One recurring theme I have going on here is that creationists aren’t necessarily stupid (although some are, very much so) — their problems are ignorance and arrogance. Those two traits reinforce each other; the ignorance allows them to think their pitiable store of knowledge is adequate and allows them to arrogantly assume they’re competent, while their arrogance drives them to refuse to consider correcting their ignorance. It’s an ugly spiral that locks them into what are genuinely stupid opinions.
Case in point: the creationist “For the Kids”, or FtK, who makes little drive-by comments here, at my daughter’s blog, and various other sites on the evolution/creation pseudocontroversy. There is now a whole, entertaining thread dedicated to FtK at Antievolution.org. She doesn’t talk science, she doesn’t understand it, but she sure likes to pretend that she’s knowledgeable. This one comment where she tries to belittle biology is a good example.
Biology certainly isn’t rocket science, and it doesn’t take a genius to understand it.
No, it’s not rocket science, but then rocket science isn’t rocket science either, in the sense of an extremely difficult subject beyond the ken of mere mortals. Both are difficult disciplines that require a fair amount of study to grasp; they may not require geniuses, but they do require some intelligence and a lot of hard work. FtK hasn’t done any of the work, and her arrogant presumption that she can master this ‘easy’ subject precludes her ever learning more.
She’s not alone, either. The only member of the intelligent design creationist cabal who has shown even the vaguest signs of comprehension of basic biology is Behe, and even he views it through the distorting lens of his creationist baggage and a lack of knowledge of the specific sub-discipline of biology, evolution, that would directly address his arguments.
Rocket science: F=ma
As self proclaimed engineer and biochemist in the comments of a previous post, I worked for years designing and making microelectronics (ICs). That is not rocket science either. But as a discipline, it requires hard work to grasp all the important material and to develop the competency such that a company would trust me to build a product that would work and make money.
Any field of study requires such work and effort. It is silly to assume you could read a few overview articles/books and be anywhere near as competent as a learned professional in the field.
I would add that some of the leaders in the creationist movement are willful liars. There are people with the capability and access to the great works of biological science, such as Dr. Egnor, that know full well the scientific evidence for evolution. They deny it purposefully to provide a safe haven for the less knowledgeable to also deny it in favor of silly literal view of biblical god mediated creation. These people lie to provide umbrella of cover; they somehow think that their religious objectives justify the means of their immoral behavior.
Has anyone considered calling in Child Protective Services on FtK? It must be really something to self-impose limitations on one’s thought and imagination. All the delusional joy of riding a bicycle complete with the perfect safety that comes from said vehicle being stationary, in the basement, with a HEPA-filtered fan providing ersatz wind. Whoo-hoo!
Allow me to quote a Great American who once said:
“For the Kids
AKA FtK A particularly contemptible creationist who specializes in smarm and ooze.”
Yes. Nailed it. She posted on the ATBC site, complained about the language, and that we made fun of her and her ID buddies, but never even a sciencey post from her, let alone an actual science post. However, she DID post that she reads “peer reviewed papers” – she just never actually proved it. Sort of like me saying that I once batted over .400 and won the MVP award, without actually proving it.
I say my story has more crdibility than hers.
Ginger Yellow, F=ma won’t always work in rocket science, because the rocket is usually burning up a signigicant portion of its mass. You need Newton’s original formulation, F = m dp/dt = m (v dm/dt + a).
I am not a rocket scientist, but I play one on TV.
Godammit, I screwed up the formula.
F = v dm/dt + ma.
More coffee!
“Those two traits reinforce each other; the ignorance allows them to think their pitiable store of knowledge is adequate and allows them to arrogantly assume they’re competent, while their arrogance drives them to refuse to consider correcting their ignorance. It’s an ugly spiral that locks them into what are genuinely stupid opinions.”
FtK didn’t used to be that way. She used to openly admit that she lacked the background knowledge necessary to evaluate the scientific issues. For instance, over on the KCFS discussion forum, she once wrote the following in response to one of my posts:
“I’ve thought about some of those issues myself, and have read some books and articles that may answer some of your questions. But, I don’t have the ability to relay the info. to you or debate the issues (gosh darn it, I really need to go back to school and take some advanced science classes).”
I miss the old FtK. At least she was able to openly admit to her lack of scientific knowledge.
Right. “Rocket science” is mostly engineering.
Rocket science is easy.
Go have a look at Larry Moran’s post on blood clotting. There are at least two parts of the process that he glosses over with a mention that maybe he can go over it later.
For each step in the process, there are parts where proteins move, attach, detach, or change shape. Each of these steps could also invoke a detailed explanation.
And for each step where something happens, you’ve got to get energy to the site, and that process is fairly complicated.
Then, each part of the process, each complex molecule, has to have been transcribed, and the process of going from stored DNA to a protein is very complex.
And of course the DNA has to be passed on and the organism in which the blood clotting has to develop the tissues (blood, etc.) that are involved.
And so on and so forth.
To completely explain every detail down to the nuts and bolts, the manufacture of every part, the development of every procedure, etc. etc. for putting some guys on the moon … to go from ores, naturally occurring liquids and gases, to an Apollo rocket and all of it’s support machinery, staff, and procedures …. is probably about an order of magnitude simpler than an equivalently detailed explanation of blood clotting. And that’s just blood clotting.
As an actual rocket scientist, I feel qualified to comment. Rocket science is just physics puttin’ on airs. Biology is much harder, which is why, after high school, I ran screaming to the cool, logical embrace of a discipline with lots of math.
Cyan, I don’t think your units work out. Besides, if you want to calculate the force generated by your rocket engine you only need F=ma, since you are most likely accelerating a known amount of mass out the back-end. But yes, in order to calculate the rocket’s resulting acceleration you need to include the rocket’s changing mass, in which case the original Newton equation is F=dp/dt not F=m dp/dt.
Neither am I rocket scientist, nor do I play one on TV.
It’s all to much “Haaard werk” (as Bush likes to say) for For The Kids.
Everything is “Rocket Science” to her. She makes that obvious.
As a layman, I don’t dispute that biology is a difficult subject. I know it is.
However, I completely agree with Sean Carroll who states in his latest book, The Making of the Fittest, that evolution, natural selection, descent with modification – ie, the basic ideas of the theory of evolution – AND the evidence for the same is more than readily comprehensible to any intelligent, reasonably-educated person.
Please don’t make the mistake of confusing “layman” with “ignorant creationist.” I don’t pretend to have expertise in any science but I can easily see the commonsense lapses in logic in “intelligent design” creationism. That is what makes the arguments of Wells, Luskin, and Egnor so shocking. They are profoundly stupid arguments.
That is the tragedy of “intelligent design” creationism. It is wasting everyone’s time.
Perhaps Greg Laden is right about the relative complexity of blood clotting v. rocket engineering, I really couldn’t say. But the real heavy lifting is not even the mastery of the descriptive details, but the creativity and inference skill required to discover those details. Creationists are really just a subset of the scientifically illiterate who haven’t got a clue about the latter.
I did catch that mistake, Steve_C, and I posted a correction immediately below. Of course, in the correction, I screwed up the spelling of my own screen name.
I also regularly step on rakes, causing the handle to spring up whack me in the face.
Yeah, I thought about making the case that biology was much, much more complex and interesting than mere glorified physics and engineering, but then I thought that would make me look arrogant, so I didn’t.
Cyan, SteveM:
We care much less about F than we do about delta-V (though the F term is contained in the derived terms of the rocket equation.)
delta-V = g*Isp*ln(mr)
Delta-V is the velocity change of the spacecraft, g is the acceleration due to gravity, Isp is the specific impulse, and mr is the mass ratio (initial mass to final mass.)
When I say something isn’t rocket science I am usually referring to the extremely low tolerances and exacting quality of the math/physics that must be employed, for example, to calculate a desired trajectory. It refers to the quality of the work and in such case biology and all other sciences must and generally do have those qualities when used by a competent person. I usually don’t use it when referring to a scientific discipline. But, creationism on the other hand is certainly not rocket science or any othe type of science for that matter.
Some examples,
I read the bible (twice) and it certainly isn’t rocket science. I studied catechism in school and it certainly isn’t rocket science. I saw some preacher on TV (briefly as I flicked through the channels) expounding on his biblical interpretations and it was a big, steamy pile of… (not rocket science).
Did you just call Behe knowledgeable? I must say, that’s quite a shock.
No one is more ignorant or arrogant than David Berlinski, of course:
And another thing. It is easy to understand. Anyone can become an evolutionary biologist in an afternoon. Just read a book. Most of them are half illustrations anyway. It’s not like studying mathematics or physics, lot of head splitting stuff there.
http://www.idthefuture.com/2006/03/an_interview_with_david_berlin_2.html
What I’m getting at is that there is a whole slew of “experts” out there that know little more than FTK who tell her that she’s read a book, so she knows as much as an evolutionary biologist (the others do so less explicitly than the egregious Berlinski). Now it’s obvious that Berlinski did become an “evolutionary biologist”, to the extent that he understands it at all, in an afternoon, hence the puerile comments he makes about it. But that’s the “challenge” that we’re met with, you know, the challenge that makes us call them idiots because we don’t have any response (well, none that they can understand, however sad that may be, since we try to dumb it down enough for their “experts”).
I don’t know if Behe really does know biology as much as PZ suggests that he does. You’d think that if he knew much he’d at least be more intelligent about what the terms “machines” and “factories” mean outside of his literalistic industrial understanding of them. Don’t forget that biochemists don’t have to learn much biology, really, just the sort of basics that an uninterested student can learn for a couple of years and then largely forget.
They’re probably even more ignorant of philosophy and its relationship with science than they are even of biology. The fact that they can’t even understand that a claim without evidence (and evidence is not, as they think, produced by knocking down rival theories) is idle speculation, means that they’re fundamentally incapable of understanding science. The trouble is that neither biology nor “rocket science” (well, there is science in rocketry, in any case, no matter that most of it is engineering) is science to them, for they don’t have a grasp of what science actually entails.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/35s39o
There’s kind of a curious dynamic at work among many of the rank-and-filers like FtK. There’s ignorance and arrogance to spare, sure, but I think there’s also a line of (specious) reasoning that goes as follows:
1.) Evolution is false and creationism is true
2.) Since “creation scientists” refute evolution, they must know more than evolutionists
3.) Since I am familiar with (or parrot) creationist arguments, I therefore know more about biology than evolutionists.
As PZ says, though, they’re too ignarrogant to know just how little they know, and they don’t realize just how dumbed-down and flat-out wrong creationists are about… well, just about everything. Their view of biology is suitably belittled, and it leads to dummies like FtK believing that “man din’t come from no monkeys!” is about at the level of sophistication of modern biology.
It also leads to particularly dim (though entertaining) trolls like “Dr. Michael Martin” at Panda’s Thumb, who think that their Perfect Knowledge allows them to credibly impersonate scientists. You know, give a little added authority to their arguments. And it’s not really a lie, is it, because surely highly knowledgeable scientists hold the creationist position; and such a scientist would surely say these things if he were here, right?
Just my suspicion, anyway.
And another thing. It is easy to understand. Anyone can become an evolutionary biologist in an afternoon. Just read a book. Most of them are half illustrations anyway. It’s not like studying mathematics or physics, lot of head splitting stuff there.
Well, also, they have to say stuff like this, to help make it so that people will take ignoramuses like Dembski, or, worse yet, Dave Scot seriously when they bloviate about science. If they can convince the rubes that anyone can ‘master’ evolutionary biology in an afternoon, it levels the playing field for the doofuses that litter the ID/C side.
All part of a whole wingnut/Christianist program of redefining expertise out of existence.
Yeah, I thought about making the case that biology was much, much more complex and interesting than mere glorified physics and engineering,
Sure, but that’s also why biology remains a less mature science than most of physics.
And another reason not to make that point is the fact that getting a knowledge of the basics of evolutionary evidence is not nearly so difficult as “rocket science,” or the complex and ingenious work of biologists. If they simply had open minds and an eagerness to learn, rather than a great desire to insist that their ignorance is a truth that we’re unwilling “to admit” (do note that they often more or less admit that any simpleton can grasp ID’s “arguments”), they really wouldn’t have much trouble understanding why biologists accept evolutionary theory.
Indeed, evolutionary theory simplifies biology. It’s not as simple as the simplistic ID view of it (everything’s complex and unpredictable, but that’s just an irreducible fact of biology, due to the inscrutability of the “designer”), of course. However a good lay understanding of biology could be had by anyone who cared to study biology and its core concepts. From FTK to Behe, they appear unwilling to either to study or to accept the major unifying and conceptually simplifying theory in biology (some will accept evolution, but only non-causally, thus without any inherent predictivity or unity).
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/35s39o
There’s alot less explosions in biology versus rocket science.
Re FtK
Ms. FtK is ofter found over at Red State Rabble expounding her incredible ignorance and whining every time somebody who knows something makes her look foolish.
Re Berlinski
Dr. Berlinski has, in the past, lied about the fact that his PhD degree is in philosophy, not in mathematics. This was the subject of a thread over at Rosenhouses’ blog several weeks ago. In response to my assertion as to his lack of veracity in this matter, he actually responded in a comment claiming that he never professed to have a PhD in mathematics. This claim was totally discredited by myself and several other commentators.
In my own “thank your gods, whoever they are, that I’m not a rocket scientist” moment, I posted my response to this thread over on “Wells misinterprets Hox genes.” So I’m copying it:
They sound like Monty Python’s Inquisition: Their problem is ignorance–No, their problem is ignorance and arrogance…. Their problem is ignorance, arrogance, and a refusal to face facts…. No, their problem is ignorance, arrogance, a refusal to face facts, and trotting out the same old debunked claims. No, wait! Their problem is ignorance, arrogance, refusal to face facts, trotting out the same old debunked claims, and a habit of calling other people liars without being able to prove a single lie… Among their problems are…
Don’t forget about these!
(Isn’t part of rocket science trying to minimize the explosions?)
Carolyn, thanks for the formula!
Arrogance and ignorance are a complimentary set of traits. The ID “lights” are not stupid, but because of their arrogance they only choose to see everything through the filters of the traits that fits their weltanschauuing.
Glen, you said “a good lay”
ftk probably needs one.
hehhehheh…
Sorry for my immaturity. I’m on serious painkillers right now after getting my wisdom teeth out.
tristero: Regarding the basic concepts being easily understood or conveyed to the general audience.
I hear this all the time from my colleagues. It was a central theme (along with PZ Myer’s assertions about creationists being dumb/not dumb, etc.) at the Cafe Scientifique a few weeks ago.
But I have a problem with this.
A well informed, well prepared, thoughtful and skilled scientist and/or teacher can do what you say: They can make the case and pretty much educate anyone on the basics … the very important basics … and you can watch this happen and you can see that it goes well.
But it is also possible to do the same thing, essentially, a distillation of the important key points, understandable and memorable and all that … but do it in such a way that one or more of the concepts gets mucked up in a way that may matter only a little now, but a great deal later when certain other concepts are encountered.
It’s like explaining basic electronics using a water flowing through pipes model: Current is speed of the water, volume is amount of water, resistance is size of pipe. That works great until you get to inductance!!!!! Then you need leaking pipes that can “unleak” …
For instance, the linkage between natural selection and “reproductive success” almost always gets you in trouble. RS is used as a stand in for “fitness” but it simply is not the same thing as fitness at all. (yes, yes, they are related but in a complex way). Most of these simple explanations use RS because it is easier, but it is essentially incorrect.
So, yes, I agree with you but in fact most of the time this … teaching evolutionary biology in an understandable way to the average person … is done, it is not really done correctly. Also, I feel that the sense people have that it can be done “easily” leads many instructors to allow fundamental errors to creep in.
Hehe…
During Charles Darwin’s education at the University of Cambridge he became involved in a national craze for the competitive collecting of beetles. On one occasion in 1828 he stripped bark from a dead tree and caught a rare beetle in each hand, then saw another new species. With the habits of an egg-collector, he popped the beetle from his right hand into his mouth and grabbed the other with his free hand. The beetle which he had placed in his mouth, likely a bombardier beetle, “ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt [his] tongue,” forcing him to spit it out; he lost the beetle, as well as the third.
I had the great fun of visiting the U. of Minnesota’s Veterinary Medical Center during its open house last Sunday in St. Paul, and while touring a facility that treats over 35,000 small animals a year in addition to the large ones, I stopped a while to look over the results of a recent first-year vet student physiology exam that was posted by the student lounge. It was a humbling experience, especially when I realized that on one question about the lymphatic system, I had never realized what its main function was – namely, to recover proteins and nutrients from interstitial tissue. Umm, I think. I also talked for a bit with a student who was cracking a physiology book at a table with information about pet blood donation – at a place that treats over 100 pets a day, they need blood too – and appreciating how much they have to learn about biology. I would have liked to gotten a shirt for PZ at one of the student tables that read “Real Doctors Operate On More Than One Species”, and I don’t doubt that the vet med students have a much greater awareness of evolution than physicians who only operate on humans do! The creationist bozos who fling poo-poo on the science of biology hopefully will bring their pet to a vet rather than pray to God for a miracle.
I don’t pretend to have expertise in any science but I can easily see the commonsense lapses in logic in “intelligent design” creationism. That is what makes the arguments of Wells, Luskin, and Egnor so shocking. They are profoundly stupid arguments.
I tried to make this point yesterday. You don’t understand evolution? That’s okay.
But if you can’t identify a circular argument and understand why it’s invalid, there is something wrong with your brain.
Can’t you make the same argument about teaching a simplified model of any concept? The simplification introduces error, and when you learn of a more advanced model you have to correct the error.
Even a simplified mental model of the way evolution works is more than adequate for dispensing with most creationist arguments.
Cyan,
My pleasure. :) It’s rare I have anything to contribute around here, since that Second Law BS has already been thoroughly refuted, and my biology knowledge stops short at the high school level.
P-Zed said…
I agree with this fully. Behe really does know a lot about biology. And this is why he is forced to admit that much of biological evolution is absolutely true. Ken Miller says it best in the first paragraph of his review of Darwin’s Black Box:
http://www.millerandlevine.com/km/evol/behe-review/index.html
Greg Laden,
“So, yes, I agree with you but in fact most of the time this … teaching evolutionary biology in an understandable way to the average person … is done, it is not really done correctly. Also, I feel that the sense people have that it can be done “easily” leads many instructors to allow fundamental errors to creep in.”
I agree completely. However, I’m not talking about instructors, I’m talking about self-study. If one simply reads Darwin as well as other scientists’ descriptions of what is meant by the basic notions of evolution (eg, Mayr, Eldredge, Gould, Carroll, PZ himself and others), it simply isn’t that difficult to grasp. “How incredibly stupid not to have thought of that!”
I am not, repeat NOT, agreeing with creationist ignoramuses who think laypeople can easily comprehend an evolutionary biology textbook. In fact I have one , Futuyama’s “Evolution,” and have tried to read it on and off for the past year or so. Of course, it is in many places an exceedingly difficult read.
My point is that intelligent laypeople CAN understand the basic ideas evolution, and CAN understand the evidence for it at some level of detail. We also can follow the essentials of many of the arguments within evolutionary biology, eg, regarding “punctuated equilibrium,” evo-devo, dna, etc. Can we grasp ALL of it? No. That’s not our job .
But we can certainly understand enough to know that “intelligent design” creationism brings nothing to the table worth chewing over and even debunk much of their argumentation. If Behe and Dembski succeed in (deliberately) miring us in the muck of pseudomathematics and pseudotheory, we can still understand enough of the argument to recognize genuine expertise in those who take the trouble to debunk them. Appeals to authority are not fallacious if the one appealed to does, in fact, know what he’s talking about.
“There’s alot less explosions in biology versus rocket science.”
Only because the bombardier beetle is Intelligently Designed!
Tristero:
Right. And that is I think PZ’s difference between ignorant and stupid. Ignorance can be wilfull!
Technically isn’t biology just REALLY complex chemistry which in turn is just REALLY complex physics? So doesn’t that make physics the One True® discipline?
I’m joking, I’m joking. :-)
I think it’s a mistake to assume that these Discovery Institute types are ignorant. We’ve been having the same debates for 150 years now, and their claims have been debunked over and over again.
I think we need to start with the assumption that Behe, Egnor, et al are intellectually dishonest — they lie. I don’t think it’s productive to rebut the same flawed statements over and over again. There were some great openings in the Dover trial with respect to the fundamental honesty of Creationists. (Remember the whole church-funded textbooks fiasco?) But now for some reason we’re back to attacking them for supposed ignorance.
Egnor and his ilk aren’t ignorant of evolution and science. They can’t be — the fundamental concepts have been explained over and over again. These people willfully and knowingly misrepresent science with the intent to deceive. They lie.
“In science there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting.”
—Ernest Rutherford
What did people use for a difficult subject before rocket science? “It isn’t alchemy! Anyone could do it!”
“In Ernest Rutherford there is only biology; all the rest is hot air.”
— The Onion
Mr Burns: Damn it Smithers, this is brain surgery, not rocket science!
Sorry.
HP said:
The trouble was, the school board members like “Deer-in-the-Headlights” Buckingham and Heather Geesey barely had a clue about what Intelligent Design was all about–they really only saw it as a way of bringing the Bible back into school. The highly paid “experts” brought in by the defense are the ones who took advantage of the naive Board members to attempt to advance their theocratic agenda.
Like Carolyn, I am a rocket scientist. And ‘ftk’ is right – biology is not rocket science. Don’t get me wrong, I really like rocket science. I like all the different disciplines it crosses; physics, chemistry, kinetics, strength of materials, structural analysis, and then there’s all that engineering. But it doesn’t take a genius to understand any of it, or even all of it. I’m sure it helps, but it’s not required. And to suggest that it’s harder than biology is laughable, or in this case, ignorant. There is so much more breadth and depth to the field of biology than rocket science that there just isn’t any comparison. I feel really sorry for ‘fkt’ because she missses so much of the wonder of life, but honestly, what do you do with that kind of ignorance?
What I can never get over is their refusal to make any logical accomodation to, let alone to understand, the wonders of a world they believe was created for them.
Ingrates.
Yep. After all, the vast majority of Brits and Europeans have no difficulty comprehending it. Hell, I never even met a denialist until I was in my late twenties. (Some fundie Christian Comp Sci undergrad.) And to this day I’ve only ever had two face-to-face conversations with them. (The Comp Sci guy, in fact, was relatively rational in conversation. But then there was the weirdo Evangelical Conference woman: “I don’t believe we’re descended from apes. Etc.” Me: nothing, because I was so utterly gobsmacked by her phobia about being in any way related to any other animal species. And she didn’t ‘believe in atheism’, either. Aargh.)
You want rocket science?
Lewis EB. A gene complex controlling segmentation in Drosophila. Nature. 1978 Dec 7;276(5688):565-70.
The complexity of genetic data that he sifted through and assembled into this giant cathedral is absolutely sick, stupid, and insane…
“rocket science isn’t rocket science either”
Neat.
Like Rosenthal’s comment on Paderewski;”He plays well, I suppose, but he’s no Paderewski.”
Does biology have a pons asinorum?
While it’s true that the average creationist seems to be ignorant and seems to arrogate the right to speak with authority on the subject, I think many of the more rational speakers on this subject are missing an important detail about the mistakes that the creationists are making. This simply isn’t about reason, evidence, or objectivity for them. It doesn’t matter to them what evidence we bring to the table. It doesn’t to them what they might learn in honest study of the subject matter.
To the average creationist, this is about showing loyalty through belief. The first techniquethat a child knows for aquiring knowledge is to look to his primary care-givers for opinions. When a young child sees something new, he often engages in a behavior called referencing; He looks to his parents to see how they react to the new thing. By default, we think of agreement as associated with loyalty. And it takes time for children to learn to be comfortable with being corrected in their opinions. Gracefully accepting the news that we are mistaken is something that some of us never learn to do well.
It takes a level of sophistication on ones philosophy of life to understand that there are objective ways to assess claims about the real world. It takes a certain kind of maturity stop viewing dissent against ones own ideas as insulting for the mere fact that it expresses disagreement. Creationists come from subcultures that never learn to do these two things. They never learn that evidence can be more important than personalities.
To those subcultures, this is all about taking sides. When we start to talk about evidence, they simply see it as a ploy. They’ll try to play the evidence game with us, as long as they think they might get an advantage from it, but they don’t really believe the evidence game means anything. They don’t believe it’s anything more than a game, and if it appears that they’re losing that game, they’ll announce that they’re not really losing, and they’ll try to switch to a different game.
So, for most of them, it’s not that their arrogance keeps them from learning. Rather they don’t understand that there’s more than just taking sides. If all you know is taking sides, then what possible good can there seem to be in spending years learning about the other side. We’ll never help them understand anything until we can help them get over this child-like and childish approach to assessing claims about the world around us.
Adrian
Funny story about William Dembski caught in flagrante, co-starring Casey Luskin, and with a snide comment about rocket scientists.
Casey parked in front of the Institute for Creation Research. We found Dembski chatting in a lecture room to a handful of Creationist professors, mostly potbellied men with glasses and large watches who could have been small-town sheriffs or aerospace engineers.
This is apparently as wild as it gets for Dembski. :-)
I think Adrian makes a good point. I think this mentality is the origin for the creationist strategy of trying to discredit evolution by trying to show Darwin had moral failings. After all to this someone that thinks that appeals to authority are the strongest kind of argument would think a great strategy would be to discredit an opponents authority figure. Only it completely misses the fact that we don’t really care who puts forth an arguement, only what kind of evidence supports it.
What’s odd though is this seems completely opposite to the attitude that is expressed by someone like FTK that started this thread. Creationists seem willing to give the authorities they agree with the benefit of the doubt to the point of absurdity, while disdaining any respect for someone that has become trained enough to be seen as an authority on a subject just because they disagree with person.
I’m actually in a rather unique position to comment on this, since I did a BS in aerospace engineering (AKA rocket science), did a year of MS work in it, then decided to forget salary and follow my dreams, doing my BS in biology (and I’m currently doing my MS). So, I’ve done both at the graduate level, within a fairly short space of time.
Honestly, it’s apples and oranges. Rocket science requires a load of math skills and lots of good mathematical reasoning and derivation, but biology has far, far more complexity and different levels to integrate. Comparing the two is like asking whether it’s more difficult to pole-vault or wrestle; they rely of quite different skill sets.
They can mesh; indeed, that’s what I do – biomechanics, the physics of how living things do the things they do (walk, eat, shoot spores, etc). But still, I do a lot less derivations now than in rocket sciences, and have a lot more to remember about the vagaries of different taxa.
James Wolcott calls the combination of arrogance and ignorance “condescension from below,” which is as close to perfect as a pithy statement can get.
First of all, might I highly recommend PZ, that one adopts our favorite nickname for the cretinist in question: Fthekids. :-)
Having to live with much of her spewing on the blogs I frequent (I am, unfortunately, stuck in KS for the next few years, and I like to follow/get involved in local politics), it gets old very quickly. I’m also on the Board of Directors for the Kansas Citizens for Science.
She regularly repeats the same claims ad naseum, and refuses to acknowledge anything that might show her how wrong she is.
As to the other topic, I am a rocket scientist by education (BS in Aerospace Engineering), but work in the aircraft industry. Close enough for me.
I read a lot of biological…subjects…I can rarely get through the technical papers for lack of terminology background, but I find biology way more complex on many levels than the relatively simple rocket science I do every day. Still fascinating stuff, but I won’t be going back for another BS in Bio!
Cheers.
As a not-quite rocket scientist (but physics geek), I’d like to generalize the force equation just a bit more:
F = dP/dt = d(mv)/dt = v dm/dt + m dv/dt
This neatly incorporates the rocket thrust (v dm/dt) and the F = ma (m dv/dt) terms, all falling out of one simple equation. Ain’t that cool?
xebecs: As someone who has been involved in logic education, let me assure you that the vast majority of people have to be taught about the problem of circular arguments.
Rick @ shrimp and grits: Indeed. The trick is knowing what sorts of simplifications are appropriate.
Boosterz: You may be joking, but the ideas of emergence and “crystallized accidents” refute those contentions anyway.
Gav: In my (limited) experience it was memorizing all the vocabulary. (In some later life-sciencey courses there was also the 3D aspect to physiology, etc.)
I was reading what you wrote but then I stopped because it began to bore me. But one thing I noticed is how you referred to creationists, as arrogant and ignorant but, honestly, not to be argumentative, everything you said seemed to come from the same place that you believe most of us to be at. A place in our lives where we are viewed as arrogant and ignorant. I know that God created the Earth but I am humble, or maybe just honest enough to admit that I don’t know all of the answers and I’m not going to know how all of the puzzle pieces fit together for a very long time. I also recognize, and love, that there are scientific truths that go hand in hand with God and religion and creationism. Truth is truth, universally. Whether it comes from science or God. You, believing that YOU are right and YOU have the answers, wow, what arrogance! It drives me crazy when people so easily, including scientists, believe the findings of the latest experiments. I love science. I love philosophizing and meditating on truth and the existence of all things. But science, alone in its arrogance, is a joke. The whole point to science is to disprove what is currently believed, even by those that “proved” it in the first place. Maybe I’m lazy or impatient or both, but isn’t it just easier to pray and ask for truth than to, for hundreds of years, continue to experiment and search for it? And isn’t it arrogance to say that You have all of the truth and we have none? And by implying that we are imcompetent and have a “pitiable store of knowledge”, well, that is true arrogance. Shouldn’t you be respectful of other’s beliefs and intelligent enough to know you don’t know everything, and that you too may be wrong. True humility is to know, recognize, accept and admit that you don’t know everthing and that you want and need help from others. Be careful. Hypocrasy is so unattractive.
Ginger
High school librarian and philosopher
Ginger, first show us the physical evidence for your imaginary deity. None has been shown to date that has survived scrutiny. So without a god, your whole god driven creationism falls apart.
Science work according to the evidence. The evidence for evolution is vast, over 100,000 scientific papers, and probably over a million that support it indirectly. No paper exists that directly refutes evolution, although someone who proved evolution wrong would receive a Nobel prize. Now ask yourself the right question. Why doesn’t creationism in its forms publish in the scientific literature? That is because creationism is a religious theory. Science cannot refute religion, and religion cannot refute science. But religion looks very silly if science doesn’t agree with it.
You really need to study how science works, and why it is not compatible with religion.
Posted by: Ginger | December 12, 2008
Maybe I’m lazy or impatient or both, but isn’t it just easier to pray and ask for truth than to, for hundreds of years, continue to experiment and search for it?
It was tried. It was called the Dark Ages.
Then how do you know
Judging from the path you are on, never.
such as?
And candy canes are candy canes.
in a way you’re right but you’re missing a whole bunch more
/facepalm
Not when those who hold those uninformed ignorant beliefs try to cram them down the throat of everyone else.
You can call yourself anything you like, that doesn’t make it so.