THE RUSE OF EFFICACY

Alternative medicine? The truth always hurts someone....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWE1tH93G9U

FOUR HUMBLING WORDS

A speech given at a high school debate.

In today’s society, it seems that all we have to do is to observe the world around us today to see the immense impact that science has on our daily lives. It obviously wasn’t always like that. As little as 200 years ago, scientists everywhere were a significant minority of the population. In Canada today, they outnumber the clergy and the officers of the armed forces combined. Historian of science Derek De Solla Price observed that “using any reasonable definition of a scientist, we can say that 80 to 90% of all the scientists that have ever lived are alive today. Alternatively, any young scientist, starting out now and looking back at the end of a normal career will find out that 80 to 90 % of all scientific work ever achieved by the end of his time will have occurred before his very eyes. Science is indeed having a colossal impact on everyone’s lives. Yet today, a looming problem is beginning to percolate throughout society. The education of a generation of young Canadians is being threatened by a mode of thinking that attacks the very heart of the scientific literacy that is so crucial to the core of today’s society. As the late Carl Sagan put it, “We have arranged a global civilization in which the most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for awhile, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.” This was his response to the increasing infiltration that superstition and pseudo-science posit to an ever-increasing scientific illiterate public.

Perhaps the greatest attack on the scientific literacy and education of you students today stems from a brand of pseudoscience called scientific creationism, and its supposed champion, Intelligent Design. It is my intent to show that these two propositions are not only false, they are often oversimplified and even misleading. If the proponents of scientific creationism and intelligent design (ID) have their way, it could have far reaching negative impacts that would reverberate throughout all aspects of society for decades to come. Let me be clear that refuting the creationists’ argument is not an attack on religion. Let me also be clear that creationism is an attack on science - all of science, not just evolutionary biology - If what Mr. Toyota is trying to sell you is right, then there is serious problems with physics, astronomy, cosmology, chemistry, geology, paleontology, botany, zoology, and all the life sciences. Can all these sciences be wrong in the same direction? Of course not, but creationists think they are, and worse, they want their anti-science taught in Canada’s public schools.

The latest attack on the teaching of evolution in Canada has occurred in the Ontario public schools. Bowing to pressure from creationists and ID’ers, the provincial curriculum has decided to avoid a religious controversy by offering what scientists have called a ‘value-neutral’ science education from grades one to twelve by removing any mention of the word evolution. The current curriculum addresses evolution in only a single course ― an advanced biology 12 designed for those students who will study biology or biochemistry in university. These are tomorrow’s doctors and researchers. In effect, the teaching of the Life Sciences has become a collection of meaningless, unrelated facts with no ties to any central unifying scientific principle. To teach biology without evolution is like teaching mathematics without numbers.
Evolution as a scientific theory may seem controversial to many people but in the scientific community it stands as one of the great unifying ideas of all time relating all the countless facts presented about life and encompassing them under one umbrella.

At its heart, evolution is a modest idea, a minimal concept, just two points, really. First, the roots of the present are found in the past; and second, natural processes, observable today, fully explain the biological connections between past and present. On purely scientific terms, those two points leave very little to argue about. The misunderstanding of evolution that is found in so many members of today’s society comes in part from an interpretation of the word "theory". Used in everyday language, in the Canadian vernacular, the word “theory” often means “imperfect fact” - part of a hierarchy of confidence running downhill from fact to theory to hypothesis to guess. Kind of like a lawyer presenting his “theory” in court about how a crime may or may not have been committed. In scientific terms, we can only call this an idea, or if it is testable, we can elevate it to the status of a hypothesis. Theories can develop only after a hypothesis is rigorously tested and confirmed over and over again by others. And so, good lawyering, but bad science. So it’s easy to see the power of the creationists misleading argument when they say: Well, evolution is “only” a theory, (implying that it is only an idea) and they claim that intense debate now rages about many aspects of the theory seriously threatening it. Amongst scientists, intense debates about evolution do occur, and this is seen as being healthy, but rest assured they are not about if evolution occurred, but rather about how evolution occurs. In scientific circles, evolution is a fact; Natural Selection is the theory that explains how it occurs.

Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world’s data. Theories are structures of ideas that interpret and explain facts. Facts do not go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. We all know that Einstein’s theory of Gravitation replaced Newton’s, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air pending the outcome. And human beings evolved from apelike ancestors whether they did so by Darwin’s proposed mechanism or by some other, yet to be discovered.

Moreover, in science the word “fact” does not mean “absolute irreversible certainty.” We can achieve certainty in the final proofs of mathematics and logic only because they are not about the empirical, or testable world.
Evolutionists make no claim for perpetual truth, though creationists often do (and then attack us for a style of argument that they themselves favour). In science, the word “fact” can only mean when something is confirmed to such a degree that it would be ludicrous and perverse to withhold temporary agreement. I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
Evolutionists have been clear about this distinction between fact and theory from the very beginning, if only because we have always acknowledged how far we are from completely understanding the mechanisms (the theory) by which evolution (the fact) occurred.

Using another invalid argument, creationists claim that Creation, or as Darwin characterized it well over a century ago, “the dogma of separate creations,” they claim is a scientific theory meriting equal time with evolution in high school biology classrooms. Well known Philosopher of science Karl Popper has argued for decades that the primary criterion of science is the falsifiability of its theories. We can never prove absolutely, but we can falsify. A set of ideas that cannot, in principle, be falsified is not science. Their brand of creationism, they claim, is “scientific” because it follows the Popperian model in trying to show the holes in evolutionary theory. Yet Popper’s argument must apply in both directions. How ironic it is when creationists and ID’ers charge us with teaching evolution as dogma when they do not consider themselves or their ideas as being accountable to Popper’s model. One does not become a scientist by the simple act of trying to falsify another scientific system; you have to present an alternative system that also meets Popper’s criterion - it too must be falsifiable in principle.

As scientists, we understand the importance of recognizing the fallibility of science and its methods. But within this fallibility lies its greatest strength; self-correction. Whether a mistake is made honestly or dishonestly, whether a fraud is unknowingly or knowingly perpetrated, in time it will be flushed out of the system by a lack of external verification by other scientists. The result is that science is in a constant flux, often to the chagrin of a scientist’s ego when he admits his own mistake to a group of his peers. But when faced with new persuasive evidence, four humbling words of intellectual courage often separate the real scientist from the pretender. The willingness to face a group of your peers, stand up and say, “I could be wrong.” As scientists, we’re the first to admit that the graveyard of science is strewn with the tombstones of discarded theories that once explained the current available evidence at that time. As technologies and
techniques improve, we are afforded the luxury of being able to discover new evidence and thus develop better theories to help explain them. Suffice it to say that evolution as a scientific theory has withstood the test for close to 150 years and still remains the unifying principle that guides all the life sciences.

Having miserably failed to convince scientists of their beliefs, Creationists today focus their lobbying efforts on school boards, educators, and parent groups in the hope that by throwing in a variety of scientific-sounding arguments and legalistic appeals for "equal time" they can create an atmosphere of doubt in the average audience. And in the face of such doubt, these people begin to think, "Since I can't tell who is right, it seems only reasonable to let both views be taught."
And so it happens: through clever word manipulation and cries for "equal opportunity," the creationists win the day. Of course any objections from the scientific community are met with immediate accusations of unfairness. In this way the underdog creationist can pose as latter-day Galileos being persecuted by "orthodox" science. They can become the champions for fairness fighting against those "dogmatic" evolutionists who have hauled them into the Scopes trial in reverse.

They cleverly argue that a good education should promote looking at both sides of the argument. On this, we fully concur. Who wouldn’t? The issue at hand however is not whether creationism or evolution is correct but rather when creationists claim that their biblical evidence is scientific, then we say that scientists have the right to “wade” into the discussion and subject their claims to the laws and scrutiny of science.
All too often they want you to think that scientists are split 50/50 over the issue, half on one side and half on the other but let me remind you that in reality the real ratio is more like two creationists on one side and 20,000 scientists in bewilderment about ‘what issue?’ on the other side.

We still hear them say, “What is the harm in presenting both sides of an issue and then letting the students decide for themselves?” The harm resides in the fact that creationism and ID are not scientific ideas in any sense of the word. Here is a particularly misleading and revealing compromise from Dr. Henry Morris, the founder of the Institute for Creation Research. "The Bible account of creation can be taught in the public schools if only the scientific aspects of creationism are taught, keeping the Bible and religion out of it altogether." This seems to mean that Biblical ideas suddenly become scientific once one hides the fact that the Bible is the source. To teach Creationism and ID in a religion class in order to foster religious belief is acceptable, but to attempt to pass it off as a scientific theory worthy of time used in our science classrooms is completely irresponsible and harmful to the scientific literacy of an entire generation of Canadian students.

Creationists will persist by often speaking about belief in evolution. “What if I just don’t believe in evolution?” and “Do you realize that 55% of North Americans do not believe in evolution?” Well it is precisely here that they just don’t get it. As if scientific research is decided by public popular opinion. When people ask me if I believe in evolution, my answer is no! Evolution is not a belief anymore than the germ theory of disease or the atomic theory of matter are beliefs. One can accept the idea, one can agree with the theory, but one cannot believe in it.

The reality of science is that it is a rather “brutal competition” of ideas. It is not particularly a situation where you get to express your idea just because you want to; that sense of fairness doesn’t exist in science. In science ideas are supported by evidence and that evidence has to be peer reviewed and it has to be repeatable and “scientific” creationism according to their own definition, has absolutely nothing to do with that.
Science can therefore be thought of as a specific way of analyzing information with the goal of testing claims. It can be defined as a set of methods designed to describe and interpret observed or inferred phenomena, past or present, and aimed at building a testable body of knowledge open to rejection or confirmation. Creationism is a belief system that is not “designed” to accommodate this definition.

ID supporters contend that evolution and natural selection cannot explain many of the phenomena and complexity that we see in nature (like the human eye and the bacterial flagellum) so therefore there must be an intelligent designer. If we cannot explain something in science yet, then their explanation is simply that “God must have designed it.” Tell me Mr. Toyota, can you tell me about the evolutionary history of the whale? That’s the exact challenge posed by Intelligent Design’s leading advocate Michael Behe to Biologist Kenneth R. Miller in a similar debate in 2000. Behe contended that the Whale is too unique and complex an animal to be explained by the forces of natural selection and therefore the evidence leads to design. Admittedly, Miller explained that science had not yet outlined the evolutionary history of the whale. It was only three years later that paleontologists working in Pakistan discovered the fossil remains of what clearly represented not one, not two, but three common ancestors to today’s whale. It was so convincing that even Behe himself conceded to the evidence.

Perhaps the most ironic problem that stems from intelligent design is that it actually poses a direct threat to the very thing it is trying to protect, religion itself. If we accept a lack of scientific explanation as proof for God's existence, simple logic would dictate that we would have to regard a successful scientific explanation as an argument against God. Now nobody wants that! What does the discovery of the cetacean (whale) anscestor mean to a supporter of Intelligent Design? Well I guess it’s just one less job for God to do?
That's why creationist reasoning, ultimately, is much more dangerous to religion than it could ever be to science. So how does evolution threaten religion? In a strict and scientific sense, it doesn’t. And I find it puzzling and disappointing that so many would have pinned their religious hopes on the inability of science to explain the natural world. A Creationists search for God is found unfortunately in the shadows of science.

I would like to end with a quote from one of the creationist’s former intellectuals, Dr. Duane T. Gish, Ph.D., He goes on to say, “We do not know how the Creator created, what processes He used, for He used processes which are not now operating anywhere in the natural universe. This is why we refer to creation as special creation. We cannot discover by scientific investigation anything about the creative processes used by the Creator.” In light of Dr. Gish’s last sentence, what then is “scientific” creationism? I’ll tell you what it is; It is a self-contradictory, nonsense phrase precisely because it cannot be falsified. I can envision observations and experiments that would show holes in any evolutionary theory I know, but I cannot imagine what potential evidence could lead creationists to abandon their beliefs. Unbeatable systems are dogma, not science, and if they get their way they will want their dogma taught in our schools. As a scientist, an educator, and more importantly as a father, I cannot and will not accept the scientific dumbing down of our kids as we prepare them for an exciting future filled with promise, discovery and hope. We need to recognize that science is only one way of interpreting the world. By being allowed to view the world through its own lens and its own methods, that is the standard by which we judge a society, and ultimately pass on to our children. Of course, like any true scientist, I could be wrong…

The Reluctant Skeptic