."
I think we have to go on the assumption that the universe makes sense. While bizarre alternatives may be the case (due to our inability to experience certain things), there's no point of putting every conceivable view on par with the educated hypotheses of science. I say this all the time in such arguments, but it's perfectly "possible" that everything popped into existent one second ago (us, with our memories intact) due to a law that says precisely that will happen. But such speculation is fruitless. If the universe makes no sense whatsoever, we'll never be able to know that.
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In the Selfish Gene, Dawkins says that every attempt to answer the question, "What is a man?" (or something of that order) before Darwin's Origin was "just plain wrong" (or something hard headed like that). This means that Kierkegaard, Kant and, of course, Shakespeare were something like "simply mistaken" about human nature. E. O. Wilson, in fact, took up the Kant thing, saying that his work should be seen as failed attempt to describe how the brain works. This sort of assinine "hard" science chauvinism is what I object to, and why I find myself defending ID in principle on occasion.
Mostly, I'm defending people's right to air (and students' right to be made aware of) statements that run counter to the "educated hypotheses of science". I think the insistence that endosring these hypotheses is the only way to show that you are proceeding on the "assumption that the universe makes sense" is foolish.
I don't think serious scientists have an opinion about the Raelian myth of origin, and I think that's to their credit. But it does mean precisely that we don't know that they're wrong, i.e., we have no science about it.
This is a heartening discussion. Thomas's posts arouse in me that sense I haven't been able to word exactly - that there is a telos in the "accidental" attribution of evolution, and that it does leave the empirical and head into the realms of belief about this helmsman/author or lack thereof.
Why not suspend both the Intelligent and non-Intelligent branches of this, and just focus on the evolving design, and offer the rest as questions. On a practical/social level, isn't it important to engage with our neighbors who disagree with us without always legislating and dragging their asses into court?
How much kudos would we offer the HS science teacher who offered this question to her students; I wonder about how much sense we can make about the claims "life arose by accident" and "life didn't arise by accident"? Could we look at them as claims, as logic and language, not just as some ideological football we must grab/block/score with?
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