I'm reluctant to post a link to an uncommon knowledge video without posting the actual video, but I think this one is worth it. I see it as a sort of test of intellectual honesty.
In it, David Berlinski is talking about some of the issues concerning Darwinism, and I'm sure he's infuriating all the right people. He's talking about something real that can't really be disputed in my view. He's talking abut something bigger than the theory itself. but in many circles, asking the very question will bring derision, ridicule and dismissal. Question evolution in the teacher's lounge, and you'll get a reaction not too dissimilar to shouting "SCREW ALLAH", into a London mosque. (You had better wear your body armor.)
But since it so angers the people you say it to, I think this is a truly beautiful thing to say. I believe it reveals a fundamental truth about the people who listen to it. Those who claim to have open minds but really don't, will react to it with hostility while others (who are deemed by the intelligentsia to be 'know nothings') will view it as confirming something they always instinctively knew, but might have been unable to phrase so elegantly.
To end the suspense, he's not talking about the viability of the theory on it's own, only on the theory as it's treated in academia; as a replacement piece of mythology. He's criticizing it as a central tenet of the religion of science. I have my own opinions about what he says, but I'll leave that to you guys to assess. I will say though that I think it's a really compelling argument to make, and worth having a look at.
David Berlinski discusses why he thinks Darwin’s theory is flawed.
20 comments:
Derb should weigh in here. (Or Razib)
In my view, anyone who uses the term "Darwinism" betrays an agenda as well as what is likely a shallow understanding of the actual science involved. Evolutionary theory has come a long way since Chuck D., and is as much a part of the bedrock of the current understanding of the universe as heliocentrism (galaxy-centrism, etc.), plate tectonics, or aerodynamics.
Also, anyone who says that evolution is "just a theory" (as opposed to a fact) suffers from a confusion of terms and mistakes in their mental categories. Of course evolution is a theory. As is general relativity. As is the germ theory of disease. None are "facts" in the way that (1) Paris is the capital of France, (2) 2 + 3 = 5, or (3) The Green Bay Packers won the most recent SuperBowl are facts.
Can theories be overturned? Of course! Can the fundemental claims/tenets of a well-established theory be mistaken? Ask Isaac Newton.
Evolutionary theory is currently the best theory we have to explain and predict a myriad of biological phenomena. No other theory even comes close. To rail against it because liberal academics are arrogant and annoying is to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
PS - For those who disagree with what they call "Darwinism", what other scientific (read: falsifiable in the Popperian sense) theory should take it's place? Lamarkism?
First of all, your defense (if I can categorize it that way) is thoughtful and not vitriolic, so I whatever else, I don't think my comments specifically apply to you.
Secondly, while you address the typical talking points of the whole argument (fair enough - we are talking about it) I suspect that you haven't actually seen the video, or at the very least, you fail to address it in your comments.
I'm loath to ask 'The Derb' to comment on something like this. He writes for a living, so I'm reluctant to ask him to write for free. But I suspect if you keep an eye on the corner and the rest of his writing over the next few days he'll raise the issue on his own.
Having spoken with him on this general topic a few times, I suspect he won't take such great exception to Dr. Berlinski's comments. In my experience few can match "The Derb" when it comes to seeing both forests and trees in the face of conversations where one or the other tends to be overshadowed.
But I think it's better to let him speak for himself.
I'll tell you what... if the end of that Uncommon Knowledge series arrives and he hasn't commented on it, I'll ask him to (although I suspect many others have already done so.)
Thanks. Keep up the great work. I found this site recently (through NRO & Derb, of course), and have bookmarked it.
I appreciate your combination of financial/trading expertise (which I lack) with your impassioned and frequent shots at the left/Obama (which I share).
I watched the clip, but without much interest. I've seen the Creationist talking points a hundred times each, and they've been refuted a hundred times each.
If someone says to me: "Pombluks are pringintious," and I reply: "No, sorry, pombluks are not pringintious. To understand why, take a basic course in Tidiology, or read this book, or this one, or peruse the links here, here, here, and here"; and then three weeks later someone else says: "Pombluks are pringintious"; then three weeks later someone else, then someone else; then someone else; and I respond to each of them in the same patient fashion, with the same references; well, I feel I have done my duty to the advancement of human understanding. From there on I just reply "Hey, fine," and change the subject.
Berlinski's statements are the usual tired old Creationist flapdoodle. For his point about tautology, for example, type "tautological" into the "Search the Archive" search box on the Talk Origins website. You will get several dozen hits which, if you read them with attention, will leave you understanding why the tautology "argument" is nonsense. The same with "irreducible complexity," "just a theory," "violates 2nd Law of Thermodynamics," and all the rest of the threadbare Creationist wardrobe.
And listen to Berlinski: "Academies throughout the Western World form a native conspiracy class, and they are very akin to a criminal class . . . [Darwin's theory] was accepted because it was a form of power."
So Berlinski would do away with universities? Does he include departments of mathematics, chemistry, computer science, and engineering in his description? How about medical schools? Is he aware that his "a form of power" explanation is quite precisely in tune with leftist postmodernist analyses of our institutions -- marriage is just a way to maintain men's power over women, etc., etc.?
Berlinski and I go back a way: here.
Well there you go.
Clearly, my friend John has much more experience and knowledge of Berliniski's arguments than I do.
With my experience limited to the two pieces of short video, I was hoping he wasn't going down that road, but based on John's comment I can only assume that he's wheeling out the intelligent design business. I was really hoping his was a criticism of academic culture, but I suppose that isn't so.
Respecting John as I do, I feel I have no choice but to eat the bird I was serving. So I suppose I'm the guy who needs to do a little more reading on the topic before I open my yap.
Since Derb posted this in the corner I feel I should come clean a little. I'm not a creationist in the sense that most people mean it, and I think intelligent design is silly. But I don't have the problem reconciling science and faith that many do.
If ever there were a topic that's easy to oversimplify this is it, so with that said please accept that I have a broader defense of the view I'm about to offer - even if I lack the time to pen it.
Science is a description of process... a pretty good one if you ask me. It can tell you how this and that work, and it can tell you where things were and where they're going. In my day to day likfe I rely on it heavily, and am even arrogant enough to believe that the scientific method plays at least a small part of my work (which is really social science)
But in my opinion, science does not address the higher question of existence. Or for those of you who believe it does… I believe it does so in an unsatisfactory way. Science gives specific answers to specific questions and no more. And I believe there is more to existence than the things it can accurately address.
If you want to hear me elaborate on that any further, you'll have to offer to pick up my bar tab.
After watching the video my initial reaction was, oh frabjous day! Just what the world needs - an anti-evolutonist as condescending and dismissive, and possessed of fully as much sneering hauteur and baseless self-regard, as Richard Dawkins.
I share Derb's weariness with the grinding lack of originality on offer by Darwin's detractors. Tired old wheezes about missing links in the fossil record keep getting less tenable with each new paleontological discovery; quite a few of the old-time missing links aren't missing anymore.
But old bones haven't exactly been the cutting edge of evolutionary science in quite a while. It is fascinating that Berlinski, whom I understand to have at least one degree in molecular biology, fails entirely to address the avalanche of evolutionary evidence provided by gene-based science. Apes, humans and Neanderthals have all had their genomes sequenced and compared. Berlinski ignores this.
He doesn't even address instances of readily observable evolution in action, such as the advent of drug-resistant strains of pathogens.
In passing, he speaks of "irreducible complexity", a favorite hobby horse of the Intelligent Design crowd, every alleged example of which has long since been shown to be quite reducible. Berlinski apparently has ties to a prominent ID institute.
Given Berlinski's alleged agnosticism, the most mysterious aspect of his anti-Darwin peregrinations is their obscure motivation. One can readily see why literalist Christians, say, have a big problem with Evolution, but it's difficult to see why someone with no alleged opinion about the reality of God should have such a vehemently negative opinion about Darwin and his heirs.
If you're impressed by this guy, you're far too easily impressed.
I don't think Intelligent Design is silly. I don't think the caloric theory, or Ptolemy's epicycles, or even geocentrism, is silly. These were all the "scientific consensus" at some point or another, before better theories came along. Evolution is simply a better way to explain the diversity and connection of life than Intelligent Design. I don't think we should argue that evolution is "right" or "true", because that's not how science works.
I think science textbooks could explain this better than they do now. My thermodynamics textbooks explain how mankind once thought that heat was a kind of conserved fluid that was stored in matter. It's only been in the last couple of hundred years that we have come to understand the relation of heat, work, and internal energy. Biology textbooks should explain how we once thought that the remarkable suitability of organisms to their respective niches to be evidence of a thoughtful God, but now we understand both adaptations and maladaptations through the mechanisms of evolutionary theory.
But astrology?... now that's silly.
Oh. "Derb" asked and answered these issues elsewhere and is just so weary of us who think him a fastidious crock who traffics in rudimentary epistemological errors. He cannot be bothered with our type who have not got with his self-evident program.
That was his breathlessly anticipated reply? Rather like The Phantom Menace for the Star Wars fanboy.
For all the anticipation of the commenters calling for his magisterial opinion, and then the self-referencing linkage from his Corner post which took me here: what a flop.
Don't rehearse your decisive arguments for our sake, "Derb." They are the poison fruit from a poisoned tree and elicit little interest outside of your fan club, which seems to gather in this unremarkable online space. But please spare us the airs -- as if you expect the world to be satisfied with your presumption that only non-serious people could possibly disagree with your well-documented dilettantism.
Hmm. Dr. Berlinski "seems to have a degree in molecular biology" as Mr. Eagleton points out above, and yet somehow the Tired Creationist declares "Pombluks are pringintious" in direct contradiction to the "refutations" Mr. Derbyshire has personally witnessed "a hundred times each"! How can that be?
How weak on the rhetorical merits alone. How boring to engage "The Derb" on this subject. He cites authorities third-hand and deploys barely clever locutions masquerading as erudition that exclusively dazzle the likeminded looking for ideological confirmation. Every niche finds an audience on the net, I suppose.
Mercifully, The Derb has taken his "usual tired old" dog-and-pony act to a separate, preposterous, and unreadable website, and no longer inflicts his flapdoodle on the NR readership. (Is Secular Right Dot Org still extant? One hardly can be bothered to direct mouse to URL bar.) And yet when we get a glimpse of it here, all the bad memories come rushing back. It should not astonish that his ghettoized scientism has undergone very little "evolution" in isolation over the years. But what's new is his invincible ignorance going proudly vincible: he bounces himself exclusively against the sympathetic under the presumption of Been There Done That, thereby walling himself off from smart dissent.
On occasion, we accidentally alight upon John Derbyshire stroking his ratty atheist hobbyhorse "but" -- and here's where we are spiritual brothers! -- "without much interest." For those others who somehow maintain their voyeuristic curiosity about his crackpot Mysterianism, please, show a little dignity and stop publicly begging for it.
In Derb’s defense (I know he doesn’t need me to defend him, but this is my show here), everyone gets tired of the same old debate. There is a limited number of times you can argue against the same old thing with the same vigor you initially held. And finding that lack of vigor tiresome and using it as an excuse for ad hominem attacks is hardly persuasive to those of us who are only spectators.
I found the initial Berlinski video interesting because it seemed to raise an issue that was separate from the ‘who is right’ debate about creation. He wasn’t talking so much about validity of the science as how the science is being mis-used as a proxy for what is by rights a question of philosophy. I thought he was saying “Evolution? OK… sure… but so what?” I found that much more interesting personally than the “who is right” debate, where in my opinion, no one on either side is prepared to learn anything from the other.
In my experience the people who believe that science can address every relevant question regarding creation, have very closed minds. What’s more, my personal experience is that when you point out that there may be bigger questions than science can answer, in many cases they can get very angry at you – as if you’ve challenged one of the core elements of their faith. “Their Faith.” Not the facts as they know them (no one gets angry at that), but their faith. And in that way, I think they are profoundly misunderstanding science, and what science is actually for.
This may be very pedestrian to you old hands in the nature of the universe debate. But to me, it was new, and interesting. The bigger question may have the two armed camps fairly well defined and dug in. But this smaller question I thought showed something particular about people, and how they answer these questions for themselves. This was the reason I posted the video at all. I honestly couldn’t give a fig about the Darwin /Evolution /Intelligent Design /Creationist debate. But people and how they think, I find very interesting.
To be frank, until a few days ago I had never heard of David Berlinski or any of the arguments he makes. The whole Atheism//Intelligent design debate is not a pool I swim in usually. I flatter myself in thinking of my work as science, (at its best it’s really social science) and of myself as a sort of profoundly sinful and mildly anti-social Catholic. So I feel like I have at least part of a foot in each camp. But I thought Berlinski’s very limited claim about how some people treat science as a faith was interesting.
I’m a little disappointed that so many seemingly very intelligent (certainly very literate) people are skipping over the original Berlinski point that I tried to call attention to and gone right on to the points he “usually” makes. I put usually in quoted because I don’t honestly know. I don’t know the first thing about the man. But lots of you seem to. In fact, not only have people skipped to the end of the story opposing him, but now they’re doing the same defending him as well.
OK fair enough. If my childhood taught me one thing it’s that some people like to fight, just to fight. I guess while I was chasing my ball I wandered into a minefield, and got what I deserved.
A-Bax said...
"Can the fundemental claims/tenets of a well-established theory be mistaken? Ask Isaac Newton."
Newton was not mistaken. His three laws are still the bedrock of dynamics - they hold precisely in any instantaneous rest frame. Einstein extended Newton, he did not do away with him.
I don't think Intelligent Design is silly. I don't think the caloric theory, or Ptolemy's epicycles, or even geocentrism, is silly. These were all the "scientific consensus" at some point or another, before better theories came along. Evolution is simply a better way to explain the diversity and connection of life than Intelligent Design. I don't think we should argue that evolution is "right" or "true", because that's not how science works.
With respect, one of these things is not like the others. Calorics, epicycles and geocentrism were, one might say, the best that could be done before the emergence of the scientific idea and of the technology to build instrumentation capable of establishing their invalidity. They were certainly the consensus, though they were not scientific. As for "right" and "true", one can indulge in philosophical word games, I suppose, but how science does work is to test falsifiable hypotheses against data gathered from the real world. I would argue that "true" is effectively equivalent to "not false."
Which is why Intelligent Design is, indeed, silly. Unlike the old false theories, ID was not invented on a best efforts basis only to be supplanted later by better theories that accorded with observation. It is, instead, the modern invention of people who, for their own reasons, simply find it personally impossible to admit the truth - or the non-falseness, if you will - of Darwinian Evolution as an explanatory framework for the simultaneous diversity, but underlying similarity of living things.
ID doesn't actually deny evolution. It's central tenet is simply that there are structures and mechanisms in living creatures that embody an "irreducible complexity" that could not have evolved in stages, by random mutation but must have required "Intelligent Design" by a sentient Creator. God got the ball rolling, so to speak, and evolution has been going on since. That's the entirety of the thing. To this point, every alleged instance of "irreducible complexity" proffered by ID's inventors has been shown to have a perfectly feasible stepwise incremental genesis consistent with Darwinian natural selection - no special creation required.
For religious literalists, ID is pretty small beer in any case. It doesn't support so-called "Young Earth" creationism; doesn't dispute the fossil record of millions of years of non-human life forms existing before the appearance of Man. It's a silly idea cooked up by silly wishy-washy people who seem equally unwilling to give Darwin his due or to go the full William Jennings Bryan.
Tom, your observations are far more subtle and edifying than Derbyshire's. Would that he had taken your approach:
I found the initial Berlinski video interesting because it seemed to raise an issue that was separate from the 'who is right' debate about creation. He wasn't talking so much about validity of the science as how the science is being mis-used as a proxy for what is by rights a question of philosophy. I thought he was saying "Evolution? OK... sure... but so what?" I found that much more interesting personally than the "who is right" debate, where in my opinion, no one on either side is prepared to learn anything from the other.
This observation indeed is an important wrinkle and is worth engaging among old opponents. I'd go further and say no discussion about evolution should proceed without a clear understanding of the misuses of proxies.
On the other hand, modest though you are, Derbyshire most certainly "need[s] [you] to defend him." He assumes himself to have transcended the need to engage, and that assumption has vitiated the philosophy he espouses, rather like leftists in the campus echo chamber who never meet serious dissent and thereby assume its absence.
Look, when we find we must repeat ourselves we can go several ways with it. We can generously set about the business of reiteration (which, not incidentally, comprises the better part of all advocacy); we can politely direct those unfamiliar with our oeuvre where one might get the entire argument; or we can express our ugly and unwarranted exasperation and pretend that suffices as a reply.
Derbyshire's argument is not in the balance here. He presented none and is coasting on reputation alone (a reputation puffed up by this site's encouragement). It is his crass behavior that is to be condemned, a behavior which all by itself indicates the quality of the thesis he finds so difficult to rehearse for the benefit of those who have not pored over his prolix website.
It's a shame, because Derbyshire's curmudgeonliness has its uses, and his gloom can be a tonic. But silence would have been preferable to his bad imitation of a professorial ideologue. Humility leavens assertion, even if it's just an affect. There would be no such thing as courtesy without affectations that are, on some level, dishonest. This is one reason for the abysmal quality of discourse on the web -- we think the absolutely essential need for courtesy in discourse has been overcome by the medium itself, and hissy fits get special attention among the noise.
How unsurprising on the internet: Derbyshire chose to be other than courteous. A brief word about his limited resources (be they time or inclination or knowledge of the subject), or a reference to a fuller expression of his position, would have been capital. That he chose the easy way says something about the man, which in turn says something about his philosophy. Just sloppy all around.
Anonymous wrote:
"Newton was not mistaken. His three laws are still the bedrock of dynamics - they hold precisely in any instantaneous rest frame. Einstein extended Newton, he did not do away with him."
A-Bax writes: This is not true. Einstein’s mechanics did not extend Newton’s, but rather replaced them. The issue is that we don’t have instruments precise enough to measure the different results predicted by E’s mechanics and N’s mechanics. For many everyday phenomena, and even many solar phenomena, the two predicted values are so close to one another as to be meaningless from an engineering point of view. But, sometimes a phenomenon arises, like the precession of the perihelion of the planet Mercury, and the distinct predicted values between the two theories falls within the realm of (current) measurability. And in these cases Newton’s prediction fail where Einstein’s are correct. (Since Mercury is so close to the Sun’s gravitational field, space-time is bent enough to show up on measurements.)
More fundamentally, Einstein and Newton conceive of the universe differently. For Newton, the three special dimensions are wholly different from time. For Einstein, time is another dimension no qualitatively different from what we usually think of as “spatial” dimensions. This has enormous implications. One of them being that time moves “more quickly” when near a large mass than far from it. So, for instance, although the difference is miniscule and currently immeasurable, Einstein’s theory predicts that an clock would tick more slowly at the top of Everest than it would in Death Valley. Newton’s predicts that the clock would tick at the same rate.
Even more fundamentally, there are no “forces” within Einstein’s mechanics. Even gravity should not properly be thought of as a “force”. Remember, one of the objections to Newton’s concept of gravity was that action-at-a-distance seemed like something out of the “occult” (which, as it turns out, Newton was familiar with). How could objects act on one another at a distance without some intermediary? (The criticism went).
Einstein replaces action-at-a-distance with the idea that large masses bend the fabric of space-time (the way a heavy lead ball might bend a suspended piece of loose-leaf if put in the center of it). Object travel along what Einstein called “world-lines”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_line
So, according to Newton, the Earth orbits the Sun in a (more or less) circular path, and stays in orbit due to centripetal force. But, according Einstein, the Earth travels in a straight line, but within a curved space (roughly “circular”) around the sun, and there is no “force” involved.
Bottom line: Einstein’s theory fully replaces Newton’s. Newton’s fundamental concepts, as elegant and intuitive as they are, are simply false.
Hear, hear, and well said:
Tom: I honestly couldn't give a fig about the Darwin /Evolution /Intelligent Design /Creationist debate. But people and how they think, I find very interesting.
... I thought Berlinski's very limited claim about how some people treat science as a faith was interesting.
Epistemology is far more interesting than what the Church of Darwin proclaims to know and that's that. We all assert at some level of faith, but the key to our quality of assertion is articulating "how we know that we know."
Charles Taylor was all over this in his exposition of the genesis of analytic philosophy in the 20th century. (Overviewed in this CBC series, part 2: http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/episodes/2011/04/11/the-malaise-of-modernity-part-1---5/ )
There is a reason why these "debates" are so tiresome. They aren't debates so much as compartmentalized assertions beneath the pay grade of epistemology. What one thinks he knows is not nearly as important as why he thinks he knows it.
With that in mind, we can approach Dick Eagleson's somewhat confused explanation: [T]he best that could be done before the emergence of the scientific idea and of the technology to build instrumentation capable of establishing their invalidity. They were certainly the consensus, though they were not scientific. As for "right" and "true", one can indulge in philosophical word games, I suppose, but how science does work is to test falsifiable hypotheses against data gathered from the real world. I would argue that "true" is effectively equivalent to "not false."
The virtue of Aristotelian science and against Cartesianism is the former's grounding in immediate experience. The further we get away from what our hands and eyes know, the easier for theory to play dangerous games with invisible assumptions. (Marxism, anyone?) Modernity has reached the point where we are comfortable denying the input of the senses so that credentialed opinion might be regnant over all matters. This is one reason why "The Secular Right" proceeds in contradiction.
Because we "now know" the earth is not flat (Do you really? Have you seen its curve with your own eyes?), we delegate all authoritative knowledge to the imaginations of scientists, who claim to speak on behalf of falsifiable conclusions derived strictly from the scientific method, but in truth are imagining worlds just as creatively as any poet (but with a fraction of the artist's expressive language).
So to say "calorics, epicycles and geocentrism were the best that could be done" is to miss the bigger conversation. Popper said falsifiability. Aquinas said revelation. Aristotle said observation.
Scientists who make pronouncements about the nature of things like papal bulls ("Settled Science") are so far from understanding this requirement that they have ceased to recognize it as a legitimate question, much less as the essential question upon which all their work depends.
The exchange becomes frustrating, and this is why Berlinski brings up what must be resolved if there is to be any synthesis among yelling opponents. We who, with Berlinski, insist on settling the epistemological authority first are branded as insufficiently deferential to scientism -- as heretics really -- and tarred as "anti-science" or accused of "Creationist flapdoodle." Tiresome.
This arrogant shtick from the likes of "The Derb" is really just an elaborate evasion, or worse, the indication of a man ignorant of how deep the argument goes. It is the taunting of children who remain safe in the shallow end of the pool while claiming to be mighty, indomitable explorers of the sea. You shake your head at their childishness, but occasionally you really really just want to hold their heads under the water.
Berlinski should be applauded for his patience and courtesy in the face of their opposite. We have seen examples of both approaches, and we can at least circumstantially conclude which has the more reliable argument. When one is engaged in the great questions, there is little impulse to, much less a need for, treating the opposition with less than generosity.
Dick:
ID was not invented on a best efforts basis only to be supplanted later by better theories that accorded with observation. It is, instead, the modern invention of people who, for their own reasons, simply find it personally impossible to admit the truth
I understand your point, but I was using "Intelligent Design" in the sense that an eighteenth-century naturalist might use the term. I think of contrivances such as "irreducible complexity" as transparent tactics used by people who are pushing a very old idea (that the apparent adaptation of life is evidence of the divine), not as features that define a new way of looking at biological systems. In the sense I am using it, ID long predates Behe et al., and in fact, was the principal approach to biology before Darwin.
With respect, one of these things is not like the others. Calorics, epicycles and geocentrism were, one might say, the best that could be done before the emergence of the scientific idea and of the technology to build instrumentation capable of establishing their invalidity. They were certainly the consensus, though they were not scientific.
Well, there is science, and then there is science, I suppose. I include the efforts of people like Aristotle, Euclid, Democritus, and Ptolemy as "science", because they were systematic attempts to understand and explain the world around us. These figures are included in any book on the history of science, I would think. There is a narrower definition of "science" that only includes modern science, that focuses on experiment and falsifiability, and I suppose there is an argument that these concepts are pre-scientific in some sense.
However, I chose those three examples deliberately. Caloric theory, albeit incomplete and superceded by thermodynamics, is more or less correct in a regime with zero work interactions -- provided you allow for things like "latent heat of fusion" etc. It's actually the way most people talk about internal energy -- they talk instead of things like "the heat stored in the oceans". And Ptolemy's epicycles can be thought of as the first two terms in a series expansion of planetary motion -- it is possible to make this rigorous. And geocentrism, tossed aside as incorrect when the almost equally incorrect theory of heliocentrism was ascendant, is understood in the context of general relativity as being just one of an infinite number of ways to choose a coordinate system, no more or less incorrect than using the sun or the moon or Building 10 at MIT as the center of the universe.
Is the argument that biological diversity comes from a divine plan significantly different? Well, the difference I would point to is naturalism, that is, the requirement that scientific theories get along without the help of a big man in the sky, which ID fails. But I think naturalism is a modern requirement that we place on scientific theories. People were observing nature closely and trying to organize our understanding of it long before we started to impose the requirement of naturalism. I think ID can be considered to be within the broader meaning of science, though I agree it was never part of modern science.
And I believe that the reason that evolution superceded "design" was that it provided a better explanation for more phenomena than design ever did. I really don't believe that scientists suddenly said "Great! At last a theory of biology that doesn't require God!" Instead they said "Hey, you know this variation-plus-selection idea can account for the differences between these two nearly alike species". In fact I think it is something of a creationist fable to believe that atheism was the principal motivation for science to adopt evolution.
A-Bax writes: This is not true. Einstein’s mechanics did not extend Newton’s, but rather replaced them."
Clearly, your knowledge and understanding of Einstein's theories and Relativistic Mechanics is, at best, superficial, and downright wrong in some respects.
Newton's Three Laws are laws. They hold exactly in a properly constructed reference frame. Einstein's theory merely gives the formulation for transforming physical quantities from one reference frame to another. And, if you are trying to determine, say, the path of a particle relative to a particular reference frame (which we almost always are), you need Einstein. But there, Einstein did not "replace" Newton. Einstein replaced Galileo.
Newton's theory of gravitation does run afoul of unrealizable "action-at-a-distance", but that is an entirely different subject from the Three Laws. And, gravitation even today is not settled, as General Relativity is incompatible with Quantum Mechanics. Furthermore, even there, Newton himself acknowledged there were inadequacies, with his famous pronouncement, Hypotheses non fingo.
Newton's three laws make systematically false predictions in certain circumstances. Newton and physicists working under his paradigm did not anticipate these circumstances.
A post-hoc qualifier of "properly constructed reference frame" does not rescue Newton's laws from the counterevidence amassed against it over the 20th century by both relativity theory and quantum mechanics.
I am well aware of the inconsistency between relativity and quantum theory. This is all the more reason to regard Newton's theory as false.
I suppose you are taking an extreme instrumentalist view of science, otherwise the inadequacies of Newton would be obvious.
Peace out.
I know that all you theophobes, including Derb, can't stand the idea that anything other than purely material cause and effect is occurring in our universe. (You all will even swear fealty to the idea of the multiverse to thwart the Intelligent Designists, but that's another argument.)
However, your irrational emotionalism is no excuse for your undeserved defense of the Modern Synthesis. It is indeed, as Rick Perry or Sarah Pain may say, a theory that is out there that has some holes in it. I'll be happy to discuss those holes, but that's not the point of my post. My point is that you can defend the fact of evolution without having to lash yourself to the mast of the Modern Synthesis (or Darwinism or Lamarkism, etc.)
I firmly believe in the existence of gravity, but I don't accept the idea of the graviton and I think that the Standard Model will be significantly reworked. (Quick, what's the mass of the Higg's Boson? Trick question.)
In other words, just because I can admit that I have no idea how gravity works that doesn't mean that I'm denying the fact that if I drop something it will fall at an accelerated rate of 9.81m/s/s.
Likewise with evolution. Evolution is an observed fact, the acquisition by E. Coli of the ability to metabolize citrate being just one example. However, the Modern Synthesis is a weak theory in that it is inconsistent with observations (e.g. horizontal gene transfers) and has little to no predictive power. We may be hundreds of years away from having a workable theory of evolution.
You evolution advocates might be more persuasive if you admitted that. Also if you clearly state that the existence or non-existence of evolution has nothing to do with the existence or non-existence of God. Aristotle sorted that out 25 centuries ago.
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