With a Success Rate Like This...
I was talking on the phone with my dad yesterday
about medical treatments we had both had when we were young. He said, "I suppose
the only medicines they still use today from when I was a boy would probably be
aspirin and quinine." Maybe baking soda, too. Not much, though, at any rate. He
was almost 20 years old before penicillin was
introduced.
In other words, you don't have to go back very far to see a much different world than the one we live in. Who do you know (in the West) who made it through childhood without ever taking an antibiotic? Anybody over 70 years old, that's who. The progress of science has been astonishingly fast, and almost inconceivably successful. It's been a spectacular century or two.
In other words, you don't have to go back very far to see a much different world than the one we live in. Who do you know (in the West) who made it through childhood without ever taking an antibiotic? Anybody over 70 years old, that's who. The progress of science has been astonishingly fast, and almost inconceivably successful. It's been a spectacular century or two.
Consider the way you look at the stars at night.
You know almost instinctively, don't you, that they're unimaginably far away. In
the mid-1800s you wouldn't have had that same automatic sensation. We had only
vague hints (based on parallax) to tell us how terrifically far they really
were, and no idea at all of how big the whole universe was. We never would have
guessed 14 billion light-years, that's for sure--especially since the speed of
light wasn't reliably measured until about then. We didn't know the universe was
expanding. We didn't know how the stars could burn without exhausting their
fuel. We didn't know there were 100 billion other galaxies.
We didn't even know there was our own
galaxy.
We didn't have a periodic table in the mid-1800s. We had no concept of what electricity was; electrons weren't discovered until the early 1900s. Light was a wave traveling through an undefined ether that everyone was sure they'd discover. Speaking of travel, the steam locomotive was the way to go; and man would never fly. My family visited the Wright Brothers memorial in Kitty Hawk just over a week ago. I never realized how revolutionary their engineering actually was, or how much basic science they did before that first flight. Flying seems so commonplace and almost natural to me, that it took some concentrated time in a museum to be reminded how recent and amazing it really is. That first flight was just barely over a hundred years ago. Now we have people signing up to be tourists on space voyages, and our whole economy seems to run on business persons flying on jet planes.
How about communications? By the mid-1800s we had the telegraph, so the Pony Express wasn't quite the fastest way to get a message across the country anymore. Until the 1860s, though, when the Transatlantic Cable was laid after several tries, it still took weeks or months to send a message across the Atlantic. When I was young, an intercontinental phone call was still a big, big deal. (Any long distance call was a big deal, in fact.) What does it cost now? With Skype, almost nothing. Many of us can remember the graphic on a grainy TV saying "Via Satellite" for those still-new overseas news feeds. Now you can have your own satellite receiver. With iChat or one of the other IM systems, you can do your own live video. Absolutely free. Or an average person could sit down in his living room with a computer on his lap and write up something that thousands of people all over the world will look at within just a few days--we call that blogging.
How about particle physics? We knew nothing about atoms 150 years ago. Quantum physics has had less than 100 years to mature, but it's already given us transistors, lasers, GPS, and far more, not to mention incredible basic knowledge about the world. When I was a teenager I read a science fiction short story--I wish I could remember its name and author--that made mockery of the ray guns in Flash Gordon stories. That was because, as the current science knew, light could never be made into a weapon. (That story was maybe 15 or more years old when I read it, and already out of date, though not by much.) Now there's a laser just a few miles from my home that can slice through 10 inches of stainless steel in one second. (I hate to think what it would do to my hometown if they left it on for two seconds!)
I started out here by writing about medicine. Have you ever seen a museum of Civil War-era medical instruments? That'll frighten you out of whatever ails you! Ether was first used for anesthesia about 160 years ago. Can you imagine surgery without it? I've had at least two, maybe three illnesses that would have killed a person 100 years ago. Now they can remove an appendix through a little laparoscopy incision (I wish it had been that easy in 1974). As for pharmaceuticals, who knows how many thousands of drugs are out there?
Now, how about another branch of biological science? In the 1860s Charles Darwin proposed a theory of the origin of species. He predicted it would be solidly supported by fossils when enough had been found to fill the gaps. But the fossil record is still just about as gap-py now as it was then: new discoveries are leaving as many empty transitional slots as they are filling. And nobody has yet observed a definite instance of speciation, especially one that involves new structures or functions, in all that time, despite up to 40,000 generations (of animals, bugs, plants, etc.) of trying.
Nobody has come up with anything approaching a credible explanation for the initial origin of life, either. That wasn't part of Darwin's theory, but how can it be anything but essential to it--especially if you view Darwinism in naturalistic terms? There has been absolutely no progress whatever on origin of life studies, unless you count Miller and Urey's demonstration that organic molecules can form under natural conditions (conditions that didn't obtain in the early earth, that is). Or maybe you could count the negative successes--ideas that have been tried and ruled out. But nothing is even beginning to make sense as a positive explanation.
What makes a science successful? You don't have to ask that question about astronomy, cybernetics, medicine, communications, transportation, chemistry, seismology, meteorology, and so on. Their incredible record speaks for itself. But with respect to evolutionary biology, what successes can it point to that couldn't as easily be ascribed to comparative anatomy, comparative genetics, and the like? You may say that it tells us about what's going on with bacterial antibiotic resistance, but can Darwin take credit for that? Weren't the same fundamental principles known by animal and plant breeders hundreds of years earlier?
What I'm suggesting is that if other sciences had the same success rate as Darwinian science has had in its most fundamental aspects, they'd still be in their infancy. If communications had made progress like Darwinism has made in finding intermediate forms and filling the fossil gaps, we'd still be using crank phones, asking the operator to make our connections, and yelling at our neighbors to get off the party line. If transportation had moved at the rate Darwinism has done in demonstrating actual speciation (in the lab or in the field), we'd still be riding horses and thinking a steam locomotive was wonderful. If astronomy had advanced as quickly as origin of life research, we'd still think the sun was using oxygen to burn some unknown and unknowable fuel. Or maybe we would have ruled that out, as some origin of life theories have been ruled out--but we'd be completely stumped as to what the sun actually is.
But again, what makes a branch of science successful? There isn't a measuring stick for the question, is there?--except perhaps for scientific consensus. And there is certainly widespread consensus on Darwinism. Some observations do fit the Darwinian framework, like the fossil evidence for gradually increasing complexity of life over time, a kind of progression from the simplest plants and animals to today's variety of life. This was already known before Darwin, but it has held firm over the decades, so we can grant that as a kind of prediction being fulfilled. There are ring species. There are homologies, which have driven the whole enterprise from the start. There's more, of course; and certainly there's a whole new world opening through genomics: maybe that will prove the breakthrough that accelerates everything.
Just as physicists rely on four fundamental forces and three laws of thermodynamics, biologists cling to Darwinism as a central organizing framework. It allows them to understand how things fit into the grand picture of life, and gives them a sense that they understand where it all comes from. Central organizing theories are marvelous things, and I sympathize with the desire to have one. I'm sure that biologists feel that Design leaves them hanging over a precipice of non-explanation, where physical causal links are broken and science has nothing to contribute, other than describing what follows. That can't be comfortable. But with or without evolution, biology can organize around species' relatedness (functional, structural, or genetic).
So maybe I'm too hard on Darwinism, to suggest that it hasn't progressed much over a century and a half. Maybe its challenges are no more embarrassing than physics' inability to unite the four fundamental forces or to build a controlled, sustained fusion reaction. But is there any other science that answers a major challenge, as evolutionists answer Michael Behe, by saying, "We can't show that we're right, but we can at least conceive of a way that we might be!" (For that's what their explanations for Irreducible Complexity often amount to.) If there is another such science, would someone like Michael Ruse say of it that it's "fact, Fact, FACT"? Or would a major spokesperson say anyone who disagrees is stupid, insane, or possibly wicked? Would it be as "certain" as "the roundness of the earth, the motions of the planets, and the molecular constitution of matter"?
Darwinism has ideas, and some evidence for them. But it sure doesn't have a Hubble Telescope to show for itself. It doesn't have lasers or cyclotrons, or jet planes or a space station (or radar to figure out where they are). It doesn't have an MRI or an fMRI or a CT or PET scanner, and it hasn't found the cure to anything. It doesn't have nuclear power plants or even emissions scrubbers for coal-fired ones. It doesn't even have one example to show of its own theory in operation--meaning an Origin of a Species, not just variation in a population. But it does have consensus. So who am I to say it hasn't made much progress? Maybe I really am being too hard on it.
We didn't have a periodic table in the mid-1800s. We had no concept of what electricity was; electrons weren't discovered until the early 1900s. Light was a wave traveling through an undefined ether that everyone was sure they'd discover. Speaking of travel, the steam locomotive was the way to go; and man would never fly. My family visited the Wright Brothers memorial in Kitty Hawk just over a week ago. I never realized how revolutionary their engineering actually was, or how much basic science they did before that first flight. Flying seems so commonplace and almost natural to me, that it took some concentrated time in a museum to be reminded how recent and amazing it really is. That first flight was just barely over a hundred years ago. Now we have people signing up to be tourists on space voyages, and our whole economy seems to run on business persons flying on jet planes.
How about communications? By the mid-1800s we had the telegraph, so the Pony Express wasn't quite the fastest way to get a message across the country anymore. Until the 1860s, though, when the Transatlantic Cable was laid after several tries, it still took weeks or months to send a message across the Atlantic. When I was young, an intercontinental phone call was still a big, big deal. (Any long distance call was a big deal, in fact.) What does it cost now? With Skype, almost nothing. Many of us can remember the graphic on a grainy TV saying "Via Satellite" for those still-new overseas news feeds. Now you can have your own satellite receiver. With iChat or one of the other IM systems, you can do your own live video. Absolutely free. Or an average person could sit down in his living room with a computer on his lap and write up something that thousands of people all over the world will look at within just a few days--we call that blogging.
How about particle physics? We knew nothing about atoms 150 years ago. Quantum physics has had less than 100 years to mature, but it's already given us transistors, lasers, GPS, and far more, not to mention incredible basic knowledge about the world. When I was a teenager I read a science fiction short story--I wish I could remember its name and author--that made mockery of the ray guns in Flash Gordon stories. That was because, as the current science knew, light could never be made into a weapon. (That story was maybe 15 or more years old when I read it, and already out of date, though not by much.) Now there's a laser just a few miles from my home that can slice through 10 inches of stainless steel in one second. (I hate to think what it would do to my hometown if they left it on for two seconds!)
I started out here by writing about medicine. Have you ever seen a museum of Civil War-era medical instruments? That'll frighten you out of whatever ails you! Ether was first used for anesthesia about 160 years ago. Can you imagine surgery without it? I've had at least two, maybe three illnesses that would have killed a person 100 years ago. Now they can remove an appendix through a little laparoscopy incision (I wish it had been that easy in 1974). As for pharmaceuticals, who knows how many thousands of drugs are out there?
Now, how about another branch of biological science? In the 1860s Charles Darwin proposed a theory of the origin of species. He predicted it would be solidly supported by fossils when enough had been found to fill the gaps. But the fossil record is still just about as gap-py now as it was then: new discoveries are leaving as many empty transitional slots as they are filling. And nobody has yet observed a definite instance of speciation, especially one that involves new structures or functions, in all that time, despite up to 40,000 generations (of animals, bugs, plants, etc.) of trying.
Nobody has come up with anything approaching a credible explanation for the initial origin of life, either. That wasn't part of Darwin's theory, but how can it be anything but essential to it--especially if you view Darwinism in naturalistic terms? There has been absolutely no progress whatever on origin of life studies, unless you count Miller and Urey's demonstration that organic molecules can form under natural conditions (conditions that didn't obtain in the early earth, that is). Or maybe you could count the negative successes--ideas that have been tried and ruled out. But nothing is even beginning to make sense as a positive explanation.
What makes a science successful? You don't have to ask that question about astronomy, cybernetics, medicine, communications, transportation, chemistry, seismology, meteorology, and so on. Their incredible record speaks for itself. But with respect to evolutionary biology, what successes can it point to that couldn't as easily be ascribed to comparative anatomy, comparative genetics, and the like? You may say that it tells us about what's going on with bacterial antibiotic resistance, but can Darwin take credit for that? Weren't the same fundamental principles known by animal and plant breeders hundreds of years earlier?
What I'm suggesting is that if other sciences had the same success rate as Darwinian science has had in its most fundamental aspects, they'd still be in their infancy. If communications had made progress like Darwinism has made in finding intermediate forms and filling the fossil gaps, we'd still be using crank phones, asking the operator to make our connections, and yelling at our neighbors to get off the party line. If transportation had moved at the rate Darwinism has done in demonstrating actual speciation (in the lab or in the field), we'd still be riding horses and thinking a steam locomotive was wonderful. If astronomy had advanced as quickly as origin of life research, we'd still think the sun was using oxygen to burn some unknown and unknowable fuel. Or maybe we would have ruled that out, as some origin of life theories have been ruled out--but we'd be completely stumped as to what the sun actually is.
But again, what makes a branch of science successful? There isn't a measuring stick for the question, is there?--except perhaps for scientific consensus. And there is certainly widespread consensus on Darwinism. Some observations do fit the Darwinian framework, like the fossil evidence for gradually increasing complexity of life over time, a kind of progression from the simplest plants and animals to today's variety of life. This was already known before Darwin, but it has held firm over the decades, so we can grant that as a kind of prediction being fulfilled. There are ring species. There are homologies, which have driven the whole enterprise from the start. There's more, of course; and certainly there's a whole new world opening through genomics: maybe that will prove the breakthrough that accelerates everything.
Just as physicists rely on four fundamental forces and three laws of thermodynamics, biologists cling to Darwinism as a central organizing framework. It allows them to understand how things fit into the grand picture of life, and gives them a sense that they understand where it all comes from. Central organizing theories are marvelous things, and I sympathize with the desire to have one. I'm sure that biologists feel that Design leaves them hanging over a precipice of non-explanation, where physical causal links are broken and science has nothing to contribute, other than describing what follows. That can't be comfortable. But with or without evolution, biology can organize around species' relatedness (functional, structural, or genetic).
So maybe I'm too hard on Darwinism, to suggest that it hasn't progressed much over a century and a half. Maybe its challenges are no more embarrassing than physics' inability to unite the four fundamental forces or to build a controlled, sustained fusion reaction. But is there any other science that answers a major challenge, as evolutionists answer Michael Behe, by saying, "We can't show that we're right, but we can at least conceive of a way that we might be!" (For that's what their explanations for Irreducible Complexity often amount to.) If there is another such science, would someone like Michael Ruse say of it that it's "fact, Fact, FACT"? Or would a major spokesperson say anyone who disagrees is stupid, insane, or possibly wicked? Would it be as "certain" as "the roundness of the earth, the motions of the planets, and the molecular constitution of matter"?
Darwinism has ideas, and some evidence for them. But it sure doesn't have a Hubble Telescope to show for itself. It doesn't have lasers or cyclotrons, or jet planes or a space station (or radar to figure out where they are). It doesn't have an MRI or an fMRI or a CT or PET scanner, and it hasn't found the cure to anything. It doesn't have nuclear power plants or even emissions scrubbers for coal-fired ones. It doesn't even have one example to show of its own theory in operation--meaning an Origin of a Species, not just variation in a population. But it does have consensus. So who am I to say it hasn't made much progress? Maybe I really am being too hard on it.
Posted: Wed - May 30, 2007 at 01:13 PM |
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Published On: Dec 06, 2007 01:04 PM
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