Pursuing praxis

My mom sent me a newspaper clipping a while back about Jonathan Wells - an intelligent design proponent with a new book out - and asked me if I’d heard of him, and what I thought. Well:

Yes, I know of Jonathan Wells. My advisor has written at least one review article on the man. I’ve read a couple of his scientific papers, in preparation for the Dover Trial last fall. Wells is full of bunk. His legit science papers in no way admit of intelligent design, much less supporting it in opposition to evolutionary viewpoints. Naturalistic explanations far and away account for what he’s shown; in fact, his paper on the microstructure and function of microtubules and centrioles in cells, is utterly indistiguishable from something another scientist, accepting evolution, would write.

He and Michael Behe and Dembski like to make an "argument from complexity." Basically they haven’t got past the 3rd grader’s observation of "Wow, the world is complicated! How do things do what they do?" But instead of listening to their 3rd grade science teachers, or picking up Dad’s "The Way Things Work" book, Wells and Behe and Dembski then suspend any inquiry and conclude that it "must" have been intelligently designed.

Really, the Argument from Complexity is an Argument from Wowness. And if the Argument from Wowness is to stand as a conclusion (rather than as the motivation for inquiry), it presupposes a view that humans are either incapable or not allowed to mentally dig beyond the Wow Observation using the same mental tools as before. The supposed intractability of such Wow Observations ("It’s just too complex!!") implies that we’re either supposed to be omniscient, or that we’re intractably retarded. And it conveniently ignores how many Wow Observations preceded this moment in history, resolutions of which enabled the culture, technology and standard of living we currently enjoy - one that is unprecedented in the history of the known universe. Chew on that one for a minute.

ID is not just an alternative viewpoint, or an a-scientific position, it’s an anti-scientific concept, because if it’s accepted as a valid way of investigating the world… all investigation stops! You don’t get past the point of wonder. Nobody - not Aristotle or Newton or Darwin or the Wright Brothers or Louis Pasteur or anybody - could have done what they did with such an approach. Put away your calculators and test tubes, lock the lab door behind you and go to church. That’s all you can do. There’s nothing deep or hard or new that can be done with such an approach to thinking.

Now try to imagine a world without the achievements of the giants on whose shoulders we stand. Now think of all the existing scientists - the highest percentage and the greatest raw number to date, and with more funding and knowledge and opportunity than ever before - but each requiring a very specific mental protocol for successfully engaging with reality at the boundaries of knowledge. What if you effectively deleted all these people, or tried to commandeer their work, replacing thinkers with saintly nuns or day laborers? That is what is at stake. Nothing less.

ID proponents claim that ID is compatible with science, but basically they’ve just worked hard to explain away all the methods and knowledge that already exist. Apart from their explanations being logically, scientifically and philosophically wrong (and they’re very good at selling these invalid arguments, preying upon subtle and common errors in thinking and language), this sort of approach doesn’t let you do anything truly new. You’re also not allowed to significantly revise anything. You just have to do more of the same. Describe a new species of mold or look a little closer at the process of cell division - but not too closely. And god help you if you are intrigued and baffled and amazed by the stuff you study - the moments when science is pure adrenaline, and nothing can keep from diving in and figuring it out - cuz that’s the point at which ID people say you can’t do your work any more. Science stalls, knowledge stops, thinking vanishes.

And it’s those moments of heady discovery, as a student or researcher, that are the irreducible reward of the scientist - of any thinker, in fact. It’s the thing you can’t take away, or ignore, or mask. The free and capable exercise of one’s mind, and the positive internal feedback of sheer happiness when you’ve done it well - that is the motor of knowledge-expansion. And without it, the downstream applications and technologies will slow down, stagnate and dry up if we stifle any thinker’s mind. As with anything - just give it time.

It is essential to think of all the times you’ve cracked open a problem, when the "irreducible complexity" of the initial task starts to give (because it does, time and time again). Only by daring to assail the confounding, petulantly resistant problems can a thinker - the scientist within all of us - reach into the black box of reality, and pull out handfuls of treasure. And, as a principle of a free market, enterprising individuals pick up this new knowledge, and make novel applications and products, improving our capabilities and standards of living, and changing humanity’s worldview time and time again. Science - that is, principled and uncompromising application of reason - as a method of thinking, is responsible for getting us out of the jungle, and getting us out of the Dark Ages and into the Information Age. That is the single largest, and irrefutable, testament to the singular importance - and efficacy - of a free mind.

And there it is: the secret ingredient of civilization. Free use of your mind, with reality being the ultimate judge, is the foundation for knowledge production and, through industry, for economics. And through economics, for politics. (Economics and politics being the principles underlying acceptable human interaction, whether in monetary or interpersonal relations). Stifle one, you stifle them all. Throttle back the human mind - and what have you got? … Nothing that’s essentially human. Just as a dog wouldn’t be what we understand a dog to be, if it didn’t have its jaws and teeth and bark, or a horse wouldn’t be a horse if it didn’t have long legs, hooves, and succeed in killing grass - a human isn’t what a human should be if he can’t use his mind freely. Not all dogs win fights, not all horses are the fastest, and not all humans are always right in their judgement - but it’s the use of these capabilities that has to be uninhibited, for everyone, in every line of inquiry. Then, as a lovely side-consequence of people freely thinking and acting to the best of their abilities, in the heat of the crucible of reality, the best of the best rise to the top, and take us all with them.

I know I sound like I’m ranting and pushing things to their extreme, but that’s the best way to expose crappy ideas: put them through their paces, and see who comes out in the long run. ID is not about evolution. It’s not even about biology. It’s about how to think, and that applies to all branches of science, all areas of intellectual activity, all human action. Just as a cancer, with enough time, will pervade the entire body, so an invalid method of thinking in biology is not ultimately confinable to biology, and it spreads to all science, all thinking. This is especially true in a society like ours, that looks strongly to precedent - in its laws, culture, norms, and values. Compromise a principle once, and you have to work ten times as hard to get that little bit back - if you can at all.

ID is nothing less than a veiled advocacy for a return to the Dark Ages. And while I can have sympathy for the Average Joes of the populace getting hoodwinked by ID, who have only mediocre levels of science education or intellectual agility, I haven’t the slightest shred of patience or the remotest hint of respect for Wells and Behe and Dembski - at least 4 PhDs among them - who have been twisting creationism into palatable versions for the scientific community, while preying upon the sympathies, feelings, and ignorance of a majority of the population. They’ve slipped cyanide into the potatoes we live on. And few people will call them on precisely what they’re doing. We hear platitudes that, in effect, potatoes are outside the province of nutrition, or that just a little cyanide isn’t bad for you, or that it’s a novel and under-appreciated approach to human health, one that is wrongfully marginalized by the elitist, institutionalized, narrow-minded potato industry.

Inocculations against these predators of poor thinking are, however, in short supply. Because ID proponents prey on people’s thinking skills, the only way to really get rid of the problem - to remove the fuel instead of putting out countless fires - is to supercharge people’s ability to wade through complicated arguments. That is, the ability to accurately identify and evaluate ideas, and see past all the frills and facades that obscure the heart of an idea, and see what makes it tick, and to judge it appropriately. I’m just learning how to do it myself. I’ve been evaluating ideas for a long time, but it’s almost always been by non-essential points - just whatever I could get a handle on, mentally, sometimes better and more right, sometimes decidedly less so. And even if I was right, I wasn’t sure how to go about proving that it was right. Vehement argumentation is no substitute for watertight logic based on reality. That much I knew, but I didn’t know how to do it.

Now, the antidote to this is not dogmatism. That’s just an even more extreme form of un-thinking. What this problem requires is unabridged thinking - showing people how to think accurately, usefully, and cumulatively about the world. The thing is, they often already do it. It doesn’t require omniscience, but the kind of mental growth and progression that comes with experience, and honest  reflection on that experience. Most people do this intuitively, but because they don’t have a name for it, they can’t call it up in their defense when someone attacks the base of knowledge. And most people don’t recognize the attack as one of terrorism against the mind, but instead see it as an isolated incident by well-meaning, if pitifully confused, people - that is, if they don’t already buy the terrorists’ arguments and fund them on the side.

Thinking well is no small task - for an individual, or for a society. I know first-hand the challenge of re-learning how to think at the age of 25, and the mind-warps and growing-pains - and the thrill, pride, and leaps forward in ability and success - that go with it. I have no illusions about how tall the order is - for me to complete, or for other people. Or how long it will take.

All this is, in fact, the task of philosophy. At the end of the day, ID is an assault on epistemology, not evolution. Evolution is the convenient voodoo doll through which ID is trying to kill the human mind. Which is one of the many reasons I am an Objectivist - it’s the one group of people I’ve found that recognize this problem for exactly what it is, and know how to solve it. But they know you can’t solve it for another person. You can’t think for another person. Don’t tell people how to think - why would they listen now? - show them. Show them how to do it, and why it works, and why it’s this method of thinking that underlies human growth, potential, achievement, security and happiness.

But, at the end of the day, each person has to choose for himself - more or less knowledgably, it’s still a choice, though not equal in strength or in responsibility. And that’s why I hold the most knowledgeable people - the Wells and Behes and Dembskis of the world - explicitly culpable. They hurt people in the long (and not-so-long) run, and they have the ability and experience to know better. So, whether they think of it directly or not, by their actions they are harming people, and in the uninhibited exercise of my judgement, I will freely and knowledgably denounce them to the ends of the earth, in defense of my own mind and the world in which I live.