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March 03, 2005
Immediate outlet for scientific venting
This piece on creationism has been sitting on my desktop for some time, waiting for an outlet for me to post it or vent about it or something.
Now is as good a time as any.
It's a great story to tell because Alfred Wegener's theory of plate tectonics was so much heresy for the first part of the twentieth century. It got absolutely no play whatsoever from the respected geologists. The only reason the theories began to get attention is because, when the 1950's hit and, in the wake of World War II, reports began to surface of sea-floor features that were not nice and neat and uniform - that there were actually mountain ranges on the ocean's bottom! - and no established theory could explain how they got there.
It took Harry Hess' sea-floor spreading hypothesis, which fit in so nicely with the plate tectonics description, to accurately describe what was going on on the ocean floor - and, gradually, plate tectonics was seen to fit in with other features of the Earth's structure as well.
The power behind plate tectonics, though, was the idea. It was the specific prediction that made explanations. So when David Velleman's post hits its stride, it (unwittingly) points out the fundamental problem contemporary creationists have:
...scientists are conservatives who will fight tooth and nail against changing their minds. But their conservativism is just healthy skepticism, which gives way in the face of empirical success. If scientists cannot beat you at the game of prediction and explanation, they'll eventually join you, every time. (Or if they don't, they'll be replaced by younger colleagues who will.) Science is not infallible, but it is relentlessly self-correcting.
Good news is often accompanied by bad news, of course, and this case is no exception. The bad news for creationists is this. Since the front door of the scientific establishment is clearly open to you, as demonstrated by the eventual acceptance of the Pangaea hypothesis,- you have no excuse for trying to sneak in the back door, by using political pressure to insert your views into science textbooks. Pangaea made it into the textbooks the honest way, without any help from lobbyists. Your theory, too, can make it into the textbooks -- as soon as you have won over the scientific establishment, as the proponents of Pangaea did.
For this to happen, though, creationists (and intelligent design advocates) have to advance an alternative scientific description, however nutty or loony, that can acutally be tested.
I am not a die-hard "evolutionist," however you choose to use that loaded word. I'm not terribly fond of Darwin's ideas, nor of the current evolutionary synthesis. I don't find myself with too much choice in the matter, because in the particular matter I'm concerned with (what relationship is there between proteins with similar functions across species lines?) there isn't a good "creationist" description of why all organisms should have similar proteins - in both structure and function to begin with. I use evolutionary ideas for the simple reason that they work. They have describing power.
My concern about the state of creationism is that everybody on that side of the aisle knows full well what they don't want. They don't want any idea set that takes any lordship away from the God of the Bible. Which is awesome. I'm all about that. But if you're going to that in front of scientists, then you have to have an alternative set of ideas that will explain how things in the world work, in ways that we as scientists can use in describing what we study.
Right now, I'm not seeing those ideas. I'm just seeing people who are so afraid of any intellectual challenge to their faith that they just want try to write those challenges out of textbooks, instead of facing them head-on.
Posted by Chuck at March 3, 2005 05:47 AM
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