Eric Rasmusen’s Weblog

p>Three Hierarchies makes the nice point that if you look closely, the Bible does not say that God directly created animals and plants, just that He created the earth, and that spontaneous generation– as opposed to God having created all living things directly— was long accepted by Christians and everyone else. It was only in the 1800’s that scientists showed that life comes from life, so that the origins of life became a puzzle: (more…)

Via Evolution News and Views:

Turner justifies his reasonable foresight by explaining that Kitzmiller only provided a pyrrhic victory for the pro-Darwin lobby:

Although there was general jubilation at the ruling, I think the joy will be short-lived, for we have affirmed the principle that a federal judge, not scientists or teachers, can dictate what is and what is not science, and what may or may not be taught in the classroom. Forgive me if I do not feel more free.

(J. Scott Turner, Signs of Design, The Christian Century, June 12, 2007.)

[This post has gotten long and sprawling as I investigated more. I’ll leave it that way, as a source of material for other people to analyze]

David Klinghoffer in the Weekly Standard tells us how Guillermo Gonzalez, a pro-ID astronomer at Iowa State, was denied tenure. Reporting is usually so bad that it’s impossible to tell whether somebody was denied tenure for good reason (his scholarship) or bad reasons (for example, his political views). But this story caught my eye because it says:

According to a Smithsonian/NASA astrophysics database, Gonzalez’s scientific articles from 2001 to 2007 rank the highest among astronomers in his department according to a standard measure of how frequently they have been cited by other scientists. He has published 68 peer-reviewed articles, which beat the ISU department’s standard for tenure by 350 percent. He has also co-authored a standard astronomy textbook, published by Cambridge University Press, which his faculty colleagues use in their own classes.

Yet in turning down Gonzalez’s appeal, ISU president Gregory Geoffroy claimed that the astronomer “did not show the trajectory of excellence that we expect.”

(more…)

I enjoyed the Christianity Today debate between Hitchens and Wilson because my guy was winning, but Hitchens was too easy a target. He embarassed himself by misunderstanding The Good Samaritan and he apparently hadn’t ever asked himself about the basis for his moral opinions, which he thinks are both self-evident and universally shared.

Here’s what he should have said to defend his position, an argument harder to attack. (I cross post this as a comment on Wilson’s blog, BLog and Mablog)

“Human morality is the result of evolution. We all share brain wiring that makes us feel guilty when we murder our fathers, steal from our sisters, and lie out of pure malice. Therefore, a human is well advised not to do these things. That is why I call them immoral. Also, our wiring makes us feel happy in condemning them, so I do.

I admit that our hard-wired morality won’t take us as far as I’d like. I can’t really say that infanticide or genocide are wrong, because too many people do these things without guilt, if the context is right. Our innate morality is designed for small groups of hunter-gatherers. But on top of that, we have the norms of our society, and the laws. My parents taught me to feel guilty if I stole even from strangers, plus I might get caught, so I don’t do it. Someone from India might well disagree, but I will cheerfully stand by my society’s principles and condemn him to other people in my society, at least. That’s fine for keeping me happy, even if it’s not universal.”

That argument require admissions of relativism and lack of personal autonomy, but it’s an argument, which Hitchens didn’t have. Also, I’m afraid that it does cause a collapse of the silly side Hitchens is defending in the debate, that Christianity has been bad for the world. A lot of his morality is society-linked, not universally human. His problem is that as a moralistic atheist, he really ought to concede that Christianity is a huge influence on his personal notion of morality and that Christianity’s influence is why he prefers the moral climate in England to that Iraq or India. His preferences (as I imagine they are) for things like equality, truth, respect for human life, and democracy are not universal.

Woman X is much more attractive to men than Woman Y, though both are the same age and equally healthy. That is hard to explain evolutionarily except as sexual selection (as opposed to fitness selection). I suppose all sexual selection is surprising in this way, but this example bothers me. One thing is that in a monogamous species adultery is a threat. If I choose woman X for sexual selection, it is because her children will also be beautiful and will have more children than average. But she will especially tempting to other men, so her children may not be mine, whereas an ugly woman’s would have been.

People criticize Intelligent Design as being a theory meant to fill in gaps in our knowledge. That, however, is often the role of theory (always?)— to make better sense of stuff that doesn’t fit our current thinking completely. The neutrino is a good example. It was posited to explain a gap in theory in 1931, but there was not experimental evidence “finding” it until about 30 years later. As “What’s a Neutrino?” tells us:

• 1931 - A hypothetical particle is predicted by the theorist Wolfgang Pauli. Pauli based his prediction on the fact that energy and momentum did not appear to be conserved in certain radioactive decays. Pauli suggested that this missing energy might be carried off, unseen, by a neutral particle which was escaping detection.

• 1934 - Enrico Fermi develops a comprehensive theory of radioactive decays, including Pauli’s hypothetical particle, which Fermi coins the neutrino (Italian: “little neutral one”). With inclusion of the neutrino, Fermi’s theory accurately explains many experimentally observed results.
• 1959 - Discovery of a particle fitting the expected characteristics of the neutrino is announced by Clyde Cowan and Fred Reines (a founding member of Super-Kamiokande; UCI professor emeritus and recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in physics for his contribution to the discovery). This neutrino is later determined to be the partner of the electron.

On page 72 of Richard Dawkins’s, The Ancestor’s Tale: A
Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, we read why absence of
fossils helps confirm the truth of the theory of evolution:

It is in the nature of sedimentary rock that its materials are
continually being recycled. Old mountains such as the Scottish
Highlands have been slowly ground down by wind and water, yielding
materials which later settle into sediments and may ultimately push up
again somewhere else as new mountains like the Alps, and the cycle
resumes. In a world of such recycling, we have to curb our importunate
demands for a continuous fossil record to bridge every gap in
evolution. It isn’t just bad luck, that fossils are often missing,
but an inherent consequence of the way sedimentary rocks are made. It
would be positively worrying if there were no gaps in the fossil
record. Old rocks, with their fossils, are actively being destroyed by
the very process that goes to make new ones.

This is not a fallacious argument, but it is in the spirit of the
equally valid “God of the Gaps” argument which Dawkins so criticizes.

From Philosophers’ Playground, something relevant to Intelligent Design:

The” grue” of which he speaks comes from Nelson Goodman’s “New Riddle of Induction” in which he argues that the central logical tool in scientific reasoning, induction, is not the language independent thing we think it is. The idea is that if the word “grue” means “green before 1/1/07 and blue thereafter” then all of the evidence we currently have that the grass is green is also evidence that the grass is grue since all observations have come before the year 2007. By using induction from this evidence, speakers of our color language would predict that on New Years’ Day, the grass will still be green, but using the very same logical inference, grue-speakers will be lead by their language to argue that all scientific evidence points to it being what we would call blue. So we have different claims about how the world will be based on the same evidence and the same scientific inference, with the only difference being the language we choose to speak — something that should be innocuous.

Is the statement “Grass is grue” only falsifiable after 1/1/07. In the naive sense, yes, because that is the first point at which there theories make different predictions. But as Duhem, Quine, Kuhn, and Lakatos (amongst many others) point out. No matter what we observe, we haven’t necessarily falsified anything in particular. We can hold onto the grue language and grue-based inductions if we are willing to make adjustments elsewhere in our web of belief.

From Jurisdynamics,

As the Harvard philosopher WVO Quine wrote, “for my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer’s gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind.” He wrote this because Homeric gods were not supposed to be taken to exist on faith, but rather as explanations of phenomena like Volcanic eruptions and lightning strikes.

In The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins gives a theoretical support
for slow-
increment evolution (against creationism, intelligent design,
punctuationism, Lamarck, and all comers). At one point, he makes fun of
an English bishop who uses what Dawkins calls the weak Argument from
Personal Incredulity. “It seems implausible to me…. I cannot believe
that… Could it possibly happen that…” Dawkins does a good job of
making fun of it.

My first thought was that the Argument is nonetheless okay. What we
often do is to describe a situation and then say, “I don’t think that’s
plausible.” It, of course, can’t really be just an argument from
Personal incredulity. Rather, we are trying to share our doubts. And
this is a rational argument, that can be refuted. The opposing view can
try to present explanations or evidence that will overcome the
doubts.

My second thought, though, was that Dawkins relies on a very similar
argument, but one that sounds even worse. What he relies on is the
Argument from Personal Credulity. His answer to the bishop is “It seems
plausible to me, … I believe that,… It could easily happen that… ”
And, of course, that is an equally legitimate argument. It can be
refuted by evidence or explanation that undermines Dawkins’s beliefs.

From Pascal’s Thoughts, T.S. Eliot translation, entry 229, I find this item which is quotable for my Concealment Argument paper:

This is what I see and what troubles me. I look on all sides, and I see only darkness everywhere. Nature presents to me nothing which is not matter of doubt and concern. If I saw nothing there which revealed a Divinity, I would come to a negative conclusion; if I saw everywhere the signs of a Creator, I would remain peacefully in faith. But, seeing too much to deny and too little to be sure, I am in a state to be pitied; wherefore I have a hundred time wished that if a God maintains nature, she should testify to Him unequivocally, and that, if the signs she gives are deceptive, she should suppress them altogether ; that she should say everything or nothing, that I might see which cause I ought to follow. Whereas in my present state, ignorant of what I am or of what I ought to do, I know neither my condition nor my duty. My heart inclines wholly to know where is the true good, in order to follow it; nothing would be too dear to me for eternity.

I envy those whom I see living in the faith with such carelessness, and who make such a bad use of a gift of which it seems to me I would make such a different use.

I had a good dinner conversation about intelligent design a couple of nights ago which inspired me to think about it in terms of frequentist (classical) versus Bayesian statistics and to contrast its application to physics with its application to biology. My notes follow.

(1) How do we do a classical (or frequentist) test here?

Null: Randomness, according to some distribution.

Alternative: Non-Random,

Test: Are the parameters in confidence region R?

(2) A simple example Let possible values of X be in {0,1,2,…1000}. Only X=1000 permits life. (more…)

Bill Vallicella at Right Reason nicely puts naturalism, scientism, and anti-ID arrogance and philosophical naivete together. People just can’t seem to realize that to conclude there is no divine intervention needs empirical justification just as much as to assume there is divine intervention— and that neither side has anywhere near a conclusive case. Indeed, the ID people are trying much harder to argue empirically for their position than the anti-ID people, who usually just sneer and act (a) as if their position doesn’t need any evidence, or (b) as if the existing evidence for evolution somehow proves that God has never, ever, not one single time, intervened in evolution.

It is unfortunately necessary to repeat that naturalism and scientism are not
scientific but philosophical doctrines with all the rights, privileges, and
liabilities pertaining thereunto. Among these liabilities, of course, is a
lack of empirical verifiability. Naturalism and scientism cannot be supported
scientifically. For example, we know vastly more than Descartes (1596-1650) did
about the brain, but we are no closer than he was to a solution of the mind-body
problem. Neuroscience will undoubtedly teach us more and more about the brain,
but it shows a breathtaking lack of philosophical sophistication — or else
ideologically induced blindness — to think that knowing more and more about
the physical properties of a lump of matter will teach us anything about
consciousness, the unity of consciousness, self-conciousness, intentionality,
and the rest.

I blogged on the Beckwith tenure denial
recently. I see that Reformclub has a list of links on the subject. None I’ve seen try to argue for why he should have gotten tenure except to say that he’s published a lot of words, he seems smart to them, and he’s inspired some students. (more…)

Francis Beckwith, a pro-Intelligent-Design scholar, was recently turned down for tenure at Baylor University. I am frustrated that despite some noise in the blogosphere, nobody is seriously discussing whether his scholarly work was up to Baylor standards or not. Thus, I don’t know whether to be upset. One can see from his website that he has quite a number of books and articles, but that doesn’t mean much. I don’t see journals that I know are high-quality. He says that he is a philosopher. I doubt he’d get tenure in a philosophy department, but he’s not in one; he’s in some kind of special, small, religious studies department. I wish somebody would evaluate his quality, instead of just saying he is pro-ID and therefore stupid, or has published a lot of printed pages, and is therefore brilliant. For info, see World, and the American Spectator, and Agapepress.

I thought of a couple of new problems for the Popperians who think
any good explanation must be falsifiable, and that theistic evolution
is not. Suppose we found a giant gold tablet on the Moon with one
of the following two messages etched on it:

Message 1. “I did not interfere with the natural process of evolution
in the slightest, and the values of the constants of physics are
purely accidental. Nor did any other intelligent designer exist. I
know, because I was watching. The Intelligent Design advocates are
wrong. Signed, God.”

(more…)

An interesting quote by Karl Popper on evolution and science:

I now wish to give some reasons why I regard Darwinism as metaphysical, and as a research programme. It is metaphysical because it is not testable. Karl Popper, Unended Quest (1992) pp.198-199

Popper is wrong, of course, but wrong in the same way that all the people are wrong who say that theistic evolution is not scientific, or that any explanation is bad if it is not testable.

David Klinghoffer has a good article on motivations in the Intelligent Design controversy. They don’t matter, of course, but the Pennsylvania judge in the Dover case said they were crucial. As Klinghoffer pointed out, two can play at that game, and the most prominent anti-ID people are openly anti-Christian too, and it is clear that is their main motivation, not love of science.

I recently had a comment on my blog about Intelligent Design not being falsifiable, and that criticism (an easily refutable one) is often made. The idea that it is good if a theory is falsifiable (though not if it is falsified) is common among scholars. I have heard that philosophers abandoned it years ago, and at any rate the idea, though initially attractive, turns out to be misleading in the end. The reason it is attractive, I think, is that it at least requires a theory to be clear enough to have some meaning. Many people come up with theories that are so vague or empty that they cannot be falsified because they have no implications whatsoever, for past, present, or future. They are simply ill-stated. Telling the person “How could your theory be falsified?” requires them to think what they really mean, and to realize they don’t know. But let’s think about clearly stated theories. (more…)

The term “intelligent design” is perhaps too broad, or at least it gets misinterpreted. I interpret it to exclude Creationism; critics often equate the two. A better term is “theistic evolution“, in contrast to “nontheistic evolution“, or even “guided evolution” versus “aimless evolution”. That dichotomy highlights that the difference is not in whether or not evolution is accepted, but in how it occurs.