Canadian journalist and cdesign proponentsist Denyse O’Leary has given us nine “predictions” supposedly derived from Intelligent Design. As a public service, I summarize for the busy reader:
One day, Intelligent Design will bring me a pony.
The best part is that the original question was if cdesign proponentsists had made any predictions which have already been confirmed by experiment.
The people in charge of Taylor County, Florida’s science education are scientifically illiterate. Exhibit A:
Whereas, the new Sunshine State Standards for Science no longer present evolution as theory but as “the fundamental concept underlying all of biology and is supported in multiple forms of scientific evidence,” we are requesting that the State Board of Education direct the Florida Department of Education to revise/edit the new Sunshine State Standards for Science so that evolution is presented as one of several theories as to how the universe was formed.
Let’s look at that last part again:
. . . so that evolution is presented as one of several theories as to how the universe was formed.
Yes, and the American Revolution is only one of several explanations for the invention of agriculture, stone tools and fire.
Browsing the TalkOrigins Index of Creationist Claims, we find that the Taylor County school board has regurgitated CA041 and CA201, for starters. I never knew the job of a school board member was so easy!
The Honorable Frank Easterbrook, presiding over the judgment of the Q-Ray Ionized Bracelet (billed as a cure-all to end all cure-alls) had this to say in his ruling.
Defendants might as well have said: “Beneficent creatures from the 17th Dimension use this bracelet as a beacon to locate people who need pain relief, and whisk them off to their homeworld every night to provide help in ways unknown to our science.”
Sweet, sweet truth. Clearly, the aliens arrive in flying saucers, or better yet, flying Russell’s Teapots.
Judge Easterbrook also remarked thusly about “testimonials” which the Q-Ray people threw about to make their bracelet sound effective:
A person who experiences a reduction in pain after donning the bracelet may have enjoyed the same reduction without it. That’s why the “testimonial†of someone who keeps elephants off the streets of a large city by snapping his fingers is the basis of a joke rather than proof of cause and effect.
Tip o’ the fedora to Rebecca.
Sal Cordova, famous for calling Charles Darwin a puppy-killer, has attempted to reply to Tyler DiPietro’s demonstration that he, Cordova, is blitheringly ignorant of quantum physics. (Such ignorance would not be a crime, of course, except that Cordova is hell-bent on using quantum physics to prop up his “Advanced Creation Science.” See here, here, here, here and here if you’re morbidly curious.) Cordova’s latest reply compresses down rather nicely; once you do him the favor of cutting out the prevarications and the contradictions, the result resembles the following.
Stringing words I don’t understand together in a row is just as good as a logical argument, thank you very much, and if the laws of physics impose any limits on the “Ultimate Observerâ€, well then Jesus will come down and make everything better.
Click away if you want the gory details. . . .
We human folk are pretty good at taking information from different sensory channels and combining it into unified impressions. When I watch a video recording of Richard Feynman, for example, my optic nerves carry a flood of data pulses, signals which somehow arrive in my brain and sync up with the voice which sounds like a Brooklyn gangster (but which actually came from Far Rockaway, of course). A unified whole then emerges, without my conscious effort.
Like they’ve done with all the other odd aspects of brain function, people have invoked quantum mechanics to “explain” this: the mind is mysterious, quantum physics is mysterious, and so the two must be related. Only your blind devotion to linear, Western, patriarchal science prevents you from seeing the Truth! (Oddly enough, the Oprah–Chopra-woo crowd never seem to remark on how the original developers of quantum physics were, almost all of them, White Males who are now Dead.) The “binding problem” is no exception.
However, as both Max Tegmark and Ray F. Streater have pointed out, the proponents of what we might call “quantum binding” — Henry Stapp in particular — fail to consider that correlations are perfectly possible in classical physics. The invocation of quantum physics is only a maladroit solution to a non-problem. In Tegmark’s words,
For instance, oscillations in a guitar string are local in Fourier space, not in real space, so in this case the “binding problem†can be solved by a simple change of variables. As Eddington remarked [77], when observing the ocean we perceive the moving waves as objects in their own right because they display a certain permanence, even though the water itself is only bobbing up and down. Similarly, thoughts are presumably highly non-local excitation patterns in the neural network of our brain, except of a non-linear and much more complex nature.
Now, a patient has turned up in whose brain binding does not occur. G. Lee and H. B. Coslett write of the patient “K.E.,”
He was unable to report more than one attribute of a single object. For example, he was unable to name the color of the ink in which words were written despite naming the word correctly. Several experiments demonstrated, however, that perceptual attributes that he was unable to report influenced his performance.
K.E. had suffered stroke damage to his parietal lobes on both sides of his brain, or in technical terms, “bilateral posterior parietal infarcts.” In addition to his binding difficulties, he experienced simultanagnosia, an inability to see more than one object out of several presented to his view at once.
It may be a “dog bites man” report by now, but I think it’s worth noting that finding patients with neural dysfunctions is still a more productive way of gaining new neuroscientific knowledge than woolly-headed speculation about quantum mechanics, speculation which incidentally ignores big facts about physics.
(Tip o’ the fedora to Mind Hacks, and to Warren Ellis, whose “4am” provides my current background score.)
One of my Christmas gifts this year was Peter Irons’ God on Trial (2007), a rollicking account of courtroom clashes about religious influence in the public sphere. Irons, you may recall, was a dry-humored champion of justice in the Stuart Pivar affair, and these days, he’s been doing a little gumshoe work to uncover cdesign proponentsist shenanigans with regard to copyright violations. This is a pretty tangled business, and it probably won’t escalate into the next Dover trial, but it does have its amusing aspects.
For example, known pseudoscientist William Dembski has been complaining to his lawyer that Irons just won’t shut up with the pesky honesty. To hear poor li’l Dembski tell it, he just can’t go a single day without some e-mail from Irons, pestering him about academic integrity and intellectual property. This part caught my eye:
Moreover, I’m not particularly happy that Irons sends them from the UCSD server, which my tax dollars are indirectly supporting.
Gee, I wonder if Dembski is going to stop paying his taxes, given that during the 2007 fiscal year, the National Science Foundation was appropriated $5.9 billion dollars, and all those half-a-trillion pennies went to support actual science instead of Intelligent Design. Now, this isn’t very much of his withholding tax, since the NSF’s slice came out of a $463.5-billion pie (called H.J.Res.20), but it’s still enough to make him yowl like a wet LOLcat: “Noooo! They be takin mah taxez! Do not want!”
Continue reading Creationist Tax Policy
Amadan declares, “I Am the Very Model of a C-Design-Proponentsist.”
Salvador “Darwin was a flatulent puppy-killer” Cordova has decided to enslave quantum mechanics in the service of Intelligent Design, or as he calls it, “Advanced Creation Science.” It’s amazing how poorly they hide the religious agenda, isn’t it? I was a little surprised when Michael Behe admitted on national television that ID was a tool for God’s Christian Soldiers to fight back against science, but letting your medievalism all hang out is apparently a ubiquitous practice among the ID crowd.
Anyway, Sal was, like, completely floored that Fourier transforms are used in both quantum physics and electrical engineering. He says he has to take a year to blog his “Advanced Creation Science” in full detail, but I have the feeling it will all reduce to the following:
Fourier transforms are used in engineering; Fourier transforms appear in quantum physics; therefore, quantum physics must have been engineered by Jesus.
Anyway, Tyler DiPietro and I are chatting about this over at his place.
UPDATE (11 December): Mark Chu-Carroll has weighed in.
UPDATE (14 December): More from Tyler here.
The following comes from a preface which Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont wrote for a book of Jacques Bouveresse, a preface entitled “Modesty, Rigor and Irony.” Bouveresse, it so happens, had been criticizing the literary/critical establishment for the same sins which Sokal and Bricmont enumerated in Fashionable Nonsense (1997), only he went farther, got there first and delivered even harsher jeremiads.
Bouveresse also astutely analyzes the sociology of intellectual life and the tactics used by some media stars (and their supporters) to immunize their ideas from reasoned critique. Here is one (pp. 64–65): First, you make some ambitious and revolutionary philosophical claim, citing in its support a prestigious scientific result such as Gödel’s Theorem; then, when critics become too precise and insistent, you explain that your use of science was “only metaphorical” and you berate your critics for being so bloody literal-minded. Here is another (pp. 18–20): Start again by making a flamboyant assertion that is either illogical or unsupported by evidence; then, when challenged, pose as a victim and accuse your opponents of being “flics de la pensée” [thought cops], “gendarmes” and “censeurs” [censors]. When people who control major collections in the publishing houses, hold chairs in the universities and have prominent positions in the media repeatedly pretend that any criticism of their views amounts to censorship, it is, as Bouveresse observes, quite comical indeed.
Comparing Bouveresse’s observations of French lit-crit circles to the antics of American cdesign proponentsists is left as an exercise for the reader.
To put the “moral” at the beginning, let’s summarize. If you want to raise my blood pressure, one good way to do it is to write a completely wrong, back-to-front absurd tirade against all of twentieth-century physics. Anyone can slip a few errors into an essay, or even a few “fundamental” errors, but if you want the brass ring, you need at the very least to misrepresent the special theory of relativity, the general theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, the use of mathematics in physics and the scientific method. Bonus points if you confuse general relativity with quantum physics; a woop-woop-woop special prize for taking a non-true assertion and calling it a “fundamental premise” of quantum mechanics; and an extra cherry on top if you take three famous observations which support general relativity, lie about two of them and forget the third.
The story so far:
I might write an actual, non-linkfesty post about this. . . but then again, other corners of the Network are calling to me and reminding me of overdue obligations, so I might leave it to my colleagues.
UPDATE (6 December): gg now has Part 2 out on the blogonets.
UPDATE (16:47 o’clock): Tyler DiPietro dons the asbestos and joins the fun, followed quickly by Mark Chu-Carroll.
UPDATE (9 December): Flavin of the St. Louis Skeptical Society offers an essay.
Starting your own journal is a time-honored way to make pseudoscience and outright antiscience look more respectable. Known loonball Paul Cameron did it in order to bolster his homophobia, and the walking dishonesty generators known as “creationists” have done it several times. (Ad hominem? Sure, if you like. But creationism is the morally bankrupt pursuit of the factually wrong, and I lost patience with it quite some time ago.) Now, Jason Rosenhouse reports, they’ve gone and done it again.
These journals invariably founder on their inability to find any scientists willing to write for them. Remember Proceedings in Complexity, Information and Design? It’s been moribund since November 2005. Or how about Origins and Design? That one went belly-up around the turn of the century.
The latest representative of the genre is Anti-Matters. It bills itself as “A quarterly open-access journal addressing issues in science and the humanities from non-materialistic perspectives.â€
Apparently, “non-materialistic” science means attacking evolutionary biology with — wait for it — the Second Law of Thermodynamics! Some bad arguments just never die.
Man, I’m on an emotional roller-coaster here. “Ooh, Jason Rosenhouse has a new post! Joy joy. I wonder what it’s about.” Then I read, and: “Oh. Creationists blathering about the Second Law.
“Now I’m sad.”
I don’t have this conversation in person, because I hang out with academics, engineers and martial artists whose idea of “ancient Eastern wisdom” runs to better ways of extracting an enemy’s eyeball from its socket during combat. However, it happens on the Internet often enough to be all too familiar:
Which is a better turn of phrase: Dishonesty Institute or Discoverup Institute?
If you mentioned quantum physics at a cocktail party ten years ago, no one would invite you back. More recently a woman approached me and said, “Isn’t quantum physics just what Eastern mystics have been saying for the last two thousand years?” I had to summon every ounce of dignity and told her, “No!”
— Sidney Coleman, theoretical physicist (1937–2007)
John Scalzi’s LOLCreashun contest is going along swimmingly:
Scott Hatfield sez, put up or shut up.