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August 03, 2005

Yes, I will be a monkey's uncle, thank you.

Since last November, as a good political moderate, I've tried to extend numerous rhetorical olive branches to the Bush administration. I'm done with that now.

Up to this point in his second term, the president has made great and admirable progress, not just in rebuilding the diplomatic relationships that were destroyed by the unilateralism of his first term, but even in making concessions to quell the rancor of his democratic opponents in Congress. Now with the simple act of appointing John Bolton as US ambassador to the UN during the Senate recess, he's managed to undo all of that. It's hard to imagine one action that could so thoroughly undermine Bush's stature both at home and abroad. If any good will come of this, it'll only be that Bolton won't be able to cause any more damage in the State Department. Indeed, since he was plucked from his position there, we've seen the beginning of the end of the diplomatic freeze-out by North Korea (not that it'll do much good, but that's a whole other thing).

I mean, that really sucks, but that's not even the most infuriating thing the president has done this week. That dubious honor goes to his coming out in support of teaching Intelligent Design in schools. Kudos to whoever thought of the ID rubric as a way to make creationism not sound like creationism so people could get on board without sounding like dogmatic zealots, but rest assured that a zealot is a zealot is a zealot, no matter how soft spoken. The president should be ashamed to count himself in their number.

It's hard to imagine what's the worst thing about ID "theory." Is it the fact that it's unscientific? Could be. Is it that it's false? Maybe.

How about the fact that it's a total intellectual cop-out? People have been trying to pass off this kind of lazy thinking as a legitimate objection to evolution by selection since Darwin's time. Back then they said it was the eye that was supposed to be so complex ("irreducibly complex" in the contemporary parlance) that it must have been designed by God. Now the examples they give are of things that you can only see through microscopes. The technology may've been updated, but the argument hasn't, and it's as bogus as it ever was. Just because you can't figure out how something evolved the way it did, doesn't mean that nobody can or will, and it certainly doesn't mean that God had a hand in it--even if nobody ever figures out how it's supposed to work.

Take for instance the mechanisms of protein synthesis. I think it's incredible that such a perfect machine was able to arise from base chemicals a few trillion years ago. When I say it's "incredible" I mean that I think it's awe-inspiring--not that it's literally in-credible!

Say nobody ever proves Goldbach's Conjecture. Does that mean that every time a number greater than 2 turns out to be the sum of three primes, that God intervened to make it so? I'll bet you a coke that it doesn't.

Obviously that's a slight disanalogy since the standard of proof in math is different than in other sciences, particularly biological sciences. A scientific theory is confirmed by its instances, and disconfirmed by recalicitrant phenomena. Given that, even if nobody ever figures out how a particular biochemical process or structure was selected for out of a set of possible mutations, you have to show that it's impossible for that process or structure to come about in that way if you want to use it as evidence against evolutionary theory. What you don't get to do is assume that it got to be that way because of the Finger of God, and then reason circularly that it disproves anything. I shouldn't have to tell anyone that when your premise and conclusion are the same thing, you haven't achieved much at all.

The fact is that, concerning evidentiary hurdles and standards of proof, there is a bona fide mass of evidence that supports evolution by something like natural selection, and literally no evidence that undermines it.

Unanswered questions don't disprove a damn thing. Quantum mechanics and general relativity are both doing fine despite the fact that we have no idea how they fit together.

It occurs to me that I haven't even mentioned the argument that teaching ID in public schools would violate the establishment clause. I guess that's mostly because it bothers me considerably more that the president wants kids to learn something so egregiously unscientific than it does that teaching it to them would be unconstitutional (which it would be).

Obviously this discussion has been going on in some form or another since Darwin's time, but with the occasional exception (i.e. the Scopes trial), it's always on the fringe. By throwing his hat in the ring, Mr. Bush has pulled this subject right into the political mainstream. If it were at all possible to use this opportunity to kill the subject once and for all, I'd welcome the president's intervention. However, I don't see that happening. As such, I can't help but express my deepest disappointment that in addition to making it impossible for chlidren to achieve the already depressingly low educational goals we've set for them, the president now wants to eliminate those goals altogether by claiming that the high watermark of human inquiry was, in fact, created by the Noachian flood.

Posted by matt at August 3, 2005 09:29 AM

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