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October 19, 2005
the intelligent design of thunder
Professor Michael J. Behe argued yesterday in a Pennsylvania courtroom that the phenomenon of thunder is far too complex to be explained away by unsubstantiated theories involving low pressure areas and ionic discharges and as such strongly suggests that other explanations, perhaps involving a “thunder god” of some kind, should be made part of the curricula in our public schools.
Biologist Kenneth R. Miller of Brown University had argued in earlier court testimony that such systems are easily explainable using the scientific method and that the circumstances giving rise to thunder are really quite ordinary. He had planned to continue his testimony later this week but was stoned to death for being “witchbreed” while catching a quick lunch at Applebee’s.
The issue arose when the school board in Dover, Pennsylvania issued a requirement that science teachers begin presenting material regarding intelligent design that casts doubt on the theory of thunder as it has been taught in classrooms for generations.
“If they can’t fully explain the origin of the leader pre-discharge or the resulting implosion of the plasma column,” lamented one Dover parent, “then they have a responsibility to let the kids know that.
“They call it the ‘theory’ of thunder for a reason you know.”
Opponents of intelligent design see ulterior motives. Noted one sociologist who wished to remain anonymous as he was still cleaning lamb’s blood off his door, “It’s a backdoor attempt to get the teaching of Norse mythology into our public schools.”
Adherents reject such criticism. “All we want to do is see to it that our children are getting the whole story and not just the secular Odin-rejecting humanist side,” said one Dover PTA member. “Sure, maybe thunder is a byproduct of the rapid ionization and expansion of air, or maybe it’s the result of mystical emanations from Thor’s mighty hammer, Mjolnir. Who’s really to say?”
Meanwhile, similar efforts are underway in Kansas to bring into question whether proton-proton fusion is capable of overcoming the Coulomb force in the interior of the sun without the intervention of an intelligent agent of some kind.
“Where do people think the permeability of a vacuum and the electrostatic force vector come from?” said one oracle mystic/political activist.
“We just think it’s time to bring Apollo back in the classroom where he belongs.”
J.
October 19, 2005 at 11:22 AM in Current Affairs | Permalink
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» Intelligent Design from Quotulatiousness
Planet Moron reports from the front lines of education: Professor Michael J. Behe argued yesterday in a Pennsylvania courtroom that the phenomenon of thunder is far too complex to be explained away by unsubstantiated theories involving low pressure are... [Read More]
Tracked on Nov 8, 2005 3:13:09 PM
» Intelligent Design from Quotulatiousness
Planet Moron reports from the front lines of education: Professor Michael J. Behe argued yesterday in a Pennsylvania courtroom that the phenomenon of thunder is far too complex to be explained away by unsubstantiated theories involving low pressure are... [Read More]
Tracked on Nov 8, 2005 3:14:33 PM
Comments
Great post.
But I won't see you in hell, because, you know. Only one of us will be there.
Posted by: Christopher Fotos | Oct 19, 2005 12:11:38 PM
You mean, "Hades."
Posted by: planetmoron | Oct 19, 2005 7:58:26 PM
Without impuning any views on the two people who have appeared thus far in the comments section, I find the "mainstreams" of both the science and the snap-o-god's-fingers camps insufficiently humble.
The smarty-pants side says "it's straight Darwin" and doesn't say "because we're smart and you're from Oklahoma", (but they do think it}. But 'Darwin' in inverted commas, seems to me to mean threee things. I think only two of them make sense and that too few people on the smarty-pants side of the fence think through their ideas hard enough.
(i) evolution happens. check. species improve themselves with a bias toward adaptations which help them fit in better with their environments, and new species evolve in stochastic bursts -- as do new gena and phyla (one of which means "larger than the other", or else it's the other one which does). Fossil record, blah blah blah. Yup, it's incontrovertable.
Then there's (ii) evolution favors successful adaptations, by a process which can be described as "natural selection" or "survival of the fittest". check. again. Time and again things get better. Lizards, birds, people. The blind albino fish growing up in the lightless cave is clearly the one that has traded in the most clutter (eyeight, pigment) for the best equal chips: extreme sensitivity to sound, pressure and electromagneticism.
The tricky Third Aspect of darwin in inverted commas, is (iii) the mechanism of variation is *random* mutation. For some reason, it's very important to some people to insist that so many zillion rolls of the dice had happened over time that the simple criteria of "living to breeding age", together with "being sufficiently attractive that a critter of the other gender is willing to engage in reproductive activity with you" and "producing viable offspring" are sufficient to explain why so many species produce so many variants to take advantage so precisely of their environments.
Now, when I went to school it was a fact that a monk named Mendel or Grendel or something had studied lima beans and concluded that you have blue eyes because an eternal series of 50:50 chances had favored you with the recessive blue gene over the dominant brown gene. Really. Saying what I just said got you an "A" on a paper. But my own personal eyes are brownish if I've been indoors or under clouds for days, green if I've been outside all day, and aquamarine green if I've been on the ocean all day.
What a lucky break. A zillion 50:50 chances produced eyes which just happen to change color coincidentally with changing light conditions. That must be because fellers with eyes like these couldn't get laid more. You can watch a flounder change colors to match the bottom he's over in a few seconds. A flounder is a really flat fish that swims on its side and hugs the sea floor. You can see a sand-colored flounder on a sandy bottom and watch it swim to a mottled bottom of pebbles, rock and sand. You can watch the fish change its colors to mottled rock pebble and sand colors. You can play with math in your head to think of the number of 50:50s to come out right for a fish to accidentally be able to blend in exactly with the coloration of his environment.
Meanwhile, you've got your handofgod crowd insisting that whatever mumbojumbo science reason those smarty-pants people cooked up there's a much better explanation in a 5,000 year old book. God snapped His fingers and it came out like this because He knew darn sure how it ought to come out in order to prduce such loveliness as Me.
Now, here's where the God Squad seems insufficiently humble. The science guys these days are saying that the odds aren't that bad after all. You take your laws of the Universe -- which valences cause which atoms to bond, what positive and negative mean, the whole shebang -- and you run it forward and it doesn't necessarily lead to us but it does necessarily lead to really highly organized Life because there's a bunch of simple science to guide it. Protease reactions happen to like to happen in the order in which they happen because atomic structure happens to tell them to.
And your Dobson response seems to be "no way. our God isn't smart enough to do all that. he just sort of snapped his fingers and POOF we was here".
They found recently that damaged DNA can fix itself over a couple of generations of some organism. That makes it a self-organizing intelligence in my book. Just because we've "mapped" it doesn't mean we get it. "Yes, in chromosome 13 we are 'xyakphzysqla12' which is why we are different from the chimps."
Feh!
Posted by: Michael | Oct 20, 2005 1:55:01 AM
