Sorry, but that is a straw man. I’m not claiming anything of the sort.
Look, my whole point is that there is a right way and a wrong way to challenge ID proponents. Just because I’m pointing out that the wrong way is wrong, that doesn’t mean to say that I think the right way is wrong as well. And just because I see some people adopting the wrong approach, that doesn’t mean that I think everyone is adopting the wrong approach.
I don’t expect that to happen.
Look, you aren’t trying to persuade people such as the Discovery Institute to become “evolutionists.” The people you are trying to persuade are people such as myself – Christians who are trying to approach the matter as honestly as we can and who are every bit as concerned about bad attitudes to science in the Church as you are, who may perhaps understand that all is not well in ID-land, and who want to know how best to address it, but who may not have the background in biology needed to understand the finer details of the subject. Or who are “on the fence” about the whole ID issue and haven’t nailed down exactly what position to take on the subject. And you aren’t going to persuade people such as myself of anything if you’re throwing insults around, building up and tearing down straw men, and treating us as if we were YECs when we are not.
Focusing on the “it’s religion, not science” aspect instead of starting off by challenging factual inaccuracies, sloppy science, and ill-defined questions.
Thing is, if someone is spouting nonsense and you’re complaining about them being religious in response, you’re giving them a free pass to play the persecution card. On the other hand, if you’re pointing out that they’re not getting their facts straight, and that they’re not meeting the high standards that science requires, then they can’t. Especially not when what you are demanding of them are things that their own religious teachings demand of them too.
If ID is merely renamed scientific creationism, then IDers are creationists.
But that wouldn’t help determine whether Buggs is one. I was hoping to get some hints from his presentation at FoCL, but without success.
But he did make one claim that I was skeptical of:
There is a relationship between the amount of genetic variation that is carried by a population, and its size. Now we thought a few moments ago about a population of two that is maintained over several generations. Very rapidly, genetic varation will be lost if we have a population of two for several generations, and the only way that you can get new variation coming in is by mutation.
But any new mutation will be rapidly lost as well.
However, if we have a bigger population, more genetic variability can be maintained; drift happens more slowly. You have a bigger chance of passing on your variants to your offspring. And when a new mutation occurs it also has a higher chance of being passed on. So new mutations tend to be maintained for longer, the bigger your population is.
No. A larger population may give an individual the opportunity of having more offspring in the next generation, and hence a greater probability of one or more of them carrying the new variant, but it also reduces the probability that an individual will have any offspring in the next generation, which has a much greater effect in transmission of the new variant.
Taking the trivial cases of populations of size 2 (one male, one female) and 4 (two males, two females), and a single mutation in one of the males:
Population size 2, with the male siring both offspring:
A mutation in one (non-X/Y) allele will be passed on to each offspring with a probability of 0.5, giving a transmission chance of 1 - 0.5^2 = 0.75.
Population size 4, with each male siring 4, 3, 2, 1 or 0 offspring with probabilities (p,q,r,q,p) respectively, where 2p+2q+r = 1:
A mutation in one (non-X/Y) allele in one male will be passed on with a probability of
p(1 - 0.5^4) + q(1 - 0.5^3) + r(1 - 0.5^2) + q(1 - 0.5)
= 0.9375p + 1.375q + 0.75r
= 0.75(1.25p + 1.8333q + r), which is less than 0.75(2p+2q+r) had hence less than 0.75.[1]
So increasing the population size reduces the probability of transmitting a mutation to the next generation. Increasing the population size beyond four reduces the probability even more. Calculations for asexual populations give a similar result.
So Richard Buggs is wrong - when a new mutation occurs in a large population it has a lower chance of being passed on to the next generation. This isn’t something I’d expect a professor of genetics to be mistaken about. As he says later on in the talk, “Don’t worry about the details of this calculation, I think I’ve made a little mistake there.” No kidding.
He does show a slide of @swamidass however, so it’s not all bad.
[1]Strictly speaking the probability of transmission could be the same if and only if p=0, q=0, r=1. It could never be greater than the probability of transmission with a population of 2.
This. Every semester a handful of students walk into my class thinking that ID is correct because that’s what they’ve been told. But they haven’t analyzed any of the claims for themselves and don’t know enough about science to do so. I start by talking about how science works, how to design an experiment, why scientists focus on data, etc. and try to get them to the point where they can evaluate ID for themselves. The biggest thing I have to do is get then to trust me. If I went in saying “Behe’s wrong and let me tell you why,” they would dig in and not listen to a word I said.
One of the highlights of this past semester was when a student came in to discuss her research paper and asked “So what Behe said about the bacterial flagellum has been refuted?”.
I wanted to hug her.
Even though OECs accept most of modern physics, chemistry, and geology, they are not very dissimilar to YECs in their rejection of biological evolution.
Such people need to understand that ID is no more scientifically sound than the belief that the earth is 4000 years old, and has no more evidence to back it up. Such people will likely become confused if one pretends otherwise.
It is also a primary objective of the ID, at the moment, to simply assert that there is a legitimate “controversy” in biology and that their work is a positive contribution to resolving this. The approach you suggest is likely to help them in this effort.
That definition doesn’t seem very useful, as it seems to encompass all theists who aren’t YEC. There are people who call themselves creationists who, by any reasonable sense of the term, are not. But I would still like to see a real example of a non-creationist who considers himself an OEC.
Roy, technically you are right about the probability of survival of one (neutral) mutant for one generation in a population of various sizes, where the population reproduces according to a Wright-Fisher model. For N=2 (diploid) it is 3/4, for N=3 it is 0.6651, for N=4 it is 0.656. It is gradually approaching a limit of 1 - e^(-1) = 0.63212. This is a modest effect compared to the effect of the expected number of new mutations occurring in the population, which rises from 4u to 6u to 8u (and so on, being 2Nu).
Respectfully, Faizal, you seem to have missed the point @jammycakes is making. He is not suggesting that you or anyone else pretend that ID is scientifically sound. What he is asking you to do is to focus your refutation of ID on how it misses the relevant scientific evidence and reasoning. I.e., focus on why it is not scientifically sound. Other strategies (equating it with religious propaganda, pleading the Wedge Document, etc.) will probably push the ID-sympathetic listener into a stronger commitment to ID. Which is not the desired outcome, right?
Thanks for engaging on this important topic. During this season, may you enjoy the peace of the child born in Bethlehem.
From my observations of conversations on PS, “focusing” on the religiousness of ID starts after challenges to the crappy science it employs bear no fruit.
We can complain about them being pseudoscientific or employing magical thinking in their arguments, first, and then proceed to show how.
His disagreement with me, it seems, is with my lumping YEC’s, OEC’s, and IDC’s together. He seems to think that there is some hierarchy of “wrongness” between the three groups, and that it would somehow make someone who dismisses YEC less likely to also dismiss OEC if I take the position that they are equally wrong on the subject of evolution.
Whereas it think it would help clarify things by explaining right of the bat that all three are worthless and pseudoscientific, before delving into the specific reasons why each is worthless pseudoscience.
That has certainly been my experience. Students come into my class armed with all of the talking points on “methodological naturalism limits science” and “ID isn’t a religion because it doesn’t mention God.” I’ve had so many of those conversations that I know what they are going to say before they do. So I don’t bother going there. I get them to think about how good science works and why it works that way. Then I let them evaluate ID and decide for themselves that it’s bad science.
I’m afraid that wasn’t very clear. What do you mean by “old earther” and what do you mean by “hard core creationist”? And would you describe yourself as an old-earth creationist, and if so what would that mean?
Yes, but if challenges to the crappy science bear no fruit then you’re not likely to have any more success with challenging its religious presuppositions.
There is, however, one thing that can bear fruit, and that is hands-on experience. The one thing that revolutionised my approach to science more than anything else was ending up in situations where I had to face the consequences of getting it wrong. At the start of my career after I left university, I mostly worked on fairly simple, low-stakes projects that involved a lot of Windows 95 and duct tape, and where getting things wrong could be sorted with a bit of manual intervention. But then there came a point at which I ended up having to work in situations where I had to be much more sharp and crisp, tight and disciplined, rigorous and exact, and it was having to adjust to that tight, disciplined approach that has given me so little patience for the bad arguments of YEC.
Unfortunately, it is not something that’s easy to communicate on a forum. It’s a bit like what Morpheus said to Neo in The Matrix – “Unfortunately, nobody can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.”
But there is a hierarchy of “wrongness.” Just take a read of the essay “The Relativity of Wrong” by Isaac Asimov for starters. In fact, pretending that there isn’t a hierarchy of “wrongness” is how YECs attempt to convince people that radiometric dating is “unreliable.”
In any case, I’m not trying to address whether ID is more or less wrong than YEC. The point that I am trying to make is that the problems with ID are harder to explain than the problems with YEC.
The question that YEC attempts to address – “How old is the earth?” – is simple, straightforward, clear, and unambiguous. It has an answer that consists of a number with a dimension and an error bar. It is determined by measuring things. Yes, there may be a lot of sophistry coming from the YEC community in terms of what they claim is being measured and how, but the question itself is simple, clear-cut, and unambiguous, and offers little or no room for confusion, misunderstanding, or equivocation.
By contrast, ID is much more complicated. The question it is trying to address depends on who you ask. Which aspects of the theory of evolution it is trying to challenge depend on who you ask. In fact, what is even meant by “intelligent design” in the first place depends on who you ask. You need to do a whole lot more work to address these ambiguities, otherwise you’re just going to end up in a minefield of confusion, misunderstanding and equivocation. And that’s before you even start to consider the relative complexity of radioactive decay rates versus the evolution of bacterial flagella.
Just speaking for myself, when someone has pointed out to me that I am using the same sort of reasoning that a creationist or anti-vaxxer or some such person would use, I don’t retrench and commit myself to my position even more strongly. Instead, I question whether I can really support my position. Is that weird?
I’m sorry I meant to say not as committed to ID as the only game in town warmed up evolutionary creationism I’m still a old earth creationist, but not as anti evolution as I was when I was younger. More ambivalent about it.
I don’t disagree entirely. I think it is true that for most people, understanding why IDC is wrong will require something more than they need to understand in order to realize that the earth isn’t six thousand years old. But I am not sure that the degree of difference is quite what you think it is.
Just speaking for myself, I hadn’t read anything in evolutionary biology beyond a few Gould columns, ever, in my entire life when I picked up Darwin’s Black Box. I’d had a traditional high school class in introductory biology where we marched through the major phyla and talked about what kind of critters and plants there were and how they were classified, and that was about it. But the defects in IDC still just scream out at one: the ridiculous saltations of reasoning, the absurd tendency to say that if we haven’t solved problem X today, it follows that problem X is unsolvable, and the constant appeal to causes unknown and undemonstrated. I don’t think figuring out that IDC is a cesspit of the most worthless crap is actually very difficult. My sense is that people work very hard to convince themselves that it’s not, and that they are aware of the flawed, motivated-reasoning nonsense in which they engage when they do this.
Now, that is not quite the same as the related question which you seem to be more concerned with: HOW does one talk about it? And it seems to me that how one talks about it depends greatly on what one’s purpose is. I have nothing but admiration for @stlyankeefan’s work with undergraduates, and I have recently said to her that I couldn’t do it. I lack the diplomatic nature to do it. I am accustomed to advocacy before the neutral and disinterested, not before the dogmatically-convinced, and the reserves of patience for which that work calls were exhausted for me decades ago.
But all conversation does not have the same purpose. It is a noble craft to take immature intellects, as she does, and steer them away from their existing misconceptions and half-baked ideas toward a more mature conception of biology. One can say nothing bad about it. But while that is indeed a noble craft and a worthwhile undertaking, it is what it is because of context and because of the arts of persuasion. What it is NOT is a thoroughgoing exploration of the defects of ID. That’s okay; in its context it is better than such an exploration, and so that is in no way a criticism.
Now, take my context. Where I find myself in real life, when I am arguing about these things, is amid educated and cultured people, not amid creationists. These people are unconcerned with, in most cases, and entirely unaware of, in some cases, the culture-war ambitions of the ID Creationists. When I talk to these people it is not a case of gently persuading them to abandon asinine but cherished notions. I am trying to wake them up to the fact that if the culture war is won by the people who invaded the Capitol on January 6th and the people who adopted the Dover Area Schools curriculum statement, the world of decent, civilized and cultured people will suffer a lasting and highly injurious blow. Mincing words and delicately attempting to accommodate the offensive absurdities of ID Creationism, or the terrifying perversion of science for which it is the flag-bearer, is absolutely contrary to purpose.
As to some of your objections to the way people argue, I agree, but I don’t see those issues come up much. In particular, when people mention Kitzmiller I rarely see anyone who argues that because Kitzmiller was decided such-and-such a way, IDC isn’t science. Rather, I see people point out that Kitzmiller was decided in such-and-such a way BECAUSE IDC isn’t science. Nobody thinks court decisions are definitive, or even particularly relevant, as to what science is or isn’t. But Kitzmiller comes up because it did, through the testimony, lay bare the absurdities of IDC. Where else would one get Behe’s infamous astrology gaffe?
And things like religious motivation: I get it, and I think everybody gets it, frankly. Religious motivation doesn’t invalidate the idea which it motivates. But it does EXPLAIN why a ridiculous idea which should have gone straight into the wastebin a century ago nonetheless persists. And it does also explain why it is that the people who seek to undo the Enlightenment and usher in that “new dark age made more protracted by the lights of perverted science” want to do what they want to do.
ID isn’t a scientific phenomenon at all. It is a culture-war phenomenon, and to see it, in truth, is to see it in three dimensions. It has this little piece which purports to be a scientific theory but which does not bear up under the slightest examination. While there are contexts in which it is best just to address that piece, there are many other contexts in which it is not.
Some of them do, others just start to have some doubts. I’ve had students come back a couple of years later and ask more questions. Telling undergrads that ID is wrong, after they were told it is correct by their parents/pastor/other professors is like telling them there is no Santa Claus. When I start raising questions, some of them dig their heels in. I’ve had more than one complain to the dean that I am “teaching heresy.”. I’ve also had students balk at learning about the evidence for evolution. But I’ve found that if I tread lightly and give them time, they will figure out that ID isn’t true on their own.
Believing that the earth is old, and I honestly I don’t know that much about kinds I should do more research I like intelligent design (and the discovery institute has some hits and misses Reason to believe is slightly better) I have some doubts about evolution (I’m open to some types of biblically based theistic evolution via evolutionary structuralism which Is a cool idea haven’t explored it too much ) but not absolute denial of evolution . Adam and Eve could possibly have existed it was likely a local flood etc personally hard core young earth creationism is a bigger problem than people opposing intelligent Design.
