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Mr. Darwin Can’t Get a Break
It can’t be easy to be Charles Darwin right now. (I mean, for reasons beyond the obvious.) A meticulous researcher and a serious and deeply respectful man, Mr. Darwin spent years carefully documenting and refining his seminal* theory of evolution through natural selection, delaying its presentation until similar discoveries by fellow British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace prompted him to go public and secure his claim as the father of evolutionary theory.
(And what is it with our British cousins, that they should produce simultaneously two men of such insight?)
Imagine for a moment if Galileo, whose encounter with the Catholic Church has been described in this fine piece by our own @Roderic, was today the target of pseudo-scientific sniping for Galileo’s enthusiastic support of the heliocentric model, and that a cottage industry of questionable academic rigor persisted in attempting to tear that theory down. Ponder a world in which the work of Isaac Newton (another big name in British science) was deemed risible by a gaggle of modern critics, despite his having discovered much of classical physics and — oh, yes — co-invented the calculus because plain old math wasn’t quite up to his needs.
Think about that, because that’s what Mr. Darwin has to put up with every single day.
Okay, there’s nothing wrong with questioning science. In fact, to do science is to question science: that’s what science is all about. But while doing science always entails questioning science, the act of questioning science is not always doing science (if that makes sense: it’s one of those p implies q does not imply that not-p implies not-q situations).
A couple of days ago the British newspaper The Telegraph ran a story about a criticism of Darwin mounted by the woke folks at Sheffield University in the UK. That story is paywalled at The Telegraph, but Breitbart is covering it here. The gist of the story is that the school deems evolutionary biology the stuff of white supremacy. The Telegraph quotes the school as writing “It is clear that science cannot be objective and apolitical…. [T]he curriculum we teach must acknowledge how colonialism has shaped the field of evolutionary biology and how evolutionary biologists think today,” and as calling for the “whiteness and Eurocentrism of our science” to be deconstructed.
It’s bad enough that Darwin’s work is attacked via pseudo-science from the right, as I mentioned recently in this piece (paywalled behind Ricochet) about the work of Stephen Meyer. Now the great naturalist is in the left’s crosshairs as well.
What caught my eye about the Breitbart piece (which was linked indirectly by Glenn Reynolds over at Instapundit) was, first, that it is about Darwin, a man I admire and with whom I share a birthday, but also that it mentioned Sheffield University. That august institution came up here recently in this piece I wrote about a quack woke geophysics lecturer at Sheffield calling for an end to the structural racism of the geoscience field. Or something.
* I have read that “seminal” is no longer considered appropriate, when discussing contributions in science. I can’t imagine why not.
Published in Science & Technology
If you mean that ID’s answers do not come from scientific inquiry because they’re not falsifiable [etc.], then just say so.
But since the answers come from arguments, don’t say they don’t come from inquiry at all.
If you’re talking about something else entirely, I haven’t a clue what it is.
This is where we’re getting somewhere. You have thought we were unclear. We have thought you were trolling. All along, the problem was you didn’t understand our definitions. We are talking about science, so we’re using the definitions used in science. You apparently have been unaware of them. So, here’s another. When someone trained in the scientific method is talking about “science,” what they really usually mean is not “knowledge” in general (the etymological root of the word science), but knowledge acquired through proper application of the scientific method.
That is why atheism is a religion. Atheism posits an unfalsifiable hypothesis, that there is no God. (You may believe it’s falsifiable, but the atheist does not.)
Again, definitions. By saying it’s not science, we know what that means. It’s quite clear to anyone who has studied science or the philosophy of science. 😜😜😜
The topic of the whole conversation is science. “Scientific” should be implied, unless one doesn’t know what science is, in which case, why are you commenting on a science thread? Which is just what we want to know about the ID people.
Did you really? I never do that. I’ve never done that on Ricochet at all.
(My wife accused me of having a trollish streak in dealing with the Left, and I couldn’t deny it. But I pointed out that I only troll them by speaking the plain truth–“Democrats banned health insurance.”)
Rubbish. I know them just fine. I just expect people to say what they mean.
Based on # 124, you apparently thought that every word in this context should be assumed to have the adjective “scientific” in front of it–“theory” means “(scientific) theory,” and “evidence” means “(scientific) evidence,” and so on.
If that‘s a rule for human conversation, I’ve never heard of it before. I would expect people to say what they mean. Especially since you and HR in particular keep referencing non-scientific perspectives; we are talking about theories and methods and standards that are not scientific, so when we’re trying to refer to the ones that are I think we should say so.
Beyond that, I can’t object to your clarity. But HR has been very unclear. Which of the following was the real point of all this? These are not the same kind of objection.
“ID is not answering any questions.”
This is just plain ignorance of ID actually does.
“ID is not science because scientific answers always specify a physical mechanism.”
That’s not Popper’s criterion of science. Or Kuhn’s, or anyone else’s I’ve ever heard of. Except HR, apparently. (Why should I accept it? Why should I even care? Do I even have time to care? Is there some reason I should try to make time?)
“ID is not science because it’s not falsifiable, and science is falsifiable.”
That’s fine. I can’t even object. (But I hesitate to agree. The first premise needs a careful look, and the second premise needs Popper to be dealt with. He’s wrong about one thing other than his falsifiability criterion, but related to it; meanwhile, the old verifiability criterion was respectable enough, and there’s always Kuhn to consider.)
Um, no. Anyone who’s actually studied philosophy of science knows that Popper’s fasfifiability criterion for science is not the only game in town. And there’s worse about Popper than that.
And very different claims have been made in here than just that one.
Six more and Herman’s Hermits might need to get involved!
I grew up dreading that song as a little kid back in the 60s.
I’m with SA on this one. I rarely understand what he’s talking about, but I have never once found him to be trollish, or even troll-adjacent. He’s always come across as a true gentleman and a scholar.
[Sigh.]
What am I doing wrong?
Thanks!
Trying to insult scholars and gentlemen, are we?
Well, carry on. I’m sure most of them deserve it.
Or one more, and we can throw a religious war in France.
It probably takes one to suspect one. And I’m from* the Lower Peninsula.
* For some values of “from.”
Being too precise where nobody else is and not precise where everybody else is.
That sounds like a case of other people not knowing they need to be precise. Perhaps a case of people not knowing what they don’t know.
Well, if that’s all it is, Socrates himself did no better. Maybe I’m doing ok.
When have I ever done that?
Earlier in the thread.
I see what you did there. ;)
I don’t know how popular Lucifer rebelling against Shub Niggurath would be though.
I don’t. I’m completely lost.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Three_Henrys
*le sigh*
My best guess is that this was an allusion to you meaning “scientific X” sometimes when only saying “X.” Sometimes, but not always.
That’s not me not being precise when others are. That is others not being precise when they should be.
“Oh would some Power the gift give us, to see ourselves as others see us.”
Or not. Could be very, very scary.
These conversations where HR tries to make some kind of metaphysical statement about God get tiresome because HR doesn’t qualify evidence as scientific or otherwise because he (judging by these discussions) doesn’t believe there can be evidence of anything outside scientific.
And SA firmly believes there exists evidence of God, even if it doesn’t fit HR’s narrow definition of “evidence”.
By HR’s definition of evidence, you will never be able to prove the person of Stina wrote on Ricochet. Not to any degree that stands the test of time at the very least. You can prove scientifically that a distinct human existed, but testable and repeatable through time does not link that distinct human to the words on this site. The words on this site are not scientific evidence of some person’s existence any more than the Odyssey and Iliad are scientific evidence that a man named Homer wrote them.
We rely on other types of evidence besides scientific. And HR will argue that this can be deduced scientifically and SA will push back on whether it is really science or may even say it is by an obscure philosopher’s reckoning. But testable, repeatable, falsifiable can not prove everything we know to be true. Because not everything worth knowing is limited to science.
Mwa ha ha ha ha!!!!!
You know what Karl Popper actually says about this?
Call him an obscure philosopher if you like, but Popper is Mr. Falsifiabilty himself. He’s the reason people say “Science is falsifiability!”
Popper says science gives us NO KNOWLEDGE AT ALL that a theory is true. It just, from time to time, gives us knowledge that some theory is false.
He said that because he never got past this supposed problem. If all real evidence is scientific evidence, science is dead as a form or source of evidence.
But has HR said that? I am quite sure he has said that intelligent design is not science, etc., etc.; religion is not science, etc. But those are different claims.
He’s obscure to me :p I was introduced to philosophy of science in a middle school homeschooling curriculum. While I love philosophy, I have not spent time developing intellectual rigor on the subject. I’d like to, but there’s a lot I’d like to do and landing on one pursuit is getting difficult.
Well if it isn’t testable, repeatable or falsifiable it isn’t science then. HR made that clear enough.
I didn’t say it was. And HR’s definition is far from the only one available.
My criticism is that there’s more than just scientific evidence by which we gain knowledge. He may agree or disagree, but he’s fooling himself to think his view represents a settled view.
He’s not arguing for scientific supremacy. He is arguing that intelligent design isn’t science. He’s limited himself to that clear argument.