The pleasures of Sunday morning

Like most of the millions of viewers who saw the futures of Six Feet Under's Fisher and Chenowith families telescoped into seven minutes last week, I've grown introspective since then about my own mortality. One of the mental exercises in considering one's own mortality is thinking about what you'd miss (if indeed we actually "miss" anything) about being alive. Oh, there are the usual things, like sex and chocolate and driving really fast on a nearly empty highway with something like early Elvis Costello or The Allman Bros. Live at the Fillmore East or even American Idiot playing at top volume, and halvah, and the insane blind hope one gets in a good year that the Mets just might still be playing meaningful baseball well into December.

But one of the chief pleasures of this level of reality for blogger geeks like Yours Truly is sitting leisurely on a Sunday morning drinking coffee and reading the op-ed pages of the New York Times.

This morning's pages are a special treat, because in addition with yet another terrific piece by Frank Rich, we have Daniel C. Dennett of Tufts University explaining patiently why while "intelligent design" may be many things, it sure as hell ain't science:

Intelligent design advocates, however, exploit the ambiguity between process and product that is built into the word "design." For them, the presence of a finished product (a fully evolved eye, for instance) is evidence of an intelligent design process. But this tempting conclusion is just what evolutionary biology has shown to be mistaken.

Yes, eyes are for seeing, but these and all the other purposes in the natural world can be generated by processes that are themselves without purposes and without intelligence. This is hard to understand, but so is the idea that colored objects in the world are composed of atoms that are not themselves colored, and that heat is not made of tiny hot things.

The focus on intelligent design has, paradoxically, obscured something else: genuine scientific controversies about evolution that abound. In just about every field there are challenges to one established theory or another. The legitimate way to stir up such a storm is to come up with an alternative theory that makes a prediction that is crisply denied by the reigning theory - but that turns out to be true, or that explains something that has been baffling defenders of the status quo, or that unifies two distant theories at the cost of some element of the currently accepted view.

To date, the proponents of intelligent design have not produced anything like that. No experiments with results that challenge any mainstream biological understanding. No observations from the fossil record or genomics or biogeography or comparative anatomy that undermine standard evolutionary thinking.

Instead, the proponents of intelligent design use a ploy that works something like this. First you misuse or misdescribe some scientist's work. Then you get an angry rebuttal. Then, instead of dealing forthrightly with the charges leveled, you cite the rebuttal as evidence that there is a "controversy" to teach.

Note that the trick is content-free. You can use it on any topic. "Smith's work in geology supports my argument that the earth is flat," you say, misrepresenting Smith's work. When Smith responds with a denunciation of your misuse of her work, you respond, saying something like: "See what a controversy we have here? Professor Smith and I are locked in a titanic scientific debate. We should teach the controversy in the classrooms." And here is the delicious part: you can often exploit the very technicality of the issues to your own advantage, counting on most of us to miss the point in all the difficult details.

[snip]

It's worth pointing out that there are plenty of substantive scientific controversies in biology that are not yet in the textbooks or the classrooms. The scientific participants in these arguments vie for acceptance among the relevant expert communities in peer-reviewed journals, and the writers and editors of textbooks grapple with judgments about which findings have risen to the level of acceptance - not yet truth - to make them worth serious consideration by undergraduates and high school students.

SO get in line, intelligent designers. Get in line behind the hypothesis that life started on Mars and was blown here by a cosmic impact. Get in line behind the aquatic ape hypothesis, the gestural origin of language hypothesis and the theory that singing came before language, to mention just a few of the enticing hypotheses that are actively defended but still insufficiently supported by hard facts.

Or for that matter, get in line behind the Flying Spaghetti Monster, as part of the "pull it out of your ass" theory of scientific inquiry.

It's an excellent article, so good that I'm going to link it again here just to make sure you go read it. (If you're not registered at the Times, go to Bug Me Not and get a user ID and password to use.)

If you're a parent who isn't a fundie nutball, the idea that "It's too complex for me to understand...it must be MAGIC" (^TM Marc Maron) is what's going to pas for science in your kid's school should fill you with outrage. As someone without kids, but who's paying school taxes, it fills ME with outrage.

And the thought that someone like John McCain would put his political ambitions ahead of the national interest, putting the final nail in the coffin of his reputation by advocating that what is nothing more than religious guesswork should be taught as science means that unless we speak up now, America is going to be the 13th century backward nation of the future, albeit one with big nasty weapons developed in the days before science was frowned upon because it might conflict with highly allegorical stuff writen thousands of years ago.