The Scientific Method: High Priests in the Court of Merlin

I got the opportunity to sit and watch a truly fascinating PBS special a couple of weekends ago, on the 2005 case pitting the Dover School board's defense of Intelligent Design against Darwin's Theory of Evolution in Science class, and it got me going on my rant again.

Coincidentally, I first heard about the Scopes Monkey Trial not long before that and was equally fascinated. I can almost understand the reluctance to embrace Darwin in the 20's, but 2005?? In a Post-Genome Project world?

And yet another revelation, I discovered this graphic which illustrates the percentage of people from various countries, who believe or deny evolution.

One of the interesting aspects of all of these data points is the gradual encroachment of religious dogma into the scientific realm. It appears to be a concerted subversive effort focused on establishing creationism as a legitimate scientific issue with the intention of rolling back the cultural changes that have been attributed to the post-Darwin era.

It turns out that there are people that believe that most of society's ills can be traced to the denial of man as a spiritual being, which they claim is a necessary by-product of the Theory of Evolution. Without the belief in a spiritual or supernatural base for our moral underpinnings it is believed that we would run amok, amoral and evil.

To stop the progress down our amoral death spiral, it is proposed that we reassert the "truth" of the dominant religious text, and remove the cancer that is evolution from our minds.

The obvious problem with the insertion of religious dogma into the scientific process in the manner asserted is the effect it has on scientific curiosity and the seeking of scientific knowledge. When a scientist sees the world around him or her, they are driven to understand it, to question its origin, to question the rules and laws governing its behavior, to test these "laws" by assertion and experimentation.

This collection of data through observation and experimentation, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses form the basis of the scientific method. (Source: Wikipedia) When curiosity about observable fact is stymied by a dogmatic belief structure, we stifle the scientific process.

The very lives we live owe a tremendous debt to the scientists and scientific curiosity that preceded us. The iterative process of observation, questioning, testing and experimentation has led to the discovery of new technologies that we take for granted. Plastics, penicillin, seat belts, the internet, germ theory, television, cell phones, fertilizers, and on, and on.

We kill the curiosity in our children, by answering their first "why?" with "because God made it so", and with the death of that curiosity, dies all that makes us human, all that separates us from the animals.

We all have a responsibility to make our best effort to understand the world around us

It's Not Magic: High Priests in the Court of Merlin

Got a strange request at work today.

An employee called from one of our remote sites describing a dispute with one of our vehicles that had been in an accident. The caller wanted to know where on our intranet they could find the satellite photos that showed the intersection at that particular time. They could find aerial views, but not for that date and time.

Hmmm... I better ask Chloe to upload the image to my PDA and run a scan across the access ports to find out if the hackers have broken into CTU to jam the satellite signal. (My name is Jack Bauer and the following took place between 8:00 am and 9:00 am)

What was disconcerting about the request was the vast number of concepts that appeared to elude the person asking for the information. They appeared to blur a multitude of distinctions, for example, between our intranet and the broader internet, and what might be publicly available information and what is probably classified, information sources etc. And it led me to thinking.

How many of us understand the world around us, how much of it do we understand and how many of us just disconnect and see "magic"

In the post-Jurassic Park era, do kids (even some adults) understand the time separation between humans and dinosaurs? Do kids even understand that it was a movie and dinosaurs no longer exist?

What about money? How do parents explain ATM's and money to children? What about credit cards?

As all these different concepts and ideas evolve from and are abstracted from the concepts that preceded them, and as we as a society, begin to lose our grasp on the original concepts, do people really understand what they see around them anymore?

The other context for this debate is the death-match struggle between faith vs fact. We see the battle all around us.

I cringed a few days ago when I heard the Prez... (wait, that's not entirely fair, because I always cringe when he talks)... Anyway, GeeDubya was quoted as saying, "I don't believe that we are in a recession". And I know, I know, don't take it out of the context.

What struck me was the words "I don't believe", and the particular emphasis and stress he put on the term "believe". I don't want to read too much between the lines, (especially in GeeDubya's case, as I have begun to suspect that there is not too much between the lines to start) but I found myself thinking that a recession, as it were, is a technical economic term. I got the sense that it wasn't that he got data that conflicted with the recession statement, it was that his belief structure didn't allow recessions to exist.

Don't confuse me with facts.

I know.. that's a little harsh, but it speaks to the discipline of scientific discovery and fact, and having the search for knowledge as a fundamental element of one's core values.

There, I said it. I'm a man of science. I "believe" that we all have a fundamental responsibility to try to understand how things work. It is not enough to accept the results on "faith".

It's not magic.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry