Feedback for March 2005

The facts are that secular humanism was listed as a possible non-theistic (no God or gods) religion in a orbiter dictum (Latin for "something said in passing"), or footnote, to the decision written by Justice Black, however being only a dictum it held no legal weight (personal disclaimer: I do not consider myself to be a "secular humanist" so its standing as a religion, or not, is of no personal concern to me).

For those interested: The Torcaso v. Watkins decision

As for acceptance of evolution equating to being a secular humanist, the mere fact that humanists accept evolution does not make evolution part of humanism any more than (most) Christians accepting germ theory makes that a part of Christianity. Nor are Christians "required" to believe in a literal reading of the book of Genesis (i.e. young earth creationism, which was the subject of Edwards v. Aguillard). This was noted by Justice Brennan who stated in a dictum to the majority opinion in Edwards v. Aguillard that:

While the belief in the instantaneous creation of humankind by a supernatural creator may require the rejection of every aspect of the theory of evolution, an individual instead may choose to accept some or all of this scientific theory as compatible with his or her spiritual outlook. See Tr. of Oral Arg. 23-29.

And indeed many millions of Christians (and believers in other theistic religions) in the U.S. and around the world do not find any conflict between their faith and the findings of science.

For some examples see the " Statements from Religious Organizations" at Voices for Evolution.

As for your affidavits they were ruled to be irrelevant to the Constitutionality of the law in question and that their contents did not "raise a genuine issue of material fact".

Justice Brennan, from the majority ruling in Edwards v. Aguillard:

Appellants contend that affidavits made by two scientists, two theologians, and an education administrator raise a genuine issue of material fact and that summary judgment was therefore barred. The affidavits define creation science as "origin through abrupt appearance in complex form" and allege that such a viewpoint constitutes a true scientific theory. See App. to Brief for Appellants A-7 to A-40. We agree with the lower courts that these affidavits do not raise a genuine issue of material fact. The existence of "uncontroverted affidavits" does not bar summary judgment17. Moreover, the postenactment testimony of outside experts is of little use in determining the Louisiana Legislature's purpose in enacting this statute. The Louisiana Legislature did hear and rely on scientific experts in passing the bill18, but none of the persons making the affidavits produced by the appellants participated in or contributed to the enactment of the law or its implementation19. The District Court, in its discretion, properly concluded that a Monday-morning "battle of the experts" over possible technical meanings of terms in the statute would not illuminate the contemporaneous purpose of the Louisiana Legislature when it made the law20. We therefore conclude that the District Court did not err in finding that appellants failed to raise a genuine issue of material fact, and in granting summary judgment21.

This case is crucial to the future of scientific education in this nation. As researchers in many different branches of advanced science, amici share a concern for the basic scientific education of this nation's public-school students. Scientific education should accurately portray the current state of substantive scientific knowledge. Even more importantly, scientific education should accurately portray the premises and processes of science. Teaching religious ideas mislabeled as science is detrimental to scientific education: It sets up a false conflict between science and religion, misleads our youth about the nature of scientific inquiry, and thereby compromises our ability to respond to the problems of an increasingly technological world. Our capacity to cope with problems of food production, health care, and even national defense will be jeopardized if we deliberately strip our citizens of the power to distinguish between the phenomena of nature and supernatural articles of faith. "Creation-science" simply has no place in the public-school science classroom. Amici urge this Court to affirm the Court of Appeals' judgment that the Louisiana statute is unconstitutional.

That the authors of your affidavits are slightly outnumbered (and "out ranked") doesn't make them wrong necessarily (science isn't done by democratic vote), but it does put them in perspective. If you want to argue that there exists an absolute dichotomy between evolution and creationism, that "atheistic evolution" and young earth creationism exhausts all conceivable alternatives, or that evolution is somehow a religion you will have to offer much more evidence than the opinions of five people on the losing side of a court case.

Fossils are recognizable as former life, so consideration of them merely reduces to the question of whether life looks designed. Regarding DNA, and life in general, some of the evidence against them being designed are:

• Life reproduces. Designed things, with rare exceptions, do not.
• The similarities and differences between DNA of different species show a pattern consistent with common descent, not with independent creation. We see the same pattern when comparing other traits of species. If life were designed, we would expect more reuse of parts independent of lineage.
• Life is complex and jury-rigged. For example, one mouse gene codes for a protein involved in its neurons. But that protein as transcribed from the DNA has a wrong amino acid in it. Another enzyme is necessary to replace that amino acid with the correct one. Without this enzyme, the mouse dies. But if you change the DNA to include the correct amino acid in the first place, the enzyme is not necessary.
• Designed things are almost always deterministic: Whenever you pull a lever here, you expect that part there to move. Life has a lot of randomness inherent in it. For example, when a chemical trigger is presented to a bunch of cells, some respond and some do not.

Of course, all of this rests on the assumption (heretical in ID circles) that design means something. If you agree with the ID crowd that design is inscrutable, then nothing can be said about it. Although you can be sure much will be.

With Alan Gishlick and Nick Matzke, I wrote a critique of the content of Meyer's paper that is on the Panda's Thumb weblog as Meyer's Hopeless Monster. This was, in fact, the very first public notice of Meyer's paper, and it concentrates upon the failings of Meyer's work. It is a substantive critique to which the Discovery Institute fellows have done a very poor job of responding.

There's a post on Panda's Thumb that gives chronology of events and links to background material concerning the publication of the paper.

Something I discovered after the original critique went up was just how similar Meyer's paper was to previously published essays that Meyer authored or co-authored. This is detailed in my analysis of the amounts of text copied between versions of the essay.

So when flacks go about accusing people of criticizing Meyer's paper solely because of issues other than its "merits", point them to the very first public notice of the paper and call them on their bluff. They will have to fold.

You are correct, however, that "simple" is a poor choice of word in that context. I have replaced it with "simpler."

Incidentally, the Bible-believing scientists, with very rare exceptions, are the scientists who accept million-year time scales.

Are you a Christian? From your writing I couldn't tell.

Perhaps we could have a discussion on how to make our disclaimers concerning the Flat Earth Society more noticeable.

Science, of course, is not the business of generating doctrinal truths. It is the business of learning about the world, and as we learn more, we must perforce change our views to match. This, they do not get.

1. "Synthetist": I wanted a term that covered the views of the Modern Synthesis of the period from 1940-1960 or so. "Synthesists" sounded like industrial chemists. Hence the term...

2. Of course we need to demonstrate that macroevolution happens. This has been done, inferring in cases where the degree of change would take, ex hypothesi, too long to observe directly.

But the arguments against macroevolution are usually offered along the lines that there are mechanisms that do prevent it from occurring (at some level - choices range from the impossibility of speciation through to the impossibility of very large "kinds" evolving from each other, at the phylum level).

Everything we know about genetics, development, and so on shows us that there are no barriers of the kinds claimed (and we know a lot more now than when I wrote this). So my argument here is that the burden of proof, or rather substantiation, has been met and no plausible reason for thinking that macroevolution at level N is impossible has been offered.

3. It is not the case that genetic processes are by definition microevolutionary. This is often said, but never defended. Genetic processes are implicated in speciation (whether by isolation and subsequent independent evolution leading to developmental incompatibility, or by "sudden speciation" in hyrbidisation), and so any higher level of macroevolutionary change must be, at the bare minimum, a series of genetic evolutionary steps. This is at least additive (some say, and I am inclined to agree, that macroevolution is more than additive).

We have seen the sorts of morphological changes occur that are held up as "impossible". Some have been sports, and some are variable forms of a species that are greater than the differences between other species. So I stand by my statement of 7 years ago.

Science is not about faith. It is about theoretical explanations of the natural world. A theory that accounts for observations, which offers predictions or expectations (for example, if whales and hippos share traits no other groups do, they will be derived from common ancestors, and this predicts all kinds of shared traits with undiscovered fossils - this is an actual case - google for "Whippo"), and which posits nothing in direct contradiction with known science, among other things - this is the best explanation in a science and it will be accepted as correct, for the moment. This is true in any science, not just the historical ones.

Macroevolution - by which I mean Darwin's idea of common descent, also known today as phylogeny - is such a theory. It therefore is the accepted theory because it explains so much. Nothing else does. So the onus at the moment is on anyone who wishes to reject it to show that it fails in some way. At the time Darwin proposed it, and for a relatively short time after, macroevolution needed to be shown to be the preferred theory against the prior views of Owen, Oken and von Baer, which was effectively a view of form causing organisms to be what they were - an Aristotelian and Platonist view. Special creation was employed scientifically only as an instance of this acocunt, by Cuvier, 50 years before Darwin.

Science changes. What is accepted at one time needs to be proven not to be the best knowledge bet, as it were. Once it has been, it is no longer a viable hand in the card game that is science (to stretch a metaphor). Creationism is not viable now, because it explains and predicts nothing and is in contradiction to the rest of known science. But to challenge existing theories of macroevolution (although not the fact of macroevolution) you have to show they fail to explain something, or that something explains it better, or that it contradicts (perhaps newly-) known science. Hence my argument in the FAQ.

Some ideas are just not open to demonstration in a way that will satisfy the extreme skeptic (not just in science; a suitably extreme skeptic could doubt I exist, for instance); but they can be demonstrated to scientific satisfaction. Science is not, as I said, about faith, but about knowing. We know macroevolution occurs to a degree of certainty that will satisfy anyone but the extreme skeptic. There is no arguing against that approach. Nevertheless, as Galileo said in another context, still it (life) moves.

I hope this clarifies the argument for you.

I hope you will enjoy them.

Some recent books that you might find interesting in this regard are;

(Disclosure of personal interest: I wrote Chapter 8, of Why Intelligent Design Fails, but like most academic authors I do not receive any royalties).

It does remind me of what Ambrose Bierce once wrote: Pray, n. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled on behalf of a single practitioner confessedly unworthy.

See:

• Index to Creationist Claims/Claim CD011: Carbon-14 dating gives unreliable results by Mark Isaak
  
  
• How Good Are Those Young-Earth Arguments? by Dave E. Matson
  
  
• Radiometric Dating and the Geological Time Scale by Andrew MacRae
  
  
• A Radiometric Dating Resource List by Tim Thompson

Or enable popups windows for this site, as that is how the HTML tools work...

The feedback writer was correct, the tools had ceased to be functional in the submit feedback page. Why the tools had previously worked on the page and still worked in the password-protected answer feedback area drove me a little crazy until I saw the problem. That problem is now corrected.

Researchers can get energy from empty space, and empty space isn't empty at all. Even a total vacuum is filled with a quantum particles that pop in and out of existence.

The Index to Creationist Claims addresses the following elements from your comment and provides pointers for further information:

• Materialism: CA301 and CA601.
• Evolution a religion: CA610
• Too advanced to understand: CA100
• Origins by chance: CB940
• DNA as a code: CB180
• SETI detecting design: CI190
• Faith in evolution: CA612
• Debating: CA340

Granted, I do not cover the lack of appearance of design of the genetic code specifically, but I do cover the appearance of design of life generally.

• 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution
• Plagiarized Errors and Molecular Genetics
• The Evolution of Improved Fitness
• Genetic Algorithms and Evolutionary Computation
• Many other files: please browse

If you want to see some "inbetweeners" then why don't you look at:

If you don't think there are any "inbetweeners" here than please tell us where the apes end and the humans begin and justify your answer. If you need information on the specimens please refer to 29+ Evidences: human-apes. Please note that creationists don't agree where to draw the line between human and ape. For more information please see this Archive's section on human evolution. In particular you might want to consider the Dmanisi fossils which bridge the gap between Homo habilis and Homo ergaster.

And then there is the extensive fossil transitionsals between reptiles and mammals How about Archaeopteryx which is about as good as intermediate between the theropod dinosaurs and the birds as one could hope for. And if you are willing to go through the scientific literature there are many examples that you could look up from the Transitional Vertebrate Fossils FAQ. Browsing this Archive will reveal more examples. And the Archive hardly documents every example. (If anyone wishes to increase our coverage consider submitting an article on it.)

You also are clearly unaware of how the word "theory" is used in science. Please see: Evolution is a Fact and a Theory. Atomic theory is still a theory even though atoms are a fact just as evolution is a fact with evolutionary theory attempting to explain that fact.