Bears in the Woods

The Bears in the Woods: Phony Scientific Skepticism from Intelligent Design to Cryptozoology

Written by Brendan Cook

Sunday, 19 April 2009

It’s said that imitation is the highest form of flattery, but I sometimes wonder whether this is always true. As far as I can tell, mimicry can be sinister as well as sincere. There’s an important distinction between a tribute and a rip-off. Take the parodies of respected hardware and electronics brand-names produced by fly-by-night companies. I once won a “Somy” DVD player, an ugly black box that broke down in a less than a month, and I recently received a flimsy Brazilian mp3 player made to look like an iPod. It goes without saying that this little device has a very limited memory, but the crowning touch was probably that the ‘wheel’ which operates a real iPod has been painted on! My wife swears she’s seen “Swiss Navy” products in the discount stores, and I’ve heard from friends about a television made by “Panaphonic”.

And then there are the cheap films that get released by distributors hoping they’ll be mistaken for a recent blockbuster. This particular swindle should be familiar to anyone who still rents movies from their local video store. A week or so before King Kong arrives on the shelves, someone releases a 1950’s ‘C’ movie about a big gorilla under the title the real KING KONG, with large font for what they want you to see and small font for the part they hope you won’t notice. Last year, Allan Quatermain and the Temple of Skulls was released at just the right time and with just the right cover art to help someone mistake it for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls. It doesn’t take much intelligence to distinguish these two films, it’s true, but then it doesn’t take much intelligence to rent an Indiana Jones movie in the first place.

But this tendency of the bad to adopt the appearance of the good isn’t just a commercial matter. It’s part of whatever people do: religion, politics, and everything between. For every Nelson Mandela who actually helps an oppressed nation find justice, there’s a Robert Mugabe who poses as a liberator while leading the people straight from their old prison into a new one. And ever since Martin Luther King made his mark as the greatest figure in American politics since Lincoln, the United States has been overrun with self-appointed successors: men like the Reverend Al Sharpton and the Reverend Jesse Jackson, professional screamers and podium-pounders who bear the same relationship to Dr. King that my Brazilian ‘iPod’ does to the real article. And what about all the poor deluded men and women, in generation after generation, who say that they’re Jesus in his second coming? What are they if not the spiritual equivalent of a “Somy” DVD player or a “Panaphonic” television? Some people make cheap knockoffs or sell them, but others are living counterfeits: walking, breathing, pontificating three-dollar bills.

But the particular ripoff that people have been trying to sell me lately isn’t a bogus product or person, it’s an attitude. It’s an attitude that counterfeits one of the most admired intellectual ‘brands’ of our time: keeping an open mind. Politics and religion are full of false saviors, and the shelves of the video store are stocked with false blockbusters, but in educated circles, the most popular racket involves false critical thinking. Intellectual ripoff-artists are selling phony examples of skeptical, scientific reasoning in the same way that “Swiss Navy” markets inferior watches and knives.

And in a sense, this is a compliment to genuine open-mindedness. It’s a recognition of the merits of a critical, rational attitude towards argument and evidence that people are trying to parody this way of thinking. Keeping an open mind has been essential to the achievements of Western science and the relative freedom enjoyed by citizens in a liberal society, so it’s no wonder that it’s become the pre-eminent intellectual ‘brand’ in North America, and arguably around the world. It’s no wonder that even the men and women who don’t see the use of critical thinking themselves are willing to profit from its prestige among their fellow citizens. Like a respected company or line of products, the skeptical attitude that has defined the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment is an inviting target for counterfeiters.

And while there are many smaller swindles, one of the best financed and most shameless is probably the Intelligent Design movement in the United States. Like Creationism in the twentieth century, Intelligent Design sets out to undermine the only remotely plausible explanation for the diversity of plant and animal life on earth: the theory of evolution by natural selection. But unlike the earlier creationists, who tried to forbid the teaching of natural selection, the proponents of Intelligent Design say that they’re merely providing an alternative to the standard theory. And instead of browbeating critics into accepting their conclusions on faith, intelligent designers appeal to doubt and skepticism: they say that they’re only asking us to keep an open mind.

There are several ways that Intelligent Design counterfeits the skeptical, rational attitude that we associate with modern science, but the first and most basic involves the presentation of the theory itself. Although supporters of Intelligent Design are drawn predominantly from evangelical and fundamentalist denominations associated with biblical literalism, they resist grounding their theory on Christian scripture. Even the intelligent designers who supported Creationism in the 70’s and 80’s avoid invoking the Bible to refute evolution by natural selection. Instead they borrow the critical language of modern science: Intelligent Design isn’t a dogma demanding assent but a hypothesis open to debate. Elaborate theories about the complexity of the human eye or a bacterial flagellum are invoked to cast doubt on the notion that these organs and structures developed gradually. Impenetrable mathematical models demonstrate the sheer improbability that random chance could have produced such a variety of organisms. And in perhaps the best touch of all, intelligent designers maintain an agnostic position regarding their own arguments. While most of its advocates belong to churches that reject evolution by natural selection out of hand, Intelligent Design is still presented as a legitimate secular theory, to be confirmed or refuted as evidence comes to light. And so the first act of intellectual forgery is accomplished. A fundamentally religious conclusion – natural biological diversity the work of a supernatural creator – is decorated with an appearance of reasoned argument and even critical self-doubt. Intelligent design is dressed up and disguised in something like the way a wheel is painted beneath the screen of my counterfeit ‘iPod’ or the cover of the Allan Quatermain DVD is modeled on the colors, the visual patterns, and even the lettering of an Indiana Jones cover.

But if the very premise of Intelligent Design is a forgery, the real masterpiece of substitution, the fake Rolex of intellectual deception, as it were, has got to be the strategy for promoting Intelligent Design in American schools. The creationists didn’t have much luck keeping evolution out of textbooks, and intelligent designers have tried to learn from that mistake. They don’t even propose forbidding other theories: they merely ask for equal time in the classroom. They ask whether it makes sense to teach students only one explanation for the variety of living creatures that inhabit our planet. How could it be wrong, say the advocates of Intelligent Design, to give competing models a hearing and explore every possibility? Of course the theory of Intelligent Design may be false, but kids should be able to decide that for themselves. The intelligent designers have even adopted a truly brilliant slogan – teach the debate! – which sows confusion just like the ‘swoosh’ logo on fake “Nike” sneakers. Teach the debate! is so effective because it appeals to intellectual fair play by implying that the very principle of free debate is at stake. If you’re against including Intelligent Design in the curriculum, you’re not just rejecting a specific theory, you want to limit students’ access to knowledge, you’re afraid of letting them hear both sides of the question. Never mind that Intelligent Design is about as credible as the geocentric model of the solar system, to oppose it is to oppose intellectual freedom. If you say it has no more business being taught to children than alchemy or astrology, you’re sinning against scientific inquiry and reasoned debate, you’re against keeping an open mind.

But perhaps I’m being unfair to Intelligent Design in singling it out this way. It’s certainly not the only intellectual counterfeit of recent times. There are plenty of other movements that abuse the spirit of agnosticism which makes real social and scientific progress possible. There are countless cases where men and women present an argument which is frankly impossible, and then, when you reject it out of hand, ask you to keep an open mind. Sometimes this is overtly religious or mystical, as when people hold on to the hope that the erroneous teachings of a favorite guru may yet be vindicated by further evidence. Many Mormons, for example, still wait for archeologists to stumble upon traces of the fabulous ancient cities described by their prophet Joseph Smith. And sometimes religion is hiding just beneath the surface, as in the statements of certain Catholic leaders on the value of condoms in preventing AIDS. It’s clear in the latter case that the real objection of the pope and his circle is religious: they believe that the use of condoms is a sin. But when Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo pretends there’s a serious scientific debate regarding the potential of the HIV virus to penetrate the latex of a condom, this is an obvious case of intellectual piracy. Here Cardinal Trujillo isn’t marketing his anti-contraceptive message under the old, discredited name of blind faith in religious authority. Too many defective teachings have been peddled using that brand for the discriminating consumer to trust it. Instead the worthy cardinal appeals to the skepticism and doubt which are essential to secular studies like history, medicine, or physics. He invokes the enlightened reluctance to conclude too hastily that one side in a debate must be right and the other must be wrong. His church once tormented Galileo, but Cardinal Trujillo has repackaged his stale sexual prohibitions in the same modern, scientific wrapping that, thanks to Galileo and his successors, is now associated with intellectual integrity.

But even this may be missing the point. The Catholic Church has certainly dabbled in bogus science, but it would be unfair to say that this happens consistently. And in any case, the size of the organization isn’t what matters. For the real connoisseur of intellectual deception, the most compelling cheats aren’t the biggest or the best funded. It’s true that the climate change skeptics, to give only one example, have a good deal of money behind them, but their scam is too obvious to be interesting. The melting of the polar ice caps is too easily verified: there’s either more ice or there isn’t. And so the oil interests who sow controversy by suggesting that the Antarctic ice shelf may actually be growing have trouble creating reasonable doubt in their own minds. In the end, the purest and most beautiful examples of false objectivity aren’t found among the professionals. As with so many pursuits, the place to look is with the amateurs, the men and women who don’t have any vested political, religious, or economic interests, people who do what they do out of love. No commercial bakery can produce pies like the ones your grandmother used to bake in her old cast iron stove, and so no large, moneyed operation can match the enthusiasm of the part-timers and the hobbyists. And for my money, the best of these are undoubtedly the Bigfoot hunters. The men and women who comb the backwoods of North America for evidence of an enormous ape unknown to zoology are rarely rich or famous, but their dedication to phony scientific rigor puts professionals like Cardinal Trujillo or the intelligent designers to shame.

To start with, it’s worth observing that the Bigfoot hunters, especially the serious ones, rarely present themselves as Bigfoot believers. Few boast of getting a good look at Bigfoot themselves, and even those who claim to have seen or heard something aren’t always sure of what it was. The best Bigfoot hunters adopt an agnostic posture worthy of the advocates of Intelligent Design. Bigfoot is a theory for them, like the complexity of the bacterial flagellum, and they say they’re willing to test it, and even reject it if necessary. Most will concede that there may be nothing to discover, just as Cardinal Trujillo might admit that not every micro-organism gets through the condom’s skin. Like the better funded climate change skeptics, many Bigfoot hunters have scientific training, and they know how to impersonate a dispassionate investigator impartially weighing the evidence on either side. Take the man from Florida – by training he’s a medical doctor – who spends his spare time searching the swamps of the Southeast for the legendary ‘skunk ape’. There’s a clip on YouTube where he explains his philosophy with a clarity which most of us couldn’t achieve while staring into a camera in the middle of the sub-tropical wilderness. Between knocking pieces of wood together and bellowing into nearby bushes – both proven methods for attracting Bigfoot – this man finds time for an eloquent defense of scientific principles.

I get asked a lot if I believe in a large North American ape, but I think belief isn’t really the question. That stems more from something you think is true when you really don’t have the facts or evidence to support it. And that’s more faith-based. I think in science what we have to do is develop a hypothesis and develop data and evidence to support or refute that hypothesis.

I don’t think I could say it better myself. But apart from this passionate defense of pseudo-scientific objectivity, Bigfoot hunters are instructive in another sense. They reveal something important about every person who pays lip service to the notion of keeping an open mind. They reveal the dogmatic interior behind the carefully cultivated appearance of fairness and skepticism. And in this way, they offer a similar lesson to that of the morally irreproachable politician caught in a tawdry sexual scandal. Just as the people who shout loudest about family values in public are often caught violating these values at home, many who demand a fair hearing for their own theories privately dismiss possibilities which they seem to consider. They pretend to keep an open mind the way a hypocrite pretends to practice virtue. Most of the professionals know how to hide this, but the amateur is interesting because he pulls back the curtain. It’s the Bigfoot hunter, who invests years of his life in a creature whose very existence he claims to doubt, who shows us how the game is played.

I’m thinking of another clip now: I’m not sure if it’s on YouTube, but it’s part of a cable show I saw on an Air Canada flight a year or two back. Two young men were camped out in a small patch of forest in some Southern state – I think it was Tennessee but I could be wrong. As Bigfoot hunters go, they weren’t very impressive. They jumped at each unexplained noise and decided that every odd impression in the ground was some sort of track. But in the process of making a fool of himself before a modest cable audience, one of the men made a valuable admission which I doubt he intended. He revealed the trade secret of all Bigfoot hunters and indeed of phony skeptics everywhere. He gave voice to something more practiced hands know better than to speak out loud: he mentioned the one thing he’s sure can’t be true.

It happened this way. The young man is gathering evidence, suspicious tracks, hairs, markings and so forth. And then a producer speaking off camera asks him if the signs he’s found could be the work of bears. Keeping with the agnostic pretence of the classic Bigfoot hunter, the man admits this as a possibility. The claw marks five or six feet up the side of a tree are in the right spot to have been made by bears. And the hairy biped reported by a local child? This could certainly have been a bear standing on its hind legs. All of this is possible, admits the young Bigfoot hunter, but he knows better – and here his eyes narrow as he prepares us for the moment of truth. “It could have been a bear,” he explains in an ominous tone, “except for one thing: there are no bears in these woods.”

And there you have it! A bear can’t have made these marks or been seen by this child for the self-evident reason that there are no bears. And how do we know this? Because the man tells us so. The same man who suspects that Bigfoot may be hiding behind the next tree is certain that the woods are free of bears. This is so memorable because it’s a rare admission of the inner conviction which most would-be skeptics try to conceal. It’s a reminder that the person who tells you to avoid deciding too quickly has often made up his own mind long ago. Behold a man open to the possibility that a race of eight-foot-tall apes has been living in the woods of Tennessee for centuries! He believes that these animals could have maintained a breeding population without being clearly photographed or filmed, without being captured alive or discovered dead, and he’s not discouraged by the fact that their bones have never been found or that their DNA has never been analyzed. When confronted by critics, he tells them to keep an open mind. But present him with the possibility that those same woods may be home to bears, and the situation is simple: he knows that there are no bears and he expects you to take his word for it.

But the last thing I would want to do is suggest that the poor Bigfoot hunter is especially pernicious. He’s only notable, as I said earlier, because he’s so typical. He’s typical of everyone who uses the language of doubt and skepticism to lend a veneer of science to conclusions which really arise from faith. Because if you give the question a moment’s thought, you‘ll see that all of the counterfeiters I’ve mentioned here have their own ‘bears in the woods’. There’s always something which each of them has rejected out of hand while claiming to keep an open mind. Behind the common facade of objectivity, there lies some explanation, some idea, some possibility, or perhaps some uncomfortable fact, which they will never concede to be true. The Bigfoot hunter won’t admit that bears could have made the marks on the tree or frightened the child, but the professionals are no better. Would an Intelligent Design advocate really give serious consideration to a scientific theory rejected by his church? Or would Cardinal Trujillo feel any better about condoms if he was certain that they could help prevent the spread of AIDS? Do EXXON and Chevron fund studies on climate change because they care about scientific truth? If anything, the antics of the doctor who spends his weekends chasing monsters behind his house seem more pardonable in this light. In maintaining a theory against all likelihood or even reasonable probability, he’s doing for personal fulfillment what others do every day in defense of their political, religious and economic interests. He may be crazy, but he’s also in good company. And if he’s a fraud, he’s a relatively harmless one. As one amateur cryptozoologist explains on YouTube, holding out hope in the existence of a giant North American ape isn't the worst abuse of the spirit of rational inquiry. “There’s all sorts of things we believe that doesn’t have any proof behind it,” the man tells his handheld camera, “why not monsters?

Consciousness - a Just -So Story

I don't actually know what consciousness is -- but I am fairly confident that we don't need any "Sky Hooks" as Dennett likes to call the unexplainable, semimagical mechanisms that allow us to avoid mundane, biological reasons for human features.

My notion is summarized in the idea that any animal that has a brain complex enough that it has to engage in some form of internal "debate" to figure out what to do next will be conscious in some fashion. More on this later. But there appear to be animals that are essentially on autopilot all the time -- wasps (the various burrowing wasps which paralyze their prey before laying eggs in the still living victim will repeat all the steps to bring the prey into the burrow over and over if the naturalist interrupts the steps by moving the victim, for example), ants, bees might operate somewhat like I do when I drive my car and forget whether I made the turn off or not. Human beings (I certainly) can perform a variety of tasks that don't engage the conscious brain .... some simpler animals might have only this capability.

But as animals get larger and evolve other features it sometimes appears to be advantageous to hone the decision circuits of the brain to make overt comparisons of possible solutions rather than going through stereotyped routines whenever there is a certain stimulus. This internal "debate" will be seen subjectively as "consciousness." The implication here is that I think that there are some animals that are conscious in some form or other that have been excluded in the past. For example, I would allow that (say) cattle or dogs or raccoons are conscious in some fashion. The convention that an animal must be able to recognize itself in a mirror seems to be too restrictive to me.

I am left with a problem with the larger reptiles. They are big and long-lived but their brains appear too small to accommodate the kind of consciousness that I am postulating so I don't pretend to have this little story nailed down.

But I do think that since we are human beings and we tend to magnify all our traits, it may be that we are making of consciousness more than it needs to be. We'll see.

“The story of the human race is war. Except for brief and precarious in­terludes there has never been peace in the world; and long before history began murderous strife was universal and unending.”

Winston Churchill's summary of our species could be dismissed as the pessimism of a man who fought history's most awful war and was present at the birth of a cold war that could have destroyed humanity altogether. In fact it has sadly stood the test of time. Though the cold war is a memory, and hot wars between major nations are rare, we still do not have peace in the world. Even before the infamous year of 2001, with its horrific terrorist attacks on the United States and subsequent war in Afghanistan, the World Conflict List cata­logued sixty-eight areas of systematic violence, from Albania and Algeria through Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Churchill's speculation about prehistory has also been borne out. Modern foragers, who offer a glimpse of life in prehistoric societies, were once thought to engage only in ceremonial battles that were called to a halt as soon as the first man fell. Now they are known to kill one another at rates that dwarf the casu­alties from our world wars. The archaeological record is no happier. Buried in the ground and hidden in caves lie silent witnesses to a bloody prehistory stretching back hundreds of thousands of years. They include skeletons with scalping marks, ax-shaped dents, and arrowheads embedded in them; weapons like tomahawks and maces that are useless for hunting but specialized for homicide; fortification defenses such as palisades of sharpened sticks; and paintings from several continents showing men firing arrows, spears, or boomerangs at one another and being felled by these weapons. For decades, "anthropologists of peace" denied that any human group had ever practiced cannibalism, but evidence to the contrary has been piling up and now includes a smoking gun. In an 850-year-old site in the American Southwest, archaeolo­gists have found human bones that were hacked up like the bones of animals used for food. They also found traces of human myoglobin (a muscle protein) on pot shards, and—damningly—in a lump of fossilized human excrement. Members of Homo antecessor, relatives of the common ancestor of Neander­thals and modern humans, bashed and butchered one another too, suggesting that violence and cannibalism go back at least 800,000 years.

War is only one of the ways in which people kill other people. In much of the world, war shades into smaller-scale violence such as ethnic strife, turf bat­tles, blood feuds, and individual homicides. Here too, despite undeniable im­provements, we do not have anything like peace. Though Western societies have seen murder rates fall between tenfold and a hundredfold in the past mil­lennium, the United States lost a million people to homicide in the twentieth century, and an American man has about a one-half percent lifetime chance of being murdered.

…………………………………………………..

the reduction of violence on scales large and small is one of our greatest moral concerns. We ought to use every intellectual tool available to under­stand what it is about the human mind and human social arrangements that leads people to hurt and kill so much. But as with the other moral concerns ex­amined in this part of the book, the effort to figure out what is going on has been hijacked by an effort to legislate the correct answer. In the case of vio­lence, the correct answer is that violence has nothing to do with human nature but is a pathology inflicted by malign elements outside us. Violence is a behav­ior taught by the culture, or an infectious disease endemic to certain environ­ments.

This hypothesis has become the central dogma of a secular faith, repeat­edly avowed in public proclamations like a daily prayer or pledge of alle­giance. Recall Ashley Montagu's UNESCO resolution that biology supports an ethic of "universal brotherhood" and the anthropologists who believed that "nonviolence and peace were likely the norm throughout most of human pre­history." In the 1980s, many social science organizations endorsed the Seville Statement, which declared that it is "scientifically incorrect" to say that hu­mans have a "violent brain" or have undergone selection for violence.⁸ "War is not an instinct but an invention," wrote Ortega y Gasset, paralleling his claim that man has no nature but only history. A recent United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women announced that "violence is part of an historical process, and is not natural or born of biological deter­minism." A 1999 ad by the National Funding Collaborative on Violence Pre­vention declared that "violence is learned behavior."

Another sign of this faith-based approach to violence is the averred cer­tainty that particular environmental explanations are correct. We know the causes of violence, it is repeatedly said, and we also know how to eliminate it. Only a failure of commitment has prevented us from doing so. Remember Lyndon Johnson saying that "all of us know" that the conditions that breed violence are ignorance, discrimination, poverty, and disease. A 1997 article on violence in a popular science magazine quoted a clinical geneticist who echoed LBJ:

We know what causes violence in our society: poverty, discrimination, the failure of our educational system. It's not the genes that cause vio­lence in our society. It's our social system.¹¹

The authors of the article, the historians Betty and Daniel Kevles, agreed:

We need better education, nutrition, and intervention in dysfunctional homes and in the lives of abused children, perhaps to the point of re­moving them from the control of their incompetent parents. But such responses would be expensive and socially controversial.

The Painful Elaboration of the Fatuous Norman Levitt Deconstructs Steve Fuller’s Postmodernist Critique of Evolution

book review by Dr. Norman Levitt

The Intelligent Design movement begets intellectual monstrosities with doleful regularity, but Steve Fuller’s new book, I think, occupies an especially odd place in this teratology. Fuller, be it remembered, is a professor of sociology of science at the University of Warwick (UK), whose career has been built on a lofty and careless disdain for science itself. That trajectory reached its apex (or, depending on how you look at it’s nadir) when he appeared as an “expert” witness for the defense (i.e., the crypto-creationists of the Dover, PA school board) in the celebrated “Kitzmiller” case. As we know, the upshot of this litigation was that a conservative and conventionally religious federal judge rendered a ruling that not only came down squarely against the pro-ID school board, but savagely excoriated the ID movement per se as without legitimate standing in science or science education. Fuller’s testimony only helped to seal the school board’s well-merited doom.

The book under review is Fuller’s subsequent effort to justify philosophically the position that failed so miserably to sway the Kitzmiller ruling in ID’s favor. It is with frank satisfaction and not a little glee that I can report that it is a truly miserable piece of work, crammed with errors scientific, historical, and even theological, a book that will find approving readers only amongst hard-core ID enthusiasts hungry for agreement but indifferent to the quality of evidence offered in support of their position. Fuller really does make it up as he goes along, laying out arguments that hardly need serious thought to refute in that they are based on howlers and solecisms that collapse under the lightest scrutiny. In this review I also want to consider the defection of Fuller (who all his life has proclaimed himself a progressive and “leftist”) to a cause demonstrably reactionary in all respects. Does this presage a wider convulsion in the academic left that will see a proliferation of equally peculiar misalliances? Academics are often very faddish creatures more terrified by the prospect of missing a bandwagon than by possible shortcomings in their own arguments. Has Fuller identified a true bandwagon with uncanny prescience or merely hopped on board a broke-down old manure wagon?

Abusing Ideas: Randomness, Complexity & All That

First, to the evaluation of Science vs. Religion itself. Merely out of mathematical whimsy, I want to consider Fuller’s very extensive discussion of “complexity” and “randomness.” This, as mathematicians and computer scientists are well aware, is a subject that has been thoroughly studied and analyzed for decades, generating a slew of deep results and fertile conjectures. Fuller, however, shows no awareness of the actual mathematical literature (even though much of it is accessible, at the basic level, to anyone with minimal mathematical skill). Instead, he seems content to take ID-theorist William Dembski as his guide. He attributes to Dembski a maxim to the effect that it is “impossible” to design a true random-number generator because it is ultimately possible to “infer” the algorithm that lies behind it (p. 61). But this grossly misunderstands a basic principle of complexity theory, the insight that in general it is not possible to devise an effective method for distinguishing a random from a non-random stream of data. Indeed, it is easily possible for virtually anyone to devise a simple way of generating such a data stream (making it highly “compressible” or non-random), which will, for all practical purposes, defeat any human attempt to say whether it is or isn’t random or how “compressible” it really is. For instance, just by way of mathematical doodling, let s_n be defined as the integer between 0 and 9 that is specified by the formula:

s_n = [(p_n^th digit of the decimal expansion of sin(17/31) ) – 4] mod 10

where p_n is the n^th prime number.

(Please note that this formula has no mathematical importance; it’s purely off the top of my head.) It is very easy for anyone knowing a bit of first-year calculus plus a bit of computer programming to write a program to generate this sequence using a couple of dozen lines of code, at most.

However, if I hand you, say, the first 3,000,000,000 terms of this sequence without giving you the generator as a program or purely in words, it will be impossible, for all practical purposes, for you to tell me whether this is a “random” sequence or a “compressible” one (it is, in fact, highly compressible), and still less possible for you to specify a generating algorithm.

Such phenomena are not mere computer-laboratory curiosities. In celestial mechanics, for instance, a deterministic classical process may generate a string of parameters that is indistinguishable from random despite its deterministic genesis. This is one of the most fascinating aspects of “chaos theory.” But in the context of I.D. “theory,” the effect is to refute the naïve notion that design by an intelligent agent is always discernible.

Fuller, despite devoting a full chapter to “complexity” and expatiating therein on chaos theory as well, shows virtually no sign of any real familiarity with this mathematics. His exposition jumps from one topic to another, from one thinker to another, mathematical or otherwise, without any demonstration that they should be linked other than by some vague connection to “complexity” in some sense or another. This deliberately discards the precision and rigor that the introduction of mathematical discourse is meant to ensure in the first place. The whole point of this chapter, one gathers, is that the emphasis on “complexity” by Dembski and Co. underwrites, to Fuller’s way of thinking, the legitimate scientific status of ID theory.

To give just one example of the fatuity to which this leads, Fuller swallows whole the idea that computer simulation of “lifelike” complexity requires that the “design” of that phenomenon must already be embedded in the “intelligent design” of the hardware and software involved. This goes wildly astray, as mathematicians incomparably superior to Dembski (John Conway, inventor of the Game of Life, for instance) will gladly testify. The point of such models is that they emulate the posited key features of the standard evolutionary model, that is, the action of a simple selective process on randomly-generated variation. It has to be noted that the variation involved may indeed be as random as seems possible in the universe; it need not be created by a pseudo-random number generator built into the program, but can be taken from unconnected external phenomena, e.g., radioactive decay or the total take at a Las Vegas casino. What emerges in the end from this completely un-designed input is “complexity” that mirrors that of organic processes. The “intelligent design” involved merely involves mimicking the mindless mechanism postulated by Darwinian theory, not creating novelty in that aspect of things. This constitutes an in silico test of the fundamental Darwinian thesis. These computer experiments have enormously strengthened the hypotheses that in nature what we think of as organic complexity arises from an algorithmic mechanism simple to describe historically iterated time and again as it acts upon random variation.

It is almost superfluous to add that Fuller has done little to come to terms with Dembski’s most trenchant critics, actual experts in complexity and information theory, such as Mark Perakh and Jeffrey Shallit, the latter of whom has justifiably damned Dembski’s work as “pseudo-mathematics.” Nor has Fuller been very accurate in describing Dembski’s intended program, which is to demonstrate “mathematically” that the evolution of complex life via natural selection is literally impossible. But to acquaint himself with this now-voluminous literature would violate one of his favorite axioms, viz., that a “social epistemologist” needn’t actually understand science in order to belittle it.

Evolutionists as an Old Boys Club

A similar farce plays out when Fuller tries to address the larger question of the supposedly contentious nature of evolutionary theory within the scientific community itself. In the World According to Fuller, evolutionary theory never really got past the stage of being a “well evidenced ideology” rather than a “properly testable science” (p. 123). What he is saying, in effect, is that the claims from all branches of biology and related science that they have contributed to a vast stream of convergent evidence verifying the essential precepts of evolution are in great measure delusional. He seems to think that biology, as a constellation of disciplines, is some kind of socially-constructed freemasonry in which assent to basic Darwinian principles constitutes a ritual formula necessary to make one part of the brotherhood rather than a cognitively-justified inference from hard evidence. More, he seems to think that evolutionary thought is mere ideological window-dressing, contributing nothing to the “hard science” behind molecular biology and the like.

None of this is backed up by serious analysis of the working methods and logical structure of biology itself. Fuller complacently views the ascendancy of evolutionary thought as a “rhetorical” rather than a “scientific” development. His principal evidence? The paucity of Nobel Prizes awarded for work on evolution! Of course, he never pauses to consider that under the idiosyncratic organization of the Nobel awards, there is no prize for biology as such. Biologists are smuggled in under the “Medicine and Physiology” category, which is just expansive enough to accommodate ethologists like Lorenz or Tinbergen, but not hard-core evolutionary theorists. In all of these pronouncements, Fuller is hard-pressed to hide his scorn for actual scientists who, it is obvious to him, know much less about what they think and how and why than a social theorist like himself who is enormously content to cite his own work endlessly.

Newton, Biblical Literalism & the Misuse of Terminology

Curiously, Fuller is even more careless and dogmatic when dealing with historical and religious matters than when talking about science. For instance, he blithely associates Newton’s secretive Anti-Trinitarianism with the Unitarian doctrine that began to gain popularity late in the Enlightenment, the idea being, I suppose, that Newton’s religiosity is really consonant with a tolerant and latitudinarian attitude toward doctrinal matters. But this flies in the face of the fact that Newton was a grim dogmatist in his religious beliefs, whose only link to “Unitarians” in the modern sense is that both deny the full divinity of Jesus of Nazareth. Newton, however, came to his views out of a strict biblical literalism deriving from the Puritan tradition that had driven England to civil war. From his point of view, the lack of direct biblical authority for the notion that Christ is an aspect of the deity condemned that dogma as a corrupt accretion inimical to true religion. Modern Unitarianism, on the other hand, arose from a skeptical attitude toward the literal truth of the Bible and severe doubts about supernaturalism and miracles in general. Newton would have been horrified by it.

This topic may seem to be a mere diversion in any serious discussion of the proper ground-rules of scientific practice, but Fuller makes Newton into a totemic figure for his own rhetorical position. Fuller’s major contention is that seeking to know the Mind of God, in a rather literal sense, trying to discern the root intelligence behind the accessible phenomenology of the universe, is just as good a way of doing valid science as “methodological materialism.” In this respect, Newton, whose religious motivations are beyond question, is the paragon to contrast with the metaphysical materialist Darwin (and, presumably, the vast majority of productive scientists who have lived and worked since Darwin’s day). However, one may freely concede that strong, conventional religious feeling can motivate an individual to do the hard work of science without yielding an inch to the quite different premise that the supposed insights of religion may rightfully dictate the manifest content of scientific work. The latter principle infuses Intelligent Design Theory, as practiced by Dembski, Behe, Wells and the gang clustered around the Discovery Institute under the tutelage of Phillip Johnson. And, conveniently, Newton himself provides a telling example of the intellectual quicksand into which it can lead.

Theistic Eschatology and Bad Physics: Newton’s Greatest Blunder

Newton’s religious streak led him to take an intense interest in eschatology, that is, the final purpose and fate of the created universe. He devoted as much time to investigations into the divine timetable for the End of Days — the prophesied arrival of the Day of Judgment — as he did to his research in mathematics and physics. But he did so in a traditional manner, that is to say, relying on information supposedly encoded in the Bible, rather than on any novel cosmological insights arising from the revolution he himself had wrought in celestial mechanics. In this sense, at least, we have evidence of the enormous waste of scientific talent and intellectual energy that can be caused by an obsessive concern with religion.

Yet Newton’s religion at one point led him into an even more paradigmatic scientific solecism, one that perfectly illustrates the peril of allowing the content of one’s scientific work to be dictated by one’s religious fervor. Newton, no less than his frankly materialist or Deist successors, was well aware that the cosmological picture flowing from his own achievement left little room for an interventionist God — an activist, miracle-working being whose constant attention is necessary to the steady functioning of the universe. He sensed that his own brilliant ideas constituted an argument for the deus abscondatus, a conceptual innovation that was soon to become a standard item of skeptical Enlightenment thought. But Newton’s religious traditionalism, unconventional as it was in some respects, found this notion abhorrent because the impersonal God it cautiously endorsed was a far cry from the Biblical Ancient of Days embedded in his own theology. This led him to argue that his own system of the world must be incomplete and that it must indeed be modified to allow a role for an interventionist God whose intermittent action is necessary to keep planets and comets in their orbits. The key point is that this line of thought did not follow from the mathematics of Newton’s mechanics, nor from any sound new physical insight. It was dictated, rather, by the psychological necessity of reconciling his scientific achievement with his pre-existing religious dogma. It was not only an uncharacteristically unsound idea, but constitutes Newton’s greatest intellectual blunder.

One would think that Fuller would at least try to come to terms with this curious history, given that he offers Newton as the paragon of scientific “design theorists”. But he never seems to have heard of it, assuming he is not simply burying it as grossly discomfiting to his line of argument. In any event, given that Newton is the stick with which Fuller intends to beat Darwin, his lack of real knowledge of serious Newtoniana is emblematic of the shallowness of his book.

Ignoring the Politically Obvious

That obliviousness is even more evident in Fuller’s utter failure to come to terms with the political nature of the Intelligent Design movement. He mentions the notorious “wedge” strategy once or twice, but only with an exculpatory purpose. As Fuller would have it, “Just as the ACLU helped to drive a wedge between the teaching of science and theology, the Discovery Institute would now drive a wedge between the teaching of science and the anti-theology prejudice euphemistically called ‘methodological naturalism.’” Aside from the false symmetry of this characterization, this description simply will not wash. The “wedge,” as conceived by the hierophants of the Discovery Institute, means discrediting evolutionary theory as the initial step of a program to re-institute traditional religious precepts (fundamentalist Christian in particular) as the dominant code governing civil and legal affairs in this country. It is a patently reactionary political program, not a philosophical one.

Naturally, this embarrassing fact is too much for someone who, like Fuller, thinks of himself as a left-populist, to admit directly. He tries to get himself off the hook by fulminating against the British National Party, a right-wing sect obsessed with maintaining ethnic and racial purity in the UK against immigrants and such, claiming that its repellent ideology is a direct corollary of Darwinian thought. This is more than a little silly if it is not actually disingenuous. I daresay that if I were given five bucks for every BNP recruit who was prompted to join that mob primarily by his enthusiasm for evolutionary theory, I couldn’t even muster the price of a tank of gas.

But this diversion serves Fuller as an excuse for ignoring the “deep structure” of, say, the Discovery Institute, whose board prominently includes the Christian Dominionist billionaire Howard Ahmanson, a prominent contributor to a legion of far right causes. Equally, it exonerates the very organization that called Fuller as a witness in the Kitzmiller Case, the Thomas More Legal Foundation, which provided pro bono counsel to the beleaguered Dover school board. This outfit, please recall, was founded and funded by pizza magnate Thomas Monaghan, an ultramontane right-wing Catholic who has also established the Ave Maria Law School, hoping to expand it to a full-fledged university dedicated to turning out neo-Crusaders by the thousand.

Movement or Tantrum?

Now I would like to consider the question of whether Fuller’s ideological flight into the embrace of the theocratic right bespeaks a wider tendency within the postmodern academy to trade its vaunted left-radicalism for the honor of riding shotgun on behalf of the new breed of creationist theocrats. Certainly, Fuller is not the first “science studies” scholar to put forth a brief on behalf of creationism. A few other figures, some even more prominent than Fuller, have done so within the past decade. Still, they all seem to have pulled in their horns as soon as it became clear that creationism is not simply the cultural self-assertion of a repressed minority trying to defy the brute scientism of modern society, but rather the tool of a well-funded and deadly serious political movement able to call upon the near-majority instinctively sympathetic to creationist ideas. Fuller, so far as I know, is the only member of this academic clan to have unreservedly taken the plunge, irrevocably committing himself to the creationist cause.

The wider lesson, if there be any, is that animosity to science as such and to its cognitive authority still pervades academic life outside the dominion of the science faculty. The compost that nurtured Steve Fuller and many of his associates in their development of “social constructivist” theory consisted principally of these doubts, resentments and antagonisms. This soil put forth a host of noxious weeds, quite varied, and sometimes taxonomically linked only by the common bitterness they exuded. Each in its own way — literary theory, cultural studies, cultural anthropology, women’s studies, ethnic studies, and a long-standing Marxisant approach to sociology — joined the tacit alliance of antiscientific intellectuals whose imprecations grew all the louder even as their influence over the practice of science and public science policy shrank to imperceptibility.

The anti-science of the contemporary academy is a late and petulant echo of Spiritualism, Anthroposophy, Theosophy, Forteanism, and a dozen other cults that once appealed to the culturally fashionable. But now they are bound up in the knotty and constipated jargon of journals and seminar rooms and lack the high spirits that made the original versions pleasantly whimsical. Anti-science in today’s university whines and grumbles when it is not busy bedecking itself with the pseudo-virtue of today’s eco-Puritanism: the Animal Rights Movement, fulminant opposition to genetic engineering, Deep Ecology, and so forth.

It is easy to mock this development and hard not to scorn it. But perhaps a little sympathy is in order, providing it stops well short of indulgence. Basically, one is dealing here with a community of people who, by common standards, are quite intelligent and imaginative, and certainly diligent enough to carve out large areas of discourse for themselves wherein their assumptions and modes of analysis remain in the saddle for decades at a time. This is not a trivial achievement, think what we may of the fundamental soundness of the enterprise. We can’t really speak of a Ship of Fools here, but rather a flotilla of somewhat unhinged idealists who still can put up a pretty good fight. Yet, ultimately, they are cruelly and fatally hemmed in by their inability to come to terms with the deepest and most penetrating ideas that our civilization, or any civilization, has yet been able to generate: the ideas of science and mathematics.

Further, they must confront the practical significance of the barrier that separates them from first-hand knowledge of science, engineering, and economics. Fields like these are vital to the formulation and critique of public policy and interact with our political institutions to a vast extent. They are the conceptual fuel that drives modern society. The vagaries of literary theorists or cultural anthropologists, by contrast, hardly leave a trace on wider public concerns. They could easily fade away without anyone outside the faith taking much notice.

Ultimately, then, we shouldn’t be startled by the alienation of academic non-scientists from science and technology, nor by the churlishnish with which they address such issues. Steve Fuller is merely an extreme case, an outlier. He represents what a widespread attitude may become when infused with mega-oses egotism and self-regard, and when maximally saturated with the desire to belittle and condescend to the much-hated scientific community. Fuller has perpetrated a dreadful book, but as a tantrum, it is exemplary. He may draw some cautious admiration from his colleagues for the operatic brio of his histrionics. But it seems to me doubtful — and this is a very good thing — that any large segment of the science-studies community, nor of the larger “academic left” will join him in the attempt to find comrades-in-arms in such venues as the Discovery Institute or the wider Intelligent Design movement. Figures like Johnson, Dembski, and Behe, not to mention Ahmanson and Monaghan, burn all too visibly with a searing desire to inaugurate a Godly polity that will be as intolerable to the postmodern left as to conventional liberals or secularists. These guys are just too scary, even for those academics who have heretofore flaunted their disdain for orthodox science. Fuller, I’m afraid, will just have to go it alone.

From "A Brief History of Mind" - how a single paradigm can take over the whole organism!

In 1984, members of the religious cult of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh sprayed the salad bars of four restaurants in The Dalles, Oregon, with a solution containing salmonella. The idea was to keep townspeople from voting in a critically contested local election; 751 people became ill. This cult merely obtained mail-order biological salmonella samples and cultured them. (This is low-tech kitchen stuff.)

The second cult, in contrast, recruited technically trained people in considerable numbers and engaged in indiscriminate slaughter. Aum Shinrikyo ("Aum" is a sacred syllable that is chanted in Hindu and Buddhist prayers; "Shinrikyo" means supreme truth) is a wealthy religious cult in Japan (recently renamed Aleph), with many members in Russia. Their recruiters aggressively targeted university communities, attracting disaffected students and experts in science and engineering with promises of spiritual enlightenment. Intimidation and murder of political opponents and their families occurred in 1989 by conventional means, but the group's knowledge and financial base allowed them to subsequently launch substantial coordinated chemical warfare attacks.

In 1994, they used sarin nerve gas to attack the judges of a court in central Japan who were about to hand down an unfavorable real-estate ruling concerning sect property; the attack killed seven people in a residential neighborhood. In 1995, packages containing this nerve gas were placed on five different trains in the Tokyo subway system that con­verged on an area housing many government ministries, killing 12 and injuring over 5,500 people.

During the investigations that followed, it turned out that members of Aum Shinrikyo had planned and executed ten attacks using chemical weapons and made seven attempts using such biological weapons as anthrax. They had produced enough sarin to kill an estimated 4.2 million people. Other chemical agents found in their arsenal had been used against both political enemies and dissident members.

A Question for Creationists:

Creationists who wish to deny the evidence of horse evolution should careful consider this: how else can you explain the sequence of horse fossils? Even if creationists insist on ignoring the transitional fossils (many of which have been found), again, how can the unmistakable sequence of these fossils be explained? Did God create Hyracotherium, then kill off Hyracotherium and create some Hyracotherium-Orohippus intermediates, then kill off the intermediates and create Orohippus, then kill off Orohippus and create Epihippus, then allow Epihippus to "microevolve" into Duchesnehippus, then kill off Duchesnehippus and create Mesohippus, then create some Mesohippus-Miohippus intermediates, then create Miohippus, then kill off Mesohippus, etc.....each species coincidentally similar to the species that came just before and came just after?

Creationism utterly fails to explain the sequence of known horse fossils from the last 50 million years. That is, without invoking the "God Created Everything To Look Just Like Evolution Happened" Theory.

[And I'm not even mentioning all the other evidence for evolution that is totally independent of the fossil record -- developmental biology, comparative DNA & protein studies, morphological analyses, biogeography, etc. The fossil record, horses included, is only a small part of the story.]

Truly persistent and/or desperate creationists are thus forced into illogical, unjustified attacks of fossil dating methods, or irrelevant and usually flat-out wrong proclamations about a supposed "lack" of "transitional forms". It's sad. To me, the horse fossils tell a magnificent and fascinating story, of millions of animals living out their lives, in their natural world, through millions of years. I am a dedicated horse rider and am very happy that the one-toed grazing Equus survived to the present. Evolution in no way impedes my ability to admire the beauty and nobility of these animals. Instead, it enriches my appreciation and understanding of modern horses and their rich history.

http://www.noanswersingenesis.org.au/horse_evolution.htm

From "How the Mind Works" by Steven Pinker

PSYCHOLOGICAL CORRECTNESS
The evolutionary psychology of this book is a departure from the dominant view of the human mind in our intellectual tradition, which Tooby and Cosmides have dubbed the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM). The SSSM proposes a fundamental division between biology and culture. Biology endows humans with the five senses, a few drives like hunger and fear, and a general capacity to learn. But biological evolution, according to the SSSM, has been superseded by cultural evolution culture is an autonomous entity that carries out a desire to perpetuate itself by setting up expectations and assigning roles, which can vary arbitrarily from society to society. Even the reformers of the SSSM have accepted its framing of the issues. Biology is "just as important as" culture, say the reformers; biology imposes "constraints" on behavior, and all behavior is a mixture of the two.
The SSSM not only has become an intellectual orthodoxy but has acquired a moral authority. When sociobiologists first began to challenge it, they met with a ferocity that is unusual even by the standards of academic invective. The biologist E. O. Wilson was doused with a pitcher of' ice water at a scientific convention, and students yelled for his dismissal over bullhorns and put up posters urging people to bring noisemakers to his lectures. Angry manifestos and book-length denunciations were published by organizations with names like Science for the People and The Campaign Against Racism, IQ, and the Class Society. In “Not in our Genes”, Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon Kainin dropped innuendos about Donald Symons' sex life and doctored a defensible passage of Richard Dawkins' into an insane one. (Dawkins said of genes “They created us, body and mind"; the authors have quoted It as "They control us, body and mind.") When Scientific American on behavior genetics (studies of twins, families, and adoptees) they entitled it "Eugenics Revisited," an allusion to the discredited movement to improve the human genetic stock. When the covered evolutionary psychology, they called the article “The New Social Darwinist,” an allusion to the nineteenth-century movement that justified social inequality as part of the wisdom of nature…….

In 1986, twenty social scientists at a "Brain and Aggression" meeting drafted the Seville Statement on Violence, subsequently adopted by UNESCO and endorsed by several scientific organizations. The statement claimed to "challenge a number of alleged biological findings that have been used, even by some in our disciplines, to justify violence and war":

'It is scientifically incorrect to say that we have inherited a tendency to make war from our animal ancestors.'

'It is scientifically incorrect to say that war or any other violent behavior is genetically programmed into our human nature.'

'It is scientifically incorrect to say that in the course of human evolution there has been a selection for aggressive behavior more than for other kinds of behavior."

"It is scientifically incorrect to say that humans have a "violent brain.""

"It is scientifically incorrect to say that war is caused by "instinct" or any single motivation. . . . We conclude that biology does not condemn humanity to war, and that humanity can be freed from the bondage of biological pessimism and empowered with confidence to undertake the transformative tasks needed in the International Year of Peace and in the , years to come."

What moral certainty could have incited these scholars to doctor quotations, censor ideas, attack the ideas' proponents ad hominem, smear them with unwarranted associations to repugnant political movements, arid mobilize powerful institutions to legislate what is correct and incorrect? The certainty comes from an opposition to three putative implications of an innate human nature.

First, if the mind has an innate structure, different people (or different classes, sexes, and races) could have different innate structures. That would justify discrimination and oppression.

Second, if obnoxious behavior like aggression, war, rape, clannishness, and the pursuit of status and wealth are innate, that would make them "natural" and hence good. And even if they are deemed objectionable, they are in the genes and cannot be changed, so attempts at social reform are futile.

Third, if behavior is caused by the genes, then individuals cannot be held responsible tor their actions. If the rapist is following a biological imperative to spread his genes, it's not his fault.

Aside perhaps from a few cynical defense lawyers and a lunatic fringe who are unlikely to read manifestos in the New York Review of Books, no one has actually drawn these mad conclusions. Rather, they are thought to be extrapolations that the untutored masses might draw, so the dangerous ideas must themselves be suppressed. In fact, the problem with the three arguments is not that the conclusions are so abhorrent that no one should be allowed near the top of the slippery slope that leads to them. The problem is that there is no such slope; the arguments are non sequiturs. To expose them, one need only examine the logic of the theories and separate the scientific from the moral issues.
My point is not that scientists should pursue the truth in their ivory tower, undistracted by moral and political thoughts. Every human act involving another living being is both the subject matter of psychology and the subject matter of moral philosophy, and both are important. But they are not the same thing. The debate over human nature has been muddied by an intellectual laziness, an unwillingness to make moral arguments when moral issues come up. Rather than reasoning from principles of rights and values, the tendency has been to buy an off-the-shelf moral package (generally New Left or Marxist) or to lobby for a feel-good picture of human nature that would spare us from having to argue moral issues at all.
The moral equation in most discussions of human nature is simple: innate equals right-wing equals bad. Now, many hereditarian movements have been right-wing and bad, such as eugenics, forced sterilization, genocide, discrimination along racial, ethnic, and sexual lines, and the justification of economic and social castes. The Standard Social Science Model, to its credit, has provided some of the grounds that thoughtful social critics have used to undermine these practices.
……………….

The confusion of scientific psychology with moral and political goals, and the resulting pressure to believe in a structureless mind, have rippled perniciously through the academy and modern intellectual discourse. Many of us have been puzzled by the takeover of humanities departments by the doctrines of postmodernism, poststructuralism, and deconstructionism, according to which objectivity is impossible, meaning is self-contradictory and reality is socially constructed. The motives become clearer when we consider typical statements like "Human beings have constructed and used gender—human beings can deconstruct and stop using gender," and "The heterosexual/homosexual binary is not in nature, but is socially constructed, and therefore deconstructable." Reality is denied to categories, knowledge, and the world itself so that reality can be denied to stereotypes of gender, race, and sexual orientation. The doctrine is basically a convoluted way of getting to the conclusion that oppression of women, gays, and minorities is bad. And the dichotomy between "in nature" and "socially constructed" shows a poverty of the imagination, because it omits a third alternative: that some categories are products of a complex mind designed to mesh with what is in nature.
Mainstream social critics, too, can state any absurdity if it fits the Standard Social Science Model. Little boys are encouraged to argue and fight. Children learn to associate sweets with pleasure because parents use sweets as a reward for eating spinach. Teenagers compete in looks and dress because they follow the example set by spelling bees and award ceremonies. Men are socialized into believing that the goal of sex is an orgasm. Eighty-year-old women are considered less physically attractive than twenty-year-olds because our phallic culture has turned the young girl into the cult object of desire. It's not just that there is no evidence for these astonishing claims, but it is hard to credit that the authors, deep down, believe them themselves. These kinds of claims are uttered without concern for whether they are true; they are part of the secular catechism of our age.