Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Bad Guy Team-Up: ID + SSK

So I was watching NOVA last night--on the Dover "Intelligent Design" case--and found out something interesting. It turns out that Steven Fuller testified for the ID side. Now, you probably don't know who Fuller is. He's a sociologist who writes on the sociology of science, "social epistemology," "SSK" (strong sociology of "knowledge"*) and science studies. And if you're not familiar with that stuff...well, it's a long story, but the short version goes like this: despite some interesting bits, it's basically a swamp of confusions. A little bit of skepticism, a little bit of relativism, a little bit of trendy po-mo social constructionism, a little bit of meat-ax naturalism, a little bit of resentment against philosophy and philosophers**, a lot of social doxastic determinism and sociological tunnel-vision...stir well...and you get a real mess. Typical claims in the area include, e.g., that physical objects can't cause us to have beliefs, only other people can. So, roughly, if you're standing next to a tree, you can't come to believe that there's a tree there unless another person comes along and exerts social pressure on you to believe that there's a tree there. Trees can't cause beliefs about trees, but peer pressure can.*** When put this starkly, most SSK types will backpedal and deny that that's what they think--but that's what they think. If you doubt that, go read Barry Barnes and David Bloor's "Rationalism, Realism, and the Sociology of Knowledge" (though they try to back-pedal, too, in the end).

Anyway, as it turns out, Fuller was in there testifying for intelligent design to be taught in high school science classes. Nice. Bad guy team-up! (Well, confused guy team-up, anyway...)

Now, the thing is that, on a sufficiently broad conception of "intelligent design theory," I might even count as a quasi-advocate of something like that view. I'm at least interested in--and even to some extent sympathetic to--the view that something like intelligence is a real force in the universe, and that there might be some tendency toward order in the world. I don't believe that an agent or person created life, but the kinds of positions I'm sympathetic to would not make a strictly naturalistic biologist happy. I also think that the American educational system would be a lot better if students learned some philosophy in high school--including, perhaps, discussions of the argument from design. (In philosophy class. Not biology class.) So, anyway, I'm not entirely unsympathetic to these guys' position.

Though, of course, Michael Behe and the lot from Dover were basically busted because they were so obviously pushing a religious view for religious reasons. (In one draft of the ID textbook, Pandas and People, researchers found that the ID folk had just gone through an old creationist textbook they'd written and tried to replace 'creationism' and 'creation' with 'intelligent design theory' and 'intelligent design.' The most amusing part of the whole business came when it was discovered that they'd forgotten to delete correctly, and had thus included in one of their manuscripts words like "creaintelligent designtionism." Now there's a transitional form for ya...)

So why is Fuller on the ID side? Well, it isn't clear, but part of the answer seems to lie with the sociological blinders aforementioned. If you've ever been around folks in sociology, you probably know that many of them have a tendency to radically over-estimate the importance of the phenomena they study. (That's common in most disciplines, actually.) That is, they think that social forces--which, make no mistake about it, are very strong--are stronger and more influential than they actually are. They also have a tendency to ignore other important influences on human action--e.g. experience of the physical world and reason. In some places, Fuller states that he testified for the ID folks because they are the losers in a social power struggle for control of biology departments and curricula. Now, there's a confusion in there typical of sociologists of Fuller's type. There is an element of power struggle in all this, but it's not the only element, it's not the major element, and it's only marginally relevant to the question at hand. The court needed to determine whether or not "IDT" is science, and whether or not it was being pushed for religious reasons. Intelligent design theory is not considered bad science because it lost a power struggle in bio departments; rather, it lost out in bio departments because it's bad science. It's considered bad science because it is bad science; though sociologists like Fuller often come dangerously close to saying the reverse. If one could show that it lost out in bio departments solely or primarily because it lost a political battle, then that would be relevant. But you cant' show that. What with it being false and all.

The major problem with the "sociology of knowledge" (more properly referred to as "the sociology of belief") is that it ignores the fact that sometimes the facts cause our beliefs. That is, sometimes we believe things because they are true, or because they are better supported by the evidence. In fact, it is something like an axiom of the strong version of such sociological views that our beliefs can never be explained by facts or evidence, but must always be explained by (non-rational) social forces. What you get, therefore, is basically a self-refuting view that begins with an axiom that virtually entails skepticism and then goes on to try to defend a positive (and very implausible and easily-refuted) theory of human belief-acquisition.

So what we get is, roughly, postmodernism in the defense of old-time religion.

A toxic combination.


*Note: not actually about knowledge at all, but, rather, orthodox belief.

** Seriously. These guys' papers are filled with little tantrums about how much better and smarter and cooler they are than philosophers. They are very angry that no one else will admit this!

*** You might note that it's implausible in the extreme that only a certain species of primate can cause beliefs in us...especially since we only know of the existence of those primates because photons bounce off of them and strike our retinas and so forth...which is, of course, exactly how we know the tree is there, too...

35 Comments:

Blogger Colin said...

My term paper for Contemporary Political Theory, the hardest but best class I ever took, was on pretty much exactly this: the problems of using Foucault's stuff about subjugated knowledges as justification for believing crazy shit with no basis in reality. The case I examined was the creationist movement in America, and how it had been dealing with the professionalization of science. Or, more simply, how scientists put up their methodology and said "if you don't use this, screw off."

I think the key thing that people in the social sciences forget, way too often, is that sometimes knowledges are subjugated because they are wrong as hell. This is why I picked a minor in sociology instead of a major, actually.

10:32 AM  
Blogger Random Michelle K said...

In case you need an antidote to this, John Scalzi went to the Creation Museum (he raised $5,118.36 [he had many contributions of $6.66] for Americans United for the Separation of Church and State in the process) and snarked the entire thing. The titles and captions for the pictures are the best part.

Especially the vegetarian dinosaurs.

http://scalzi.com/whatever/?p=121

He also wrote that he had a large number of Christians e-mail him and say, "just so you know, we're not all stupid."

So for all the stupid out, there is still plenty--if not more--of not stupid.

Just doing my part to keep you from getting so gloomy right before Thanksgiving break.

10:50 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Nice diagnosis, Winst. Fuller is at the other university in my town and he gave a paper at my university last year and you have basically confirmed my impression of what he's up to. Our resident philosopher of biology ended up yelling, from the audience, "You need to learn some science!"

Colin: if they're "wrong as hell," we shouldn't call them "knowledges." Like many Foucauldian tics, it only makes for confusion.

12:37 PM  
Blogger Colin said...

I went to the museum of creation. Some painful to look at shit. My favorite part wasn't that dinosaurs were all vegetarians, but that pineapples didn't have spikes before the Fall of Man (since there was no pain, or something like that). Also, there was no poison and nobody ever aged, or got hurt ever. The exhibit was of a dinosaur in the Garden of Eden eating a rounded pineapple. Mind-expanding, in a way.

Jimmy: Confusing terminology in philosophy? Well I never. I think this is more of a problem with people not understanding terminology within a system, and not Foucault having a bad choice of words. (Side note: I think his word in french for knowledge was 'savoir,' and I forget whether that has implications past just the english word 'to know'.) Seems to me like your beef is more with people who use words differently in a system than with Foucault specifically.

2:06 PM  
Blogger Tom Van Dyke said...

I also think that the American educational system would be a lot better if students learned some philosophy in high school--including, perhaps, discussions of the argument from design.

Yes, but it never comes, nor is it likely to.

The theist, or even the rationalist, asks if there's more to reality than the material world, more to the universe than its mechanisms.

That would suit me fine, and would get at least some of the religionists (not all, unfortunately) to back off on some of this stuff.

For instance, "Intelligent Design" is an OK notion, and I bet most of its supporters simply like the name. As a formal theory, I don't find "irreducible complexity" in the form of the eyeball or the flagellum particularly convincing. Those who see a divine hand in all this have hitched their wagon to the wrong star, IMO.

Still, why does the carbon atom behave so uniquely? An education that does not muse on the important things is no education at all.

[I think astrophysicist Fred Hoyle was a real pisser, with the soul of a philosopher. He was no doubt wrong on a lot of things, but a flawed argument can contain more truth than a flawless one that discounts inconvenient variables. I especially like his disdain for peer review, which is a friend to truth but also orthodoxy, and so is an enemy of inquiry. Philosophy is about the latter, not the former.)

5:13 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

From the Wikipedia on Silicon:

Having the same structure to the outer electron orbitals (half filled subshell holding up to eight electrons) as carbon, the two elements are very similar chemically and both are semiconductors readily either donating or sharing their four outer electrons

That we cannot imagine a silicon-based life form doesn't mean they aren't possible elsewhere in the Universe, just that we don't see it in our little corner of the Universe.

From the Wiki on the Fine-Tuned Universe:

Stenger in that paper is critical of the claims of the fine-tuning advocates and provides his own explanations highlighting the flaws in those claims, concluding that "The universe is not fine-tuned for humanity. Humanity is fine-tuned to the universe".[4]

From the paper in question:

However, as philosopher David Hume pointed out in the eighteenth century, the fact that we cannot explain some phenomenon naturally does not allow us to conclude that it had to be a miracle.

From the end:

Design advocates argue that the universe seems to have been specifically designed so that
intelligent life would form. These claims are essentially a modern, cosmological version of the
ancient argument from design for the existence of God. However, the new version is as deeply
flawed as its predecessors, making many unjustified assumptions and being inconsistent with
existing knowledge. One gross and fatal assumption is that only one kind of life, ours, is
conceivable in every conceivable configuration of universes.
However, a wide variation of constants of physics leads to universes that are long-lived
enough for life to evolve, although human life need not exist in such universes.
Although not required to negate the fine-tuning argument, which falls of its own weight,
other universes besides our own are not ruled out by fundamental physics and cosmology. The
theory of a multiverse composed of many universes with different laws and physical properties
is actually more parsimonious, more consistent with Occam's razor, than a single universe.
Specifically, we would need to hypothesize a new principle to rule out all but a single universe.
If, indeed, multiple universes exist, then we are simply in that particular universe of all the
logically consistent possibilities that had the properties needed to produce us.
The fine-tuning argument and other recent intelligent design arguments are modern
versions of God-of-the-gaps reasoning, where a God is deemed necessary whenever science has
not fully explained some phenomenon. When humans lived in caves they imagined spirits behind
earthquakes, storms, and illness. Today we have scientific explanations for those events and
much more. So those who desire explicit signs of God in science now look deeper, to highly
sophisticated puzzles like the cosmological constant problem. But, once again, science continues
to progress, and we now have a plausible explanation that does not require fine-tuning. Similarly,
science may someday have a theory from which the values of existing physical constants can be
derived or at otherwise explained.
The fine-tuning argument would tell us that the Sun radiates light so that we can see
where we are going. In fact, the human eye evolved to be sensitive to light from the sun. The
universe is not fine-tuned for humanity. Humanity is fine-tuned to the universe.


Let's bring in warty bliggens for for his take on the Universe:

i met a toad
the other day by the name
of warty bliggens
he was sitting under
a toadstool
feeling contented
he explained that when the cosmos
was created
that toadstool was especially
planned for his personal
shelter from sun and rain
thought out and prepared
for him

do not tell me
said warty bliggens
that there is not a purpose
in the universe
the thought is blasphemy
a little more
conversation revealed
that warty bliggens
considers himself to be
the center of the same
universe
the earth exists
to grow toadstools for him
to sit under
the sun to give him light
by day and the moon
and wheeling constellations
to make beautiful
the night for the sake of
warty bliggens

to what act of yours
do you impute
this interest on the part
of the creator
of the universe
i asked him
why is it that you
are so greatly favored

ask rather
said warty bliggens
what the universe
has done to deserve me
if i were a
human being i would
not laugh
too complacently
at poor warty bliggens
for similar
absurdities
have only too often
lodged in the crinkles
of the human cerebrum


As for peer review:
A common rationale for peer review is that it is rare for an individual author or research team to spot every mistake or flaw in a complicated piece of work. This is not because deficiencies represent "needles in a haystack" that are difficult to locate, but because with a new and perhaps eclectic subject, an opportunity for improvement may be more obvious to someone with special expertise or experience. For both grant-funding and publication in a scholarly journal, it is also normally a requirement that the subject is both novel and substantial. Therefore, showing work to others increases the probability that weaknesses will be identified, and, with advice and encouragement, fixed.

Reviewers are typically anonymous and independent, to help foster unvarnished criticism, and to discourage cronyism in funding and publication decisions. However, as discussed below under the next section, US government guidelines governing peer review for federal regulatory agencies require that reviewer's identity be disclosed under some circumstances.

In addition, since reviewers are normally selected from experts in the fields discussed in the article, the process of peer review is considered critical to establishing a reliable body of research and knowledge. Scholars reading the published articles can only be expert in a limited area; they rely, to some degree, on the peer-review process to provide reliable and credible research that they can build upon for subsequent or related research. As a result, significant scandal ensues when an author is found to have falsified the research included in an article, as many other scholars, and the field of study itself, may have relied upon the original research


................

Allegations of bias and suppression

In addition, some sociologists of science argue that peer review makes the ability to publish susceptible to control by elites and to personal jealousy.[9] The peer review process may suppress dissent against "mainstream" theories.[10][11][12] Reviewers tend to be especially critical of conclusions that contradict their own views, and lenient towards those that accord with them. At the same time, elite scientists are more likely than less established ones to be sought out as referees, particularly by high-prestige journals or publishers. As a result, it has been argued, ideas that harmonize with the elite's are more likely to see print and to appear in premier journals than are iconoclastic or revolutionary ones, which accords with Thomas Kuhn's well-known observations regarding scientific revolutions.[13]

Others have pointed out that there is a very large number of scientific journals in which one can publish, making total control of information difficult. In addition, the decision-making process of peer review, in which each referee gives their opinion separately and without consultation with the other referees, is intended to mitigate some of these problems. Some have suggested that:

"... peer review does not thwart new ideas. Journal editors and the 'scientific establishment' are not hostile to new discoveries. Science thrives on discovery and scientific journals compete to publish new breakthroughs."[14]

Nonetheless, while it is generally possible to publish results somewhere, in order for scientists in many fields to attract and maintain funding it is necessary to publish in elite, prestigious journals. Such journals are generally identified by their impact factor. The small number of high-impact journals is susceptible to control by an elite group of anonymous reviewers.[citation needed] Results published in low-impact journals are usually ignored by most scientists in any field. This has led to calls for the removal of reviewer anonymity (especially at high-impact journals) and for the introduction of author anonymity (so that reviewers cannot tell whether the author is a member of any elite).

1:15 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hey, who said we can't imagine silicon-based life?:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horta_(Star_Trek)

And another part of DA's comment takes me back to an uncomfortably difficult philosophy seminar I took in college, based on these two books:

http://www.amazon.com/Plurality-Worlds-David-K-Lewis/dp/0631224262/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195152109&sr=1-1

http://www.amazon.com/Naming-Necessity-Saul-Kripke/dp/0674598466/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195152182&sr=1-1

It got the point where impenetrable ideas like the non-necessity of the laws of physics were contemplated, and a lot of the discussion turned on the Humean relationship between *true* modality and the limits of human understanding.

1:46 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Colin: unless "in a system" means "words can mean whatever we want," the objects of knowledge (ie propositions) are *true*, whatever "system" is at issue. This also goes for "savoir." My beef is with sloppy and sophistic diction.

1:56 PM  
Blogger Tom Van Dyke said...

Thank you for the refresher, DA. I already know everything I need to about science---I subscribe to Discover Magazine, and I saw every episode of Star Trek. No Kill I.

Stenger's arguments are fine, but if you claim they're conclusive on the greatest question of all, then you claim a philosophical certainty that rivals any other dogma.

You're using the vocabulary of science in philosophy, and that's perhaps the modern vs. the ancient project. Why, man asks. Why not, answers science, which is some sort of answer, but not one that satisfies man.

A man said to the universe:
"Sir I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."


Now I like that one, but it was Ben Franklin who said he considered himself a deist for much of his life, but realized one day that that leads exactly...nowhere.

As for miracles, the estimible logician if not metaphysician CS Peirce took on Hume on the subject of miracles, and to my mind, got the better of it.

If a mind as estimible as CS Peirce's didn't close the inquiry, neither should we poor "gentlemen."

But you do illustrate why there will be no philosophy class in high school, as those who run them have closed the inquiry, to the poverty of us all.

As for peer review, and falsifiabilty, they're fine, but are essentially derivative and uncreative endeavors, whose only purpose is to establish [and define] orthodoxy. They also serve who stand and identify error, but they are not our philosophers or even great scientists. That's where Hoyle is coming from.

As for a multiverse fulfilling Occam's Razor, that's true only if we discard all possibility of meaning for this universe. Man is not ready to go there quite yet.

We are carbon-based lifeforms, and the carbon atom behaves idiosyncratically. That proves nothing in itself, but it's entirely proper to wonder upon that fact. For even if they one day explain it, the vocabulary of science is insufficient to ask why.

3:55 PM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

That's called 'carbon chauvinism.' It's not molecularly correct...

5:18 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I should have clarified that I meant imagining a real silicon life form, or speculative exobiology at best. I myself don't have the knowledge of chemistry or the imagination for such a project, so the line forms to the left............

if you claim they're conclusive on the greatest question of all

No, that would be scientism,and I wouldn't claim conclusive proof that there is no God or other plane of existence besides the one we all share at the present time.

I would say that the verdict on 'fine-tuning' is not-proven.

Why, man asks. Why not, answers science, which is some sort of answer, but not one that satisfies man.

Science is our best attempt to answer how, and is incapable of answering why. Darwin, for example, stated that his theory didn't answer the question as to how life started in the first place, and wasn't meant to.

As for peer review, and falsifiabilty, they're fine, but are essentially derivative and uncreative endeavors, whose only purpose is to establish [and define] orthodoxy.

You keep attempting to create some sort of 'orthodox' Frankenstein monster out of science when it's nothing of the sort.

Wikipedia on Falsifiability:

Falsifiability (or refutability or testability) is the logical possibility that an assertion can be shown false by an observation or a physical experiment. That something is "falsifiable" does not mean it is false; rather, it means that it is capable of being disproved under hypothetical circumstances. Falsifiability is an important concept in science and the philosophy of science.

Some philosophers and scientists, most notably Karl Popper, have asserted that a hypothesis, proposition or theory is scientific only if it is falsifiable.

For example, "all men are mortal" is unfalsifiable, since no amount of observation could ever demonstrate its falsehood. "All men are immortal," by contrast, is falsifiable, by the presentation of just one dead man. However, the unfalsifiable "all men are mortal" can be the logical consequence of a falsifiable theory, such as "all men die before they reach the age of 150 years". Thus, unfalsifiable statements can almost always be put into a falsifiable framework. The falsifiable does not exclude the unfalsifiable, it embraces and exceeds it.

Not all statements that are falsifiable in theory are so in practice. For example, "it will be raining here in one million years" is theoretically falsifiable, but not practically.

...................

Ethics

Ethical statements such as "murder is evil" or "John was wrong to steal that money" are not usually considered to be falsifiable. This does not necessarily amount to conclusion that they are all false, or without truth-values. It mainly impacts their status as scientific theories. The meta-ethical thesis that ethical statements have no truth-value is called non-cognitivism.


Evolution

Main article: Objections to evolution

Many creationists, have claimed that evolution is unfalsifiable. This is in large part because, like theories such as gravitation, evolution is so widely-accepted, and its claims so foundational and broad, that it is often difficult to imagine any evidence that could disprove it.

Numerous examples of potential ways to falsify common descent have been proposed. Richard Dawkins said that "If there were a single hippo or rabbit in the Precambrian, that would completely blow evolution out of the water. None have ever been found."[3][4][5] Similarly, J.B.S. Haldane, when asked what hypothetical evidence could disprove evolution, replied "fossil rabbits in the Precambrian era".[6] In contrast, many religious beliefs are not falsifiable, because no testable prediction has been made about the supernatural.[7]


Popper himself made a difference between common descent and natural selection. While he agreed to the view about common descent (he used the even more drastic example of the remains of a car in cambrian),[8] he said about natural selection that it "is not a testable scientific theory but a metaphysical research programme".[9] However, Popper later "recanted", clarifying that natural selection can be formulated in a falsifiable way and offering a more nuanced view of its status. He still admitted that "Darwin's own most important contribution to the theory of evolution, his theory of natural selection, is difficult to test." However, "[t]here are some tests, even some experimental tests; and in some cases, such as the famous phenomenon known as 'industrial melanism', we can observe natural selection happening under our very eyes, as it were. Nevertheless, really severe tests of the theory of natural selection are hard to come by, much more so than tests of otherwise comparable theories in physics or chemistry."[10]

Falsifiability is only possible in the material world as of yet, so your objection that a screwdriver isn't the appropriate tool when a hammer is called for is duly noted.

As for Peirce:

Never mind this. The important point is that predictive success is no miracle if the predicted facts are used to construct the theory in the first place. What is miraculous is novel predictive success. And the best explanation of such ‘miracles’ is truth, either truth of wholes or truth of parts.

Wikipedia on Hume:

Critics have argued that Hume's position assumes the character of miracles and natural laws prior to any specific examination of miracle claims, and thus it amounts to a subtle form of begging the question. They have also noted that it requires an appeal to inductive inference, as none have observed every part of nature or examined every possible miracle claim (e.g., those yet future to the observer), which in Hume's philosophy was especially problematic (see above). Another claim is his argument that human testimony could never be reliable enough to countermand the evidence we have for the laws of nature. This point on miracles has mostly been applied to the question of the resurrection of Jesus, where Hume would no doubt ask, "Which is more likely – that a man rose from the dead or that this testimony is mistaken in some way?"

But you do illustrate why there will be no philosophy class in high school, as those who run them have closed the inquiry, to the poverty of us all.

What inquiry, exactly?

As for a multiverse fulfilling Occam's Razor, that's true only if we discard all possibility of meaning for this universe. Man is not ready to go there quite yet.

ask rather
said warty bliggens
what the universe
has done to deserve me


For even if they one day explain it, the vocabulary of science is insufficient to ask why

See the above.

10:06 PM  
Blogger Tom Van Dyke said...

We're agreed. I just want people to ask why. That is the inquiry. All answers are provisional.

And I think the carbon atom is interesting. It was enough for Fred Hoyle to rethink his atheism.

It's the rethinking that's the inquiry, the soul of philosophy.

As for science, I myself don't hold any unorthodox views.

10:18 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The physicist Niels Bohr, in response to a question about a student's theory:

We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.

10:55 PM  
Blogger Tom Van Dyke said...

Now yer cookin'. Hoyle was likely wrong about most things, but so what? He gravitated toward the crazy, and the world is grateful. [Which is why he was no fan of peer review---who were his peers? They're still catching up to CS Peirce, and he's been dead 80 years.]

I'm sorry to see the Bible account of creation being so rigorously defended, as aside from apparently being right about the Big Bang [altho Hoyle didn't think so, and it was he who coined the term!], it works fine as poetry, but not science.

Religion's real enemy, and I believe the spirit of man's [see CS Lewis], is indeed scientism.

But science itself has opened up all sorts of food for thought, and I wish they taught more of that than banging on evolution, which is a fine working theory.

I mean, man might be well-tuned to the universe, but geez, it sure seems well-tuned even without us. That we're here to observe and wonder on it seems like icing on the cake. This is the kind of stuff they should be tickling young minds with:


Although [Professor Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in high energy physics] is a self-described agnostic, he cannot but be astounded by the extent of the fine-tuning. He goes on to describe how a beryllium isotope having the minuscule half life of 0.0000000000000001 seconds must find and absorb a helium nucleus in that split of time before decaying. This occurs only because of a totally unexpected, exquisitely precise, energy match between the two nuclei. If this did not occur there would be none of the heavier elements. No carbon, no nitrogen, no life. Our universe would be composed of hydrogen and helium. But this is not the end of Professor Weinberg's wonder at our well-tuned universe. He continues:

One constant does seem to require an incredible fine-tuning -- The existence of life of any kind seems to require a cancellation between different contributions to the vacuum energy, accurate to about 120 decimal places.

This means that if the energies of the Big Bang were, in arbitrary units, not:

100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000,

but instead:
100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 000000000000000001,

there would be no life of any sort in the entire universe...


Cool.

1:06 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

It should be remembered that Hoyle also advocated the idea of panspermia, which only begs the question of the origin of life:

One critic [7] argues that Hoyle's line of reasoning in this case incorporates a number of clear logical mistakes and omissions, such as assuming that the spontaneous creation of life must occur simultaneously, that the life thus created would be as complex as modern life (as opposed to one of its more primitive ancestors), and that the unlikeliness of a single instance of spontaneously-appearing life is not overcome by the large number of simultaneous trials occurring throughout the (very large) universe over its entire existence. As a result, this line of reasoning (which comes up frequently in discussions of Intelligent Design vs. Evolution) is often referred to as Hoyle's Fallacy.

Don't know where you're getting the Biblical account of creation defense bit.

As for peer-review, it should be noted that when Einstein published his papers in 1905 they survived the peer-review process, although at that time his 'peers' were limited to the Nobel Laureates who reviewed his papers before publication.

You refer to Hoyle's objections to the process generally but you haven't offered anything of his specific reasons to reject peer-review as a method for dealing with reports of major or minor scientific discoveries.

seems to require a cancellation between different contributions to the vacuum energy, accurate to about 120 decimal places.

That would be well and good if we understood vacuum energy, which we don't completely:

Why doesn't the vacuum energy cause a large cosmological constant? What cancels it out?

and

During the 1980s, there were many attempts to relate the fields that generate the vacuum energy to specific fields that were predicted by Grand unification theory, and to use observations of the Universe to confirm that theory. These efforts have failed so far, and the exact nature of the particles or fields that generate vacuum energy, with a density such as that required by inflation theory, remains a mystery.

Of course, there is the possibility that life on Earth is relatively obscure and unimportant compared to the life that our Universe was really meant to contain, it could be the case that carbon-based lifeforms are in a minority status in our universe, we merely have insufficient data on this point, as with countless others.

This occurs only because of a totally unexpected, exquisitely precise, energy match between the two nuclei.

Again, the implication that life wouldn't be possible in a universe filled with only hydrogen and helium is unproven, as with the corollary notion that life is only possible with the carbon atom.

At some point, you start getting into the "have you ever looked at X? I mean, really, really LOOKED at X?" territory.

I still prefer what JBS Haldane said about beetles and stars in regard to Natural Theology over the notion of Intelligent Design.

That isn't taught in schools either, BTW.

6:20 AM  
Blogger Tom Van Dyke said...

It is by default, since what is taught is a mechanical view of reality. But Haldane seems like my kinda guy.

Keep in mind I'm not trying to "prove" anything. But fallibilism, properly understood---if I properly understand it---is anything but nihilistic. It opens to possibilities, not closes.

As for Hoyle, I already noted some or even most of his work was flawed. Neither was he solely a scientist, so to judge him solely that way is to miss out on what made him great.

As for peer review, Lamarck didn't pass it, but today we know he was somewhat correct---acquired characteristics can be inherited after all.

Haldane's quote on stars and beetles is a bit illogical and decidedly unpoetic. If diamonds were as common as sand, they would have no value.

4:04 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Neither was he solely a scientist, so to judge him solely that way is to miss out on what made him great.

As an astrophysicist, he was great and never got the Nobel Prize he deserved in Physics.

As a biologist, not so much. That's the problem with the "Scientist Celebrity" who pontificates about matters outside their primary field, vide Dr. Watson, late of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory after his remarks about intelligence and ancestry became well-known a while back.

As for peer review, Lamarck didn't pass it

True, in the sense that it didn't exist in his field of study:

Prior to the 20th century, the only known peer review process was medical peer review. This was first described in the Ethics of the Physician written by the Arab physician Ishaq bin Ali al-Rahwi (854–931) of Syria. His work stated that a visiting physician must always make duplicate notes of a patient's condition on every visit. When the patient was cured or had died, the notes of the physician were examined by a local medical council of other physicians, who would review the practising physician's notes to decide whether his/her performance have met the required standards of medical care. If their reviews were negative, the practicing physician could face a lawsuit from a maltreated patient.[54]

Peer review has been a touchstone of modern scientific method only since the middle of the 20th century, the only exception being medicine.


Now, his work was published and commented on by his contemporaries beforehand somewhat like what happens in peer review today, the major difference being that he would get direct feedback from friends/collegues, but that's been true ever since Newtons' time.

It is also true that Lamarck was a respected scientist in his time,and like Hoyle, made some important contributions to his field of study even if that's not why people remember him

Lamarck:

In the modern era, Lamarck is remembered primarily for a theory of "inheritance of acquired characters", called "soft inheritance" or Lamarckism. However, his descriptions of soft inheritance were, in fact, reflections of the folk wisdom of the time, accepted by most natural historians (including Charles Darwin in his Origin of Species). Lamarck's contribution to evolutionary theory consisted of the first truly cohesive theory of evolution, in which an alchemical complexifying force drove organisms up a ladder of complexity, and a second environmental force adapted them to local environments through "use and disuse" of characteristics, differentiating them from other organisms.[5]

and, oddly enough, Darwinism and Lamarckism aren't incompatable:

The inheritance of acquired characteristics (also called the theory of adaptation or "soft inheritance") was rejected by August Weismann when he developed a theory of inheritance in which "germ-plasm" (the hereditary material passed from parents to offspring) remained separate and distinct from "soma" (the material composing the body of an organism); thus nothing which happens to the soma may be passed on with the germ-plasm. This model underlies the modern understanding of inheritance. Weismann is famous for an experiment in which he cut the tails off mice, demonstrating that the injury was not passed on to the offspring; but historians of science such as Stephen Jay Gould argue that this experiment had far less effect on the acceptance of Lamarckism than Weismann's more comprehensive theoretical framework[27] (Believers in Lamarckian inheritance did not count injury or mutilation as a true acquired characteristic: only those which were initiated by the animal's own needs, that were beneficial, were expected to be passed on. This Lamarckian view is consistent with Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection).

Epigenetics:

Epigenetic changes have also been observed to occur in response to environmental exposure—for example, mice given some dietary supplements have epigenetic changes affecting expression of the agouti gene, which affects their fur color, weight, and propensity to develop cancer.[28][29] Although this change isn't adaptive since the underlying mutation was developed artificially, the observation of epigenetic change occurring in response to environmental factors opens up the possibility of organismal adaptive inheritance—a sort of Lamarckian inheritance. Although this remains speculative, if this does occur some instances of evolution would indeed be separate from standard genetic inheritance.[30]

5:21 PM  
Blogger Tom Van Dyke said...

I hope we're understanding each other. Of course peer review has its role---the mistake is accepting it as the final word. One can be correct about something, although the explanation may be faulty. I think of acupuncture that way---the "meridians" stuff is pretty mumbo-jumbo; still it seems to work. We should not reject it because the explanation is bad.

WS inspired me to survey CS Peirce. According to him, the creative spark---the what if...?---that underlies all inquiry, including scientific, the germ of the hypothesis, the craziness, is what he calls abduction.

Investigating, testing, peer review, falsification, etc., come later, and are processes derivative of the spark. But they are not the spark, and neither is peer review concerned with it, only its derivations.

Now, a cooperative joint inquiry is not adverserial---the other fellow might be on to something, the spark may be pure. He might be right for the wrong stated reasons [I often feel that way reading Edmund Burke], and true progress can only be made by helping out with the back end. Peer review, on the other hand, looks backward. Of course identifying dead ends has its use, but that's housecleaning, not housebuilding.

And of course, philosophy is about truth, but its soul is in the inquiry itself. [Which is where fallibilism creeps in, always leaving the door open a crack.]

And as we know when it comes to the matters of man, truth is not synonymous with wisdom, but that's for another day.

5:58 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

TVD, you have a bee in your bonnet about peer review. It's a good tool, but like any good tool, it has its' limitations, and to term it 'housekeeping' demonstrates a misunderstanding about how peer review works.

Keep in mind that E=M(C squared) was peer reviewed, hardly a case of housekeeping at work.

As for abduction, that leads to scientific realism, hardly a philosophy I'd think you want to be associated with, but I am possibly wrong in this matter.

true progress can only be made by helping out with the back end.

I really don't know what you mean by that, as it sounds better than it actually is, as Mark Twain observed about Wagners' music.

Your last sentence manages to be cliched and true at the same time, as wisdom is a quality that cannot be falsified per se, unlike observations about how the physical universe does and doesn't work.

You might consider what Niels Bohr had to say:

Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think.

1:44 AM  
Blogger Tom Van Dyke said...

true progress can only be made by helping out with the back end.

I really don't know what you mean by that, as it sounds better than it actually is, as Mark Twain observed about Wagners' music.


Not atall. I'll be happy to help you out with your argument as soon as you come up with one.

In between, it seems you're merely arguing. There's a difference between reading the Socratic dialogues and watching Law & Order. I assume you can tell your students what it is. If you cannot or will not, we're merely fencing, and not on the same team in the relay race.

2:26 AM  
Blogger Tom Van Dyke said...

Breaking News: There is a God, to whom we all should be grateful.

Case closed.

4:15 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Sorry TVD, but making vague remarks and not explaining them doesn't cut the mustard with me. That's not Socratic dialog, although it might come in handy for the fictitious defense lawyers one finds on L&O.

In between, it seems you're merely arguing.

And again, you remind me of the Argument Clinic:

M: An argument isn't just contradiction.
A: It can be.
M: No it can't. An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition.
A: No it isn't.
M: Yes it is! It's not just contradiction.
A: Look, if I argue with you, I must take up a contrary position.
M: Yes, but that's not just saying 'No it isn't.'
A: Yes it is!
M: No it isn't!

A: Yes it is!
M: Argument is an intellectual process. Contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of any statement the other person makes.
(short pause)
A: No it isn't.
M: It is.
A: Not at all.
M: Now look.
A: (Rings bell) Good Morning.
M: What?
A: That's it. Good morning.
M: I was just getting interested.
A: Sorry, the five minutes is up.
M: That was never five minutes!
A: I'm afraid it was.
M: It wasn't.
Pause
A: I'm sorry, but I'm not allowed to argue anymore.
M: What?!
A: If you want me to go on arguing, you'll have to pay for another five minutes.
M: Yes, but that was never five minutes, just now. Oh come on!
A: (Hums)
M: Look, this is ridiculous.
A: I'm sorry, but I'm not allowed to argue unless you've paid!
M: Oh, all right.
(pays money)
A: Thank you.
short pause
M: Well?
A: Well what?
M: That wasn't really five minutes, just now.
A: I told you, I'm not allowed to argue unless you've paid.
M: I just paid!
A: No you didn't.
M: I DID!
A: No you didn't.
M: Look, I don't want to argue about that.
A: Well, you didn't pay.
M: Aha. If I didn't pay, why are you arguing? I Got you!
A: No you haven't.
M: Yes I have. If you're arguing, I must have paid.
A: Not necessarily. I could be arguing in my spare time.
M: Oh I've had enough of this.
A: No you haven't.
M: Oh Shut up.

(Walks down the stairs. Opens door.)

M: I want to complain.
C: You want to complain! Look at these shoes. I've only had them three weeks and the heels are worn right through.
M: No, I want to complain about...
C: If you complain nothing happens, you might as well not bother.
M: Oh!
C: Oh my back hurts, it's not a very fine day and I'm sick and tired of this office.


If you can't be clear about your questions, then the attempt to find answers is ipso facto made more difficult, if not impossible by the approach you take, as in this thread and many others.

Clarity of thought: It's not just for Vulcans anymore.

I myself prefer Voltaire's take:

God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

10:07 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"I'm at least interested in--and even to some extent sympathetic to--the view that something like intelligence is a real force in the universe, and that there might be some tendency toward order in the world."

Philosophically, I don't know what arguments could be valid for intelligence being "a real force in the universe." Commonsense tells us that stupidity, rather than intelligence, has a far greater chance of being a real force.

And scientifically, there is no evidence for such an intelligence, unless you define the interaction of time plus matter as intelligence, which is a strange definition, to say the least.

10:35 AM  
Blogger dveej said...

I think The Dark Avenger and Mr. Van Dyke are the same person.

10:48 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"creaintelligent designtionism."

In case you care, that transitional form was "cdesign proponentsists".

11:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

But this is not the end of Professor Weinberg's wonder at our well-tuned universe.

That's not even the start of it. Weinberg uses the triple alpha process as an example of a fine-tuning that isn't so fine when you actually look closely.

11:41 AM  
Blogger Milo Johnson said...

"Transitional form." That has to be one of the funniest fucking comments I've ever seen. Thanks. Now I have to clean all the Diet Dr. Pepper off my monitor...

12:39 PM  
Blogger Ed Darrell said...

Still, why does the carbon atom behave so uniquely? An education that does not muse on the important things is no education at all.

I think Fuller would be obligated to answer that the carbon atoms are responding solely to peer pressure.

1:33 PM  
Blogger Tom Van Dyke said...

DA, you ask what, I ask why. We're not sharing the same inquiry.

I'm comfortable with my response to Haldane. Cheers.

3:07 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

TVD, I've attempted to point out the limitations of using science and scientific methods to answer the question "Why?".

My training was in "What?", and you seem to have some idiosyncratic inclination against peer review, which I gladly concede isn't a method that should be applied to the questions of "Why?".

Aside from "Hoyle didn't think much of peer review", you haven't clearly demonstrated what you think is wrong with the process as a tool of "What?".

Since it is of recent origin, it is possible that in the coming years information technology advances to the point where journal-based science becomes as archaic as the notion of the "Kings' Touch" is in medicine today.

Cheers!

4:34 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Still, why does the carbon atom behave so uniquely?

Remember that the Anthropic Principle is currently indistinguishable from the Lithic Principle. An interesting suggestion is that it's actually all about maximizing the number of black holes...

"Transitional form." That has to be one of the funniest fucking comments I've ever seen. Thanks. Now I have to clean all the Diet Dr. Pepper off my monitor...

I don't know if that particular form is really attested, but the transitional fossil between "creationists" and "design proponents" has been found: cdesign proponentsists. Looks like someone did a manual search-and-replace instead of the intelligently designed search-and-replace function that comes with every word processor.

Regarding peer review, it does regularly fail (resulting in published crap), but it does not automatically consolidate the orthodoxy either. My thesis supervisor and I recently got a peer-review that praised our manuscript for its innovative approach (while pointing out several mistakes we had failed to spot -- no wonder, the mistakes were in the math).

That we cannot imagine a silicon-based life form doesn't mean they aren't possible elsewhere in the Universe

Well... there are differences. Unlike carbon, silicon is limited to single bonds; double and triple bonds are feasible but not stable. Carbon can form chains of apparently infinite length; but the longer a silicon chain gets, the more easily it falls apart -- chains longer than a few silicon atoms fall apart at most temperatures. Silicon-based life would require very cold temperatures -- but remember that the speed of chemical reactions increases drastically with temperature. This leads to the joke: "Sex between silicon male and silicon female takes longer than the universe is old."

The small number of high-impact journals is susceptible to control by an elite group of anonymous reviewers.[citation needed]

They aren't going to find a citation. I can't imagine how that control is supposed to work. To control the impact factor of a journal, you need lots and lots of people to cite the papers in the journal.

Results published in low-impact journals are usually ignored by most scientists in any field.

Bullshit. Whoever wrote that hasn't compared Nature to, say, the Special Papers in Palaeontology: the former announces breakthroughs on almost never more than three pages, the latter publishes monographs (such as theses); the former has an impact factor of 27 or something, the latter probably doesn't even have one, and if it does, it is below 0.5 and probably below 0.3 -- because there are so few people in the field. Within that tiny field, few can ignore that journal, maybe just as few as can ignore Nature.

Hoyle was likely wrong about most things, but so what? He gravitated toward the crazy, and the world is grateful.

Not so fast. The paleontologists still despise him for his deeply, deeply, deeply ignorant claim that the two most famous specimens of Archaeopteryx were fakes. That idea wasn't crazy, it was wrong, and it was so obviously wrong that a bright mind like Hoyle should have learned the basics and noticed that it was wrong.

and, oddly enough, Darwinism and Lamarckism aren't incompat[i]ble:

Indeed not. Darwin's own theory of heredity* was Lamarckistic.

* Not mentioned much in the last 100 years, not just because it was wrong, but also because it was even behind Darwin's own time, and because it soon turned out to be completely unnecessary for the theory of evolution.

4:52 PM  
Blogger Tom Van Dyke said...

Thanks for the peer review, Mr. Marjanović.

6:51 PM  
Blogger Duck said...

If you're referring to the Barnes & Bloor article in Hollis & Lukes, ed., Rationality and Relativism, then its title is "Relativism, Rationalism, and the Sociology of Knowledge," not "Rationalism, Realism, ...". (In case someone searches for it.) Good collection btw.

I'm not sure you're being *quite* fair to the SSK position; but eh, close enough.

10:07 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

We know trees are there from our birth. When the wind blows they move and whisper to us. When they fall we hear them, feel them, burn them. We name them.

10:15 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I had a boat once which sunk at the dock. It too, succumbed to pier pressure!

5:14 PM  

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