Hello all:
Apologies in advance for such a long email, but this is a fascinating
subject.
It is very hard today to find a way to accommodate both spiritual and
scientific views of the world, and to allow that each one has their
power. I am very aware that for a large majority of people, for a
large majority of human history, people have lived by non-scientific or
religious explanations. And I am reluctant to take a teleological view
of human knowledge, saying that we have gotten smarter over time, or
that we secular scientific types have more access to truth than the
rest of humanity. The best I can do with this is...if you want to
predict how nature is going to act, you pretty much want to use the
scientific method, religion has a terrible track record with
prediction. If you want to comfort a dying friend, that might be a
good time to look to the spiritual/religious side, as the scientific
approach is not very comforting.
That said, in the world of science there is an accepted set of
practices. In that world, Intelligent Design does not make it. It is
not a testable theory. But it is an altogether understandable human
urge. Last week, there was an email going around with pictures of fish
washed up ashore by the Tsunami. It was a hoax (thanks Snopes.com!),
the incredibly odd and varied fish were actually collected by
scientists over the past several years. My colleagues at the science
center and I were looking at these pictures, and we all had comments
like: "Whoever made these had a sense of humor" I think that it is
almost impossible to look at the variety of nature and not project the
idea of an intelligence at work. And for most people, that is really
fine. They are not deluded, they simply don't have the same stringent
requirements that scientists have. But if you are a scientist, it
seems to me you need to be pretty rigorous about following scientific
principles and practices. Therefore, a scientist who advocated ID as
part of their work is likely to find themselves ostracized just as if a
journalist decided to make things up. It is fine for a novelist to
make things up, but once you accept the rules of a profession, it is
predictable that you will be ostracized for breaking those rules.
A couple of other things. A friend of mine, a biologist, has been
studying a subtle and interesting aspect of this debate. He has been
asking teachers and students if they understand the distinction between
"evolution" and "natural selection." "Evolution" is a phenomenon, like
the refraction of light. Defined as change, it happens to everything
at rates that can be well predicted by the understanding of physics,
chemistry, and systems. "Natural selection" is a theory, in the
scientific sense of the term. It is the mechanism that drives
evolution in biological systems. Predictably, everyone conflates the
phenomenon "evolution" with the mechanism "natural selection.
Finally, the Hall of Science is planning a travelling exhibition on
evolution that will be led by Dr. Martin Weiss, our VP of Science. He
is working with people around the country to try to find a way that
such an exhibition could travel into geographic areas where there are
people who are adamantly and disruptively anti-science in this context.
It is a challenging project, more challenging than I could have
imagined.
Eric Siegel
Executive VP
Programs and Planning
New York Hall of Science
47-01 111th Street
Queens, NY 11368
[log in to unmask]
www.nyscience.org
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