#53342: — 12/10  at  03:33 PM
There's one truthful statement in Chapman's letter:

"Yes, there is strong, organized opposition to intelligent design..

Could that be because there is strong, highly organized, compelling evidence that ID is bunk??

This is the conspiracy theorists argument. The evidence against me is so strong, that it must be a conspiracy. No evidence could really be that strong.

What? you have more evidence? Aha! I've caught you again! It's a conspiracy!!

#53343: — 12/10  at  03:33 PM
Just because someone's a chemist, it doesn't give them a pass to pretend ignorance of biology. We're all acquainted with the scientific method. Even if a physicist, chemist or engineer has never taken a biology course in her/his life, they should know that ID is not science by any definition.

#53345: Adam Ierymenko — 12/10  at  03:40 PM
There is very little support for ID in the field of biology. You are correct there.

However, there is a lot more support than you might think for intelligent design (and outright creationism) in other fields, especially mathematics, engineering, and computer science. Mathematicians are the worst since most mathematicians are Platonists and ID is really just strict Platonic cosmology. All things must come from a higher world of forms, etc. Mathematicans on average tend to have a tough time conceptualizing or even accepting "bottom up" self-organizing phenomena. They are just not in the habit of thinking that way. Note that Dembski and several other hard-core IDists are mathematicians. The "conservation of information" and "no free lunch" arguments sound good on the surface to Platonist mathematicians, and debunking them requires knowledge of topics that lie somewhat tangent to mathematics outside regions typically trodden.

Engineers and CS people have similar mental habits and are vulnerable to similar flummery. The "DNA is a computer program, and computer programs must have authors" bad analogy works particularly well on CS people. Of course, showing CS people artificial life systems tend to do a great job debunking that one. I have gotten tons of e-mails about my simple little Nanopond system from CS folks saying "oh! now I get it! wow!" Nanopond is an introduction to basic evolutionary principles presented in the C programming language, and it does a great job generating many different small but functional programs that do not have authors. The cumulative size of these programs can exceed the size of the original Nanopond program that generated them by up to a factor of ten even after strict filtering and compression to remove redundancy. So it also debunks the "conservation of information" turkey pretty well for CS people. (Click my name if you'd like to see it.)

The basic "fools gold" trick of ID is to make arguments that sound good on the surface but require digging to see their flaws. Almost all of these arguments rely on bad analogies that drop the context of the systems they are analogizing and at the same time smuggle in characteristics from other systems that the topic of the analogy does not possess. Learn to recognize sloppy analogies and fallacious reasoning by analogy-- they are characteristic not only of ID but also of lots of other kinds of sloppy thinking and deceptive argument.

#53352: — 12/10  at  04:19 PM

Mathematicans on average tend to have a tough time conceptualizing or even accepting "bottom up" self-organizing phenomena.

This is a gross generalization and I'd like to see you try and back it up. Speaking not exactly as a mathematician, but as a theoretical computer scientist, I would say that self-organizing systems pose a problem for the standard methodology of mathematics (and CS theory), which is proof using logical inference. Because it is hard to predict the trajectory of any complex system without effectively simulating it, it is hard to find concise proofs about many interesting things they might eventually.

But it's one thing for a mathematician to say that proving self-organization is outside the scope of current mathematics using standard methodology, and quite another thing to say it doesn't happen, particular now that it is so readily repeatable through computer experiments.

For another example, computer science is replete with imperfectly understood heuristics for solving useful cases of problems considered intractable in a general sense. It can be hard to publish these heuristics because the justification does not fit into standard methodology. But few mathematicians actually deny that they work.

The stereotype of mathematicians as platonists may have some basis in fact, but I doubt it applies to "most", at least most that have received degrees in the last few decades.

#53353: Adam Ierymenko — 12/10  at  04:27 PM
PaulC:

I don't see why I need to explain. You just did a great job!

Note that I said "most." There are of course lots of exceptions.

"I would say that self-organizing systems pose a problem for the standard methodology of mathematics (and CS theory), which is proof using logical inference. Because it is hard to predict the trajectory of any complex system without effectively simulating it, it is hard to find concise proofs about many interesting things they might eventually."

That's precisely why. To a lot of people, something that cannot be represented by their chosen tools and metaphors does not exist. Mathematicians are not the only people who fall into this trap-- people in every field do to some extent.

Of course, like I said, there are exceptions. There are some mathematicians who make a career out of studying self-organizing systems and emergence.

http://www.santafe.edu/

I wasn't trying to be offensive, so I apologize if I was. I was just trying to explain why I think a lot of mathematicians fall for ID claptrap.

#53354: — 12/10  at  04:27 PM
Not only are Iowa's universities unanimously in support of the theory of evolution, The University of Iowa is a vanguard of the field.

#53356: — 12/10  at  04:39 PM

I was just trying to explain why I think a lot of mathematicians fall for ID claptrap.

Maybe we don't disagree on much then. I will readily concede that mathematicians have an unfortunate tendency to declare a conjecture "uninteresting" if it defies attempts at proof. But I think it takes an unusually thickheaded one to extend this to the point of declaring the conjecture untrue. They exist, but I don't think they amount to "most."

I would add that a mathematician is no more of a credible expert on questions about evolution than a historian or a philosopher would be.

#53358: MAJeff — 12/10  at  04:42 PM
Tara Smith is the Iowan science blogger. She's critiqued Guillermo Gonzalez, the DI's man at UI,

Sadly, Gonzalez isn't at UI. He's at my alma mater, Iowa State University. UI=Iowa City and Big 10, ISU=Ames and Big 12.

Even though we have to suffer having an IDiot in Ames, at least we beat UI in basketball last night.

#53368: paul adams — 12/10  at  06:30 PM
I'm new to this blog, so I should probably be extra careful. Nevertheless, I will go ahead and say it: the ID morons are, perhaps inadvertently, making a useful point. We biologists assume (based on our education, our study of the evidence, and above all on our understanding of the power of natural selection and the beauty of its molecular realisation) that there is no other explanation for complex adaptive systems than Darwinian evolution. Dawkins wrote a long, brilliant but unoriginal book claiming precisely this ("The Blind Watchmaker"). However, the only alternative theory he came up with was that old straw man - God.
But we have never actually examined the possibility of other mechanisms. Or, more precisely, we pretty much assume that other potential candidates, such as various self-organising algorithms, are equivalent to Darwinian evolution. No-one had done the hard work of showing that these other possible
candidates are actually ISOMORPHIC with Darwinian evolution,
and if they are not, whether the differences are qualitative
or quantitative. In other words, are there other possiblities? It's just not enough to assert that there are not, because we have never really tried to find out - biologists are perfectly happy that Darwinism does the job, so we have no real motivation. But this does open a chink which the IDers are exploiting.

#53370: PZ Myers — 12/10  at  06:38 PM
There are people doing interesting work in alternatives--Goodwin and Kauffman come to mind--and the thing is that IDists also like to appropriate their work as supporting ID, even though it doesn't.

Just saying "alternative" is not sufficient. They have to do the hard work of coming up with empirical evidence to support a clearly stated, testable alternative. They haven't.

#53377: coturnix — 12/10  at  07:54 PM
When Reed Cartwright joins us here in North Carolina, who is going to remain in Georgia to keep an eye on evolution wars there?

#53389: — 12/10  at  10:10 PM
Paul Adams wrote

Or, more precisely, we pretty much assume that other potential candidates, such as various self-organising algorithms, are equivalent to Darwinian evolution.

Well, no, Kauffman at least doesn't think that his self-organizaing systems are equivalent to Darwinian evolution. As I understand him (especially in Origins of Order), he thinks they're complementary to evolution by natural selection and prior to Darwinian evolution: they generate populations of replicating 'structures' on which Darwinian evolution can then work.

RBH

#53401: — 12/11  at  03:51 AM
Aw, jeez. Guillermo Gonzales was a TA who taught a few classes I took at UW. I always thought he was a mealy-mouthed twit--now I know for sure. How depressing to see him doing this crap.

#53402: — 12/11  at  04:05 AM

Engineers and CS people have similar mental habits and are vulnerable to similar flummery. The "DNA is a computer program, and computer programs must have authors" bad analogy works particularly well on CS people. Of course, showing CS people artificial life systems tend to do a great job debunking that one.

Any computer scientist that believes in ID is a bad computer scientists. Heck, there are even a type of algorithms based upon evolutionary principles.
Like your claim about mathematicians, this is a gross gross generalization in my opinion. I have certainly never run into a computer scientists (in real life or online) that belived in ID.

#53413: Keith Douglas — 12/11  at  10:07 AM
Adam Ierymenko, do your evolutionary algorithms (Nanopond) actually produce code in C, or is C simply the language the system is programmed in? The reason I ask is because evolution does require whatever is evolving to not be "brittle" in a certain way, and (naively) I was thinking that C would be too brittle a target language without some severe constraints on the evolutionary mechanisms. This is important, because a creationist (or IDiot) is going to seize upon these aspects: "aha! and who set up the conditions for the evolution to be possible! you've contrived the language!" This is ridiculous for various reasons, but I was wondering if that objection could be forstalled.

(Curiously enough this is related to my long standing goal to work out a good mereology for computer programs. Maybe now it has another application. )

#53418: — 12/11  at  11:32 AM

Like your claim about mathematicians, this is a gross gross generalization in my opinion. I have certainly never run into a computer scientists (in real life or online) that belived in ID.

I attended a small (~ 600 students) science and engineering school for my bachelor's degree. It was full of CS and math and engineering students. I remember running into a grand total of one student who was at all disposed to believing in creationism of any sort.

Of course, it helped enormously that comprehending introductory biology was a requirement for graduation, either by taking and passing an introductory biology class or getting a maximum score on the AP biology exam in high school. I believe that among relatively educated people who are not religious extremists, belief in creationism has less to do with a person's profession or area of study than with exposure to, and comprehension of, the basic ideas behind evolutionary biology.

Although some CS types will fall for the "complexity has an author" nonsense, many specific arguments for ID are transparently false to anyone with any background in CS. For example, anyone who's written a program of any significant complexity has created irreducibly complex systems as a side effect of doing something else. It's not hard to see that this particular complexity does not arise from conscious intent to create it. In fact, in many circumstances it's a sign of poor code design.

I know, "anecdote" is not the singular of "data", but this sort of story has played out throughout my adult life.

#53426: Kagehi — 12/11  at  12:40 PM
See.. All these chemist are jealous because petri dishes are bigger round than test tubes and it makes them feel insignificant. lol

Seriously though, the ID crowd need to come up with more than 12 'real' people in the wrong field or 100 mostly misrepresented ones (also from the wrong fields) before they can claim support, and if we start seeing that we seriously need to start looking for some kind of virus that produces stupidity or something. ;)

#53428: — 12/11  at  01:09 PM
Tara Smith's so-called "critique" of Gonzalez is just terrible. It seems to be nothing more than obviously biased reporting mixed in with a series of smirks. More than anything else, the emotions behind it do a great job of demolishing her credibility on this topic.

#53433: — 12/11  at  01:29 PM
Actually, Tara's reporting is not "obviously biased". She is reporting what was said, and explains the reactions of the listeners. Given the fact that all Panda's Thumb's readers all know the problems with Gonzalez’s arguments (or could easily find out through a little time spent on either that site or TalkOrigins), there is no need for her to establish her credibility.

#53443: Anthony Kable — 12/11  at  02:52 PM
I browse this blog fairly regularly, but have never commented before. I am finally motivated to do so by the extraordinary claims being made in this thread about mathematics and mathematicians.

PaulC wrote

I will readily concede that mathematicians have an unfortunate tendency to declare a conjecture "uninteresting" if it defies attempts at proof.

Let's think about this for a second. For a start, what is a conjecture? I claim that a reasonable description of the scope of this term in mathematics has three components. First, a conjecture must be a definite mathematical statement. Secondly, it must be an interesting statement, offered with some reason for taking it seriously. Thirdly, it must have resisted efforts to prove it. So I think PaulC's statement is self-refuting. Even if you don't agree with my claims about what a conjecture is, there are plenty of specific counterexamples. Consider the Riemann hypothesis (RH) for example. You'd be hard pressed to find a mathematician who doesn't think that RH is interesting. It has generated a huge amount of work over the years and regularly appears on lists of the most important open problems in the field. It's still open, meaning that is has resisted all efforts at proof. Anyone with even an amateur interest in mathematics will be able to multiply this example many times over. Furthermore, there's a healthy list of conjectures that resisted efforts at proof, sometimes for hundreds of years, before they were finally solved, and continued to generate lots of interest during the period between their being proposed and their being solved. Fermat's Last Theorem is, of course, the most famous recent example, but there are many others.

Deciding whether or not a statement is "interesting" enough to count as a conjecture isn't itself a mathematical matter. It depends at least in part on individual taste and social factors within the community of mathematicians, although arguments that go beyond these things are sometimes possible. For example, RH has numerous consequences, many of which are rather unexpected when you first look at the statement. This could be offered as an argument for granting "interesting" status to RH. It may be that PaulC has conjectures in mind that he wishes mathematicians would work on. We may not decide to work on them, but our decision isn't going to be based on whether they resist proof or are hard to formulate in a known mathematical framework. Mathematicians love challenging problems that motivate the development of new techniques and new frameworks.

This is going to be a long comment, I guess, so I'll move on to another statement I regard as equally amazing.

Adam lerymenko wrote

Mathematicians are the worst since most mathematicians are Platonists and ID is really just strict Platonic cosmology.

I'm not aware of any empirical studies addressing this question. However, I'll see Adam lerymenko's totally unsupported assertion and raise him my anecdote: I am a mathematician. I know a lot of mathematicians well enough to have some idea of their philosophical views. I do not know a single one who is a Platonist. More precisely, it is my experience that most mathematicians "do the work" without committing themselves to any philosophical position. I suspect that this is true of people in most fields. Are all, or even most, biologists terribly worried about issues in the philosophy of biology? I doubt it. In any case, among those mathematicians who do have clear philosophical commitments, the vast majority subscribe to some version of Formalism. This is a general term for a pretty wide variety of specific positions, and does not necessarily refer to Hilbert's original Formalist program, but a Formalist is definitely not a Platonist. There are minorities of Realists, Constructivists, Intuitionists (again these are both more or less broad terms) and numerous other positions. Adherents of minority positions are often much more vocal about their philosophical commitments than is the norm, which can sometimes lead to a false impression for an outsider to the field. There are a few famous Platonists in the history of mathematics. Kurt Godel is perhaps the best known example, but he was rather widely regarded as very strange in his views, and his Platonism certainly wasn't accepted by the majority of his contemporaries.

Another possible source of confusion is that it is psychologically useful and leads to convenient manners of speaking to adopt a methodology and a shorthand that can appear Platonist (again, mainly to outsiders). Mathematicians will make statements like "Every continuous function on the interval [0,1] is uniformly continuous." This is really shorthand for a much more complicated statement in which the axioms, logical system and sequence of deductions leading to the statement are made explicit. Many mathematicians know these things, and could explain why this or that type of Constructivist would reject this statement because they reject this or that logical principle or interpret the quantifier "there exists" differently than is the norm. Few people would claim that these differing interpretations are objectively wrong. If they are critical at all, they would say that these interpretations are unnecessarily inconvenient or less fruitful than the standard versions.

The last thing I want to comment on is the idea that there are lots of mathematicians (many, most depending on which comments you're reading) who accept ID. This is at least as ill-informed as the other comments I have objected to here. Most mathematicians spend no more time thinking about biology than most biologists spend thinking about mathematics. If we restrict attention to the subset who have an interest in the question, most regard ID arguments (particularly, in my experience, the notion of irreducible complexity) as absurd on their face. Again, this is anecdote, based on my own experience. Of the academics repeatedly cited on this blog as examples of prominent ID supporters, one (Dembski) has advanced training in mathematics, one (Behe) in biochemistry, and one (Johnson) in law. I'm not seeing the pattern. Also, it seems to be generally accepted (here at least) that Dembski's motivation for his arguments comes primarily from his religious convictions, not from his mathematical training. That he attempts to turn the tools available to him towards his predetermined ends is hardly an indictment of the tools, or of others who use the same tools for their own purposes.

I hesitated about whether to post this comment. Reflecting on my motivations for writing it, I realized that I can think of quite a few instances where I have dealt with colleagues from other fields (through committee work, casual conversations, and so on) and found that they have prior negative opinions about mathematics and mathematicians, often based on the kinds of misconceptions that were expressed here. It disturbed me then, and it still does. Maybe posting this will make me feel better, and if Dr. Myers objects to such lengthy comments, he can always delete it.

#53445: — 12/11  at  03:08 PM
"Actually, Tara's reporting is not "obviously biased"."

Is it reporting, or is it meant to be a "critique" as PZ claimed?

Actually, it is "obviously biased". The smirking, sneering tone of her piece hardly gives one any confidence in the accuracy of her reporting.

Tara's credibility clearly does not need to be established when she is playing to the gallery at "The Panda's Thumb". For the rest of us it is as open a question as that of the ID supporters.

Scott Adams was right: it is hard to find *credible people* in this debate.

#53447: paul adams — 12/11  at  03:37 PM
Kable is correct in almost all his points. He may not be correct in saying that which conjectures are interesting is not itself a mathematical question, and that it may depend merely on style and taste. It is perhaps what one might call a "metamathematical" question - a question that may one day be amenable to mathematical investigation, but is not yet. Math is replete with examples that have moved from foundational to mainstream (or from metamath to math). One confimation of my point is that the best mathemeticians make the best conjectures (eg Riemann).
There is also a strong connection to questions of "beauty", in the arts of course but also in physics. The reason we find "beauty" to be largely unanalysable is not that there is some mysterious thing that is beyond scientific/mathematical explanation, but because we know rather little about what the human mind/brain actually does, and how it does it. Even so, we can guess that the brain is interested in regular patterns, and conjectures that reveal more connections between existing mathematical ideas (i.e. more mathematical "regularity") are more interesting. This corresponds to what mathematicians actually do consider to be interesting, and it should be possible to quantify it.

#53454: — 12/11  at  04:53 PM
paul adams wrote:

No-one had done the hard work of showing that these other possible
candidates are actually ISOMORPHIC with Darwinian evolution,
and if they are not, whether the differences are qualitative
or quantitative. In other words, are there other possiblities?

Here's an NON-creationist site, devoted to collecting, summarizing and critiquing various Darwinian and non-Darwinian models of evolution

http://home.wxs.nl/~gkorthof/

It alas has the very unfortunate title 'Was Darwin Wrong?'.
The site-lord is a Dutch fellow with training in biology and philosophy, as best I can tell.

#53455: — 12/11  at  05:11 PM
Adam's point -- which isn't that mathematicians and engineers tend to be anti-evolutionist, but that a fair number of technically trained anti-evolutionists are engineers, mathematicians, computer scientists, rather than, say, *biologists* -- accords with my own experience of evolution naysayers online. I get the impression that these are people who aren't used to being wrong about technical and logical matters, who therefore assume they are 'right' about evolution, despite almost never being in full grasp of the biological facts of the matter.

Wouldn't Scott Adams fall into this category? I thought he was an IT guy.

#53469: — 12/11  at  08:56 PM
About that "international conference" - the 4 sponsors listed were Konos Connection, Discovery Institute, European Scientific Network, and Komenského institut v Praze.

Konos Connection - Creationist "academy" run by Charles Thaxton and his wife Carole. http://www.konos.org/
(excerpt: "KONOS CONNECTION is a non-profit educational organization, incorporated as a 501(c)3 in 1991. Our focus has been within the academic community, giving a well-reasoned perspective on the relationship between Christianity and the various academic disciplines. Charles' specialty is in the relationship between Christianity and science, while Carole's focus is education and counseling.")

Discovery Institute - These liars you already know.

European Scientific Network - Another creationist outfit trying to sound scientific:
http://www.euroleadership.org/ 20...igentdesign.htm
(Excerpt: "Dr Richard Carhart earned his Ph.D. in theoretical particle physics from the University of Wisconsin. He is Professor of Physics Emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago, having taught there and done original research for 35 years. He served as an academic missionary for one year at the University of Nairobi, Kenya, and one year at Charles University and the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague, Czech Republic. Richard has been a lay theologian and Bible teacher over the last 40 years. His interest in scientific apologetics stems from his own need to integrate his Biblical faith with the findings of science, and to counter prevailing erroneous worldviews. Richard serves as the Coordinator of the European Scientific Network, a division of the European Apologetic Network and lectures internationally using scientific apologetics.")

Komenského institut v Praze - Anyone want to place bets on whether this is a Czech creationist outfit? Who here speaks Czech and can track down info on this group?