One Wild Political Day

[filkertom]

Let's see. Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) signed on to the challenge of Ohio's twenty electoral votes, forcing actual public debate on the matter. I don't believe the challenge will change the outcome, but there were way, way too many discrepancies, almost all of which favored the Republicans, to let it go without something. You can write a thank-you note to Sen. Boxer here.

Attorney General nominee Albert Gonzalez is on the hot seat today. The first part included some fawning by Senator John Cornyn (R-TX), the guy famous for man-on-box-turtle sex. You can follow it live at C-Span. And here's a guide at the NY Times showing just why this Gonzalez fella has danced his impish way into our hearts.

And, the Dover Area School District near Harrisburg, PA is determined to introduce "Intelligent Design" to science classes. I simply have to include this quote from the story:

Intelligent Design does not presuppose any supernatural being, and is not creationism, the school district said in its response....

Well, then. Must be some guy named Larry. He had a kit.

A big kit.

These people are in charge of your children's education, Dover Area School District. Let 'em know what you think.

(Cross-posted to my political blog, Mandate, My Ass.)

Comments

[smallship1.livejournal.com]

Well, it depends how they're teaching Intelligent Design. If they're giving it as one of a range of alternative possible theories on the origin of the universe, then hooray for them. I don't much like the idea of being an accident, but I like even less the dogmatic insistence that I must be an accident, could only have been an accident, and ought to be jolly well glad to think of myself as an accident. There is no conclusive evidence either way, and the scientific attitude is to consider all possibilities till the evidence is in.

If, on the other hand, they're teaching Intelligent Design in the same dogmatic way "because a book which may or may not be the Bible tells us so," then boo and sucks and man the torpedoes.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

The biggest problem I have with Intelligent Design is a simple logical problem: If humanity is so complex that it had to be created by something or someone... where did something that complex come from?

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

here did something that complex come from?

Blue-light special at K-Mart.

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

I am not-repeat-not a creationist (or any sort of theist, actually), but no one said that the universe had to be logical. (And in fact you can ask the same question about the Big Bang, if you like that theory.)

[smallship1.livejournal.com]

I don't know. My favourite of the many possibilities is that it developed from something simpler, that was in turn created by something more complex (though there's no reason to presume that something that can create a universe necessarily has to be more complex than its creation...) and so on all the way back, or round in a circle, or a spiral, or a wheel within a wheel. As jrtom says below, the same question can be asked of the Accidentarians: okay, there was this protouniverse that just suddenly decided to become a universe? Where did it come from? Why at that moment and not sooner or later, or not at all? How come?

See, these are the questions science doesn't bother with, and they are the ones that matter to me. I don't care how many dimensions the universe had 0.00000003 of a nanosecond after the Big Bang. It's not relevant to me. Why the Big Bang happened, that's relevant, because that tells me why I'm here, and the Earth, and Alpha Centauri, and Uma Thurman, and cool stuff like that. And I'm sorry, but it's not scientific to rule out a theory in the absence of any evidence to disprove that theory, just because (as far as I can make out) That's What Scientists Are Supposed To Do Dammit.

Okay, having gone down the comments, some of which I almost understood, Intelligent Design looks to be, as you say, largely rubbish, and I would rule it out. I would not, however, rule out intelligent design (i.e. the theory that the origin of the universe at some point and on some level might have involved intelligence and volition on the part of some entity as yet unidentified) and, unless there's a body of evidence somewhere I don't know about--always a possibility--anyone who does rule out that theory is being dogmatic, not scientific.

As some scientific type once said: "The universe is not only queerer than we imagine, it is queerer than we can imagine." Queer I can deal with. Accidental, no.

[skull-leader3.livejournal.com]

That would be John Burdon Sanderson Haldane (http://www.marxists.org/archive/haldane).

[zachkessin.livejournal.com]

Not to mention that they are often using very poor translations of that book. Dang'it if you are going to be word for word literalist, at least do it in the original language

[arensb.livejournal.com]

Believe it or not, I've seen it argued (probably at Dial-the-Truth Ministries) that the most perfect language in the history of the world was early-17th-century English, and that God planned things in such a way that the translations and retranslations of the Hebrew/Aramaic Bible would culminate in the most perfect version ever: the King James Version.

[zachkessin.livejournal.com]

Ok that one strange web site. I have a feeling that those folks would not know Hebrew, Greek or Aramaic if it bit them on the a**. Not to mention that much of the meaning of English has changed since 1611.

[mrfnord.livejournal.com]

Intelligent Design is, on a good day, metaphysics. On a bad day, it's theology. Philosophy and theology are both valid and honorable realms of knowledge, and I wouldn't be adverse to seeing high-school students getting a decent introductory course in either.

However, in no way shape or form is Intelligent Design a science.

[arensb.livejournal.com]

I'm all for discussing weaknesses in mainstream theories. If there really are multiple leading theories in some field, teach them both (at whatever level is appropriate for the class). However, ID ain't one of them, for reasons I've mentioned elsewhere.

Yes, there are arguments and disagreements between evolutionary biologists. AFAIK there is as yet no consensus on the origin of humans' huge brains: it might be that bigger brains led to more clever hunting techniques; or it might've been sexual selection; or something else.

There's also gradualism vs. punctuated equilibrium, but even there, the arguments aren't even about whether evolution occurs, but rather which mechanism (or combination of mechanisms) best explains a particular case.

But the worst part is that ID isn't even a scientific theory. It's built on the logical fallacy of argument from ignorance: "I can't imagine how the bacterial flagellum might've evolved, therefore it must have been Godan intelligent designer." In other words, it's Paley's Watchmaker, dusted off and with a fresh coat of paint.

[arensb.livejournal.com]

Intelligent Design does not presuppose any supernatural being, and is not creationism, the school district said in its response....

Strictly speaking, this is correct: ID says nothing about who the designer was, and people like Michael Behe do say that it could be space aliens. In public, at least. The sum total of their argument is that living beings have features that couldn't have evolved, therefore they were designed. That was the state of things in 1996 when Darwin's Black Box came out, and as far as I know, that's still the state of things today.

This in itself should be setting off BS-meters. Imagine if an astronomer said, "We've figured out that some anomalies of Neptune's motion can't be accounted for by the gravity of Jupiter, Uranus, and Pluto, so therefore there must be some undiscovered planet *cough*Barsoom*cough*" and stopped there. Imagine if, eight years later, he still hadn't made any progress on figuring out the orbit or mass of the mystery planet. And to complete the analogy, imagine if the rest of the astronomical community, spurred on by the original announcement, had looked into the matter and learned new stuff about Uranus that explained the anomalies.

So yes, ID is just creationism with the serial numbers filed off. If it doesn't say anything about God, it's because it doesn't say anything at all, other than "somewhere, somehow, there's something wrong with evolution."

The next time an IDiot says that ID says nothing about the designer, ask why not. And ask how they propose to learn more about the designer.

[nubianamy.livejournal.com]

Man on box turtle?

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

I updated the main post to include a link to a news story. Cornyn is quoted, appropriately enough, near the bottom.

[nubianamy.livejournal.com]

Oh, that is priceless.

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

Actually, a friend of mine recently proposed to me the notion that evolution itself is an intelligent process: not that it is driven by an exterior intelligence, but that it is intelligent in something like the same way that a person is. This is not what is generally meant by "intelligent design", of course, but it's an interesting idea to contemplate.

[arensb.livejournal.com]

Well, there's theistic evolution, which is the notion that God created humans, but used evolution to do so. Which means that evolution is part of God's plan and all that.

Another intriguing notion I've run across is that living beings have evolved to evolve. The fact that the DNA-copying mechanisms aren't perfect might be a feature, not a bug: if there aren't any mutations in a population, then it might not have the requisite diversity to survive changes in the environment.

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

Without getting into the deep waters of what it means for God to have "created" humans if he used evolution to do it, that isn't what I meant: as I said, my friend was proposing that evolution *is* intelligent, not a tool of an intelligence.

As for the second notion, I'm not sure what the first sentence means, but yes, it's not difficult to believe that mutations can be useful for increasing diversity.

[arensb.livejournal.com]

my friend was proposing that evolution *is* intelligent, not a tool of an intelligence.

I'm trying to make sense of this, and can't. That's like saying that fluid dynamics is intelligent.

As for the second notion, I'm not sure what the first sentence means

Simply that some setups evolve more efficiently than others. For instance, a centipede might have genes for building the first segment of its body, then a separate set of genes for building the second segment, a separate set for the third, etc. Or it could have a single set of genes for a generic segment, and another set that says "Now make 50 copies".

Let's say that the environment changes such that being green is advantageous (better camouflage, perhaps). The first type of centipede might get a mutation in the genes for the 12th segment that turn it green. So now it has one green segment and 49 brown (or whatever) segments. It's a small improvement.

The second type of centipede gets a mutation in its genes for generic segments. Now all fifty segments are green. This is a much bigger improvement. So in this scenario, the centipedes that evolve more quickly outcompete the ones that evolve more slowly.

There are some problems with this idea, but it still seems interesting.

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

'm trying to make sense of this, and can't. That's like saying that fluid dynamics is intelligent.

It may help to try to formally define what you mean by intelligence first. (This is not easy; my friends and I have killed a lot of hours on this. This same friend once defined intelligence as "the ability to do something that you don't know how to do".) Once you've done this, then consider whether the process of evolution satisfies that definition or not. If you don't have a formal definition in mind, then it's hard to evaluate whether this kind of statement makes sense.

If it helps, I would not say that fluid dynamics is intelligent; FD is just a mathematical model, if you will, of a certain subset of the physical world. Evolution is not a model, but a process.

I'm not saying that I completely buy this characterization (of evolution as an intelligence of sorts). But it's an interesting way of thinking about both intelligence and evolution.

[arensb.livejournal.com]

It may help to try to formally define what you mean by intelligence first. (This is not easy; my friends and I have killed a lot of hours on this.

Urg. Yeah, I've wandered into that particular minefield myself.

This same friend once defined intelligence as "the ability to do something that you don't know how to do".

There has to be more to it than that. By the definition above, my coffee mug is intelligent: it doesn't know jack squat, yet is able to hold liquids, fall off the table, keep papers in place, etc.

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

There has to be more to it than that. By the definition above, my coffee mug is intelligent: it doesn't know jack squat, yet is able to hold liquids, fall off the table, keep papers in place, etc.

All depends on what you mean by "know". ;)

[huskiebear.livejournal.com]

"The fact that the DNA-copying mechanisms aren't perfect might be a feature, not a bug:"


That's actually a fairly well accepted notion, and the mechanisms underlying it are a hot-and-sexy topic for research at the moment. There are some regions of DNA that were previously thought to be "junk" that some folks down the hall from me are now showing to be basically evolution engines. The project I'm working on right now is so incredibly frustratingly complex because of these mechanisms that allow for rapid changes in The Way Things Are Done. The more genomes we sequence, the more we learn about ourselves.

We keep thinking we know so much, but there is an infinite amount left to learn. Just because we don't know it (yet!) doesn't mean it is unknowable.

[arensb.livejournal.com]

Sounds way cool. Can you recommend any reading on the subject, suitable for a lay reader? (I.e., someone who's read Dawkins's "Blind Watchmaker" and "Mount Improbable", Ridley's "Genome", and several of Gould's books of essays (but not The Brick), but doesn't know what a plasmodium is and is fuzzy on the notion of transposons.)

You say that "some regions of DNA" have a function. This doesn't surprise me, but am I correct in assuming that most of the DNA that isn't expressed is still useless junk?

[admnaismith.livejournal.com]

It's turtles, turtles, turtles, going down all the way!

Er, Tom, you did filk the box turtle sex story, didn't you? Even just a line or two? Will the turtle be unbroken, by and by Lord, by and by...

[unclelumpy.livejournal.com]

If w'ere the product of 'Intelligent Design', then how come so many of us are goddam IDIOTS?

[zachkessin.livejournal.com]

Just because the design was intelligent does not require that the end product is.

[metalfatigue]

"Intelligent design" is not the same thing as "good design." Just ask any competent software engineer.

[nuveena.livejournal.com]

Yanno...

One day, when my son was just starting to walk proficiently, my husband and I were cleaning while we were watching him play. He had crossed to one side of the room, and, after I moved the coffee table, he crossed back using approximately the same path that he used to get to the other side in the first place. HOWEVER, he neatly walked around the table that I had inadvertently placed smack in the middle of his thruway.

My husband stopped cleaning for a second, and looked at our son. He said, "Do you know how long it took for AI programmers to get a robot to do that?"

Which is very true. Programming a robot to cross a cluttered room is easy. Programming a robot to enter a room, analyze the obstacles and, by itself, plot a way around them, is not.

Putting this in the context of the evolution debate, what's more impressive? A god that, from a set of plans, calls forth into existence the world exactly as it is today with no capacity for change? Or a god who designs a system (starting from scratch) for a self-perpetuating, constantly changing universe, which eventually, by itself, using its own mechanisms, creates life? And not just life, but extremely complicated life forms capable of all sorts of rational and abstract thought?

I'll take the latter. But only on the days when my agnostic faith is weak. :)

[arensb.livejournal.com]

Programming a robot to cross a cluttered room is easy. Programming a robot to enter a room, analyze the obstacles and, by itself, plot a way around them, is not.

From http://bash.org/?top2:

<Patrician|Away> what does your robot do, sam
<bovril> it collects data about the surrounding environment, then discards it and drives into walls

[selenesue.livejournal.com]

Patrician? Sam? There is something subtly Pratchett-ish about this exchange. Now if the second correspondet were LeonardOfQ we might have a real suspect!

[arensb.livejournal.com]

On the Internet, nobody knows you're a naive genius living in a tower somewhere.

[umbran.livejournal.com]

As others have noted, Intelligent Design is not science, and therefore has no place in a sicence classroom. Teaching that the theory of evolution is a theory, and there are some things that may seem difficult to explain via this theory, is okay.

However, as a teacher, I'm not sure I would mind all that much reading the statement in the class on January 13th. Why? Because I expect I could read it in such a way as to make the ones who wrote it sound very, very foolish indeed. Remember - presentation matters.

[selenesue.livejournal.com]

I have used your link to Sen. Boxer and sent a nice thank-you note. She got more "stones" than much of the rest of the Senate put together; she just keeps them on the inside!

[trdsf.livejournal.com]

I sent Senator Boxer a thank you note as soon as the news broke this morning that she would sign off on Representative Jones' objection.

I had to. Us Ohioans don't have any Senators worth mentioning.

Meanwhile, the first speaker against the motion was our local representative, who went off on a shrill, harsh screed. So I still consider my representative to be Marcy Kaptur, who was my rep when I lived in Toledo.

Kudos to the Republicans who spoke--and there were a couple--who were calm, collected, and actually addressed the question at hand rather than launch ad hominem attacks and smearing every dissenter in sight. I still think they're wrong, but at least they're rational about it, and I can respect that.