On 1/4/07, jabberwock@poetic.com <jabberwock@poetic.com> wrote:
>
> We must tread with care on matters of religion here, but I can't help being reminded of the excellent talk given recently by Richard Dawkins at a Virginia university. His new book, like all his books, praises Darwin and science in general and somewhat demeans the recent 'intelligent design' theory. Many students at the Southern University stood up to counter his ideas but he held his ground well and actually had overwhelming support.
Well, that's the least to be expected -- "intelligent design" can't be
called a scientific theory by any measure, it can't be falsified. For
those unaware, ID is an idea that says "some things look too complex
to have evolved, therefore there was a creator that did them".
The problem beeing, even if you imagine that's true (and so far, they
don't have any examples that can't be explained by plain old
evolution), it only push back the problem (if there's such an
"intelligent creator" where does he/she/it comes from ?) and is anyway
completely useless as a scientific theory as it doesn't predict
anything (eg when would you know you saw an example of an intelligent
creation and not simply a complex result of evolution ?) and can't be
falsified (ie you can't find any counter-example that ID proponents
would accept, as they can redefine what's "complexity" all the time).
It's a thin-veiled creationism lookalike. The worse thing beeing they
try to pass "ID" as a scientific theory -- which it's not -- and that
there is a "controversy" among scientists -- which there's not.
Therefore you hear way too much about them, sadly.
-- Nicolas Roard -- This is the NewtonTalk list - http://www.newtontalk.net/ for all inquiries Official Newton FAQ: http://www.chuma.org/newton/faq/ WikiWikiNewt for all kinds of articles: http://tools.unna.org/wikiwikinewt/Received on Mon Jan 15 02:59:37 2007
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