[meteorite-list] Kansas: Creation, Evolution and Intelligent Design

From: Jake Pelletier <jakep_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Fri May 13 18:45:01 2005
Message-ID: <002d01c5580d$61fa9b40$ea78bbd8_at_S0031512725>

Hello list,

Here is a link to some more logical information on why it should be
evolution that is taught in schools.

http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/evolution98/

Jake

----- Original Message -----
From: "Darren Garrison" <cynapse_at_charter.net>
To: "MARK BOSTICK" <thebigcollector_at_msn.com>
Cc: <meteorite-list_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Sent: Friday, May 13, 2005 9:02 AM
Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Kansas: Creation,Evolution and Intelligent
Design


On Fri, 13 May 2005 10:27:10 -0500, "MARK BOSTICK" <thebigcollector_at_msn.com>
wrote:

>I think most rational people like or at least don't mind the new
>definition.
> However, do not be disillusioned that they are trying to teaching
> students
>to be open minded. More so, one could not teach creationism under the old
>definition. That was the last obstacle to keep the bible out of the
>classroom. They need now only to force it on the education board, since
>the
>board rejected it on their own will. This current "debate" will accomplish
>that.
>

Here's the article I was looking for earlier-- words to live by.

http://homepages.wmich.edu/~korista/baloney.html

Baloney Detection
               How to draw boundaries between science and pseudoscience

   By MICHAEL SHERMER


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

When lecturing on science and pseudoscience at colleges and universities, I
am inevitably asked,
after challenging common beliefs held by many students,``Why should we
believe you'' My answer:``You
shouldn't''

I then explain that we need to check things out for ourselves and, short of
that, at least to ask
basic questions that get to the heart of the validity of any claim. This is
what I call baloney
detection, in deference to Carl Sagan, who coined the phrase Baloney
Detection Kit. To detect
baloney--that is, to help discriminate between science and pseudoscience--I
suggest10 questions to
ask when encountering any claim.

             1. How reliable is the source of the claim?
Pseudoscientists often appear quite reliable, but when examined closely, the
facts and figures they
cite are distorted, taken out of context or occasionally even fabricated. Of
course, everyone makes
some mistakes. And as historian of science Daniel Kevles showed so
effectively in his book The
Baltimore Affair, it can be hard to detect a fraudulent signal within the
background noise of
sloppiness that is a normal part of the scientific process. The question is,
Do the data and
interpretations show signs of intentional distortion? When an independent
committee established to
investigate potential fraud scrutinized a set of research notes in Nobel
laureate David Baltimore's
laboratory, it revealed a surprising number of mistakes. Baltimore was
exonerated because his lab's
mistakes were random and nondirectional.

             2. Does this source often make similar claims?
Pseudoscientists have a habit of going well beyond the facts. Flood
geologists (creationists who
believe that Noah's flood can account for many of the earth's geologic
formations) consistently make
outrageous claims that bear no relation to geological science. Of course,
some great thinkers do
frequently go beyond the data in their creative speculations. Thomas Gold of
Cornell University is
notorious for his radical ideas, but he has been right often enough that
other scientists listen to
what he has to say. Gold proposes, for example, that oil is not a fossil
fuel at all but the
by-product of a deep, hot biosphere (microorganisms living at unexpected
depths within the crust).
Hardly any earth scientists with whom I have spoken think Gold is right, yet
they do not consider
him a crank. Watch out for a pattern of fringe thinking that consistently
ignores or distorts data.

             3. Have the claims been verified by another source?
Typically pseudoscientists make statements that are unverified or verified
only by a source within
their own belief circle. We must ask, Who is checking the claims, and even
who is checking the
checkers? The biggest problem with the cold fusion debacle, for instance,
was not that Stanley Pons
and Martin Fleischman were wrong. It was that they announced their
spectacular discovery at a press
conference before other laboratories verified it. Worse, when cold fusion
was not replicated, they
continued to cling to their claim. Outside verification is crucial to good
science.

             4. How does the claim fit with what we know about how the world
works?
An extraordinary claim must be placed into a larger context to see how it
fits. When people claim
that the Egyptian pyramids and the Sphinx were built more than 10,000 years
ago by an unknown,
advanced race, they are not presenting any context for that earlier
civilization. Where are the rest
of the artifacts of those people? Where are their works of art, their
weapons, their clothing, their
tools, their trash? Archaeology simply does not operate this way.

             5. Has anyone gone out of the way to disprove the claim, or has
only supportive
evidence
             been sought?
This is the confirmation bias, or the tendency to seek confirmatory evidence
and to reject or ignore
disconfirmatory evidence. The confirmation bias is powerful, pervasive and
almost impossible for any
of us to avoid. It is why the methods of science that emphasize checking and
rechecking,
verification and replication, and especially attempts to falsify a claim,
are so critical.


When exploring the borderlands of science, we often face a ``boundary
problem'' of where to draw the
line between science and pseudoscience. The boundary is the line of
demarcation between geographies
of knowledge, the border defining countries of claims. Knowledge sets are
fuzzier entities than
countries, however, and their edges are blurry. It is not always clear where
to draw the line. Last
month I suggested five questions to ask about a claim to determine whether
it is legitimate or
baloney. Continuing with the baloney-detection questions, we see that in the
process we are also
helping to solve the boundary problem of where to place a claim.


             6. Does the preponderance of evidence point to the claimant's
conclusion or to a
             different one?
The theory of evolution, for example, is ``proved'' through a convergence of
evidence from a number
of independent lines of inquiry. No one fossil, no one piece of biological
or paleontological
evidence has ``evolution'' written on it; instead tens of thousands of
evidentiary bits add up to a
story of the evolution of life. Creationists conveniently ignore this
confluence, focusing instead
on trivial anomalies or currently unexplained phenomena in the history of
life.

             7. Is the claimant employing the accepted rules of reason and
tools of research, or
have
             these been abandoned in favor of others that lead to the
desired conclusion?
A clear distinction can be made between SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial
Intelligence) scientists
and UFOlogists. SETI scientists begin with the null hypothesis that ETIs do
not exist and that they
must provide concrete evidence before making the extraordinary claim that we
are not alone in the
universe. UFOlogists begin with the positive hypothesis that ETIs exist and
have visited us, then
employ questionable research techniques to support that belief, such as
hypnotic regression
(revelations of abduction experiences), anecdotal reasoning (countless
stories of UFO sightings),
conspiratorial thinking (governmental cover-ups of alien encounters),
low-quality visual evidence
(blurry photographs and grainy videos), and anomalistic thinking
(atmospheric anomalies and visual
misperceptions by eyewitnesses).

             8. Is the claimant providing an explanation for the observed
phenomena or merely
             denying the existing explanation?
This is a classic debate strategy--criticize your opponent and never affirm
what you believe to
avoid criticism. It is next to impossible to get creationists to offer an
explanation for life
(other than ``God did it''). Intelligent Design (ID) creationists have done
no better, picking away
at weaknesses in scientific explanations for difficult problems and offering
in their stead. ``ID
did it.'' This stratagem is unacceptable in science.

             9. If the claimant proffers a new explanation, does it account
for as many phenomena as
             the old explanation did?
Many HIV/AIDS skeptics argue that lifestyle causes AIDS. Yet their
alternative theory does not
explain nearly as much of the data as the HIV theory does. To make their
argument, they must ignore
the diverse evidence in support of HIV as the causal vector in AIDS while
ignoring the significant
correlation between the rise in AIDS among hemophiliacs shortly after HIV
was inadvertently
introduced into the blood supply.

             10. Do the claimant's personal beliefs and biases drive the
conclusions, or vice versa?
All scientists hold social, political and ideological beliefs that could
potentially slant their
interpretations of the data, but how do those biases and beliefs affect
their research in practice?
Usually during the peer-review system, such biases and beliefs are rooted
out, or the paper or book
is rejected.


Clearly, there are no foolproof methods of detecting baloney or drawing the
boundary between science
and pseudoscience. Yet there is a solution: science deals in fuzzy fractions
of certainties and
uncertainties, where evolution and big bang cosmology may be assigned a 0.9
probability of being
true, and creationism and UFOs a 0.1 probability of being true. In between
are borderland claims: we
might assign superstring theory a 0.7 and cryonics a 0.2. In all cases, we
remain open-minded and
flexible, willing to reconsider our assessments as new evidence arises. This
is, undeniably, what
makes science so fleeting and frustrating to many people; it is, at the same
time, what makes
science the most glorious product of the human mind.



             The Author:
             Michael Shermer is founding publisher of Skeptic magazine and
author of
            The Borderlands of Science.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

from the November & December 2001 issues of Scientific American




plus an interesting expanded version here:

http://www.physics.smu.edu/~pseudo/baloney.html
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Received on Fri 13 May 2005 06:44:52 PM PDT