Sunday, January 16, 2005

shame on Boston Legal Ouch! Just finished watching the ABC show "Boston Legal" and saw Candice Bergen defending Intelligent Design in a courtroom as a reasonable, scientific alternative to evolution (with, ironically, original Star Trek-heart throbbing captain William Shatner at her side!). The judge in the case sounded like the ideal mouthpiece for the ID crowd, fortunately very different from the real life judge who recently behaved much more sensibly in a real courtroom in Georgia. The fictional judge managed to string together an incredible amount of nonsense in a few phrases toward the end of the show, suggesting that the US was established as a Christian nation (it was not, as any serious historian will testify), that lawsuits to remove nativity scenes from public grounds are "ludicruous" (they are not, given the obvious violation of the separation of Church and State), and that scientists are dogmatic when they claim that intelligent design isn't a possible "explanation" of life on earth (they don't claim that, they just say that it isn't a scientific explanation, and therefore it doesn't belong to a science class). As most real-life Americans do, the fictional judge completely confused science and scientific evidence on one hand with belief -- even majority belief -- on the other: it is undeniable that most Americans believe in a god, but this is irrelevant to the teaching of evolution, since science doesn't work by democratic vote! Wow, it's hard to imagine a worst service to public understanding of both science and religion than tonight's episode of Boston Legal. Shame on whoever wrote the silly episode. 11:07:42 PM    comment []

creation, evolution, and the nature of science Well, here is yet another defeat for creationists, this time handed out by a federal judge whose understanding of science is better than that of many science teachers (at least in Cobb County, Georgia!). Despite the subtly biased reporting by CNN (notice that the creationist position is detailed at the end of the article, which contributes to making a more lasting impression on the reader), the issue is clear: to claim the of evolution is "just" a theory, not a fact, is to play on the difference between the technical and common meanings of the word "theory" (a well substantiated body of general statements about nature in the first case, a more or less arbitrary hunch in the second case), thus favoring a particular religious interpretation of what ought to be taught in public schools and how. Also notice that, contrary to an apparently impossible to eradicate creationist belief, the theory (in the technical sense) of evolution is most definitely NOT a theory of how life originated. The latter is a matter for biophysics and biochemistry, not evolutionary biology. Evolution (in the neo-Darwinian sense) started after the origin of life on earth, and cannot therefore possibly be invoked to explain such origin. Nor do scientists ever use the theory for that purpose! 8:23:24 PM    comment []