Hokum-Balderdash Assay

Was reading a Live Science article when I noticed the following advert on their page:

Ironic. Pathetic.

(PS. The ad may or may not be there if you visit the page. Keep reloading the page and it might surface.)

 

Geriatrician Dr. Gary Sy is one doctor who's all over the map--with his adventures and vast territory more than encompassing WooLand. An hour ago he was on the air again for his weekly radio program. As always he starts by dispensing sensible, science-based advice: eat right, avoid fat, avoid foods that increase blood uric acid levels, exercise, etc. Then, as if by protocol, he caps it all by prescribing woo: "Most of all, have faith in the one above." I nearly cursed out loud when he said that. Faith?! In which one? The Flying Spaghetti Space Monster? He would've been closer to home had he said, "Above all, take a placebo."

This doctor is really one who's gone to the dogs. Minutes later, as I was going about my business in the kitchen, I suddenly hear him talking about the year of the Fire Dog. As in, What! This meathead is also into Chinese zodiacal signs?! Sy goes on to read from some literature about what's in store for the various signs. He tells us that 2006 is not too good a year for those born in the year(s) of the Rabbit, healthwise that is. He then prescribed some commonsensical health tips for all the bunnies out there. On to the year of the Dragon, and he advises all the reptiles to quit smoking, get some exercise, etc. I didn't even bother keeping glued to whatever else was going to gush out of Dr. Gary Feng Shui Sy. I just couldn't stand it.

I really pity his audience.

Might just fire off a letter to this "breathtakingly inane" doctor.

(And no! Dr. Sy, you can't conjure up a backdoor claiming you're doing some form of psycho jujitsu, using the public's belief in Chinese astrology or feng shui to more effectively prod your (geriatric) audience to become more health conscious. That won't wash. Such means doesn't justify your end. Inculcating erroneous/useless/potentially dangerous beliefs is unethical, doctor.)

Donald U. Wise, emeritus professor of geology at the University of Massachusetts, composed the song "Marching Song of the Incompetents" in honor of ID creationism.

The song, to the tune of "Battle Hymn of the Republic," goes like this:

My bones proclaim a story of incompetent design
My back still hurts, my sinus clogs, my teeth just won't align
If I had drawn the blueprint I would certainly resign
Incompetent Design!
Evo-Evo-Evolution. Design is but a mere illusion
Darwin sparked our revolution. Science shall prevail!

All together now! "My bones proclaim a story of incompetent design..."

More from Judge Jones' decision:

The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.

With that said, we do not question that many of the leading advocates of ID have bona fide and deeply held beliefs which drive their scholarly endeavors. Nor do we controvert that ID should continue to be studied, debated, and discussed. As stated, our conclusion today is that it is unconstitutional to teach ID as an alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom.

Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.

(Kitzmiller v. DASD, all emphases added)

Inane is the word. The School Board's decision was Inanely Designed, Deliberated, and Deployed.

God is for Suckers now spells this extinct/exterminated species "Intelijunt Desine." We Pastafarians say Ramen! to that. (Hmmm, I wonder if "Desine" has anything to do with sine and cosine trigonometric functions. A DEconstruction of sorts perhaps?)

(Thanks to Heathen Dan's comment and Anne's heads up I've been motivated to at least browse the entirety of Jones' 139-page decision, which now doesn't look that long given the huge font and double spacing).

In his 139-page decision, Judge John E. Jones III concluded, "The proper application of both the endorsement and Lemon tests to the facts of this case makes it abundantly clear that the Board's ID Policy violates the Establishment Clause. In making this determination, we have addressed the seminal question of whether ID is science. We have concluded that it is not, and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents."

All over in Dover

10-mile wide asteroid just slammed into Eden. Will the friggin American creationist dinosaurs be mutating into their fourth kind anytime soon? As biologists say life is tenacious. While this meme is a damn hell of a weed.

Till the next round.

Seems ID creationists have been crying foul. If SETI and the search for E.T. intelligence is considered legit why not their search for His Royal Architect? Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute explains why not:

[T]he credibility of the evidence is not predicated on its complexity. If SETI were to announce that we’re not alone because it had detected a signal, it would be on the basis of artificiality. An endless, sinusoidal signal – a dead simple tone – is not complex; it’s artificial. Such a tone just doesn’t seem to be generated by natural astrophysical processes. In addition, and unlike other radio emissions produced by the cosmos, such a signal is devoid of the appendages and inefficiencies nature always seems to add – for example, DNA’s junk and redundancy.

...

[T]he champions of Intelligent Design make two mistakes when they claim that the SETI enterprise is logically similar to their own: First, they assume that we are looking for messages, and judging our discovery on the basis of message content, whether understood or not. In fact, we’re on the lookout for very simple signals. That’s mostly a technical misunderstanding. But their second assumption, derived from the first, that complexity would imply intelligence, is also wrong. We seek artificiality, which is an organized and optimized signal coming from an astronomical environment from which neither it nor anything like it is either expected or observed: Very modest complexity, found out of context. This is clearly nothing like looking at DNA’s chemical makeup and deducing the work of a supernatural biochemist.

(via NSCE)

Behind the headlines ... intelligent design as a field of inquiry is failing to gain the traction its supporters had hoped for. It has gained little support among the academics who should have been its natural allies. And if the intelligent design proponents lose the case in Dover, there could be serious consequences for the movement's credibility.

(Intelligent Design Might Be Meeting Its Maker)

 

 

Third species of creationism going the way of dinosaurs so soon? Guess it's time to mutate ... again.

Ben Goldacre's Guardian article slices and dices the latest desperate attempt by homeopaths to shore up their dilutional medicine. The meat's in the last four paragraphs.

Back in August this year professor of ecology and evolution Jerry Coyne treated us to a great primer on Darwin's theory and the evidence for it. He also provided a history of creationism in the United States and the various legal battles in connection with it. He told us that Intelligent Design is the latest species of creationism, created in order to get around US law regarding separation of Church and State. In the second half of the article he analyzed the current ID brouhaha in the US and critiques in detail the ID book Of Pandas and People, delivering fatal blows to ID and creationism.

In view of our progress in understanding biochemical evolution, it is simply irrational to say that because we do not completely understand how biochemical pathways evolved, we should give up trying and invoke the intelligent designer. If the history of science shows us anything, it is that we get nowhere by labeling our ignorance 'God.'

Today we have another Coyne making mincemeat of ID creationism:

Intelligent design isn't science even though it pretends to be.... If you want to teach it in schools, intelligent design should be taught when religion or cultural history is taught, not science.

--Rev. George Coyne, the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory

I was about to say how I admire Jesuits for their intellectual acumen, having attended Jesuit schools and having had one Jesuit professor with two PhDs in physics. But I'm no longer doling out praises to the Society, realizing how even this double PhDer couldn't think clearly at all about his belief in his fairy tale deity, and noting how the latter Coyne made me frown after making me jump in joy.

God in his infinite freedom continuously creates a world that reflects that freedom at all levels of the evolutionary process to greater and greater complexity.... He is not continually intervening, but rather allows, participates, loves.

Coyne does have hard evidence for that, just as evolution theory has overwhelming supporting evidence in its favor, right? The above ain't just pure speculation on his or his church's part, right?

It's Kansas again, the state wallowing somewhere between the 13th and 14th century (now, was that CE or BCE?). It's trying to make up its mind what the word "science" means:

The changes in the official state definition are subtle and lawyerly, and involve mainly the removal of two words: "natural explanations." But they are a red flag to scientists, who say the changes obliterate the distinction between the natural and the supernatural that goes back to Galileo and the foundations of science.

The old definition reads in part, "Science is the human activity of seeking natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us." The new one calls science "a systematic method of continuing investigation that uses observation, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena."

Adrian Melott, a physics professor at the University of Kansas who has long been fighting Darwin's opponents, said, "The only reason to take out 'natural explanations' is if you want to open the door to supernatural explanations."

Gerald Holton, a professor of the history of science at Harvard, said removing those two words and the framework they set means "anything goes."

...

The scientist's job description, said Steven Weinberg, a physicist and Nobel laureate at the University of Texas, is to search for natural explanations, just as a mechanic looks for mechanical reasons why a car won't run.

...

One thing scientists agree on ... is that the requirement of testability excludes supernatural explanations. The supernatural, by definition, does not have to follow any rules or regularities, so it cannot be tested. "The only claim regularly made by the pro-science side is that supernatural explanations are empty," Dr. [James Robert Brown, a philosopher of science at the University of Toronto,] said.

(Philosophers Notwithstanding, Kansas School Board Redefines Science)

And they are empty because they cannot be tested/falsified and therefore can neither be confirmed nor disconfirmed. When something cannot be dis/confirmed, then it is useless to furthering our understanding and knowledge--which is what science is all about. Supernatural explanations summarily put an end to further investigation--they're "science stoppers" (philosopher Michael Martin's term). When one claims, "God did it!" there is no way to test whether that is true or not. There is no condition for which it can be falsified, since various illicit ad hoc explanations can be posited ad infinitum to explain away any potential confuting results. Thus, it is an empty statement. At most "God did it" can merely be a belief--a lame one at that. If we were to accept that phenomenon Y was brought about supernaturally, then there is nothing more to investigate. There would be no science. And yet if humanity had accepted that explanation for lightning, the sun's heat, hurricanes, earthquakes, and anything else that was once mind-boggling, we would not have understood what these phenomena are. The search for natural explanations has been the most successful epistemic avenue for humanity. The supernaturalistic boulevard, around for thousands of years, has led nowhere epistemically. There is not a single supernatural premise that is known to be true (any supernatural belief is premised upon the existence of the supernatural--yet this root premise is not known to be true, it has not been empirically shown to be true; therefore, any conclusions derived from it cannot be known to be true)

As Holton above states, what the Kansas redefinition is foreshadowing, is an anything goes runaway train. And one heck of a sorry farce should it come to pass. This resurgence of creationism--which has evolved into the third of its species--is a blight that will be remembered by future Americans as yet another blackhole in their country's intellectual history.

 

Shoot! It just occured to me. I live on the corner of Kansas St.! Hmmm, I wonder how many years I'll spend in my new  address if I take down the street signs.