The Logic of Yogic Discovery

Judging by Schrodt’s comment of “I am not, repeat, not accusing the authors of fraud”, I’d guess that his sentiment was much the same as yours.

Still, perhaps my imagination is limited, but to what extent can ID proponents possibly meaningfully enter a scientific debate? If would be difficult at best to demonstrate that it is necessarily impossible for some structure to have arisen as a consequence of evolution; merely to say that something is improbable at first glance due to something like complexity, specified complexity, or what have you is to say very little at all.

Scientific method != statistical hypothesis testing. (Life-science areas that rely most heavily on it, like epidemidiology, are the parts of biology with the least solid results.) Science is not a matter of applying statistics to any random asinine hypothesis that happens to come along. Discussions of statistical methodology have essentialy zero to do with the reasons why ID is crap.

If all you have is a hamemr…

Sigh. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”.

That’s the missing piece in focusing purely on methodology. Let pass somebody’s trivial experimental paper which is probably a statistical artifact, because hey, nobody’s reading it anyway, and they need the publication record, and suddenly, other people want to know why the morphogenic field of tranquility produced by chanting “Om” isn’t the same as, e.g., drug effectiveness testing, because they both have statistics.

Look, why is it so hard to deal with the fact that if someone sounds like a snake-oil peddler after you’ve already seen a dozen snake-oil peddlers, people don’t want to waste their time? It’s not orthodoxy, it’s lack of patience for slogging through yet another crank or religious fanatic’s fantasy, where you know they aren’t going to believe the refutation anyway.

taion,

As one of the few regular commenters who has some sympathy for ID, I will try to answer your question, “to what extent can ID proponents possibly meaningfully enter a scientific debate?”

It isn’t easy. The basic issue is defining which questions can be answered scientifically, what a scientific answer involves, and what a scientific answer excludes.

The big question is, “Can a scientific explanation rely on an intelligent-but-unknown actor?” Secondarily, how can you figure out when that explanation is needed?

If I asked you to prove that your car was (or was not) designed by people, how would you do it–assuming you had a junkyard full of cars, but lived in a Stone-Age society?

You say: “…I will point out that the fact that the “natural experiment” methodology in social sciences can deliver the result that transcendental meditation stops wars, ought to give a hell of a lot more trouble to the fans of Steven Levitt and “Freakonomics” generally than it in fact does.”

This strikes me as a cheap shot at something you were already skeptical about. I’m sure there is a literature debating whether natural experiments of various sorts provide believable evidence. Why not cite some of it? (Or contribute to it!)

Why not just be honest and say: “even though this paper provides evidence of a quality level that I would usually accept, I am so skeptical of their hypothesis that I will require more evidence to be convinced on this issue.” It’s not really an unreasonable thing to say. After all, you can “prove” a false hypothesis (to the 95% level) 1 out of 20 times you try. If that reasonably approximates your view (and I am interested to see if it does), why hide behind attacking the entire category of methodolgy?

Uh, no, #4 is about the limitations of statistical methods. (It’s a bit better if you can use a Bayesian rather than a frequentist approach, in which case you can properly incorporate the implausibilty of silly hypotheses in your priors.)

By the way, I detest that word “materialism”, it’s really completely meaningless. If something has an observable effect on the world, what does it matter whether you call it “material”? And if it doesn’t have an observable effect on the world, what does it mean to say it “exists”? But a frequentist hypothesis test supposedly showing that some utterly implausible effect, for which there is no remotely credible mechanism, meets some leve of “statistical significance”, is merely a parody of science and belongs in no journal except perhaps Annals of Improbable Research. There’s a hell of a lot more to scientific methodology than that.

Also, who put the bloke there?

Ray,

It may not explain, but it can still be accurate–that’s the problem.

If I try to explain the remains of Inca temples in Peru as the result of geology, I’ll have a lousy explanation. If I explain them as something people built, for not-well-understood purposes using not-well-understood technology, I would consider that a better explanation–even if it still leaves most of my questions unanswered.

If you explain Incan remains as something that people built, you can make some predictions based on that. You would expect to find pottery in there, for example. There might be distinctive patterns found on the pottery and also on the walls. You would expect to find similarities between those man-made things and other man-made things in the same period and area. You’d expect to find middens. You’d expect to find lots of human bones nearby.
If your explanation for the Incan temple is “God made it pop into existence”, you don’t have a research project.

No, daniel, you’re reading through your peculiar cognitive lenses and not getting what I wrote. 1) Mere statitistics without a reasonable supporting mechanism is in no sense “evidence” in science. Many epidemidiologists have discovered this to their cost; all too many supposed causal links, that had nothing but statistics on their side. have been proclaimed that later had to be abandoned, often at the cost of fueling public cynicism about medical science. 2) Science is not about statistically testing any old observation statement whether or not it connects in any way with the existing body of knowledge. In epistemology I’m a fan of Haack’s “crossword puzzle” model of knowledge- candidates for new knowledge must both be supported by observation and cohere in significant ways with existing knowledge. 3) Repeatedly attempting to pin the useless word “materialisim” (are quarks “material”? Are strings and branes, if they turn out to exist?) on anyone who points out your outsider’s defective understanding of how science is done, even after your target has disavowed that tired and shopworn word, is just a cheap rhetorical move not an argument, and is unworthy of you.

Steve and Ray,

To avoid derailing the thread totally, this is my last post on ID unless daniel requests otherwise.

Here’s my basic criteria for proving/disproving ID as an explanatory theory for the universe or some of its features.

The same criteria and technique has to give the right answer in three other cases:

Stonehenge
A society with only Stone-Age technology studying a junkyard
The Giant’s Causeway (in County Antrim)

I don’t know if it is still true, but for a long time there was a striking statistical correlation between the behavior of the U.S. stock market and the winner of the Super Bowl (for you World Cup fans, the national championship of the sport known in the colonies as “football”). The stock market moved up when the winner was either a member of the National Fottball Conference or an original member of the old National Football league (before the merger between the old NFL and the old American Football League) and moved down when the winner was an American Football Conference team not originally part of the old NFL (some teams, Pittsburgh significantly, were old NFL teams that were placed in the AFC).
The statistical correlation was quite robust, but there was no conceivable causal mechanism. From 1967 on, the US stock market rose most years. Until the recent run by New England (AFC and not old NFL), most of the dominant teams in the different eras were either NFC (Cowboys, 5 wins, 49ers, 4 wins, Packers, 3 wins, Giants and Redskins, 2 wins each) or old NFL (Pittsburgh, 5 wins) teams. And in some years, the NFC team played an old NFL team (Minnesota-Pittsburgh, Baltimore-Dallas), so the winner was guaranteed to meet the criterion for a stock market rise. Presumably, this dominance was based on football-related trends, not the state of the economy or investor expectations.
The point is that it is always possible, after the fact, to find a robust statistical correlation between X and some chosen Y. Without a reason to believe before the fact in a causal relationship between X and Y, the correlation is just a freak stat. Do we really need to investigate the hypothesis that cancer causes smoking?

Daniel, “neutral” does not mean exemplifying the old wheeze about having a mind so open that your brain falls out your ear. And in experimental science one anyway does not publish results from a single experiment that hasn’t been repeated, even when the effect under consideration actually has a plausible mechanism, and even when the definition of the outcome is a lot less subject to fiddling than is the case here. Finally, the criticisms found just in that abstract by Schrodt should be more than sufficient to get a paper rejected by any respectable journal.

There should have been “number of” before “doggie generations”, sorry.

They may not be wolves, but they will be “generic” dogs of a fairly uniform type, who as such are not likely even to attract any particular attention from the martians.

Daniel: No reason to “rule them out,” just no reason to take them as particularly useful. After all, it might actually be true that some genetic factor that predisposes one to cancer also makes one more likely to smoke, but I wouldn’t recommend that funding agencies put money into it until there’s a plausible story beyond the numbers.

s/insignificant/significant/

Who designed the designer?

bi,

OK, I’ll add falsifiable to my list. Now, explain how you use it in the junkyard case. (Or, alternatively, explain how you’d apply it to evolution at the life/non-life boundary.)

Steve,

“Who designed the designer” is pre-mature unless you know more than “there was a designer.” One can, for example, identify early stone tools as designed and made by intelligent creatures without knowing exactly which of the early humanoids made them–much less how those humanoids got to that location.

Samchevre: Again, this is my point!! Most scientists think that modern evolutionary theory (that is, include genetics, modern theories about geology etc. as supporting evidence) IS AN EXCELLENT description of how the life we see on Earth came to be so diverse and complex, even if it doesn’t have a huge amount to say about life’s ultimate beginnings. So there is no need to bring in ID to explain anything. I will, however, credit you with being up-front about you belief that evolution is a “just-so story”.

To take your stone tool anology: this is bad, because we already know that primitive humans existed, and as others said above, where we find stone tools, we often find other evidence of early humans (or at least intelligent animals). If we found stone tools with absolutely no supporting evidence of life, then it would be bad science (not to mention logic) to immediately suggest a “designed origin”: the onus should be to see if there exist other explainations, or other supporting evidence. A good example might be crop circles: some people see evidence of ET-intelligence behing them; I prefer to more prosaic explaination of bored artists.

I don’t have any sympathy for actually-existing ID theory and while I am a Christian, I don’t think there’s any good evidence for supernatural intervention in evolution. If there were, fine, but so far there isn’t. Okay, disclaimers out of the way–

It often does sound like some of the anti-ID crowd want to win the argument by definition. If you don’t like samchevre’s junkyard in the jungle analogy, it’s easy to change. Let a plane crash in a remote jungle, or have a 16th century galleon be smashed in a storm at sea, with all hands washed overboard, and all their belongings, and let it run aground on the coast of Australia. It’s made of wood and it is like no piece of technology the locals have ever seen, so are they supposed to conclude it’s a weird kind of tree? Would it be a rule of science that you don’t postulate ridiculously advanced technology that is indistinguishable from magic, when there’s an example that has just washed up on your beach?

The reason for dismissing ID is simply because none of their examples of things conventional evolutionary theory can explain are all that impressive. Darwin spoke of complex organs which exist in one species solely to benefit another species (with no reciprocal benefit provided as a result) as an example of something his theory couldn’t explain. So far nothing like that has popped up.

Suppose they had run the experiment the same way, but instead of meditating had drunk six coca-colas a day, or avoided stepping on sidewalk cracks, and the same change in terrorist activity had been observed (as, I believe, it would)? Would it still merit publication? Is there any hypothesis so lacking in a plausible causal mechanism that statistical significance shouldn’t be a sufficient hurdle?

“In fact, back in grad school, I asked Orme-Johnson to send me his dataset for the SIR study of DC. He gratefully obliged. “

I meant to say “graciously” but actually, I remember him seeming quite happy that someone, even some anonymous grad student, was taking the study seriously enough to request the data. I doubt he was grateful, however!

Donald Johnson, SamChevre: I for one am willing to leave open the possibility that it’s a weird kind of tree. But I don’t see any need to quickly jump to any conclusion — after all, would it be wise to demand that Egyptian hieroglyphics be completely deciphered before the discovery of the Rosetta stone?

As evidence for the “galleon is a weird kind of tree” hypothesis, an aborigine might exhibit a way to grow galleons from galleon seeds. As evidence against it, one might see an actual bunch of people constructing a galleon. (And if seeds can grow galleons, anyone who suggests that the seeds were acted upon by an undetectable intelligent force to produce a galleon should get whacked.)

loren king: in a way, that’s Ray’s point.

“after all, would it be wise to demand that Egyptian hieroglyphics be completely deciphered before the discovery of the Rosetta stone?”

I don’t think that is a good analogy. I think you could plausibly have argued that hieroglyphics were intelligently designed and had meaning long before we understood what that meaning was.

Sebastian Holsclaw: actually I was referring to the need to jump to conclusions based on incomplete information.

OK, so I’m going to try tying this discussion back to the original post.

The problem is that observations of phenomena with no known, material causal mechanism are problematic for scientists. They could be statistical artifacts (as many of us suspect the Maharishi study is). They could be observations of a not-yet-studied causal mechanism (like the frog legs). They could have a perfectly good explanation, that we have only partly worked out and that there are still alternatives to. (DNA as a trait-producing mechanism, given that we are now learning that the same DNA can be differently expressed). And they could be observations of something that is real, but not in our calculations. (God, aliens, another civilization)

The problem that some of us have is that some scientists want to say that only some of the explanations for these phenomena are worth studying; that is, they want to define “science” to exclude what others see as likely explanations. In the short term, that makes their arguments unconvincing. In the long term, whether their arguments are right or not, it won’t much matter; regardless of what the establishment thought 1000 years ago, that the Earth orbits the Sun is clearly established today.

“Medical science and observation led to the use of anti-biotics well before the mechanism that antibiotics use was understood.” Uh, no. Antobiotics were discovered as bacteriocidal agents. Long after the germ theory of disease was discovered. Not knowing HOW the compounds killed bacteria does not change the fact that there were sound scientific reasons for believing that a bacteria-killing compound would be useful in treating bacterial infections. In this case it’s the mechanism of disease-fighting that’s relevant. Bad example.

Sebastian: “I’m not convinced that this is a particularly good objection. Much of the first step is observation of what happens—long before you can provide a good expanation of why it happens.”

Sure, but I think it’s a bit weird if you’re characterizing scientific observation as somehow unburdened by theoretical and philosophical commitments (theories and commitments that good scientists are up front about, of course, and willing to reconsider).

And even if science did proceed from theoretically and metaphysically untarnished observation (a point I’d dispute as a general characterization, but it has some plausibility for initial theorizing, and lets grant it more generally for a moment), in the Maharishi case your point probably isn’t especially applicable, because they do come to their observations with an elaborate metaphysical account of the mechanisms they claim to be testing (reality is fundamentally various manifestations of consciousness in a substratum of pure consciousness, etc). I’m all for observation leading to interesting stuff to be explained later, but if you’re going to claim that reality is fundamentally consciousness and that TM gives the tools to hack that reality, then I’d prefer to see experiments and quasi-experiments that test specific elements of the TM hackers toolkit, not treat the mechanism as a black box.

“It is almost trivial at this point to describe the actual interactions of gravity—but unless I’ve missed something lately there isn’t a great explanation of the mechanism by which two masses interact (they bend space-time? that’s nice but shouldn’t Loren and Steve ask for an explanation of how they do that?).”

Actually, I often ask my physicist friends exactly these sorts of philosophical questions, and they are surprisingly eager to speculate based on the latest work going on (but then, several of them are mathematicians rather than experimentalists, so perhaps they are really metaphysicians at heart?)

“Medical science and observation led to the use of anti-biotics well before the mechanism that antibiotics use was understood.”

Certainly, but a good scientific approach then keeps hammering away until we really understand the mechanisms at work. Otherwise, we might rest content with explaining antibiotic effects as balancing the woods and vital energies of the body. The initial observations are helpful, but alone they don’t help us figure out whether competing theories (traditional Chinese versus western molecular-organic models, for instance) are better or worse as explanations of how things work in the body. To do that, we need more observations tailored to distinguishing between competing hypotheses about mechanisms and processes.

Steve,

You’re missing something. I agree, “Get out of jail free” cards simply can’t do any useful work in science. But partial explanations CAN do very useful work for science–they can help us figure out what not to look at. To use Donald’s galleon example, knowing that “it was built” will keep us focused on the question “how do we build one?”, instead of pursuing fruitless experiments in how to grow galleons.

Steve,

I’ll have to pass on “current examples in biology”. I’m a mathematician/accountant with an economics background, not a biologist; the last biology class I took involved looking at an earthworm through a microscope. I think the thought experiments are helpful, because we know what the right answer is. (They are like test cases in a computer program–you wan tto make sure your program gives the right answer when you know what the right answer is, before asking it for answers when you don’t.)

You see, that’s just it- ID proponents and sympathizers have nothing of use to offer working biologists, and very few of them even have much actual knowledge of biology. Their two intellectual leading lights are 1) a biochemist who hasn’t done any real research in years, who has repeatedly lied through his teeth about the current state of the scientific literature by claiming there is no published research where there is actually piles of it, who likes to talk about mousetraps (his version of galleons) more than about living organisms, and who made a complete ass of himself in Dover; and 2) a mathematician (who, remarkably, is extremely prone to making embarrassingly trivial mathematical errors.) The ID movement simply has nothing at all to offer to biologists. It is a propaganda movement pure and simple, cooked up to advance Johnson’s “wedge strategy”, with the hope (which turned out to be delusional)of escaping the First Amendment demise that previously overtook “creation science”. You’re wasting your time paying attention to this crap.

Steve: “Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New ‘Intelligent Falling’ Theory”

Not to drag this even further afield, but who can forget the compelling evolutionary theory of gravity? (once fruit fell in all directions, but only those fruits that fell earthwards could pass along the “direction of fall” trait …).

“in the Maharishi case your point probably isn’t especially applicable, because they do come to their observations with an elaborate metaphysical account of the mechanisms they claim to be testing (reality is fundamentally various manifestations of consciousness in a substratum of pure consciousness, etc). I’m all for observation leading to interesting stuff to be explained later, but if you’re going to claim that reality is fundamentally consciousness and that TM gives the tools to hack that reality, then I’d prefer to see experiments and quasi-experiments that test specific elements of the TM hackers toolkit, not treat the mechanism as a black box.”

Ahh, but now we get to the crux of the issue from a scientific perspective. You don’t like their explanation (which is fine) so you want to deny their observations. It is perfectly fine to say that their explanations don’t adequately explain their observations. That can lead to great science. But that provides absolutely no reason to deny their observations.

Once again, I would be shocked if their observations turn out to be other than non-reproducible statistical artifact. But that is just my personal prejudice about how I think the world works–not a valid scientific judgment.

sebastian: “now we get to the crux of the issue from a scientific perspective. You don’t like their explanation (which is fine) so you want to deny their observations.”

But I’m not denying their observations (I’m not exactly sure what you mean here, but I’ll take you to mean ‘deny the existence of’). I’m denying that their observations support their explanation in the way they suggest.

And it’s not that I don’t like their explanation — this isn’t a matter of personal preference. Indeed, I personally think it’d be really cool if consciousness were the ultimate stuff of reality (whatever that might mean) and that we could hack it with our minds (that’s the part that sounds cool to me). I simply don’t think the TM folks have done the conceptual and experimental gruntwork needed to make scientific sense of that causal model, and to test it with the tools they use (the urban intervention studies).

But it does provide good reason to doubt their observation.

Absolutely. But I don’t agree that statement their observation is doubtable precludes it from being publishable. This is their interpretation of an observation. If it’s so clearly wrong, it can be refuted easily in another study: via replication, unpacking the black box, etc.

Where I think the disagreement here lies is that I think that it’s perfectly acceptable to publish an opening gambit with spectulative interpretations that others can work on. Whereas others here believe that a published article must be the authoritative and final word.

Where I think the disagreement here lies is that I think that it’s perfectly acceptable to publish an opening gambit with spectulative interpretations that others can work on.

Well, as I think about this more, it seems to me that the cross-purposes this discussion has at times gotten into arise in part from the fact that standards on this point quite frankly differ greatly among fields, certainly in the natural sciences (I note that the specific topic of this discussion more properly pertains to the social sciences where I’m really not in any position to judge.) When a field is relatively undeveloped and/or inherently has a very high speculation quotient- let’s pick evolutionary psychology as an example that periodically gets bounced around in this forum- stuff not much better than “TM prevents wars” actually does get published a lot. In more mature fields there’s so much really solid stuff to keep up with that there’s just not much room for far-out speculation either in the journals or in practitioners’ heads, a phenomenon to which Loren King has repeatedly and rightly alluded above.

“If you have glasses that accurately can see the color of people’s underwear, that is clearly a scientificly interesting observation even if your explanation for how it works is clearly wrong. If that is reproducible it would be great to figure out how it really works.”

Quick thought experiment for you, Sebastian. On the tube into work tomorrow, this guy comes up to you, and says Peter Pan flew into his bedroom last night and sprinkled pixie dust on his glasses. Now their magic powers allow him to see that your underwear is white. Do you
a) think ‘Lucky guess’
b) run away very quickly, or
c) think “Fascinating! I must bring this man to my lab, so I can study his glasses further!”

If the argument here is just that Behe and Dembski haven’t presented anything convincing, I’ve got no problem with that. My objection was to claims that even in principle ID couldn’t be science. Well, if intelligent aliens (or God) really had tinkered with the evolution of life, it’d be a little silly to define the nature of science in such a way that we couldn’t acknowledge what they’d done.

Now for a slight threadjack–on the subject of the anthropic principle, a couple of Bayesians named Bill Jefferys and Michael Ikeda claim that the fine-tuning argument actually tends to refute supernaturalism. I suspect this is wrong, but wasn’t able to convince Jefferys (or myself) in a usenet discussion I’d be too embarrassed to link to even if I went and found it. Briefly, if I’m not butchering it, their argument is that if the physical constants allow life to exist, it’s what you expect in a naturalistic world, but God could have created an arbitrary one instead and still allowed life. So the fact that the physical laws allow for life supports naturalism, not supernaturalism. It’s given a Bayesian gloss. I don’t think they correctly state the logic of the fine-tuning argument. I think the fine-tuning argument is that the meta-laws, so to speak, that gave us the physical constants most likely would have produced non-life friendly constants and the fact that the constants turned out to be life-friendly means Someone stacked the deck. (Or alternatively, there’s a huge number of parallel universes and we pop up in the life-friendly ones.) Jefferys didn’t agree and I could be wrong–for that matter, it’s been a few years since the argument I had with him.

The address is here–

http://quasar.as.utexas.edu/anthropic.html

I’d try linking it, but I messed up last time–gotta check and see what I’ve been doing wrong.

I don’t understand your question, samchevre. If you’re asking, is there something in biology that biologists are scratching their heads about saying, “wow, we really don’t see how eveolutionary biology could account for this”, then the answer is no (understanding that the amount of detailed explanation currently available will differ greatly for different questions. Thank goodness, since it would be very sad if everything was solved and science was over!)

Wnat to understand why the hooha over ridiculous ID crap is so frustrating to a biologist? Incredible progress, almost unimaginable even 30 years ago, is being made in fields like the evolutionary genetics of animal development, yet gets an infinitesimal fraction of the public attention that the IDiots command. If you want to see how infinitely more fascinating that stuff is than any thought that will ever occur to William Dembski in the next million years, try a book I’ve plugged before, Endless Forms Most Beautiful by Sean Carroll.

sebastian writes: “It is perfectly valid science to say “I have seen ‘W’ seemingly cause ‘X’ and I have no idea how it might do so”.”

Only if the observation has been made under controlled conditions that remove other possible causes.

If a bunch of TM people are meditating, and they observe a large metal cylinder lift into the air, they could say that their meditation seemingly caused the cylinder’s levitation. But it might be because the cylinder was a helicopter.

sebastian writes: “If you have glasses that accurately can see the color of people’s underwear, that is clearly a scientificly interesting observation even if your explanation for how it works is clearly wrong. ”

It isn’t interesting if the “experiment” were conducted by guessing the color of the underwear of elementary school boys, where a 95% accuracy level would be easy to obtain by just saying “white” all the time.

Do the glasses work? No – the “experiment” was poorly designed by using participants who generally wear white underwear, making it easy to guess.

Samchvre, I tried again to make sense of your question, and what you don’t seem to get is that “narrowly evolutionary theory” is not some well-defined separable part of biology. This is like asking a chemist “can you explain the reactivity of this molecule precisely using ‘narrowly’ organic chemistry but no quantum mechanics?” Evolution and the rest of biology are no more separable subjects than organic and quantum chemistry are nowadays. Evolution is as much involved in making sense of everything in biology as QM is in chemistry. Conversely, nobody aimagines that you can get the answer to that chemistry question by asking a physicist who has never studied organic chemistry.

Sorry, Steve–I’m not trying to be confusing here.

My question is–what does the contested portion of evolutionary theory tell you that is valuable in the real world of biology? ID proponents don’t contest genetics, so far as I know–so telling me that genetics is very valuable isn’t an answer.

I’m not asking for an answer that doesn’t involve genetics (or, in your example, organic chemistry). I’m just asking for an example where genetics isn’t the entire answer (since no one is contesting genetics).

I simply don’t think the TM folks have done the conceptual and experimental gruntwork needed to make scientific sense of that causal model

But (and I think this serves as an answer to everyone else who made the same point), how can they be expected to, when the game is so obviously rigged against them? Of course it makes no sense for the yogis to throw good money after bad. They’ve been shut out of the scientific process, and so a question that could have been settled through science has been settled through non-scientific means. That’s Steve Fuller’s point I think.

I’d also add that a very great deal of evolutionary psychology (and behavioural economics, and a few other worthless subfields I could name) appears to have benefited from the opposite effect – they’ve found it a lot easier than they should have done to get published, meaning that a number of theories which actually wouldn’t necessarily do all that better than TM or intelligent design, have acquired an altogether spurious plausibility.

Samchevere, the answer to #100 is “pretty much everything”, evolution being the indispensible central explanatory principle of biology just as QM is of chemistry.

The answers to #101 are many and various but just to pick two examples there is no reason in “Bill’s biology” why organisms should fit into a consistent hierarchical classification system of exactly the sort that would result from descent with modification, nor any explanation in “Bill’s biology” for certain quite arbitrary biochemical similarities among all organisms (like the genetic code) without invoking common descent. (So much so that Behe, the only actual biologist trying to play this game, has pretty much conceded not only common descent but when pressed, even much else in evolutionary theory- only where there is what seems to him a hard problem, i.e. an opportunity to sneak some theology in, does he selectively invoke his get out of jail free card. That’s not science. He is really just a theistic evolutionist of a particularly exaggerated and incautious kind, because that’s as far as any biologist can possibly go, even one trying to make a name for himself as a proponent of “ID”.)

For much much more info I invite you to visit talkorigins.org where you will find a goldmine of information on ID and other forms of anti-evolution, and equally on real evolutionary biology. There’s just no substitute for knowing a considerable amount of biology and I can’t really teach you a freshman biology course here!

D2: They’ve been shut out of the scientific process, and so a question that could have been settled through science has been settled through non-scientific means. That’s Steve Fuller’s point I think.

That’s exactly Fuller’s point, but it’s also exactly what’s wrong with Fuller’s point.

There may be science that’s feasible but never gets done because of prevailing social forces or prejudices in science. Perhaps if we saw some better examples than ID & TM it wouldn’t seem like Fuller is just letting in the crazy.

OK, just to generalise the problem slightly more here’s an example from the human, um, ‘sciences’. Rosemary Crossley (reasonably well known as the author of Facilitated Communication Training)had an article accepted for the European Journal of Communication Disorders dealing with the case study of someone whose expressive language problems improved markedly with a touch on the shoulder and who could, having speech, discuss this.

Crossley concluded that “The case does, for example, seem to demonstrate that language difficulties remediable by touch do exist.” but that “One of the problems with many critics is that they seem to want the explanations to come before the observations.” As the editors had eventually realised that the piece was controversial they added a series of commentaries (I’m mildly surprised that JSTOR didn’t adopt this generally recognised method of washing your hands of the controversy) in which one said that “Crossley offers no justification as to why a touch of a finger can have the effect… … we would like at least some of the explanations to come with the observations.”

To which Crossley retorted that
“I have not attempted to provide explanations for phenomena for which I have no explanations. However, theories are not essential accompaniments to observations. Apples fell before Newton provided us with an explanation. In the affairs of this world, and in our science, we must take into account both facts for which we have explanatory theories and facts for which we have, as yet, no such theories. The absence of a justificatory theory (or, indeed, the possible incorrectness of a justificatory theory) should be no barrier to the acceptance of a fact. Language disorders that are susceptible to remedy through touch exist. I appreciate any and all attempts to explain these phenomena, but their existence does not depend on my ability to account for them.”
I hope that counts as a new hare.

That’s why I say that if you want to disprove ID to my satisfaction, your methodology needs to work in the other cases I mentioned.

Excellent approach and one I shall cherish in using to drive people crazy when discussing ID. So, prove to me that God/Aliens/Whatever don’t exist…

Also, I can’t resist mentioning this (though it is shameful for me to know it), you may benefit from reading the introduction to Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard who clearly knew a thing or to about science and religion – though to be fair, should anyone have to read such a thing? Anyway, in it, he discusses his aim to write a science fiction book rather than a fantasy. His distinction, drawn from hazy memory, was to take an example of a character needing a sword. Fantasy: poof! the sword appears by magic, no further explanation necessary. Science Fiction: some extrapolated mechanism based on science. Either way the character gets a sword.

samchevre, you simply have to know a lot more biology than you do know in order to see why this ain’t gonna happen. If interested, again I recommend you read some of the excellent articles at talk.origins (and talk.design), and also hang around the Pharyngula blog (P.Z.Myers’s place)- PZ is very good at providing clear lay-level summaries of recent work in evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo, as it’s known.)

Now, I’ve been polite, but this business of people who by their own description know next to nothing about science “sympathizing” with one or the other anti-science line of bullshit really does get my goat. Has it occurred to you that it’s pretty damn arrogant to express such “sympathies” in the absence of any knowledge and understanding of what you’re talking about? Do you really think you can come up with questions that thouands of scientists working across many years haven’t thought of? Frankly, it’s just anti-intellectualism of the rankest variety.

113 a response to 111, obviously.

On the Crossley case study, linked to by Chris, I find the ‘observation before explanation’ rejoinder, while not unreasonable, to be a bit simplistic.

Sure, apples fell before Newton, but it isn’t as if there haven’t been widely held superstitions and metaphysical beliefs floating about for centuries, about why objects fall toward the earth. No doubt somewhere in the mists of evolutionary time, some early homo sapiens saw fruit fall, and maybe had the glimmerings of curiosity about it, absent anything we’d recognize as a causal story, but by the time anyone was systematically cataloguing the apparent facts of the natural world, I suspect there was already a significant background of familiar conjectures and suppositions that guided observations (with a desire either to confirm or challenge received wisdom). Many of those suppositions turned out to be bad explanatory models (cough – Aristotle), and were replaced by better ones once people did start to think more carefully about how things work.

That isn’t to deny the value of a scientific division of labour: no one should have to do all the work. But it’s a bit annoying when someone who publishes a case study (that just happens to support a clinical technique they endorse) cries foul when people ask for some sort of plausible causal story about what might be going on. (On the other hand, it seems as if at least some of her respondents may have been just a wee bit condescending, so perhaps this is something specific to this field, and to this exchange in particular.)

Just one more remark: In a way, repeatability a.k.a. reproducibility also applies to singular things such as Stonehenge. While there’s only one Stonehenge, there are lots of people who can observe Stonehenge, so the “observability” of Stonehenge is itself repeatable. Can one say the same for Claude Vorilhon’s aliens?

Loren: fun idea on statistical methods course. We could do it!

Leaving aside the mechanisms issue, there’s a question of whether this is good empirical work, and if so whether it has implications for the policy experiment literature like that of Levitt (among very many other economists). It doesn’t seem to me to be particularly close to the natural experiment literature, really.

A quick critique of the paper, taking it very seriously. First: the time series model seems to include only a few weeks, which is quite frankly not long enough to develop a decent model. Second, their policy intervention variable (which actually seems to have been number of practitioners, rather than on or off?) is likely to be affected by violence on any given day itself (so not exogenous, though they do discuss this possibility). Third, there’s no control by comparison to another area or areas (eg: does meditation in Jerusalem affect violence in Korea?). They don’t even do a proper statistical comparison of Jerusalem v Lebanon, although their theory suggests no effect on Lebanon until numbers of practitioners are high enough.

There are a few recent papers in economics about issues re policy experiment studies (Bertrand/Duflo/Mullainathan on correlations in series across time; and Conley/Taber on small numbers of policy changes). But in most cases they are way more considered than this one. Most of the economics studies, including all of Levitt’s work, at least use other states as controls, and typically have more than one policy change (in the abortion case, different states changed policy at different times, and identification is from those timing differences).

Also, as Loren points out, it’s probably not particularly costly to run (true) random experiments of TM, which is certainly not the case for, say, abortion laws. So lets have more of them, I say!