The Skepticality podcast has been doing a real bang-up job of covering the controversy over “Intelligent Design” propaganda piece Expelled, mostly be interviewing the various scientists touched directly by the controversy. The most recent interview was one of the most frustrating—Dr. Randy Olson, who moved from being a biologist to being a filmmaker. Dr. Olson has a lot of criticisms of people he calls “evolutionists”, but I got the feeling he was more interested in knocking heads than really being right, and he might do well to reconsider some of his own ideas. Even though he agrees with people who accept the theory of evolution, he insists throughout the interview in using the term “evolutionist”. This is short of calling someone a “Darwinist”, but it’s still falling for a right wing frame. The right wing frame is to suggest the the controversy is over a clash between two belief systems of equal evidential validity: Christianity and “Darwinism”, much like their other favorite clash, between Christianity and Islam. And that the battle is merely to be won on faith. But evolutionary theory is not a belief system, and nor is it necessarily in conflict with Christianity, since most mainstream Christian churches accept it the same as they accept that the Earth goes around the Sun, contrary to Biblical claims otherwise. It’s a well-established theory with no real evidence against it, and mountains of evidence for it. Mind-boggling, impossible to tally amounts of evidence for it. Using terms like “evolutionist” undermines this reality. Dr. Olson would not call people who accept the reality of gravity “gravitationalists”, so why buy into the right wing frame on this one?
Obviously, you can’t just call the defenders of evolutionary theory biologists, because more than biologists defend it—the larger scientist community and non-scientists like me are avid defenders of the importance of accepting reality. And of course, this group has religious and non-religious people in it. So what to call them? I suggest “reality-based community”, which has more syllables than “evolutionists”, but rolls off the tongue more easily. The best part about it is that it reframes the debate in more accurate terms: As one between people who accept evidence and appreciate knowledge, and people who insist on viewing the world through a magical lens.
That out of the way, Dr. Olson said a couple things I appreciate. I agree with him that scientists and their defenders need to get smart about the new media era. I agree with him that it does no good to wave your hands and pretend that movies like Expelled are failures. From what I understand, the movie was boring and terrible, and it got bad reviews. But there’s no denying that the expensive production values and huge box office gave some credence to the lies trotted out about “Intelligent Design”. As a member of the reality-based community, I’m open to accepting that reality and working with it, instead of fantasizing that this disaster didn’t happen. I agree that one of the most important things defenders of science can do is to describe their discoveries and theories in ways that make sense to the public and draw positive attention, and that Stephen Jay Gould is the model for how to do this.
But what I don’t agree with is his constant admonishments to reality-based people to be nice and gentle. Look, you need to attack a public relations problem with a carrot and a stick. Right wingers figured this out a long time ago. They’ve got their Jesus-laden carrots, but they also have the stick. Why else do you think “liberal” is now a bad word? The idea that science defenders are only using the stick makes no sense—even on P.Z.’s blog, he posts regularly about how cool biology is. If coming across as condescending towards your enemies were pure poison, right wingers would have had no followers, because that’s their big trick.
But what really stuck in my craw was how Olson kept instructing scientists to suck it up and embrace the need for P.R., without ever admitting that is exactly what many have done. As P.Z. notes, Olson seems to think the only kind of media that counts is movies. He actually claims that it was a mistake for P.Z. to publicize getting kicked out of a viewing of Expelled, because he claims P.Z. got all this P.R. with nothing to sell. Wrong: Pharyngula has seen a permanent 30-50% bump in traffic since that event, and I’ll bet a good deal of money that more people heard about that incident than went to see the movie.
Olson’s argument hinges on the idea that science blogging is a fairly pointless way to engage, but it’s really not. His own arguments—which I agree with—about why Expelled was successful also apply to science blogging. To succeed in its mission, Expelled had to rally the troops and get some mainstream attention to their argument/lie: That creationists have a legitimate right to teach their nonsense as if it were science. What the reality-based community has to get out there is a story about how we’re on the side of right, and creationists are liars who want to equate magic with science. By putting up a blog and getting mainstream attention to his side of the story, P.Z. did a bang-up job of getting our narrative out there. He’s also positioned himself to be a go-to spokesperson for the reality-based community on this issue; now even more reporters have someone right off hand to call whenever this issue flares up.
I suspect that the internet-assisted outcry against this movie, which bunched up around the P.Z. expulsion incident, emboldened reviewers to utterly trash it. Conservatives exert undue amounts of pressure on mainstream media types, who self-censor liberal or even aesthetic opinions for fear that they’re going to get ravaged with criticism without supporters. But because of the internet, the reality-based community had a voice and were able to convey the message to reviewers that no matter how vicious their reviews of this movie, we’d have their backs. Without that support, I don’t think you’d have seen near the bad reviews that you did, and Olson repeatedly states in the interview that he thinks that bad reviews were critical in discrediting this movie.
I do have to disagree with P.Z. on one thing:
Part of it is that the movie started with no credibility, but I suspect another part of its failure was in its marketing: ads on The Daily Show sound impressive to us, but weren’t going to draw in likely attendees, and using a rock-and-roll soundtrack and the image of rebelliousness is also not going to woo the evangelical crowd. Daily Show ads would have probably been very effective for Olson’s movie, Flock of Dodos, but they were wasted effort for this one.
The movie’s intended audience might have been evangelicals, but the point of running ads on “The Daily Show” was probably less to get butts in seats and more to create the impression that creationism should have a seat at the table, to be legitimized in the same way that neocon ideas were legitimized in the public discourse. “The Daily Show”’s audience didn’t need to see the movie for the ads to work to convince them of this; in fact, considering how horrible it was, it was probably to its benefit if they didn’t see the movie. The long term goal of the “Intelligent Design” movement is to kill evolutionary theory and pretty much the entire field of biology—Ben Stein has gone so far as to suggest that science itself should go. (I have to wonder if that includes science that leads to weapons development.) The short term goal of this movie, however, is to create political will to pass laws that give creationists the right to shoehorn themselves into positions the imbue them with the title of legitimate scientists. Then they can dismantle science from the inside.
The hope is that phrases like “teach the controversy” and “academic freedom” could lull liberal-minded, decent people into demanding that creationists have a right to sit at the table. And it probably would have worked, if scientists like P.Z.—who I think are still widely respected and admired by the public—hadn’t come out swinging and exposing the fact that these phrases are lies to cover up the real goal of the movement, which is to dismantle science. That’s where Olson is really wrong. Getting the public behind science is an important thing to do, but unless the public realizes that “Intelligent Design” is an attack on science, it won’t matter in this battle. And you have to throw punches to make it clear that you’re defending something from an actual assault.
“The long term goal of the “Intelligent Design” movement is to kill evolutionary theory and pretty much the entire field of biology—Ben Stein has gone so far as to suggest that science itself should go.”
This is truly the real motivation behind the Christianist attack on Evolution.
Science, being logic- and evidence-based instead of belief-, faith-, and superstition-based, does indeed pose a threat to any religion that refuses to stay in its own “proper” sphere of influence, like philosophy.
It’s not enough for Christianists to give people guidelines to living the “right way”. They need to directly attack and eliminate science, or some people will be tempted to reject “god” and the authoritarian belief-system behind it.
“Reality” is what they want it to be (they will claim it’s what god tells them it is). Everything that seems not to fit their received wisdom is a trick by Satan, etc.
“(I have to wonder if that includes science that leads to weapons development.)”
That’s actually a pretty scary aspect of Christianist life. Science can be stopped, in the sense of no longer making new discoveries.
But the application of science can usually continue unimpeded. As long as you have a recipe to make gunpowder, for example, you don’t need new science to make it. The resulting product will work just as well whether you think of the explosion as a chemical reaction or the unleashing of demons…
Compared to the money Randy Olson made with his movie, Expelled was a success, but as movies are judged, it will not even begin to make back the costs of its advertising budget, and because of its sheer arrogant stupidity in deciding they could invite a lawsuit from Yoko Ono and EMI, it has been enjoined from striking new prints or even printing DVDs. That is not financial success as viewed in the reality based community.
I’ll try to extend your point. The movie was practically irrelevant to their goal of getting their assault on science out there in a very big marketing splash, which was the product way more than the movie was. What they bought with their investment was a P.R. campaign that got Ben Stein out there promoting disbelief in gravity and mainstreaming science denial and, only incidentally, having a specific product to pitch, the more controversial the better.
What P. Z. did, was, without spending as much money as Ass Prod Mark Mathis paid P. Z. for appearing in the movie, was completely destroy their credibility. He used smarter P.R. than they did in responding the way he did to being kicked out of that screening, and became the story in a way that went viral, debilitating their marketing efforts by taking over a lot of the narrative. It became as much about P.Z. and Richard Dawkins in a way that made Ben Stein look like a parody of a stupid, boring comedian whose movie just tanked.
So, Olson and Nisbet and Mooney and Prongs thrash about and concern troll with all their framing BS. Olson has even defended their ganking of “Imagine” on fair use grounds, which would be a horrible case for the fate of fair use to depend upon, but no matter. All this hand-wringing about scientists and how nice they should be is irrelevant. The IDiots perpetrated an epic fail, and for the life of me, I can’t understand why Olson is trying to turn that around and characterize the way P.Z. pwned them as science doing its job wrong. There is no value in making the argument, “a pox on both their houses,” which is all that Olson has to sell.
I agree; I don’t think you can judge it by its financial success. The question is: Does it legitimize ID and rally the base? The former was mitigated by the events you describe. But the latter was actually reinforced by the Ono lawsuit, which will be viewed by evangelicals as another example of evil atheist hippies attacking Jesus Christ. The problem is that this movie’s going to linger in churches and on Christian networks for forever.
One thing this whole thing has done for our side is it’s decided for us whether the ignore it or attack strategy is best. The latter is the winner—by painting science as under assault (i.e., the truth), we get a leg up. Creationism was gaining ground because it had this underdog status. Now science can be repositioned as something being defended effectively on a shoestring budget against a well-funded, evil enemy.
I have to agree with Olson that it would have been better if Yoko Ono hadn’t sued. Seriously, she’s a hated person in this country, and it’s easy to play the “evil bitch sues innocent Christians” card. I know that she sues everyone she possibly can for using Lennon’s material, but still. I wish she’d laid off. There’s no way to escape the idea that she’s greedy when she does stuff like that. It’s because it is greedy—she has more money than god, I’m sure, and can totally let Lennon’s stuff slip into the public domain without worrying about how to live in super wealth for the rest of her life and her child’s as well.
“The movie’s intended audience might have been evangelicals, but the point of running ads on “The Daily Show” was probably less to get butts in seats and more to create the impression that creationism should have a seat at the table, to be legitimized in the same way that neocon ideas were legitimized in the public discourse.”
But the people who watch the Daily Show tend to be a little bit more media-savvy than your average bear, and the Daily Show has run more than one segment trashing evangelical crusades, including creationism. I imagine my reaction to seeing that ad–a “Fuck you, Ben Stein” followed immediately by “Wait, did someone actually let them pay for an ad on the Daily Show?”–was not an uncommon one.
I think it also really helped give the Meyers-Dawkins incident cachet. Here’s Ben Stein in some douchebag ad about how he got kicked out of class just for asking a question, and not only do they turn around and bar an opponent from even watching the thing, but they do it in an incredibly, hilariously idiotic way. The story of this incident is then disseminated via the means that same demographic is all over. It would have been stupid without that ad. With the ad, it was almost a practical joke on creationism proponents.
Science, being logic- and evidence-based instead of belief-, faith-, and superstition-based, does indeed pose a threat to any religion
Exactly. Which is why it’s absurd to say things like this:
evolutionary theory is not necessarily in conflict with Christianity
Does the Bible say “In the beginning, God made an ever-changing world and watched as evolution created heaven and Earth”?
“Does the Bible say “In the beginning, God made an ever-changing world and watched as evolution created heaven and Earth”?”
Obviously it doesn’t. However, there are people who are able to accept both science and belief, by doing things like not taking the biblical story of creation as being literal.
It’s not my cup of tea, but I know people who support both, and if they get some benefit from the religious part of that duo, more power to ‘em…
As long as they don’t use the their belief in god to justify controlling everyone’s behavior (believers and non-believers alike), it’s cool. There just seem to be very few religionists who can resist taking that last step…
But you can judge the movie by its lack of financial success–part of Ben Stein’s appeal to these jokers is his veneer of Calvinist accomplishment–by that measure PZ et al won Ben Stein’s money.
As suggested by MikeEss, who’s to say that “God” didn’t create evolution? I know that personally, were I to be a Christian, I’d believe evolution was God’s way of improving /creating creatures.
It is hardly impossible to believe both science and religion, and if one can’t they don’t have decent grip on either.
Simply put, the world didn’t freeze 2000 years ago, and I’m pretty sure evangelicals are the first group to truly believe that it did.
I’m with Yoko Ono on this one. It’s trademark as well as copyright; if she wanted to let it slide her lawyers wouldn’t have let her, and EMI, which owns the actual recording, would have sued with or without her involvement, with the same results–the movie can’t distribute DVDs to the faithful until this is resolved. If the IDiots ripped her off out of principle, it isn’t the principle that she needs the money that she struck back. If they want to sell their commercial product by using somebody else’s commercial product, they can pay for it like everything else they paid for.
You’re buying into Olson’s framing with this one. Of course she’s an evil hippie despised by stupid hippies who, to quote Cheech and Chong, were all strung out on drugs, and now they’re all strung out on The Lord. The gang of IDiots behind Expelled had to gank that one song, or lose their street cred with their base, and did so calculatedly as an investment in the publicity of the lawsuit providing more free publicity.
Of course they’ll sell their turkey of a film, even if the famous missing fifteen seconds are only available on the bootleg for the elect, but being nice about it and letting them get away with it isn’t going to sway those clowns to reason anymore than anything can be done to dissuade the 25% of the country that is Bush’s base to pull their heads out of their asses.
“Does the Bible say “In the beginning, God made an ever-changing world and watched as evolution created heaven and Earth”?”
No, but it also doesn’t say “Evolution didn’t happen, neener neener.”
You don’t have to be down with the abiogenesis hypotheses proposed in order to give credence to the theory of evolution. You don’t have to take everything in Genesis completely literally any more than you have to think Thessalonians 5:2 means that home security systems are Rapture-incompatible.
There are plenty of people whose faith does not grow or wither based on ancient nomadic goat-herders getting astrophysics and molecular biology exactly right, and it’s hardly unusual to see the change in tone from Old Testament to New explained by means of society evolving to the point where it was ready for a revised and expanded version of the religion. The people for whom that is credible usually don’t have much trouble with the idea that God issued a condensed version of planetary history in order to get the point across to humans who were as yet incapable of understanding that the earth was not a giant diorama.
Just to add on to this discussion about the compatibility of belief in God and support for evolutionary theory, we should note that many of Darwin’s supporters were themselves Christians and remained so throughout their lives. A good example would be the botanist Asa Gray, who probably did more than any other scientist to promote Darwin’s evolutionary work in the United States. Gray maintained that evolution was the work of God, but had no trouble discussing evolutionary theory with those who did not hold that view (Darwin himself being one of those).
Gray’s view is in pretty strong accord with the philosophy of natural theology that was fairly popular among naturalists in the English-speaking world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Natural theology held that by studying the natural world (particularly the living world), the wonders of God’s creation are revealed to us. Indeed, it is a form of worship to do so. Natural theology arguably encouraged the study of nature, since one could then come to some understanding of God on one’s own.
(retyped after last submission appeared to twizzle into the ether)
I’m on Yoko Ono’s side here. Whether or not she sued, EMI, the owner of the actual recording, was going to sue with the exact same result. They claim principle as a fig leaf (fair use!) when all they really wanted to do was rip off Yoko Ono. If the gang of IDiots from Expelled are going to use somebody else’s commercial product to enhance the commercial value of theirs, they can’t pick and choose which one to pay for and which one to gank. As this was propaganda for those in the pews, they couldn’t very well keep their credibility and pay Yoko Ono, the evil hippie hated by the stupid hippies (Cheech and Chong: “Before, I was all strung out on drugs. Now, I am all strung out on the Lord.”) but they can’t say that in court, can they?
As for Yoko’s lawsuit playing into their hands, if we can ascribe to intent what can just as readily be explained by incompetence, then they wanted the prosecution by the evil Yoko to provide more free publicity to prove their idiot thesis. As it is, they can’t print DVDs until something is worked out. But Yoko being nice wouldn’t have changed any minds either, and it isn’t making anything worse. That’s Randy Olson’s useless point again. Not fighting back is not effective in prying the duped away from their science denial, just as not fighting back won’t chip away at the numbers that comprise Bush’s base.
No, look, it pretty much does. Genesis details - twice - the order of creation of living things, in a fairly specific timeframe, and that order and timeframe are a direct contradiction to the evolutionary history of life on Earth, the timeframe that we had no knowledge of until the 1800’s, thousands of years after the writing of Genesis.
So it’s fairly ridiculous to assert that primitive goatherders in the Bronze age wouldn’t have gotten it completely, literally wrong, because how could they have known? Genesis contradicts evolution regardless of how “literal” your reading is, because the people that wrote Genesis had literally no idea of the evolutionary history of living things, that history having begun more than a billion years before any of them were born.
Can we please, please get past the idea that science is all logic and religion is all faith? Science is as much of a human endeavor as religion. And science has an awful lot of philosophical infrastructure to support it even if contemporary scientists are typically ignorant of it (Galileo, Newton, and Einstein didn’t just collect data …) The ‘logical truth’ is no more revealed to us that the ‘divine truth.’ You have to work damn hard at science and you need an awful lot of cultural and cognitive apparatuses to make it work. It doesn’t do science any service to act as if TRUTH is granted to us from LOGIC AND OBSERVATION because then you are taking up a theological discourse and emptying it of the jeebus part. But the problem with religion isn’t just the jeebus stuff, it’s the revealed ultimate truth part, also. The strengths of the sciences come for their messiness and pluralities, their logics and their observations.
This is why I’m not sure if its so wrong for Olson to use the term ‘evolutionists.’ I’ll maybe return and take back this claim once I get a chance to listen to the podcast, but sometimes non-right wingers who are in philosophy of biology circles will use the term neo-Darwinists or evolutionists to name people (like Dawkins) who think evolution by natural selection explains absolutely everything (or at least all the interesting stuff) about human behavior. As Amanda so often points out, evolutionary psychologists are choad ’scientists’ precisely because they cannot see anything but a very reductive picture of human behavior that supports reactionary politics. I think defenders of science need to go after evolutionary psychologists (who are often crappy economists and philosophers, not biologists) just as much as IDiots because they both claim to be science when they are pretty damn theological.
Anyway, my point is this: when IDiots say ‘but science is just another religion and we should be at the table too’ we’re not going to win by responding with secular theology about how science is LOGIC and nothing else. To win, defenders of science need to be very clear that science is a flawed, contingent, human activity that kicks supernaturalism’s ass when it comes to explaining natural phenomena. That activity has some philosophical content that isn’t empirical but is necessary in order to make sense of the empirical world. It can’t explain everything about humans or human experience because only theology is in the game of explaining everything. Theology can’t replace science because theology has to have a non-contingent sky-fairy to reconcile all the non-reconcilable stuff in our world. If we want to understand a pretty good chunk of our world fairly well, then we’ll turn to science and teach that in science class.
But maybe she can’t live with asshole ID proponents using his music.
Do people really hate her? Really?
The Beatles thing was such a long time ago, and it wasn’t her fault that John and Paul grew sick of each other or that Paul tried to put his inlaws in charge of everything after Epstein died.
I agree that one of the most important things defenders of science can do is to describe their discoveries and theories in ways that make sense to the public and draw positive attention, and that Stephen Jay Gould is the model for how to do this.
Good grief I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Some of you pseudo-intellects here realize I’m sure that your obsession with “framing” belies your ostensible esteem for “reality”. Reality doesn’t need to be “framed”, it needs exactly the opposite. Reality is for example what you get when you take away the smothering, distorting, reality-denying “frame” of political correctness.
Gould is a perfect example of what’s wrong with “evolutionists”. He was a science popularizer, yes. Very politically correct, yes. But his theories on the significance of human genetic differences were less scientific than the ID theories “evolutionists” to love sneer at. Yet you “reality-based” people hold Gould up as a paragon. He’s your model, your hero in the crusade against the evil IDers. Pathetic.
A better hero would be EO. Wilson. Or better yet, James Watson. Talk about speaking truth to power. Hmmm. But the power Watson challenged was the political correctness of the “evolutionists” who deny that Darwin’s theories apply to man. Rather than welcoming Watson’s view of reality, they cast him out for his grave sin.
Science is not about ignoring differences, it’s about examining and understanding them. The value of ID is that it calls into question the orthodoxy of evolution. It picks at the weak points where science has so far only been able to sketch a little “Insert Miracle Here” placeholder. Ironically God’s agents are showing scientists exactly where they need more science.
Anti-religious zealots who like to think of themselves as “reality-based” should appreciate that kind of challenge to orthodoxy. Instead they behave exactly as if their faith has been challenged. Oh my this ID is such foolishness, we shouldn’t have to answer questions from ignorant jesus freaks!
True scientists like Wilson or Watson don’t consider questions heresy. They don’t try to silence or intimidate people from posing them. They don’t fret about “framing”. True scientists and true intellects welcome alternate, even bogus theories. Their understanding of reality advances at least as much by discovering which ideas are wrong as it does by positing what might be true.
The idea that ID is an attack on science is psychological projection. It is natural for cultural marxists to think this. After all, it is they who with malice aforethought undermined objective science and turned academia’s ivory towers into postmodernist towers of babel. Now from those ruins they rail against ID. What a farce.
loneoak, “truth” is something people seek from religion and other forms of philosophy.
Science doesn’t deal in “truth”, but fact. When a “fact” turns out to be something less, the search for a replacement begins.
Religion starts with “the answers” and attempts to gain believers in the absence of fact. In many religions, often the fewer facts available, the stronger the belief is.
“To win, defenders of science need to be very clear that science is a flawed, contingent, human activity that kicks supernaturalism’s ass when it comes to explaining natural phenomena.”
…which is the obvious weakness science faces when dealing with True Believers. They already KNOW The Truth, while those silly scientists are foolishly still looking…
loneoak, the short answer is no. Unfortunately, too many people out there want to equate science and religion, and you’re playing into their hands by saying, “It’s all human endeavor.” Bicycling and murder are, too, but we can make evaluative comparisons about their relative value.
(third try)
I’m on Yoko Ono’s side here. Whether or not she sued, EMI, the owner of the actual recording, was going to sue with the exact same result. They claim principle as a fig leaf (fair use!) when all they really wanted to do was rip off Yoko Ono. If the gang of IDiots from Expelled are going to use somebody else’s commercial product to enhance the commercial value of theirs, they can’t pick and choose which one to pay for and which one to gank. As this was propaganda for those in the pews, they couldn’t very well keep their credibility and pay Yoko Ono, the evil hippie hated by the stupid hippies (Cheech and Chong: “Before, I was all strung out on drugs. Now, I am all strung out on the Lord.”) but they can’t say that in court, can they?
As for Yoko’s lawsuit playing into their hands, if we can ascribe to intent what can just as readily be explained by incompetence, then they wanted the prosecution by the evil Yoko to provide more free publicity to prove their idiot thesis. As it is, they can’t print DVDs until something is worked out. But Yoko being nice wouldn’t have changed any minds either, and it isn’t making anything worse. That’s Randy Olson’s useless point again. Not fighting back is not effective in prying the duped away from their science denial, just as not fighting back won’t chip away at the numbers that comprise Bush’s base.
Sorry MikeEss, but science isn’t just a collection of facts. That’s a very outdated and mistaken picture of science, discredited at least since logical positivism fell to Kuhn and Quine in the ’60s on the philosophical front and then came under further attack from sociological accounts of science, especially from Latour, Hacking, Haraway and the like.
It’s pretty untenable to separate fact and truth as if they were a priori separate categories. If you disagree, please explain how it is that you are able to identify a fact without first having an account of what could count as truth?
The facts that science picks out are not only the product of empirical research, but also the conceptual tools that enable us to have an account of what we ought to be looking for when we look for facts. That philosophical aspect is unfortunately hidden from view by the way we train scientists and the cultural power we grant them as ostensibly neutral arbiters.
I’m sorry to get all philosophy-y here, but I think these supposedly philosophical questions matter an awful lot to the politics at stake here. Like I said above, you don’t beat the religious true believers by being a science true believer. Yes, there is a difference between theological true believers and science true believers in that science looks to empirical investigation and religion doesn’t, but some of the discourses around science are awfully theological. For instance, the notion that there are facts on the one hand and truth on the other because facts are just given and truth is something you make up. Well, for religionists, their ‘facts’ are just given too, so you’re just fighting over the best method to find the given. I for one don’t want the given or the found, I want the method that does the best at producing the truth, even if truth is a messy and ambiguous notion. Believing that science has no philosophical basis or history is to imagine it came from nowhere and gives us immediate, non-problematic access to the world. It don’t, won’t, can’t do such a thing and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise.
Revealed truth is one of my favorite things ever. It can be absolutely anything at all, from requiring plural wives (as with Joseph Smith) or Paul’s fantasy on the road. Can’t confirm none of ‘em.
I’m only playing into their hands if you buy their framing of the issue. I’ll all for gung-ho defense of science against idiocy—and I entirely agree that we shouldn’t buy into the ‘be a nice atheist’ line. But I think defenders of science play into religionists hands when they buy into their framing of the deeper issues at play. For me, the most problematic and theological aspect of discourses about science is the notion that facts are just given to us.
There’s a rich history of feminist philosophy of science/feminist science studies that I think you would enjoy, Amanda, that would challenge some of the framing you use when talking about science. Of course there isn’t a single party line, but the closest you might get to one is that science is made weaker by not acknowledging its history and philosophical tools, some of which are problematic and ugly. It’s the same move made by the patriarchy to make itself invisible. And there’s a history of this claim being completely ignored by scientists because the term ‘feminist’ is there. There’s a nasty patriarchal history to science that is embedded in some of the ‘new atheist’ talk about science. If that’s bait enough, feel free to email me and I’ll suggest some reading.
That’s a very outdated and mistaken picture of science, discredited
Hi. I know all you philosophers think us science-folk are ignorant of philosophy of science. What you need to understand is that we actually aren’t; we just think the misconceptions you people hold about what we do are completely hilarious.
Discredited, nonsense. Discredited among some philosophers, of course, but since none of them ever seemed to bother to ask scientists about what they did, and how they do it, nobody outside the rigor-free, insular world of philosophy takes it especially seriously.
I’m sorry to get all philosophy-y here, but I think these supposedly philosophical questions matter an awful lot to the politics at stake here.
No, they don’t; philosophical questions don’t matter to anything at all. The entire field exists as an endeavor with no intellectual rigor, just like economics and theology.
Philosophy is nothing more than a dumpster for questions that are not of any interest to any more legitimate field, or are fundamentally unanswerable (and therefore pointless) by definition.
Believing that science has no philosophical basis or history is to imagine it came from nowhere and gives us immediate, non-problematic access to the world.
The world is all around you, philosopher. Your body and mind are steeped in it. You don’t need anything but your senses to give you access to it. The second you start actually taking a look, the second you stop playing with your brains in jars and shadows in Plato’s cave, is the second that you stop being a philosopher and start adding to the body of human knowledge, instead of subtracting from it.
I spend an awful lot of time around scientists, especially in genomics and genetics. And yes, most of the scientists I know are ignorant of philosophical questions. And yes, that is a problem and they think so too.
The philosophers who discredited that notion of science as accumulated fact were the first ones to actually hang out with scientists, moron. In the early history of science, the people we now identify as scientists all called themselves philosophers, like Galileo, Newton, and Boyle. (You might also look at Bohr’s philosophical writings and then tell me that quantum mechanics doesn’t use philosophical tools when examining indeterminacy and uncertainty.) Then as science became a more independent institution, philosophers started to fantasize about it and come up with the positivism that most scientists today identify as science as such. Then Kuhn, who was a physicist, you arsehat, really threw scientists and philosophers alike for a loop. You might claim to not be ignorant of philosophy of science, which I doubt, you are ignorant of history if you think philosophical questions had nothing to do with science.
You might think twice before painting another discipline with such a broad brush as if it were a singular thing. I don’t do that with science–it was scientific questions that made me want to study philosophy.
(My apologies for my earlier repetitious waste of bandwidth)
There’s a nasty patriarchal history to science that is embedded in some of the ‘new atheist’ talk about science.
What, like that nasty oppressive Cartesian Coordinate System (Stavely, SIGGRAPH ‘93)? Ahem. LOL
While you made quite a few good points, you steered off into the land of philosophy woo pretty quickly, with your positivism and your paradigms. As biologist Athena Andreadis said once, “philosophy is for those who prefer not to be bound by observation and evidence.”
So what if what we call science today had its origins in “natural philosophy?” Prior to that, it was all under the rubric of theology. Neither theology nor philosophy have the cachet of science, thus all the turf warring. Science, though, is what gets results. I’ll let an authority on the philosophy of science rule on this one, John Wilkins from his science/philosophy FAQ over on talk.origins:
Theology and philsophy, compared with science, are otiose. This is why theologians and some philosophers want to reduce the practice of science to “metaphysical naturalism” instead of “methodological naturalism.” Science is usually too busy producing results to bother with theologians, philosophers, and framers.
Well, from his wandering-around-concentration-camps riff you’d think so, but in fact there’s a whole segment of technologists (afaik in bio as well as the “hard” sciences) who seem able to compartmentalize their beliefs in such a way that they can do good work in their fields while still having bugf*** crazy religious beliefs that include creationism. (Remember, for example, that devout engineers were a strong part of the iranian revolution. Or think of all the people who did remarkable technical work while believing that they were working against godless communism..) So believing in G*d and creationism is really no bar to inventing equipment for killing.
(I’d speculate that the doublethink it requires might for some people even make it easier for them to devote themselves to the technology of death, but that would be going mostly beyond the evidence.)
It kicks supernaturalism’s ass because of its willingness to revise itself when presented with facts. Pretending that science isn’t fact-based is ridiculous. Sure, sometimes the observations are wrong, or the experiments are set up badly, or the conclusions don’t really fit the raw data. That’s where the human activity comes in. But that’s also the reason journals are peer-reviewed and edited in ways the the ID journals aren’t. Science might be influenced by human opinion, but it strives to be fact based in a way that most disciplines don’t.
loneoak, I agree that there have been many scientists who have used their knowlege and experiences as a jumping off point for philosophic journeys. But when they do so, they are not engaging in science.
“It’s pretty untenable to separate fact and truth as if they were a priori separate categories. If you disagree, please explain how it is that you are able to identify a fact without first having an account of what could count as truth?”
When used correctly, the words “fact” and “truth” ARE different concepts.
A fact is something like the amount of time some chemical reaction took to complete, the presence of colors when a prism is placed in white light, the elliptical orbit of planets, or the observed bending of light in the presence of a strong gravitational field. Science seeks to explain how these things occur, using our current understanding of facts and “proven” theories. When a fact collides with our understanding, then we must alter our understanding to accommodate that fact.
“Truth” is too squishy to pin down. It seeks to answer a whole host of extremely ill-defined questions, like what is love, why are we here, what is “good” and what is “bad”.
A fact “is”. “Truth” is believed. Fact can be demonstrated. Truth cannot be.
A stone dropped anywhere on earth will fall toward the earth. In the absence of other information, we may disagree about what causes this to happen, but the fact of its occurrence is irrefutable.
I think the sticky part is when postulation and theory come into the discussion.
Science cannot unequivocally give the “final” answer to anything. Seekers of Truth see this as a weakness of science. Practitioners of science just see it as the inevitable result of the constant gathering of new facts, which sometimes leads to changes to or replacement of theories that are shown to no longer correctly model reality.
For example, Newton’s “laws” are correct in almost any reasonable situation. But there are circumstances where those laws do not correctly predict observed fact. Einstein supplied an enhanced version of those laws that corrected the flaws.
Science sometimes has answers to the questions truth seeks to answer. For example, “love” is (most likely) a set of chemical reactions that bond people together for their mutual benefit.
But a question like “why are we here” almost certainly will never have an answer from the realm of science…
But you’re missing the point here. I don’t give a rat’s ass if most scientists don’t have much use for philosophy in an everyday sense–they shouldn’t because it’s not their field of study. The blog entry is about science, politics, public perception and framing. My contention is that if science wants to break out of the ‘but you’re a theology too!’ argument, its defenders should stop borrowing from theology rather than just yelling ‘but we’re all about facts!’ Because we’re not all about facts, we’re about a certain kind of evidence that there are damn good reasons to prefer when making naturalistic claims. Those reasons have a history and a philosophical foundation. The history of science has always been fucking contentious about fundamental issues and its only relatively recently that defenders of science have started acting otherwise. It’s not like empiricism appeared out of nowhere one day and all the sudden we had finally had glorious empirical facts and everything else disappeared into the dustbin. That’s a fantasy of revealed truth.
I’m sorry that this thread got taken off topic by this stuff about the relationship between philosophy and science, which wasn’t my point anyway. It is that a lot of ‘defenders of science’ do their efforts a disservice by trying to battle theology while accepting a theological framework of facts just being given and not the product of human endeavors, even if we have to admit that those endeavors are imperfect. Would someone please address that point?
I so much prefer imperfection over swagger it really hurts when my allies choose swagger instead of finding strength in imperfection.
Come on, MikeESS, did I really say otherwise? I didn’t use those words as synonyms, I just pointed out the rather simple notion that (for the last time on this thread) that the production of facts requires that we have some idea of what would count as truth before we start. Let’s fight against IDiots by showing science has a much better standard than theology, rather that just saying ‘we have facts and they have woo.’
One thing the “facts as product of human endeavor” thing does is rope in a lot of the more sane believers — travesties like creationism and ID are an affront not only to atheists and agnostics but to any religious person who believes that the universe is a marvelous creation of their deity/whatever. There’s a whole strain of christian scientific study, for example, in which working to understand the cosmos is a form of worship. For such people, taking up anti-factual positions such as creationism and ID is like tossing your bible in the trash because you really don’t want want to hear about loving your neighbor.
you’re missing the point here
No, I’m ignoring your inept framing and calling you on your attempt to take credit as a framer/philosopher/bafflegabber for what science does. Anybody who has bothered to spend five minutes paying attention to what scientists do knows one is happy to be proved wrong because a new hypothesis better explains observations and evidence and leads to better questions. Answers are provisional. Lather, rinse, repeat. Whatever theology and philosophy contributed to science before it became what we call science today, they are superfluous to science now, because science is a method, neither a philosophy nor a religion, nor a frame.
For me, the most problematic and theological aspect of discourses about science is the notion that facts are just given to us.
So don’t be the first to introduce such a ludicrous strawman having nothing to do with what anybody is advocating.
Sorry, but Edmund Wilson is a lousy example of “speaking truth to power.” His sociobiology theories are little more than a convenient excuse to justify sexism and racism on the grounds of genetic determinism. His work became popular solely because it so neatly fit in with the status quo, not because it was accepted by other scientists.
I also have little respect for James Watson, who denigrated and belittled the work of Rosalyn Yalow. His work on DNA would not have been possible without Yalow’s pioneering research, yet to this day he hasn’t apologized for characterizing her as an unfeminine nutcase in his book. He not only didn’t speak truth to power, he won a Nobel Prize - and continues to blather nonsense about race and intelligence that was debunked quite some time ago.
I shed no tears for either of these men. They’re hidebound to the point of bigotry. At least Gould didn’t claim that women were genetically programmed to be housewives, or that non-whites were genetically less intelligent and creative than Europeans.
As for Ben Stein - he’s a marginal actor, a minor economist, and a failed game show host. Why the hell anyone would choose him to host a bad movie is beyond me.
Sorry, make that “Rosalind Franklin.” It’s been a long, long day.
“The long term goal of the “Intelligent Design” movement is to kill evolutionary theory and pretty much the entire field of biology— . . .”
For anyone not already familiar with the infamous ‘wedge strategy, the goal of the ID creationist movement, in their own words (and an example of why one doesn’t take top-secret culture-war manifestos to get copied at the local Kinko’s . . .):
“The proposition that human beings are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built. Its influence can be detected in most, if not all, of the West’s greatest achievements, including representative democracy, human rights, free enterprise, and progress in the arts and sciences.
Yet a little over a century ago, this cardinal idea came under wholesale attack by intellectuals drawing on the discoveries of modern science. Debunking the traditional conceptions of both God and man, thinkers such as Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud portrayed humans not as moral and spiritual beings, but as animals or machines who inhabited a universe ruled by purely impersonal forces and whose behavior and very thoughts were dictated by the unbending forces of biology, chemistry, and environment. This materialistic conception of reality eventually infected virtually every area of our culture, from politics and economics to literature and art
The cultural consequences of this triumph of materialism were devastating. Materialists denied the existence of objective moral standards, claiming that environment dictates our behavior and beliefs. Such moral relativism was uncritically adopted by much of the social sciences, and it still undergirds much of modern economics, political science, psychology and sociology.
Materialists also undermined personal responsibility by asserting that human thoughts and behaviors are dictated by our biology and environment. The results can be seen in modern approaches to criminal justice, product liability, and welfare. In the materialist scheme of things, everyone is a victim and no one can be held accountable for his or her actions.
Finally, materialism spawned a virulent strain of utopianism. Thinking they could engineer the perfect society through the application of scientific knowledge, materialist reformers advocated coercive government programs that falsely promised to create heaven on earth.
Discovery Institute’s Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies . . . .
. . . . The social consequences of materialism have been devastating. As symptoms, those consequences are certainly worth treating. However, we are convinced that in order to defeat materialism, we must cut it off at its source. That source is scientific materialism. This is precisely our strategy. If we view the predominant materialistic science as a giant tree, our strategy is intended to function as a “wedge” that, while relatively small, can split the trunk when applied at its weakest points. The very beginning of this strategy, the “thin edge of the wedge,” was Phillip ]ohnson’s critique of Darwinism begun in 1991 in Darwinism on Trial, and continued in Reason in the Balance and Defeatng Darwinism by Opening Minds. Michael Behe’s highly successful Darwin’s Black Box followed Johnson’s work. We are building on this momentum, broadening the wedge with a positive scientific alternative to materialistic scientific theories, which has come to be called the theory of intelligent design (ID). Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions. . . .
Five Year Objectives . . .. .
. . .5. Spiritual & cultural renewal:
Mainline renewal movements begin to appropriate insights from design theory, and to repudiate theologies influenced by materialism
. . .
Darwinism Seminaries [sic] increasingly recognize & repudiate naturalistic presuppositions
Positive uptake in public opinion polls on issues such as sexuality, abortion and belief in God . . . ”
And product liabiltiy, don’t forget product liability. That’s my favorite part of the whole rant ( . . . I always imagine it being read in a Grandpa Simpson voice, but with an extra helping of nutjob . . .).
If we’re engaging Racist Troll@Comment #17:
“Hunt-Grubbe stated that Watson’s “hope” was “everyone is equal” but quoted him as having said “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.”” [wiki/
That’s science? Anyway, for years, Watson’s been coming across as the elderly uncle who can’t stop leering at young women and making inappropriate remarks while complaining bitterly about the Negroes. It’s a shame, really.
Wrong. ID has no value. At the heart of it ID is an argument from ignorance. The Discovery Institute is conducting no research. Instead we have a string of articles from people who declare that anything that works is due to intelligent design. Eggs? Intelligent Design. The immune system? Intelligent Design. Eyes? Intelligent Design.
Real scientists spend years conducting research. But the IDiots want their untested (and untestable) hypothesis to receive equal treatment without actually doing anything. But that’s not how it works.
Tanstaafl:
This is, of course, not even slightly true. Now, I’ll grant you that the people who run the creationist movement would be absolutely thrilled to hear you claim otherwise, since they know just as well as we do that they can’t be honest about their anti-science motivations (stated motivations, even) in public. They need people like you to buy the bullshit cover story, or they’d never get anything done at all.
This is the part of my post where I tell you that if you don’t know what you’re talking about, your opinion doesn’t count.
Sadly, I see from your blog that you’re some kind of white nationalist, one of those people who for some reason honestly believes that calling out racist white people for being racist is itself racist, as if that belief weren’t some kind of marginally sophisticated version of “I know you are, but what am I” playground logic.
Me, I’m still trying to figure out what’s so fucking fantastic about being white that people like you feel the need to wax ecstatic over how much it needs to be protected from the ever-imminent taint of the mud people.
Tanstaafl:
Forgot about this little gem. Oh, the things that are wrong about this.
It is indeed true that science thrives on competing theories and healthy argument, and so does every other academic discipline. I’ve watched it happen with my very own two eyes. But academic argument isn’t a Monty Python sketch: it’s just a means to an end, not the end in and of itself. I’m sorry to say that unfortunately for you and yours, ID has already failed this test, miserably and quite spectacularly, and it will continue to do so until such time as it deigns to put forth a worthwhile scientific argument. And no, sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting “LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU LA LA LA” at the top of your lungs doesn’t count.
See, that’s the problem with science, and with academia in general: it has rules. You can’t just show up with some cockamamy idea backed up by fuck-all and expect everyone to give you a gold star and a pat on the back. If you showed up at a pick-up basketball game and told everyone that God said you didn’t have to dribble, you’d rightly get laughed off the court. Same deal in science.
of the “evolutionists” who deny that Darwin’s theories apply to man. [citations needed]
The value of ID is that it calls into question the orthodoxy of evolution. It picks at the weak points where science has so far only been able to sketch a little “Insert Miracle Here” placeholder. Ironically God’s agents are showing scientists exactly where they need more science.
[Citation needed]
Anti-religious zealots who like to think of themselves as “reality-based” should appreciate that kind of challenge to orthodoxy.
What’s most fun about this is that our visiting racist wingnut (yes, I checked out your sick little home page) probably has no idea where “reality-based” came from.
Anyway, do you have any evidence for any of your claims? Any?
I just finished my MS two weeks ago. My thesis was a bit unusual in that I actually did create some new stuff that made possible some limited predictions before I had run the data and verified them. Let me repeat that: I made a prediction about two specific quantities (actually the behavior of them, so the slopes of two different curves) and then I ran the molecular simulations to see if I was right. I was told that this made my thesis was rather decent for a masters.
Where in this process of me being paid to “do science” last year did I NOT use my understanding of the phenomena to pre-filter for which facts would be useful in better understanding it? Because precisely that is what I see loneoak talking about here.
It’s even structural. You generally can’t get a grant unless you can describe precisely what you expect to learn, which hypotheses will be tested with the money and time and people applied to the question. I don’t see a random process of collecting facts and trying to sift out truth from them, I see a semi-directed process of identifying interesting areas of study before enough of the facts of those areas are known to shed light on the truth of what is happening. Phenomena that are not interesting (read as: politically and economically viable) don’t get funding. For example, I haven’t seen much funding applied recently to the quest for the universal DFT functional even though it is known to exist and its formal discovery would basically “solve” quantum chemistry forever.
So where exactly has loneoak gone off the deep end here? When we’ve got social structures dictating which facts in science are worth discovering, doesn’t that call into question whether the idea that the scientific process itself (hypothesis -> test -> theory) as practiced in the real world is really value neutral? And if that question is called up, what discipline in science is appropriate to answer it? Sociology for mapping out how the social structures affect the science? Psychology for determining how individual scientists brains are affected when exposed to the ideas around them? Or philosophy for mapping out which fundamental values are actually being pursued and which are being ignored?
Or is there another discipline for the study of the scientific process itself? Which college is it generally put under in academia?
KL, no one disputes that scientists - being human and subject to the same weaknesses, biases, preconceived notions, and cultural framing as other humans - have their personal life experience intertwined with the process they use to determine which projects to pursue, which theses to favor, and which facts to emphasis.
Welcome to being human.
But there is a huge difference between the scientist’s flawed application of the scientific method in the search for understanding and the religionist’s use of dogma to filter out fact where it conflicts with their preferred ogma.
The religionist, and followers of ID are certainly members of that group, already knows “the answers”, and seeks only to convince others (really only those whose faith is too weak to just believe) “the answers” are correct…
and then I ran the molecular simulations to see if I was right
Now, these points of data
make a beautiful line.
And we’re out of beta.
We’re releasing on time!
So I’m GLaD I got burned-
Think of all the things we learned-
for the people who are
still alive.
Or is there another discipline for the study of the scientific process itself? Which college is it generally put under in academia?
I believe you’re looking for the English Department.
the most problematic and theological aspect of discourses about science is the notion that facts are just given to us.
The first thing I learned about science was that it was time to crush my skepticism and replace it with a healthy credulity.
loneoak, feminist critiques of science cross a line and discredit feminism once they start making ridiculous points equating religion and science. It’s embarrassing. It hurts feminism more than anything.
It’s one thing to challenge any kind of scientific statement you find lacking on its own merits. When I hear feminists start to lean on pseudo-philosophical statements about ways of knowing instead of directly examining the evidence and conclusions, I see laziness. Yep, laziness. Above all, it’s lazy to equate religion and science, because you don’t want to actually grapple with science. Religion is alluring because it’s a lazy way to get to “truth”, and because it can be manipulated—in theory—to say whatever you want.
For instance, say a evo psychologist like David Buss gets a story out into the press about how rape is built into men and they can’t help it or whatever. There are two ways a feminist can call bullshit. The lazy way—”I will lean on some post-modernist sounding hoopla to say that ’science’ is just like religion.” Or the not-lazy but more intellectually sound way. “What’s his evidence? How did he study this? Are there competing theories with better evidence?” I prefer that, even though I will grant that it’s a lot more work.
For those bashing philosophy, though, I have to point out that a lot of people in the field are happily pro-science. In fact, the UT philosophy department held a debate about intelligent design here and the pro-science side was the easy winner.
For those bashing philosophy, though, I have to point out that a lot of people in the field are happily pro-science.
Yes, I linked to a pro-science philosopher, John Wilkins. I’m not bashing philosophy so much as the position that science can’t be done without it so philosophy trumps science.
Point taken. The ferocity of the debate made me wonder since when there was necessarily animosity.
I do think that a lot of people who hide behind philosophy to spank people for making qualitative judgments are lazy. But you know, philosophy is supposed to be a field where you have to have a lot of intellectual rigor. Certainly more than my lazy ass is capable of.
Ellid says: I shed no tears for either of these men. They’re hidebound to the point of bigotry. At least Gould didn’t claim that women were genetically programmed to be housewives, or that non-whites were genetically less intelligent and creative than Europeans.
Thanks for illustrating my point. Many in the “reality-based community” who ridicule the religious have their own delusions. For example, denying the reality of sex and race differences. They strawman it as “programming” to shift the argument away from differences.
Gould denied there were significant human genetic differences, a ridiculously indefensible position to take from a scientific point of view - akin to claiming the world is flat. But it also happens to sound very nice, because it is very politically correct. What Watson said, and was vilified and sacked for, was his heresy against exactly this political correctness. As scientists continue to decode the genome and, more slowly, the proteome, they’re going to have more and more bad news for sex- and race-difference deniers.
This is the part of my post where I tell you that if you don’t know what you’re talking about, your opinion doesn’t count.
King of Fruits and Lord of Buns are funny. I’m sure they agree Ellid. But I detect something darker too. They think by routing their disgust for Whites through “racist wingnut” or “white nationalist” proxies nobody will notice who they really hate. They fling feces when they tire of playing at words, and vice versa. I’m guessing they’re the resident Goulds. They pick and quibble and babble on with their pseudo-logic until they wear their enemies out. Exemplar products of postmodernism.
“. It picks at the weak points where
sciencecrudely literalist religion has so far only been able to sketch a little “Insert Miracle Here” placeholder.”Fixed that for ya.
I mean, honestly, you’re not just confused here, you’re completely befuddled and bamboozled, you’ve got it all turned around.
Science says, hey, we don’t know how this works/happened; we’re going to start from the assumption that it reflects a natural rather than supernatural process (see thunder&lightening, crops growing, epilepsy & other mental illnesses, infectious disease, movement of planets, etc.) - but we will try to find out, constructing and vigorously testing hypothesis.
Creationism, whether in YEC, OEC, or new! ID flavors, says oh gosh golly, a MIRACLE occurred. Indeed, that’s one of the IDer’s major complaints (see for example Phillip Johnson’s work - at least one whole book spent whining that science is SO UNFAIR! because it won’t consider supernatural explanations. And then they cry that they’re being expelled because no-one takes their silliness seriously. Help, help, I’m being oppressed, the Germ Theory fundamentalists refuse to take seriously my Malevolent Spellcasting theory of disease! Imagine a movement built on Hagee’s Divine Homophobia theory of hurricane formation - God did it! - trying to shove itself into schools, with apologists insisting that it ‘picks at the weak points in meteorology where science has so far been able to sketch a little ‘Insert Miracle Here’ placeholder’. Sounds kinda dumb, right?)
Oh, but so ID creationism literally says ‘Insert Miracle Here’. All its PR efforts are bent towards- well, more and more convincing people that modern evolutionary biology is EVIL!! HITLER!! GENOCIDE!!! MODERN APPROACHES TO PRODUCT LIABILITY!!(ok, that one less so), but insofar that it even pretends to be a pseudoscience, towards convincing folks of the appearance of design. Who is the designer? We ‘don’t know’ (it’s intended to be the biblical God, of course, but they’re not supposed to say that out loud), and we can’t find out. How did He - oops, I mean It/They/? do this designing? We don’t know, and we can’t find out. What were Its/Their standards, intentions, purposes, etc.? - ie, are bad backs, wonky knees, blindspot eyes and hernia-prone males design flaws, necessary tradeoffs, or highly aesthetic features? - ok, all together now:
We don’t know, and we can’t find out!
It’s A Miracle. God Did It. Now sit down, shut up, and stop thinking.
(Of course, if there was strong evidence to support this utterly defeatist attitude - but there isn’t. It’s possible to imagine a world were things at least look that way - but it’s not ours.)
“ Ironically God’s agents are showing scientists exactly where they need more science.
Meh. Science is doing just fine. If anything, those who have to put in time pushing back Creationism 3.1 aren’t getting to do the ‘more science’ they need.
“The idea that ID is an attack on science is psychological projection.”
See my post #36.
“. As scientists continue to decode the genome and, more slowly, the proteome, they’re going to have more and more bad news for sex- and race-difference deniers.”
In other words, neither you nor anyone else actually has such evidence; you’ve just decided to believe that this will be the case.
“They think by routing their disgust for Whites through “racist wingnut” or “white nationalist” proxies nobody will notice who they really hate.”
Heck, some of my best friends are White. In fact, I’m actually married to a white person. Even my parents are/were white . . .Ohmigod, I’m white! Crazy!
But yeah, racist wingnut white-nationalists are kinda disgusting.
Revealed Truth, or why a part of the Urals went radioactive….had to do with the critical mass of nuclear wastes and what was “revealed!” by the writings of Marx and Lenin. The physicists screamed “NOOO!” and the nomenkultura went “Nonsense! This is as has been reveled….”
After the nuclear meltdown, the Soviets decided that physicists would be EXEMPT from the Doctrine of Revealed Truth.
IDers–you’re over 100 years late and a dollar short. The time for all your fooraw was back in the 19th century, when the idea of evolution was first raised. The arguments didn’t work then, they don’t work now. To quote LaGrange: “we have no need of that hypothesis.” Giving space for IDers to “teach the controversy” is equivalent to giving space to Holocaust denialists to “teach the history controversy.” (And given what you’ve got on your website, I have no doubt that quite a few IDers and YEC idiots are also denialists as well.)
Incidentally, I hope that the IDers and YECers realize that they’re just handing over any US competence in biology and medicine to the Chinese.
Hope you like having your kids say “and would you like rice with that” to your new Chinese overlords, because that’s the life you’re outfitting them for. See Lysenkoism, effects on Russian science of.
Hey speaking of science, they landed that contraption on the mars just now.
They better found some ice. I need it for my next mars trip. Cold Martini for everybody…
http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/
www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/main/index.html
Tanstaafl:
The only reason to worry about differences, genetic or otherwise, between sexes and races is if you’re deeply invested in the social structures that endlessly obsess over and heirarchize those differences. Which, clearly and by your own admission, you are.
See, the problem is you’re not even arguing about the same thing that the rest of us are. We don’t actually care whether or not there are real genetic differences between sexes and races, because we’re talking about how sex and race are socially, not biologically, constructed.
I’m sorry, but a population-wide genetic variance of about a tenth of a percent doesn’t qualify as “significant” according to any definition I’m aware of. I don’t even need Gould to tell you that, just a sixth-grade understanding of percentages.
I mean, if you want to make a racist mountain out of a genetic molehill, be my guest, but you don’t get to complain when most everyone else thinks you’re just being a drama queen and either ignores you or makes fun of you.
By and large, the genome project is showing us that there’s five or six times as much variation within racial groups as there is between such groups, and that any alleged “significant” differences between the sexes are genetically non-existent, regardless of the population sample. And of course, there’s always the problem of exactly how you chunk up humanity into racial groups in the first place. In fact, compared to the rest of the mammalian kingdom, humanity shows remarkably little intra-species variation.
Now, of course, I don’t believe for a second that you actually give a crap about genetics, or that you’d deal with it honestly if you did. It’s pretty clear to me that to you, the “reality” of sex and race differences is wrapped up exclusively in skin color and dangly bits and hundred-year-old Victorian social roles, not in nucleotides and protein encoding and inheritance.
It’s not that I don’t like white people in general, it’s that I don’t like white people like you. I realize that you’re way too self-absorbed to understand the difference, but there you go.
Shorter Tanstaafl: “I didn’t understand what you said, therefore it isn’t true.”
I can always tell the people who wouldn’t recognize actual post-modernism if it jumped up and fucked them right in the ear from the way they use the word as an imprecation.
Owl: But yeah, racist wingnut white-nationalists are kinda disgusting.
Sorry, I missed one of the resident Goulds. Anyone else?
Fruit: we’re talking about how sex and race are socially, not biologically, constructed.
It’s not that I don’t like white people in general, it’s that I don’t like white people like you.
Yes, you construct your little frames. Very nice. The most interesting one is the anti-racist frame that permits you the guilty pleasure of hating your stereotypical boogeymen, your “racists” and “white-nationalists”. It includes the “white people in general” who vote for Bush, and even the hard working democrats who vote for Hillary. If the “reality-based community” could face reality they wouldn’t use the euphemism “anti-racism” - they’d call it anti-Whitism, because that’s what it really is.
The anti-Christianity and anti-Republican frames interest me too, though to a lesser degree. The common thread is the hypocritical labeling and despising of Others because they label and despise Others.
Fruit: a population-wide genetic variance of about a tenth of a percent doesn’t qualify as “significant”
I know Gould looms large in your anti-racist frame. You sound just like him. Maybe it’s genetic.
The cliched arguments by zinger of the resident Goulds are entertaining but insubstantial. Clearly nobody here wants to face the substance: Reality and “framing” are mutually exclusive. Science does not discourage challenges. “Reality-based” ideologues perceive opposition as attacks because they are consumed with launching attacks. Attacks coldly calculated to alter reality, not abide it.
Shorter Gould: “I understand very well what you’re saying but I’ll pretend you don’t understand what you’re saying, therefore it isn’t true.”
(re: racist troll)
Oh, eww.
But hey, that’s the helpful thing about shit. It stinks. Otherwise people could mistake it for chocolate cake and such.
(I see no purpose in further engaging with the white supremacist troll as if they were a rational being arguing in good faith; to do so, it seems to me, in some sense almost legitimizes them, implying that they actually have a place in the discourse. One can talk about such a person, but talking to them, I dunno . . .
However, their comments do point to an interesting habit of thought common to various varieties of bigot. For example, if you’re perfectly fine with men (after all, I’m one myself), but don’t believe that they are superior to women & thus deserving special rights and privileges & both personal and societal dominance, the misogynist will believe that you ‘hate men’. If you’re perfectly fine with Christians - even if you don’t share their beliefs - but don’t believe that our secularly-founded nation and freedom-loving society should strive to approximate (or simply become) a theocracy, the Christianist will believe that you ‘hate Christians’. And if you’re perfectly fine with white people (remember [pointing to self], white person), but don’t believe that (see above), the white supremacist will believe that you ‘hate whites’. And the odd thing is, from their hateful perspective, it presumably would appear to be true, since we want to drag the noble men/Christians/whites down to the level of those lowly, disgusting cunts/nonbelievers/mud people. After all, in their minds, there has to be a hierarchy, there has to dominance and submission, there has to be people on top and people kneeling in the dirt on the bottom, there has to be masters and slaves, bros and hos, etc, etc, etc (oddly enough, they somehow always end up the first term - funny, that). And of course any practice of dealing with people as equal co-humans will be viewed as a perverse, unnatural, and very personal threat - not only does this overturn the ‘natural order’, it deprives them of unfair special rights, even if only the satisfaction - lacking other forms of validation and self-worth - of being able to look down on others. (And of course, wherever supported by the wider culture, or if in a position of power, to do real damage to others.
In this view, anti-racism really is anti-Whitism, because they think racism is right.
Yes, I know, this is old hat to most folks here, but I have to think things through time and time again before they sink in (and even then they tend to fall out - I swear, the kitchen utensil my mind most resembles is a colander. With extra-large holes.)
Here’s a few selected cuts of racist goodness from Mr. Tanstaafl’s droolings on his personal blog:
“What the anti-racists are doing is demonstrating their own hypocritical hate. They do so not only by being willfully blind to reasonable explanations Whites have to poll and vote as they did, but also by so thoroughly misinterpreting the statistics. They are eager to see only the “racism” they want to see.
I realize I have to explain this in more detail. This is because the media, our schools, and the liberal anti-racists who run them have done a very thorough job of brainwashing everyone that White = racist, and racist = bad.”
“[Referring to Ted Kennedy] It appears we will not have to endure him much longer. To those of us who recognize that “diversity” is a euphemism for ethnic cleansing and “immigration” is a euphemism for invasion Kennedy is no hero. He is an evil-doer. A traitor to his country. We can expect however that in response to his demise the media will produce a series of fawning retrospectives of his life. He is their hero.”
“What interests me is not orthodoxy or modernity. It is the clash between jews and Whites. What distresses me is the deleterious effect that clash is having on my people. Whites. The problem is that anti-racialism, anti-racism, and philo-semitism have come to dominate White thought. Generally speaking our leaders deny race, dislike Whites, and love jews. Just like jews.
This is good for jews, but bad for Whites. Bloom can see it. My anti-anti-semite foil Larry Auster can see it. Most jews can see it. Or they could if they ever turned their self-obsessed thoughts about what’s good for them outward and recognized that Whites might think the same way about themselves. The problem is: they won’t and we don’t. We cannot expect jews to change. The majority perceive that as bad for themselves. Get it? It’s up to Whites to set aside the anti-racialist crack pipe. Recognize that we are White. Recognize that anti-racism is anti-Whitism. And think, as Whites: What is good for Whites?”
“Intolerance, insularity, cheating “the goyim” (a disrespectful label we do not attach to ourselves), and manipulative arguments are indeed fundamental, long-held characteristically jewish values. Certainly in comparison to those of European stock. The cheating and manipulation are especially alien and objectionable. From his thoughts Bloom seems a rare breed. Liberals like him usually have no problem cheating or making manipulative arguments. He enjoys his muted jewishness while disapproving, openly in a book, of others who feel their bigotry more strongly. That’s rare. And finally, jews usually get their panties in a bunch only when they sense intolerance, insularity, and fundamentalism in White Christians.”
“Whether Hirsi Ali is a feminist, an african, or an immigrant is beside the point. She is not a charlatan. At some point she will realize, as I did, that the progressivist globalists, the West’s leftist-plutocrat alliance, don’t see any fundamental incompatibility between themselves and islam. That they’re helping subvert the West and establish a worldwide caliphate. That pundits like Pipes, Chomsky, and Wolfowitz are gatekeepers. That they help channel public opinion and define the bounds of legitimate discussion primarily in the best interests of jews, not the West, and certainly not Europeans or somalis.”
“Among the more prominent signs of increasing vibrancy are our two new latino holidays. On May 1st the invaders take to the streets to remind us that we had better accept their invasion, or else. On Cinco de Mayo invasion supporters, including the invasion-commander-in-chief in the White house, celebrate the invasion and pretend we all see it as valuable and enriching.”
“When globalists like Juan [referring to John McCain] say our immigration system is “broken” what they mean of course is that it does not yet permit turd worlders to move in and tear apart White families as fast as they would like.”
Tanstaafl, one small criticism. You’re racism isn’t quite blatant enough. In the future, you should just go ahead an advocate killing everyone not just like you. You know, like your German friends did.
It would make it that much easier to quickly dismiss everything you say…
I’ve got a comment in moderation for our friend “Tanstaafl”…
However, there are people who are able to accept both science and belief, by doing things like not taking the biblical story of creation as being literal.
But the Bible specifically says “do not put your own interpretation on this book”. It is silly to say you believe in the Bible, but put aside the parts that don’t agree with some outside standard, by saying they aren’t literal for instance.
who’s to say that “God” didn’t create evolution?
Everyone. Scientific laws weren’t “created”, they are that way because that’s the only way the universe can be. We don’t say that 1+1=2 because a god said so. And a god can’t come along and say that 1+1 now equals 3.
Evolution by natural selection isn’t just one possibility out of many that could have been decreed. It is the only rational possibility given the facts we have at hand.
Amanda, IANAL, but from watching copyright debates I get the impression that a) copyright does not slip into the public domain ever, and b) the copyright holder is completely free to let anyone they want get away with it and sue the one person who gets on their nerves or whose politics they disagree with.
And while I would feel it evil, greedy and contraproductive to sue a bunch of elementary school children singing on a school event, sueing a bunch or marketing people with too much cash to spend on spreading b.s. is like the hearing that the neighbor’s rottweiler bit the bully from across the street.
Caren, Do people really hate her? Really?
The Beatles thing was such a long time ago, and it wasn’t her fault that John and Paul grew sick of each other
Hell has no fury like a fangirl seeing her OTP broken up by canon.
(Hm. Can that be said gender-neutrally?)
I didn’t come here to make friends. I came here to poke at your deeply held supremacist convictions. From the petulant reaction I can see I hit home. When reality intrudes on your oh so self-consciously constructed frame-world you’d think somebody, as the Owl so colorfully aludes, shit in your birthday cake. The way the Goulds here project their motives onto their designated boogeymen really is precious. I think it’s the basis for their framing fetish. They disguise their destructive urges by constructing views of the world in which they pose as champions against evil-doers. Bravo!
Petulant’s a good word to describe a child’s reaction upon hearing that no, they can’t get another slice of chocolate cake. Decent people’s reactions upon hearing some anachronistic waste drone on in the kind of cadences that helped lead to things like this and this . . . well, petulant’s not a good word for that.
____
Please go away, person. You’ve helped remind us that this sort of loathsome idiocy is still very much alive - a vital service - but your continued presence here serves no further purpose, as you cannot be reasoned with, nor are we so lacking in moral sense and humanity as to accept your view.
Thank you.
Everyone. Scientific laws weren’t “created”, they are that way because that’s the only way the universe can be. We don’t say that 1+1=2 because a god said so. And a god can’t come along and say that 1+1 now equals 3.
Evolution by natural selection isn’t just one possibility out of many that could have been decreed. It is the only rational possibility given the facts we have at hand.
This is incorrect and indicates the “close mindedness” that Tanstaafl alludes to. Scientific laws are accurate only for this point in time in our existence. True scientists do not ignore other ideas due to the currenet idea is “the only rational possibility”. They constantly check and re-check, making sure that the current belief still holds up to critique.
I’m not an IDer, just in case people here think I have an axe to grind.
Tanstaafl, one small criticism. You’re racism isn’t quite blatant enough. In the future, you should just go ahead an advocate killing everyone not just like you. You know, like your German friends did.
This is a strawman. We have current conflicts in South Africa this very moment where there is discrimination, violence, murder, and suffering that is directed at the “foreign” Zimbabweans, Mozambicans etc. by the South Africans. Why, because they want their own living and working space without the need to compete against the “foreigners”. I’m using foreigners because the SA are. You see, group survival and preservation is not a “white supremacist” and “German” thing, but a human thing. I’m assuming people here are aware of such things before they spout tired, old “nazi” mantras, right?
http://www.monstersandcritics.com/news/africa/news/article_1407626.php/South_Africa_townships_calm_as_focus_shifts_to_the_displaced__Roundup_
Tanstaafl: first, kindly quit soaking a perfectly respectable psuedonym in smegma.
Second, I very cordially invite you to kiss my white, male, ass. You’re a debit from your “race”.
Meanwhile, the rest of us are going to stop worrying about who shows up better at night, and get on with advancing the HUMAN race.
Sorry, Nazi scum infuriate me, and make me ashamed to be of (mostly) European decent and Southern roots. Bugger off, you, and don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
“This is incorrect and indicates the “close mindedness” that Tanstaafl alludes to. Scientific laws are accurate only for this point in time in our existence. True scientists do not ignore other ideas due to the currenet idea is “the only rational possibility”. They constantly check and re-check, making sure that the current belief still holds up to critique.”
You’re SO right “Bubba”. Any day now, they’ll probably just throw out that “Theory of Gravity” in favor of the “Attraction to Satan Who Lives in the Middle of the Earth Theory”. ‘Cause that’s just how science works - the next thing to come along eliminates the previous.
And BTW, it’s turtles all the way down too…..
“I’m not an IDer, just in case people here think I have an axe to grind.”
…right…and I’m not just an anonymous blog commenter, I’m actually Emperor of the Galaxy…