Academic freedom is at the very core of all that I do. I have a great liberty in science, the liberty of thought. But the popular image of a physicist, that of Einstein in his old age, is quite misleading. Most of the physicists that I know do not spend their days in tall-backed chairs, smoking a pipe, contemplating the nature of the universe and wondering about the mind of God. That is the domain of a few, but not the average day of a physicist.
Rather, the life of a physicist is a plate at Thanksgiving. Projects of many textures and flavors fill the day, from mundane software engineering, to the endless discussions at meetings, to the tackling of both engineering and mathematics problems. That plate is also typically heaping, carrying too much activity, too much responsibility. But it is a good life. Sure, we fight for every dollar that we spend on our research, but most of the time we are asking hard questions about the universe and doing the difficult work of conducting experiments and searching for answers. This is not a life of silence and contemplation, but a life of interaction, a life of labor, a life of inquiry.
Tonight, as I pulled up the road to my cottage in the Redwood City hills, I had what is often referred to as a “driveway moment”. Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” carried a lengthy piece on “Intelligent Design, the life of academics engaged in this topic, and the public debate”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5007508. Before you go a step further in this essay, it is imperative that you read the transcript or listen to the piece. The issues I’ll henceforth touch on depend on the discussions advanced by this story.
Now that you’ve have a good read or a good listen, let’s continue. There were several themes in this piece, but the central theme was the heart of academic freedom, the right to pursue a line of inquiry without fear of retribution. I believe that all people have the right to ask any question they want. However, let us not be mistaken when it comes to science: asking questions is only a step; to be a scientist, you must go much further than simple inquiry. For those who are futher trained in the methods of science, who have demonstrated the aptitude to continue in the field (as through the earning of a PhD), and who then go one to make contributions to science comes not only the right to inquire, but to pursue the experimentation needed to determine the answers.
Academic freedom in not simply the act of inquiry. Academic freedom is the liberty to question, but also the *responsibility* to pursue the answers using a rigorous methodology. One such methodology is science, the use of hypothesis and verification or refutation through experimentation to discern the applicability of the original proposal. Science primarily seeks explanations for effects in nature, by applying the methodology under the assumption that the cause or causes will be demonstrably reproducible through the repeated application of the method. Science is a means to couple the liberty and responsibility inherent in academic freedom.
I was disturbed by the first piece in the public radio story, regarding the alleged retribution being sought against Richard Sternberg, who oversaw the publication of a review article by Steven Meyer. This article tried to illustrate only the flaws in evolution without advancing any evidence for the validity of “intelligent design”. While Dr. Sternberg’s choices in his edtorial role were at least questionable, they certainly deserved no personal or professional ire, so long as he adhered to the ethics of peer review in overseeing the publication of that article. I am particularly disturbed by any vindictive response to the publishing of a powerless review article, especialyl this one. It was in a relatively minor journal with a very low impact factor for the community. While a victory, in some sense, for the Discovery Institute, certainly the impact of a content-free review article is zero on evolutionary biology.
The second part of the piece then focused on students and academics who hold to a belief in intelligent design. Some of them fear their chances for tenure will plummet if anybody in their department finds out who they are. Those in the inner circles of the intelligent design movement have publicly called on these academics to keep their beliefs secret until they have tenure. For the students who believe in this idea, the group discussed in the story was clearly overtly religious, as they attended their meetings on ID along with their Bibles. What worried me most was that there was this attitude that, like a virus, the movement must sneak into the walls of science, use its own structure against it, and burst it from the inside.
One of those interviewed in the story, Michael Behe (whom I have discussed before [TAOMPH124] [TAOMPH165]), tried to make the arguments that the advancing of intelligent design against the “orthodoxy” of evolution is like Galileo’s struggle to advance the heliocentric universe against Church dogma, and that intelligent design should be no more or less acceptable than the big bang theory. These are very poor arguments, for several reasons. Personally, I find them offensive, and I suspect Galileo himself would have some extremely choice words for Dr. Behe.
Let’s think about the first argument, that advocating intelligent design is like the struggle between Galileo and the church. I agree, except in reverse. I think that science is now in a struggle with radical American Protestant orthodoxy, and that to accept the existing arguments for intelligent design would be like accepting the argument that the sun must go around the Earth because at the battle of Gibeon, Joshua commanded the sun to stand still and God made it so. That said, there are further flaws in likening ID to Galileo’s struggle.
Foremost, Galileo was armed with something that proponents of intelligent design would do well to search for: evidence. He didn’t fight the church with gaps in Biblical theory. He didn’t argue that the Bible must be wrong because it doesn’t offer a complete picture of the world, particularly the existence of mathematics. If all Galileo had were negative arguments pointing to gaps, the world would have waiting long indeed for the enlightenment.
Galileo had observations, and data, and he conducted meticulous experiments to test his ideas. He discovered the moons of Jupiter, orbiting Jupiter and not Earth. He observed the phases of Venus, strong evidence for Venus’ orbiting of the sun and not the Earth. He saw sunspots, challenging the orthodoxy that the sun’s surface was pristine. He laid down the first theory of relativity, and did both the thought experiments and the lab experiments needed to demonstrate that a body in motion with another body will remain in that motion, even if it leaves contact with the second object. This helped to explain why the Earth could be rotating very fast, making night and day, but we don’t fly off the Earth (gravity is the other piece of the puzzle).
That’s right: Galileo had data, because he advanced the hypothesis that the Earth was not the center of the universe and wondered what the consequences of such a fact might be. He pursued observations to test those implications, and recorded data that, once amassed, cast great doubt on church orthodoxy. That’s because his evidence *contradicted* the Ptolemaic astronomical model adopted by the Church. It didn’t stress the gaps in Church dogma, but rather *challenged the core natural consequences of church dogma*. Given that, it becomes clear why intelligent design is not remotely like Galileo’s work: his work had real evidence, evidence that actually contradicted the predictions of the Ptolemaic model. Intelligent design has neither experiment, nor data, nor even the ability to make contradictory predictions to those in evolution. It merely tries to fill gaps, and therefore is not even a scientific hypothesis.
The second argument advanced by Behe, that the big bang and intelligent design have a lot in common, is also farce and fallacy. His analogy already breaks down when you realize that the steady-state model, that of an unchanging universe, was the preferred “dogmatic” viewpoint at the time. Einstein argued that view best, as when he said of quantum mechanics that God does not play dice (he was very wrong about that, since quantum mechanics is the foundation of modern society and has never been proven wrong in any experiment). Einstein introduced the cosmological constant as a means to balance the expansion and contraction of the universe. The view of a permanent, unchanging universe was very much an attempt to cling to a dogma.
But here again, we see revealed the inherent fallacy of intelligent design. The big bang theory made predictions, predictions that in some places directly contradicted steady state theory. For instance, it predicted that if the universe was born all at once from a singular point of infinite density, that as spacetime expands it pulls galaxies along with it. Since spacetime expands in all directions at once and at all places at once, it would seem, standing here on Earth, that all galaxies are receding from us. In the steady-state model, spacetime stands still and galaxies would have random motion, some moving toward us, some away. Observations in the 1920s and since then have all confirmed that all galaxies appear to recede from us, validating the big bang hypothesis. Likewise, if the big bang occurred then as the universe expanded and cooled, photons would have first been trapped in excited atoms, but later free to stream across open space when atoms neutralized in the cool universe. This “cosmic background radiation” would appear to come from all directions equally, and would now have a temperature of 3 degrees above absolute zero thanks to the expansion of spacetime, stretching and lowering the energy of lightwaves. Indeed, this radiation was accidentally observed by Penzias and Wilson in 1965. In a steady-state universe, there would never have been a time when the universe was hot enough to create photons, then trap them in atoms, then free them when the universe cooled below the atomic ground state.
Intelligent design, as a hypothesis, has never made a testable prediction. It only ever dictates, again and again, that this or that is too complex for random mutation and natural selection to have created it. It tries to squeeze into gaps, without creating anything new. It doesn’t create ideas, it doesn’t promote experiments, its proponents don’t collect data. It proposes a force acting outside of nature, impossible to test with repeatable methodology. It therefore lives beyond science, in the realm of the supernatural, never to be refuted.
It is central to academia to be able to ask questions without fear of retribution. But with inquiry you must accept criticism. This is part of the rigor of peer review that vets different ideas, and spurs innovative experimentation to test the original idea. However, with the liberty to question comes the responsibility to act. Any scientist who spends a life asking questions but never working to answer them is wasting somebody’s money. They are no scientist. They are a philosopher. Do not confuse such people, no matter how many PhD’s they sport, with scientists. A real scientist daily struggles to inquire and to answer. A real scientific theory makes predictions, testable with repeatable experiments. That’s real science. Any academic who engages purely in the advancement of an untestable idea deserves neither pay nor respect as a scientist. Let them pursue tenure in a different field.
.. [TAOMPH124] http://steve.cooleysekula.net/blog/?p=775
.. [TAOMPH165] http://steve.cooleysekula.net/blog/?p=733
