Adumbration

A couple weeks ago I heard on Science Friday and also the Skeptics Guide to the Universe, commentaries that referred to the recent court case pertaining to teaching of evolution in the public schools.  It sounded interesting, so I looked it up on line and found the transcripts at the address noted below.

• http://www2.ncseweb.org/wp/?page_id=11
• http://www2.ncseweb.org/kvd/index.php?path=highlights/

So for the last several days, every evening or so, I found myself picking up the narrative of the trial, mostly with the Behe cross-examination, and then the final opinion delivered by the trial Judge, John Jones, US District Court in Pennsylvania.  I suppose one must be a bit deranged to be entertained by court transcripts, or perhaps there must be good transcripts that one just comes across and anyone would appreciate their significance.   In the course of this reading I was reminded of the Gish/Doolittle debate on the ISU campus (CY Stevens auditorium, maybe?), back in 1980 or so.

I picked up the trial in the middle, so there were legal foundations discussed early in the trial that I did not witness, per se, but it was not hard to pick up the flow, nonetheless.  I did not keep notes as I was reading the transcript, so if you don't want to follow the links above, you'll have to take my memory for what it's worth in what follows.  At any rate, the trial kept my attention for several points:

The lying of leaders of the school board, under oath, as pointed out by the judge in his opinion at the conclusion of the trial.  Lying about prior discussion they had regarding creationism in the apparent hope that when they just changed the terminology to "intelligent design" no one would notice.  Lying about their interest in advancing scientific discussion, when they admitted knowing nothing about science or even what ID was supposed to represent.

I was particularly drawn to the testimony of the defense expert witness, Michael Behe, who is associated with the Discovery Institute.  Michael Behe's testimony was filled with his comments to the effect that experiment and findings in evolutionary biology were either non-existent, impossible to show evolutionary explanations for his examples of "irreducible complexity", or just not convincing. During his cross-examination the plaintiffs' attorney pressed him on this point, presented into evidence a stack of peer-reviewed articles and texts, which 1) he had not read, 2) he did not think needed to be read, and 3) he believed were not persuasive anyway.  He was asked about a previous challenge to his theory, and prior admission in print years earlier of a flaw in his reasoning that he would have to address in "future work";  of course no such future work has come out of him.  His one paper in a peer-reviewed journal that even touches on his claim addressed an evolutionarily insignificant time frame and only one evolutionary pathway.  His whole foundation of irreducible complexity goes in the wrong direction, asking whether the item would function if a part was removed, while evolution starts from some prior state that was either passive or did something and is modified from there.

There area few points of humor in the proceedings.  Behe has only about four particular examples of "irreducible complexity" which he brought up time and again;  his testimony goes on for a couple days so we hear those remarks repeatedly.  The cross-examination focused on a couple of these in detail and at one point well in to it, Behe again mentioned one of the others.  This is where the plaintiffs' attorney remarks something like "I had sworn a blood oath with my co-counsel to not bring up this point again, and now you have made me do so".

The primary text that the school board wanted to introduce, "Of Pandas and People", has a darkly amusing aspect.  Plaintiffs found earlier drafts which showed that there was a wholesale substitution to replace "creationism" with "intelligent design", that was done immediately after a prior court decision had shown creationism to violate the establishment clause of the first amendment.

I don't recall exactly now whether it was a portion of Pandas that Behe wrote, or a different work, but he tried to equate that writing to something from a peer-reviewed journal, when the supposed reviewers of Pandas knew virtually nothing about the text.  Behe admitted that the plausibility of intelligent design grew greater if one was predisposed to religion.

The legal foundations have quaint references.  Among them are the two "prongs" of the "Lemon test", which refer to a prior Supreme Court decision (Lemon) that defined "purpose" and "effect" as points at issue in determining whether a particular government action "establishes" religion in violation of the 1st amendment.

The final decision captured in the Judge's opinion was a thorough indictment of all parts of intelligent design and the attempts by the school board to introduce this in the science classrooms.  Taking what he describes as the "belt and suspenders" approach, Judge Jones appeared to deal with every prior precedent and showed how this case violated all defined legal criteria, and furthermore concluding ID is not science to begin with.    The science teachers in the school refused to comply with the Board instruction to introduce ID as an alternative to evolution, so in practice the school administrators came in at the start of each session to read the statement, each sentence of which Jones showed to establish religion.

I don't know whether the school board was ever charged with perjury, but they should have been.  As it was they were forced to pay the attorney fees, and hopefully this complete defeat will keep down similar attempts in other jurisdictions.

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Sunday March 24 I found this in my morning news read:

• http://tinyurl.com/2u63ed

"The two-day event will feature well-known supporters of intelligent design. Dr. Michael Behe is the author of Darwin's Black Box and was a key witness in 2005 at a federal trial that produced a ruling that intelligent design was religion rather than science."

They don't give up.

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Addendum (24 March, 2007 10:36:07 PDT)

An argument made during the trial was the point by the defense that they need to supplant the foundation of science that requires testability, that requires a theory be possible to refute.  They want to allow scientific explanations to invoke supernatural forces, and grant that ID will never be accepted as science until that foundation is removed.

What they think will happen after that is anybody's guess.

My impression is they oppose evolution solely because it flies in the face of literal readings of their received wisdom, that they can not stand evidence to stand against their faith, and don't really care what it takes to reject the evidence.  They think their philosophy can drive the universe rather than the other way around.

<BEGIN philosophical aside>

There is a sense in which I support the notion that philosophy drives the universe, in as much as it drives how one interacts with the universe on all levels, which in turn has certain consequences in the world around us.  The fact that those consequences are somewhat predictable returns me to the sense of the statement as originally written.

<END philosophical aside>