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December 23, 2005

Fake ID

I am pleased with the ruling in Kitzmiller vs Dover.

To preserve the separation of church and state mandated by the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, and Art. I, § 3 of the Pennsylvania Constitution, we will enter an order permanently enjoining Defendants from maintaining the ID Policy in any school within the Dover Area School District, from requiring teachers to denigrate or disparage the scientific theory of evolution, and from requiring teachers to refer to a religious, alternative theory known as ID.

First of all I am a stong believer in the concept of Emergent Behavior. Emergent behavior is basically the acknowledgement that there are objectively useful and complex behaviors that emerge out of very simple interactions which are not directly explicable by simple interactions. We have a sense of this when we say that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Also when we think of an ant colony as doing something in service to the queen, even though we know that the queen doesn't have a cell phone to every soldier. These are complex behaviors that emerge out of simple interactions. Ants don't think "hey let's make a long line", they're just sniffing the butt of the ant in front of them. Think of it as the positive side of unintended consequences. Sometimes very complex systems do things that make sense even though they are comprised of random and/or very simple interactions. Think of the calming effect of watching the sun's reflection off ripples on the ocean. It's absolutely impossible to 'program' the ocean's ripples and yet we percieve a pattern of beauty in it. The ocean's ripples are random and so is the angle of the sun, and who can say with any accuracy what exact color each will be on any ocean or any time of day. Yet we understand this thing and call it lovely.

The logic in the religiousity of Intelligent Design is to posit a god, i.e. some supernatural being or force, as a Creator of this beauty. If it is beautiful, says the logic, then there must have been some intelligent designer behind it otherwise how could we percieve it as beautiful? There are problems with this logic is twofold and related to the matter of teaching the scientific method.

The first problem is found in the the variant fungibility of attribution. Perception of things such as beauty or the appropriateness of the size of human eyeballs is abstracted to have some human value only through human agency. So one could conceivably construct a worldview (or a religion for that matter) that dictates that sunshine on the water is hideous and ugly. What Intelligent Designers would attribute to God is just as easily attributed to the Devil, or natural forces of decay or chaos. Simply because some group of people see the face of the Buddha in some pattern of dirt on a street in Karachi doesn't prove or disprove the idea of God. But the fundamental impetus to direct and control that attribution and interpretation is contrary to the scientific method. That is what makes ID value laden.

The attitude of scientific inquiry is 'it is what it is' and while it attempts to explain whatever is perceptible, it encourages and incorporates skepticism and contingency. The second problem with ID is that the it goes backwards and says the answer is always an Intelligent Designer. ID is what it needs to be.

I think that it is also notable that ID proponents are trying to reverse-engineer the educational system to suit their purposes. They pretend to want to be a credible scientific theory, yet they start with public schools for children instead of research universities where their ideas would be subjected to closer scrutiny. If it were to compete as a serious theory it would have the attention of top researchers in evolutionary biology but they reject it out of hand because it simply isn't science. The only people it fools are people who aren't true scientists - they can be bamboozled.

I've heard Intelligent Designers suggest that they're not necessarily religious, after all it might have been aliens who designed us in their super-fantastic laboratories. Ok, supposing that's true, what evidence do they present? Nothing approximating that presented by a logical presentation of the fossil record vis a vis evolutionary biology.

This is a war over methodology, and the ID Fakirs are are trying the public primary and secondary schools to interject an overbroad interpretation of the scientific method. I think it's very useful for courts to give some strong, persuasive and accurate descriptions of the scientific method in order to keep what's science clear legally, because it is vitally important to the the integrity of the American system that the divide between church and state be maintained. The public school system has a hard enough time teaching real science to be burdened with the activist agenda of teaching religion as pseudo-science, or belief in aliens.

Posted by mbowen at December 23, 2005 09:35 AM

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Posted by: MichaelEmanuel at December 24, 2005 06:10 PM