Notes from an Evil Burnee

Sunday, 22 February 2009

The frustration of "Intelligent Design"

The reason why concerned scientists get so irate when discussing the ideas of "intelligent design creationists" is that ID proponents glibly claim they have an alternative to the Theory of Evolution, and when challenged they steadfastly refuse to produce it. Claiming that because evolution does not (yet) explain in complete detail how life came to be the way it is today, their alternative must by default be true, is not only presenting a classic false dichotomy, it is also welching on a promise: what, then, is the alternative theory - the one that does explain life in complete detail?

The ID proponents' response to this question is "God". But where's the explanation, the theory? Oh, it's not God? It's instead "an intelligent designer"? Well, whatever, but what's the theory, the explanation?

This lack of explanation is far worse than the scientists' answer, which is: we don't know. Scientists take this lack of knowledge as inspiration for further research; the ID answer stops research in its tracks. What's the point of pursuing the question if the answer is "Goddidit"?

ID, along with other spin-doctoring of the Discovery Institute and its ilk, comes down to one thing: science contradicts scripture, and therefore must be wrong. But science, as everyone knows, actually works, and people won't easily be persuaded that it's mistaken. So the Discovery Institute's job is to come up with science that supports scripture. To date they've been unsuccessful in this quest, and it seems likely that they will remain so. It's a hiding to nothing, because this isn't how science is done. Science follows the scientific method: investigation, hypothesis, attempts to falsify, followed by more investigation, hypotheses, repeat as necessary, until the revised hypothesis resists falsification, at which point you have a theory.

ID proponents, however, continue to lobby for so-called "academic freedom", attempting to challenge science with non-science. They will continue to lose this battle, but only if concerned individuals remain vigilant, and continue to point out what is and isn't science, to those responsible for making decisions in education.

Burnee links for Sunday

BBC NEWS | UK | Bus posters: Atheist and Christian head-to-head

The Gentle Secularist: an interview with Ariane Sherine

In Defence of Johann Hari | Edger

Creationists are still denying Darwin. Stephen Moss asks why | World news | The Guardian

Doubting Darwin: Debate Over The Mind's Evolution : NPR
A short outline of a long-running inter-blog debate between Steven Novella and Michael Egnor, concerning dualism.

Pharyngula: We consider ourselves atheists and scientists, of course

(click to bignify) (click here for original post)

YouTube - Evolution

Saturday, 21 February 2009

Moral relativism - a debate too short

This week's Moral Maze was broadcast live on BBC Radio 4, on the evening of Wednesday 18 February 2009.

From the Radio 4 website:
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/religion/moralmaze.shtml)

This week the Moral Maze celebrates its 500th edition with a special programme in front of a live audience at the Royal Society of Medicine, in London. The question Michael Buerk and the panel will be posing is; if you don’t believe in a set of divinely inspired moral rules, how do you decide right from wrong in a world with complex and competing interests? We live in an age where there is no longer general agreement on religion and the time when our society was united by a common set of values based on a belief in God is long gone. Is it hopelessly optimistic to believe that Man can create an ethical framework based on a belief in individual responsibility and mutual respect or are those secular values a much a better guide than any sectarian dogma or religious text? Can a post-religious society be a moral society and if so, whose morals will we live by?

PANEL: Michael Buerk (Chair); Melanie Phillips; Claire Fox; Michael Portillo; Clifford Longley.

WITNESSES: Tom Butler, Bishop of Southwark; Professor Alistair McGrath, Head of the Centre for Theology, Religion and Culture at King’s College and author of The Dawkins Delusion; Peter Cave, chair of the British Humanist Philosophers group and author of Humanism, a Beginner's Guide; Dr Evan Harris MP, Liberal Democrat MP for Oxford West and Abingdon.

The audio is available here for seven days:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/religion/moralmaze.shtml

Also available on RapidShare:
http://rapidshare.com/files/341833475/MoralMaze_The_BBCR4dtt-20090218.mp3
(20 MB 64k mp3 43'34")

The Moral Maze is usually live, but not recorded before an audience. This 500th edition was broadcast live, and in front of an audience, whose reactions to the various contributions were audible. Peter Cave did a good job deflecting Melanie Phillips' loaded questions, and succeeded in doing so with understated humour and a degree of gentle mockery. Alister McGrath was, as expected, his usual circumlocutory self (a description I've used before - he doesn't change). Michael Portillo seemed to be sincerely engaged with the issues, but the debate was too short with too many participants. My (biased) assessment of the consensus is that the secularist/humanist side won this debate by a clear margin. At the least, the programme will have raised consciousness.

Thursday, 19 February 2009

Facebook and Twitter will give you cancer!

A short item on the Today Programme this morning had Dr Aric Sigman explaining the conclusions of a paper he has authored for the peer-reviewed Institute of Biology Journal, Biologist, entitled Well Connected?: The Biological Implications of ‘Social Networking’. The BBC website covers it here: BBC NEWS | UK | Online networking 'harms health' and you can hear Dr Sigman on the BBC here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7899000/7899649.stm

I'm not a biologist, and not a member of the Institute of Biology, so I can't access Dr Sigman's article*. But his press release is available on his website, so I've looked at that. Early on in the press release is this graph, presumably excerpted from the article:

I'm not a biologist, neither am I a statistician, but this graph seems to show only that over a period of 20 years, face-to-face social interaction went down from six hours to two hours per day, while over the same two decades use of electronic media went up from four to eight hours per day. So the conclusion seems to be that the four hours that were spent face-to-face in 1987, were in 2007 spent in using electronic media. He seems to be suggesting that face-to-face interaction has gone down because of the increase in use of electronic media. Maybe. Or it could be coincidence. The graph doesn't show what people were doing with the other hours in the day, so on the whole it doesn't tell you very much.

The rest of the press release seems to claim that face-to-face interaction has positive health effects, and this may well be true, but the preponderance of "links" and "associations" suggests that most of these are correlations and not causation. Take this, for example:

"Women who have suspected coronary artery disease (CAD) with a small social
circle exhibit more than twice the death rate of those with a larger social circle."

It's possible that some women have a small social circle for reasons that are to do with being medically disposed to more serious and life-threatening coronary artery disease - not the other way around. I've not seen Dr Sigman's actual paper (which appears to be a meta-study, and presumably doesn't include any actual clinical research), so I don't know if the causation he ascribes is valid.

Valid or not, it makes a good headline, and you can rely on the Daily Mail to pick it up: How using Facebook could raise your risk of cancer.

If the audio expires, download it from RapidShare here:

http://rapidshare.com/files/341833475/MoralMaze_The_BBCR4dtt-20090218.mp3

*UPDATE 2009-02-19:
The paper published in Biologist is now freely available:
http://www.iob.org/userfiles/Sigman_press.pdf

UPDATE 2009-02-20:
Until I get around to reading the paper myself, here's someone who already has:
http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2009/02/facebook_causes_marb.html
(via Ben Goldacre's Twitter feed)

Saturday, 14 February 2009

Christopher Booker, creationist

"One would never have guessed from the adulation heaped on the great man by the likes of Sir David Attenborough that there is something very odd about Darwin’s theory."

Okay, I'm with you so far, Mr Booker, but this I didn't expect:

"One great stumbling block to his argument is that evolution has repeatedly taken place in leaps forward so sudden and so complex that they could not possibly have been accounted for by the gradual process he suggested - “the Cambrian explosion" of new life forms, the complexities of the eye, the post-Cretaceous explosion of mammals. Again and again some new development emerged which required a whole mass of interdependent changes to take place simultaneously, such as the transformation of reptiles into feathered, hollow-boned and warm-blooded birds."

It's from last week's Sunday Telegraph, also available online:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/4550448/Charles-Darwin-zealots-have-made-science-a-substitute-religion.html

I can't help wondering whether Mr Booker actually understood (or even paid any attention to) what David Attenborough so lucidly explained in his recent exemplary BBC TV programme, "Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life". To take just one obvious example from the quote above, Attenborough's explanation of the evolution of the eye, accompanied by clear and excellent graphics, shows precisely why it cannot be held to be "irreducibly complex".

Just because you don't understand something, doesn't mean it's incapable of being understood. Do your research - pontificating on the basis of ignorance is not what I call reasoned argument.