Pharyngula::The Star Tribune achieves zen-like purity

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Sunday, October 02, 2005

The Star Tribune achieves zen-like purity

PZ Myers • 11 Comments

I think the Star Tribune is beginning to get it. On the front page of today's Op-Ex section is a commentary on Intelligent Design debate damaging public's perception of science by Kenneth Keller, then there is Science, religion/The discussion needs recasting by the editors, a reprint of the Flying Spaghetti Monster story, and a highlighted letter from James Satter on Darwin. I looked all over, and most shocking of all, they had not gone looking for some clueless dogmatist to provide a false "balance" to the paper.

I could hardly believe it. I am so used to seeing every public expression of the legitimate, well-established scientific position paired with the gibbering nonsense of some creationist (the Star Tribune did it to me last Spring, when my op-ed was matched with some excrement from Dave Eaton) that it is rather stunning to see a paper actually stick to the facts.

Maybe there is some hope for the media, after all.

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Comments:

#42439: coturnix — 10/02 at 09:54 AM
Oooommmmmmmmmmm!

#42443: MAJeff — 10/02 at 10:46 AM
While you lucky folks in MN get the STrib's wisdom on this, we in Boston have to put up with the usual idiocy from Jeff Jacoby:

Today, Darwinian fundamentalists fight to keep the evidence of intelligent design in the diversity of life on earth out of the classroom, because that would be at odds with a strictly materialist view of the world. Eighty years ago, the thought controllers wanted no Darwin; today's thought controllers want only Darwin. In both cases, the dominant attitude is authoritarian and closed-minded -- the opposite of the liberal spirit of inquiry on which good science depends.

As always, those who challenge the reigning orthodoxy face repercussions. In April, the science journal Nature interviewed Caroline Crocker, a molecular microbiologist at George Mason University. Because ''she mentioned intelligent design while teaching her second-year cell-biology course . . . she has been barred by her department from teaching both evolution and intelligent design." Other skeptics of Darwinism choose to keep silent. When Nature approached another researcher, he refused to speak for fear of hurting his chance to get tenure.

If intelligent design proponents were peddling Biblical creationism, the hostility aimed at them would make sense. But they aren't. Unlike creationism, which denied the earth's ancient age or that biological forms could evolve over time, intelligent design makes use of generally accepted scientific data and agrees that falsification, not revelation, is the acid test of scientific validity.

In truth, intelligent design isn't a scientific theory but a restatement of a timeless argument: that the regularity and laws of the natural world imply a higher intelligence -- God, most people would say -- responsible for its design. Intelligent design doesn't argue that evidence of design ends all questions or disproves Darwin. It doesn't make a religious claim. It does say that when such evidence appears, researchers should take it into account, and that the weaknesses in Darwinian theory should be acknowledged as forthrightly as the strengths. That isn't primitivism or Bible-thumping or flying spaghetti. It's science.

#42444: Bob Davis — 10/02 at 10:47 AM
A one day example without he-said-she-said journamalism does not a hopeful trend make.

Now two days, that would be something.

#42457: — 10/02 at 12:11 PM
But it's still one more candle in the dark!

#42465: — 10/02 at 03:27 PM

intelligent design isn't a scientific theory but a restatement of a timeless argument: that the regularity and laws of the natural world imply a higher intelligence -- God, most people would say -- responsible for its design. Intelligent design doesn't argue that evidence of design ends all questions or disproves Darwin.

...

It's science.

The reason I started an English BA course is because I genuinely believe that English education has considerably improved my ability to analyse deep and complex structures outside of my own meagre knowledge and that this will help me to gain some understanding of just about any topic that I become interested in. That journalists like Jacoby are paid actual, real, power-to-purchase-goods-and-services money to write things like this is somewhat disheartening.

-Schmitt.

#42473: QrazyQat — 10/02 at 05:35 PM
Jacoby is right when he says of this statement: "when such evidence appears, researchers should take it into account, and that the weaknesses in Darwinian theory should be acknowledged as forthrightly as the strengths. that "it's science".

That is science; that's exactly what science does. It is not, unfortunately for the rest of his argument, what ID does -- ID simply doesn't bring anything new or useful to science; its most (only, really) valid suggestion is the above, and science has always done that since that is the fundamental core of science.

#42486: — 10/02 at 09:18 PM
nit (from the strib op-ed):

You'd be wise not to waste too much time trying to build a perpetual motion machine because another theory, the second law of thermodynamics, gives pretty reliable guidance that it won't work.

the law which precludes a perpetual motion machine is the first law of thermodynamics, not the second. Also, I'm not sure that it is accurate to the first and second laws of thermodynamics as theories, but axioms considered true by direct observation

#42487: MJS — 10/02 at 09:40 PM
Busy, Busy, Busy looks at Jeff Jacoby's giddy reasoning.

+++

#42498: — 10/03 at 07:44 AM
The Pioneer Press has this today...
http://www.twincities.com/mld/twincities/news/editorial/12788139.htm

I hope that opens; if it doesn't just go to http://www.twincities.com and link to their Opinion page. Look for the op-ed piece by Leonard Pitts.

#42499: Gerard Harbison — 10/03 at 08:00 AM
Re post number 42486.

There are actually two classes of perpetual motion machines, 'perpetual motion machines of the first kind', which violate the first law; and 'perpetual motion machines of the second kind', which violate the second law. I find the latter more interesting; they usually take 5 minutes to rebut, instead of 5 seconds.

Gerry Harbison
Professor of Chemistry, University of Nebraska at Lincoln

#42776: — 10/05 at 11:21 AM
Gerry,
your point is well taken, but I would maintain that the article is incorrect: I would assert that using the term "perpetual motion machine" without further qualification unambiguously means the first kind. I really don't think that the author of the article meant anything else.

At the very least, the statement I referenced is extremely confusing, and I think is a slip by the author.

Anyway, like I said, it's kind of a nit...

Regards
Krill

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Sunday, October 02, 2005

The Star Tribune achieves zen-like purity

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