Revised Gilderism
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Pirate modeBack in September, I grumped about that horrible Gilder piece on Intelligent Design in Wired. Gilder himself replied to that on 15 October; and the Discovery Institute posted a revised version of his Wired article on 18 October, claiming that the Wired editors had heavily edited the piece.
I compared the two. Yes, if this was the original version and not some newly edited copy, Wired cut the article back a bit. They didn't really change the sense of anything, though, and the extra stuff in the new version just makes poor Gilder sound even more unhinged.
| Wired | Discovery Institute |
|---|---|
| In a self-refuting materialist superstition, teachers deny the role of ideas and purposes in evolution and hence implicitly in their own thought. | But they fail to report the central testimony of twentieth century science: the paramount role of rigorous mathematical information in the universe. |
I guess now we don't just deny ideas and purposes, but we reject math. Although I think Gilder is using "rigorous mathematical information" here as a synonym for his "god"; and yes, I think we do reject that.
| Wired | Discovery Institute |
|---|---|
| Natural selection should be taught for its important role in the adaption of species, but Darwinian materialism is an embarrassing cartoon of modern science. | Schools should continue to teach Darwinian evolution as a powerful force in intra-species adaptation. However, a successful theory of the origins of new species—new biological forms and information—still eludes biologists. |
So we're not a cartoon anymore. Instead, we're getting the usual creationist harping on the micro/macroevolution distinction. Speciation is a complex process with multiple modes of occurrence, some understood, some not. I hope Gilder doesn't think we should invoke Design for every new fruit fly species.
| Wired | Discovery Institute |
|---|---|
| What is the alternative? Intelligent design at least asks the right questions. In a world of science that still falls short of a rigorous theory of human consciousness or of the big bang, intelligent design theory begins by recognizing that everywhere in nature, information is hierarchical and precedes its embodiment. The concept precedes the concrete. | This failure is no scandal. Science still falls far short of developing satisfactory explanations of many crucial phenomena, such as human consciousness, the big bang, the superluminal quantum entanglement of photons across huge distances, even the bioenergetics of the brain of a fly in eluding the swatter. The more we learn about the universe the more widely open the horizons of mystery. The pretence that Darwinian evolution is a complete theory of life is a huge distraction from the limits and language, the rigor and grandeur, of real scientific discovery. Everywhere we encounter it, information comes from mind. Whether in biology or in technology, it moves from the general to the specific, from the concept to the concrete, from architecture to circuitry to device physics, in top-down, hierarchical patterns. Recognizing this phenomenon, some scholars uphold a view called Intelligent Design, which attempts to pry open agnostically the issue of whether ideas and information precede or follow their material embodiment. |
He dropped the point about ID asking the "right questions"…I guess there was some concern that someone might ask him, "What are those questions?"
Gilder still can't resist the temptation to add big impressive-sounding words in places where they don't make sense: "the bioenergetics of the brain of a fly in eluding the swatter"? Why "bioenergetics"? Does he want to imply that the Designer is helpfully infusing the brain of a fly with a boost of ATP whenever it needs to avoid a threat? If he's just trying to say we don't know all the details of how even a fly brain works, fair enough. But unfortunately for his point, we do know a good bit about how fly escape responses work: descending giant fiber systems and bendless, and so forth.
Otherwise, though, watch out, physicists! It looks like Gilder is staking a claim here that Intelligent Design is going to explain the Big Bang and quantum physics. They really are going to have to expand their research program.
The rest is just more of his prior mangling of information theory.
| Wired | Discovery Institute |
|---|---|
| The contrary notion that the world of mind, including science itself, bubbled up randomly from a prebiotic brew has inspired all the reductionist futilities of the 20th century, from Marx’s obtuse materialism to environmental weather panic to zero-sum Malthusian fears over population. In biology classes, our students are not learning the largely mathematical facts of 21st-century science; they’re imbibing the consolations of a faith-driven 19th-century materialist myth. | On this central point in the philosophy of science, however, I am not an agnostic. I believe that the notion that the intricate biological structures of the world bubbled up from a prebiotic brew and that ideas are an after-effect of a meaningless random material flux is the most sterile and stultifying notion in the history of human thought. It inspired all the reductionist futilities of the twentieth century, from the obtuse materialism of Marx to the pagan worship of a static material environment, from the Freudian view of the brain as a thermodynamic machine to the zero-sum Malthusian panic over population, treating people more as mouths than as minds.
Intellectuals should know better. In the insight of Nobel Laureate biophysicist Max Delbruck, the spectacle of scientists attempting to reduce the mind to material brain suggests nothing so much as Baron Muchausen’s effort to extract himself from a swamp by pulling on his own hair. Claude Shannon’s information theory gives biologists a powerful new mathematical tool to use in analyzing biological structures and information systems. They should use it and teach it. To focus on random chemical mutations rather than on the majestic underlying and overarching logic of the universe reduces the presentation of biology to a confectionary zoo story, replete with cute pandas and Disney dinosaurs and free of the rigors of mathematics. This approach is less 21st century science than a retrograde retreat to 19th century materialist superstitions, which delude our students that they are learning the facts of science when instead they are imbibing the consolations of a faith-driven materialist myth. In their schools and lives, they deserve some intelligent design. |
Isn't it interesting how the 20th century, the period so far of the most rapid scientific advance in the history of the world, produced nothing but "reductionist futilities"? All this expansion of his text has done is increased the volume of the ignorant babble. I sure wish I knew what "pagan worship" he was thinking of. Shannon's information theory does not provide evidence for any "overarching logic of the universe". Stating that modern biology is free of the rigors of mathematics just shows that Gilder knows absolute nothing about modern biology.
This new version doesn't help his case any better—it's just more pompous pseudoscience from a guy who doesn't know any real science.
This is a little tangential, but:
Claude Shannon’s information theory gives biologists a powerful new mathematical tool to use in analyzing biological structures and information systems. They should use it and teach it.
Actually, we do, but not in the way that the author may guess. We use information theory all the time in bioinformatics: for example, we use relative entropy and the idea of information content to construct and analyze position weight matrices, data structures which describe interesting biological sequences. And as for teaching it, why, we just went over it in Intro to Bioinformatics here at UPenn! I'm posting this from class right now!