The Design Paradigm

Our friend Allen MacNeill over at EvolutionList has written a bunch about Steve Fuller in his last two posts, but he seems to have badly misunderstood what Fuller was saying. Allen seems to not realize (as a Macht pointed out to him in the comments) that Science Wars is a name for an intelluctual discussion between the humanities and the sciences during the nineties. It has nothing to do with evolution or ID or the culture wars. What is even sadder than this misunderstanding is that it spawned a whole conspiracy theory of an alliance between postmodernists and Christians who desperately want win some kind of social discourse.

You can read a bunch of articles on the Science Wars here by Fuller. The wikipedia article on the Science Wars also has some useful information.

It was common during the science wars for scientists to remonstrate that the sociologists, philosophers and historians who wrote about science knew nothing about science. It seems in this case we perhaps may have the reverse scenerio.

Memo to friends, enemies, and anyone who wants to find out about us: You can just ask, really. We haven’t any secrets, and you don’t need to play spy games.

Of all the reporters we’ve spoken to during the past year and a half the IDEA Club has been in existence, none has been quite as interesting as last week’s exchange with Celeste Biever of the New Scientist. An exchange which we didn’t know had happened till it was over.

It began with an innocent-looking email through our contact form.

"Maria wrote:
Hi, I am a student at Cornell and am interested in coming to an IDEA meeting.
When will the next one be? Thanks, Maria"

Here on campus we don’t usually introduce ourselves as "Cornell students"; that is generally considered to be a given. But, well, if she felt the need to clarify that, who were we to object? We emailed her the time, and she replied back in a request for more information, which we also provided.

But there was something odd about that email. It was from the same address that had been submitted with the contact form, and the email was still signed Maria, but the name that went with the address was one we didn’t recognize. Was "the student Maria" using a friend’s email address? Oh well, people do odd things sometimes.

From: Cel Biever <xxxxx@gmail.com>	Signed-By: gmail.com

Subject: Re: IDEA Club

Second memo: if you want to play spy games, do it properly.  For instance, changing the name your email provider uses before sending out emails pretending to be someone else might be rule one in the book.

Maria didn’t come to a meeting, and we almost forgot about the incident, till Biever’s name was brought up in an unrelated conversation. She was described as a New Scientist reporter interviewing a host of people for a story on ID, and then things fell together in a way strangely reminiscent of the games we used to play in third grade ("Go spy on the enemy, and steal their secret map!") 

Now that we’re past third grade, though, surely we save those kind of expedients for crucial, perhaps life-and-death situations? Finding out publicly available information about a little IDEA club on a college campus…well, does it really qualify as a justification for outright lies?

Especially since it so ridiculously unneccessary; there is no secret map.

Our letter to the editor of New Scientist can be found here. And just so no-one makes the same mistake– if you ever want to come to a meeting or find out about what we do you don’t need to pretend to be someone else; we’ll let you in under your own name. There are plenty of Cornellians who can witness the fact that even people who come with the avowed intention of "shutting us down" are made welcome at our discussions and on our private listserves. We’re simply a forum for civil, informed discussion, and we like having various points of view. If you think you’ve got a strong argument supporting either side, we’d love to hear it. And if you just want to come and listen to the arguments you’re welcome too.

We do prefer, though, if you don’t lie to us.

Update 10/6:   The New Scientist has responded to our letter, characterizing the event as unique in Biever’s history and unrepresentative of New Scientist reporting.

Update 10/19: The reply from the New Scientist is now posted on our website. 

Another topic that has been brought up many times is the question of analogy.  What is its role in scientific reasoning? When is an appeal to it justified, when not? In the thread on "Vacuity", Allen writes:

I would be happy to present a more formal analysis of the relationship between analogy, identity, and validity if any of you are interested. I’ve been working on it for several years, and would be curious to see what your reactions might be.

Please!

Freawaru — thank you for the Geswæpabinn. We really needed it.

It’s easy when you’re arguing passionately about something to feel the other person is stupid, dumb or just plain idiotic. Maybe in other places on or off-line insults and ridicule have been the usual coin of trade. However, here it’s different. We in the IDEA club have consistently felt that’s it very important to argue logically without resorting to ad hominem attacks or other insulting jibes.

I remember a couple years ago seeing a piece in Tompkin’s County Herald Examiner (it was actually a reprint of an address by Edwin J. Feulner at the 2004 Hillsdale Commencement) that succinctly stated this idea. In his address Feulner compared the broken window theory of crime to the breakdown in civility.

The whole address deserves to be read, but I’ll just repeat a couple parts here. Feulner says;

The broken window is their metaphor for a whole host of ways that behavioral norms can break down in a community. If one person scrawls graffiti on a wall, others will soon be at it with their spray cans. If one aggressive panhandler begins working a block, others will soon follow.

In short, once people begin disregarding the norms that keep order in a community, both order and community unravel, sometimes with astonishing speed.

Police in big cities have dramatically cut crime rates by applying this theory. Rather than concentrate on felonies such as robbery and assault, they aggressively enforce laws against relatively minor offenses — graffiti, public drinking, panhandling, littering.

When order is visibly restored at that level, the environment signals: This is a community where behavior does have consequences. If you can’t get away with jumping a turnstile into the subway, you’d better not try armed robbery.

Now all this is a preface. My topic is not crime on city streets, rather I want to speak about incivility in the marketplace of ideas. The broken windows theory is what links the two. . . .

. . .What we’re seeing in the marketplace of ideas today is a disturbing growth of incivility that follows and confirms the broken windows theory. Alas, this breakdown of civil norms is not a failing of either the political left or the right exclusively. It spreads across the political spectrum from one end to the other. . . .

. .  .This is how the broken windows theory plays out in the marketplace of ideas. If you want to see it working in real time, try the following: Log on to AOL, and go to one of the live chat rooms reserved for political chat. Someone will post a civil comment on some political topic. Almost immediately, someone else will swing the verbal hammer of incivility, and from there the chat degrades into a food fight, with invective and insult as the main course. . .

. . . Incivility is not a social blunder to be compared with using the wrong fork. Rather, it betrays a defect of character. Incivility is dangerous graffiti, regardless of whether it is spray-painted on a subway car, or embossed on the title page of a book. The broken windows theory shows us the dangers in both cases.

Therefore, let us argue passionately about ideas, but in the heat of an argument let’s remember to respect each other’s (and our own) dignity. Let us remember the difference between an insult and an argument. Let us lay our hammers down.

The funniest abstract I’ve read in a long time, from an article available here, and which is to appear in Mod.Phys.Lett.A:

We argue that the cosmic microwave background (CMB) provides a stupendous opportunity for the Creator of universe our (assuming one exists) to have sent a message to its occupants, using known physics. Our work does not support the Intelligent Design movement in any way whatsoever, but asks, and attempts to answer, the entirely scientific question of what the medium and message might be IF there was actually a message. The medium for the message is unique. We elaborate on this observation, noting that it requires only careful adjustment of the fundamental Lagrangian, but no direct intervention in the subsequent evolution of the universe.

Question: Which sentence was introduced by the peer-reviewers?

HT: Uncommondescent.com

Lost the email announcing an IDEA event? Unsure where we’re going to meet? Tired of always having to plug in the information into your calendar?

We’ve made a public calendar for IDEA club events. This can be added to your GMail calendar (if you use GMail), or any other calendar program you use.

 Now there’s no excuse to miss a meeting.

Spider draglines appear to be a good candidate for reverse-engineering.  According to an article published last week in Nature:

The ductility and strength of spider draglines means that they outperform the best synthetic, but surprisingly little is known about the torsional properties of this remarkable filament. Unlike a mountain climber swinging from a rope, a spider suspended from its silk thread hardly ever twists. Here we show that a spider dragline has a torsional shape ‘memory’ in that it can reversibly and totally recover its initial form without any external stimulus; its observed relaxation dynamics indicate that these biological molecules have successively different torsional constants.

The article is a pretty non-technical and a fun read. 

An intriguing article in the Journal of Theoretical Biology I came across this afternoon.  The abstract:

The living cell exists by virtue of thousands of nonlinearly interacting processes. This complexity greatly impedes its understanding. The standard approach to the calculation of the behaviour of the living cell, or part thereof, integrates all the rate equations of the individual processes. If successful extremely intensive calculations often lead the calculation of coherent, apparently simple, cellular "decisions" taken in response to a signal: the complexity of the behavior of the cell is often smaller than it might have been. The "decisions" correspond to the activation of entire functional units of molecular processes, rather than individual ones. The limited complexity of signal and response suggests that there might be a simpler way to model at least some important aspects of cell function. In the field of Artificial Intelligence, such simpler modelling methods for complex systems have been developed. In this paper, it is shown how the Artificial Intelligence description method for deliberative agents functioning on the basis of beliefs, desires and intentions as known in Artificial Intelligence, can be used successfully to describe essential aspects of cellular regulation. This is demonstrated for catabolite repression and substrate induction phenomena in the bacterium Escherichia coli. The method becomes highly efficient when the computation is automated in a Prolog implementation. By defining in a qualitative way the food supply of the bacterium, the make-up of its catabolic pathways is readily calculated for cases that are sufficiently complex to make the traditional human reasoning tedious and error prone.

Shapiro seems to suggest that some application of this sort of thinking may be useful for analysis of IC systems.   I am only beginning to think about this, and will probably not be finished till at least next week.  So perhaps a disclaimer is in order:  This post does not imply, suggest or otherwise make any insidious claims about evolution, intelligent design, or any other theory of origins. 

But that needn’t thwart discussion– reach whichever conclusions you like on your own. 

Because we were having a little trouble staying on topic, and abiding by our rules of engagement…