Transcript Scientific Ignorance as a Way Science as a Way of Life

Scientific Ignorance as a Way
Science as a Way of Life
of Life
…From Science Fiction in
Washington, to Intelligent
Design in the Classroom
American Association for the
Advancement of Science
Denver, Feb 16, 2003
Science Under Attack?
Scientific Ignorance pervades our society.
At the same time, science is either being
attacked, or at the very least marginalized at
all levels, from the White House to the high
school classroom.
Science Under Attack?
• Journalists must work to reflect the nature
of science in their reporting: be skeptical,
yet informed.
• Scientists must become ACTIVISTS, both
locally and nationally, in attempting to
explain the nature of science and the
scientific method, and counter wellorganized misinformation campaigns
In March 1996, Presidential Candidate Patrick
Buchanan asserted ABC’s This Week, that he
personally was not descended from monkeys, and
he didn’t think children should be taught that they
are. Not a single reporter questioning the
candidate asked about this assertion, although he
was subjected to harsh criticism of his positions on
trade protectionism, and immigration limits---all
issues about which there is much more room for
debate.
Fallacy self-evident???
• Hesitancy to offend religious sensibilities?
• Hesitancy to state that some things are NOT
open for debate…
Journalism:
There are always two sides to every story
Science:
Most times one side is simply wrong
Because of lack of comfort on scientific matters
there is a hesitancy for many journalists to make
pronouncements….
• National Anchor fears…
• NYT…
SCIENCE AS NON-CULTURE!
This makes it difficult to
distinguish nonsense from sense..
FOX “NEWS”….. 50th anniversary 1997
John English, International Aerospace Hall of
Fame…
Religious Sect Announces the First Cloned Baby
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr. (New York Times)
A religious sect that contends that space travelers created the human
race by cloning themselves declared today that the first cloned human
had been born
…Raëlians are followers of Raël, a French-born former race-car
driver who has said he met a four-foot space alien atop a volcano in
southern France in 1973 and went aboard his ship, where he was
entertained by voluptuous female robots and learned that the first
humans were created 25,000 years ago by space travelers called
Elohim, who cloned themselves.
Evolution… Human Archaelogical Record.. Hominid
Species..5 million years
Some Facts and Figures
• The fraction of school children believing in astrology rose
from 40 percent to 59 percent between 1978 and 1984.
• In a 2001 NSF Survey on Science Literacy:
• 53% of American adults were unaware that the last dinosaur died
before the first human arose.
• 50% of adults knew that the earth orbits the sun, and takes a year
to do it.
• 53% of adults knew that: “Human beings, as we know them today,
developed from earlier species of animals.
• 30% of Ohio adults surveyed in 2002 stated their belief
that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old.
In a democratic society…. Everything
should be open to debate!
EXPERIMENT
….. THE EARTH IS NOT FLAT!
“It appears to me that they who rely simply on
the weight of authority to prove any assertion,
without searching out the arguments to support it,
act absurdly. I wish to question freely and to
answer freely without any sort of adulation. That
well becomes any who are sincere in the search
for truth.”
V. Galilei, 1574
“I believe in an open mind, but not so open that
your brains fall out.”
Arthur Hays Sulzberger
Publisher, New York Times 1935-61
WHY SHOULD WE CARE?
Truth blurred!….
Appeals court grants stay in Kennewick Man
case
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 2003
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday granted
a temporary halt to pending studies of the 9,000-year-old
Kennewick Man. Four Pacific Northwest tribes asked
the court for a stay while they appeal a federal judge's
decision to allow scientists to study the remains. The
appeals court in a short order agreed to the tribes' motion,
which was supported by the federal government.
A find of great scientific value…
Kennewick Man as closely genetically
related to Umatilla tribe members as I
am…
We are too afraid of offending
religious/cultural sensibilities… even
when those sensibilities are wrong!!!
TOO OPEN A MIND?
• 1925
State of Tennessee convicts John T. Scopes of the
crime of teaching evolution
• 1968 in Epperson v. Arkansas, Supreme Court rules that
states cannot ban the teaching of evolution on religious
grounds
• 1982 Federal district court rules in McLean v.Arkansas
Board of Education that “creation science” is in fact religion.
• 1987 in Edwards v. Aguillard, the Supreme Court reaffirms
1982 decision. But dissenting opinion raises idea of
“evidence against evolution”
• 1999
Kansas State Board of Education votes to remove
evolution from state science curriculum
• 2002 Ohio Board of Education developing new science
curriculum. Debates inclusion of “Intelligent Design”, and
Intelligent Design:
• Open-Mindedness
• Honesty
• Fairness
Intelligent Design:
• Closed Minded
• Dishonest
• Unfair!
Science is a particular way of knowing about
the world. In science, explanations are limited
to those based on observations and experiments
that can be substantiated by other scientists.
Explanations that cannot be based on empirical
evidence are not a part of science…
Science and Creationism
The National Academy of Sciences
“Science standards use a little known “Rule” to
censor the evidence of design. The Rule, which is
usually unstated, is often referred to as
“methodological naturalism.” “
= Scientific Method!
Source: Science Excellence for all Ohioans
http://www.sciohio.org/start.htm
WHAT IS INTELLIGENT
DESIGN?:
WHAT IS INTELLIGENT
DESIGN?:
• The notion that life was designed?
• The notion that existing cellular structures
are too complex to be explained without
design?
• ???
WHAT IS INTELLIGENT
DESIGN?:
INTELLIGENT DESIGN HAS NEVER BEEN
SUBJECTED TO THE MOULDING AND
DEVELOPMENT THAT OCCURS WHEN
SCIENTIFIC IDEAS ARE SUBJECTED TO
YEARS OF EXPERIMENTAL DEVELOPMENT
AND PEER REVEW!
WHAT IS INTELLIGENT
DESIGN?:
INTELLIGENT DESIGN IS SIMPLY :
OPPOSED TO EVOLUTION!
THE WEDGE STRATEGY (1998)
“
CENTER FOR THE RENEWAL OF SCIENCE & CULTURE
The proposition that human beings are created in the image of
God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western
civilization was built. …. this cardinal idea came under
wholesale attack …drawing on the discoveries of modern
science…
Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and
Culture seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism
and its cultural legacies.’
“THE
WEDGE STRATEGY (1998)
Governing Goals
* To defeat scientific materialism and its destructive
moral, cultural and political legacies.
* To replace materialistic explanations with the
theistic understanding that nature and human beings
are created by God.
Five Year Goals
* To see intelligent design theory as an accepted
alternative in the sciences and scientific research being
done from the perspective of design theory.
*begin attacking science teaching in public schools
….
The Scriptures are absolutely true.
However, if
the Scriptures appear to disagree with the results
of scientific investigation, one should re-examine
one’s interpretation of the Scriptures.
Maimonides, A Guide for the Perplexed
Intelligent Design: Non-Science at Work?
1. What predictions does it make?
Intelligent Design: Non-Science at Work?
Arguments against design?
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•
Almost all species that have ever appeared are now
extinct.
The whole functions without the parts, and the parts
function without the whole
…..
23 species “designed”
21 “design” failures?
Human Evolution
Intelligent Design: Non-Science at Work?
Humans designed?
•
•
•
Fallen arches
Back problems…..
….
The National Academy of
Science
Special creation or supernatural intervention is not
subjectable to meaningful tests, which require predicting
plausible results and then checking these results through
observation and experimentation…
AAAS Resolution
Recognizing that the "intelligent design theory" represents a
challenge to the quality of science education, the Board of
Directors of the AAAS unanimously adopts the following
resolution:
• Whereas, to date, the ID movement has failed to offer
credible scientific evidence to support their claim that ID
undermines the current scientifically accepted theory of
evolution
• Whereas, the ID movement has not proposed a scientific
means of testing its claims
• Therefore Be It Resolved, that the lack of scientific
warrant for so-called "intelligent design theory" makes it
improper to include as a part of science education…
Wesley R. Elsberry: Ph.D. candidate in Wildlife and
Fisheries Sciences at Texas A&M University
"Oct. 25-27, "Research and Progress in Intelligent Design"
conference, Biola U., La Mirada, CA.: "Its purpose is to
form new collaborations among scientists seeking to do
research on the interface between science and faith,
particularly within the context of ID.” It will cover a broad
range of topics, from fine-tuning in physics and habitability
to molecular machines in bacteria. E-mail:
[email protected]"
BACK
Teach the the
Controversy?
Manufacture
Controversy?
In a survey of over 10 million articles in over
20 major science journals during the past 12
years:
• 115,000 articles that used the keyword "evolution," -most
referred to biological evolution.
• "Intelligent design," appeared in 88 articles. All but 11 of
those were engineering articles
• of the remaining 11, 8 were critical of the scientific basis
of intelligent-design
• The remaining 3 were not in research journals
Fine-Tuning the Case for Fine-Tuning: a Cosmic
Breakthrough
by Hugh Ross
“Lawrence Krauss, at Case Western Reserve
University in Ohio, unabashedly acknowledged in the
Astrophysical Journal (July 10, 1998) a forward leap
in the case for a "designed" rather than accidental
cosmos. His efforts to refine our understanding of the
universe's expansion have significantly advanced
modern cosmology and, at the same time, have
contributed substantially to the Christian's argument
for the biblical Creator.”
“100 scientist”
poll!….
• “100 scientist” poll!….
• Bringing in the ‘Steves’…
The Steve Project
“Evolution is a vital, well supported, unifying principle of
the biological sciences, and the scientific evidence is
overwhelmingly in favor of the idea that al living things
share
a common ancestry.
Although there
legitimate
In Memory
of Stephen
Jay are
Gould
scientific debates about the patterns and processes of
evolution, there is no serious scientific doubt that evolution
occurred or that natural selection is a major mechanism of
evolution. It is scientifically inappropriate and
pedagogically irresponsible for creationist pseudoscience
including but not limited to “intelligent design” to be
introduced into the science curricula of the public schools”
Signed, Steve200
An Ohio Example…
• For the first time in the 77 years following the Scopes trial,
the word "evolution" appears in the science standards
proposed by ODE
• An apparently innocuous phrase suggests that students learn
"how scientists continue to investigate and critically analyze
aspects of evolutionary theory.”
• ODE Standards Committee: “This does not support the
teaching of intelligent design in the classroom”
• Stephen Meyer (Discovery Inst): “A victory for the
principle of teaching the contoversy
• Philip Johnson: “Ohio is not a minor state.. Kansas is a
marginal state -- not one the Eastern establishment pays
much attention to..” Ohio's decision is a victory in the battle
to free science classes from the grip of Charles Darwin”.
Coming to a State Near You?…
Just a Theory?:
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Newton’s Law of Gravity
Copernicus
Darwinian Evolution
A flat Earth
A 10,000 year old earth
Intelligent Design
Astrology
The Holocaust Never Happened..
Just a Theory?: Surviving
Science
• Newton’s Law of Gravity
• Copernicus
• Darwinian Evolution
Survive the test of
experiment, and make useful
predictions
Historical Science?
“I can’t understand what they’re squealing about.
[Millions or billions of years ago] I wasn’t here,
and neither were they.”
John Bacon, Kansas
State Board of Education member
Historical Science?
“This misses the point about how science tests
hypotheses. We don’t see the Earth going around the sun
or the atoms that make up matter. We “see” their
consequences. Scientists infer that atoms exist and the
Earth revolves because they have tested predictions
derived from these concepts by extensive observation and
experimentation.”
Science and Creationism
The National Academy of Sciences
All Science is Historical
Science!
Historical Science?:
Historical Science
PREDICTS The future.
THE RESULTS OF
EXPERIMENT AND
FUTURE
OBSERVATIONS!
Predictions and Tests
Claim: Eukaryotes (nucleated cells) evolved from Prokaryotes
(non-nucleated cells). Specific Parts of nucleated cells, like
mitochondria that handle oxygen consumption, were ultimately
incorporated into these cells following a long period of
symbiotic relationship between parasite bacteria--the ancestors
of the mitochondria -- and the host cells they invaded.
Prediction: Individual components of Eukaryote cells, like
mitochondria, have greater genetic resemblance to certain free
standing prokaryote cells than they do to each other.
Observation: makeup and antibiotic sensitivities of ribosomal
RNA of mitochondria and several bacteria support this
prediction.
“The First Amendment protects against the
government establishment of religion, but that
doesn’t mean it will protect against bad
science.”
Eugenie Scott,
Director, National Center for Science Ed.
BACK
Novel
Intelligent
Scientific
Design
Claim
Theory
Research
Peer Review
Calls for the Teaching
of “ID Theory” amount
to an attempt to ShortCircuit the Process of
Science Itself.
Scientific
Consensus
Classroom &
Textbook
Fairness ?
“I need it spelled out that I don’t have
to address a string of silly alternative
theories. With 175 classroom days, I
don’t have time for that”
Bruce Miller, high school
biology teacher in New Mexico,
speaking on Board of Ed. decision to limit
science curriculum to theories based on science.
Science is NOT FAIR!
NOT ALL IDEAS TREATED
EQUALLY!
THE GREATEST LEGACY
OF SCIENCE.
After the Columbine school shootings, House
Majority Leader Tom DeLay (a former biology
major) suggested that the tragedy had occurred
"because our school systems teach our children that
they are nothing but glorified apes who have
evolutionized out of some primordial mud.
These are the people who will be
legislating on such issues as stem cell
research!!!
Science Fiction in Washington..
On March23, 1983, President Reagan called upon “the
scientific community in our country, those who gave us
nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents to the cause of
mankind and world peace; to give us a means of rendering
these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.”
STAR WARS!!!
ALL STARSHIPS WORTH THEIR SALT HAVE
SHIELDS….
• THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN ENTERPRISE!
• NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE!
"Yeah, but 300 years ago people would have
said it would be impossible to fly!"
• There is probably more we do not know
about the Universe than we do know.
• BUT : WE DO KNOW SOMETHING!
• Balls fall down
• The Earth is round
• We know how electromagnetism works
• The Earth is billions of years old, not
thousands!
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•
•
•
•
1972 ABM Treaty
Intercepting the Moon?
Decoys are cheaper than missiles!
Missiles are cheaper than interceptors!
Probabilities: more reliable than any
system…. Compare to space shuttle…
• AT LEAST GET IT TO WORK BEFORE
DEPLOYING! 40% success rate thus far.
• 100 billion dollars at stake!!
• 95% efficiency of success per interceptor.
• >50% likelihood of avoiding interception,
>13 missiles required.
• 90% efficiency of success per interceptor
• >50% likelihood of avoiding interception,
>6 missiles required
• Would it be acceptable for General Motors
to begin marketing a new SUV when trials
had shown that 60% of the time it toppled
over when turning a curve at greater than 50
km/hr?
• Would it be acceptable to build nuclear
power plants if there was a 60% failure rate
in all prototypes?
Democracy and Technology..
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MISSILE DEFENSE
Global Warming
Stem Cells
International Space Station
Biological weapons
….
“Political” Science
• The National Cancer Institute, which used to say on its
Web site that the best studies showed "no association
between abortion and breast cancer," now says the
evidence is inconclusive.
• A Web page of the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention used to say studies showed that education about
condom use did not lead to earlier or increased sexual
activity. That statement, which contradicts the view of
"abstinence only" advocates, is omitted from a revised
version of the page.
THE UNIVERSE IS A REMARKABLE
PLACE WITHOUT ALL THE JUNK!
Only when we are willing to accept the Universe
for what it is, without myth, without fear, will we
be able to build a just society.
Scientific ethos: honesty, open mindedness,
creativity, egalitarian, full disclosure…
Science works!
• Journalists must work to reflect the nature
of science in their reporting: be skeptical,
yet informed.
• Scientists must become ACTIVISTS, both
locally and nationally, in attempting to
explain the nature of science and the
scientific method.