"That's Hot!" is Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie's trademarked saying applied to anything from, well, let's just leave it at anything. The two blondes, both quite wealthy in reality and both more than passingly bright, play the clueless rich girls bumbling through the actual lives of real people on The Simple Life. Calling everything hot is designed to demonstrate their cluelessness and it is an appropriate statement when referring to the kafuffle that has the Kansas educational system debating evolution and intelligent design, not only because all sides to the issue are clueless, but also because both sides seem to be getting pretty heated up about nothing.
For starters, the argument has nothing in the world to do with evolution. As it stands now, only one side of the debate is showing up in Kansas, with the evolutionists choosing to boycott the proceedings claiming that arguing the reality of evolution would be admitting that there was any argument to start with when in fact evolution is a scientific fact that requires no argument. One of the favorite statements by evolutionists is, why would scientists want to argue the scientific fact that the Earth travels around the sun? Anyone that would question this scientific fact would question the scientific fact of evolution, meaning that anyone questioning evolution is on the mental level of an ape.
Of course, this is merely an update of the 19th Century argument made by evolutionists that anyone who didn't believe in the scientific fact of evolution didn't believe in the scientific fact that the Earth is round, or to put it more bluntly, any one that believes the Earth is flat has the mental level of an ape. Probably the biggest difference between the two arguments, that to deny evolution is to deny the Earth is round or that it goes around the sun is that no one in recorded history ever believed the Earth was flat while everyone in most of recorded history believed the sun went around the Earth. Scarcely five centuries ago, the notion that the sun traveled around the Earth was a scientific fact.
The two statements do have something in common, however. Neither the statement that the Earth is round nor the statement that the Earth travels around the sun is a scientific fact. Both statements are actual facts in reality, measurable facts that are not the product of theory, or the scientific method in which a theory predicts a fact and once the fact is found, the theory itself is considered to be fact, in the terms of our empirical ideologues, a scientific fact.
Readers are well aware of my view on evolution. (See columns 09-05 and 25-05). Briefly, I disagree with the species evolution for which there is no evidence in the geologic record, evolutionists having demonstrated that Darwin was not falsifiable, and therefore not a scientific theory with Gould's punctuated equilibrium. Darwin, without the benefit of knowledge in the area of genetics, neither with respect to Gregor J. Mendel's laws of heredity in peas, which, because it opposed species evolution was buried for many years, nor with respect to the mid-20th century discovery attributed to James D. Watson and Francis Crick of the double-helical configuration of the gene, and therefore no knowledge of the nature of DNA or the production of the picture of the genome, did not propose characteristic evolution, which is the obvious course evolution takes.
The incredible appearance of many species in the geologic record, and the mass extinctions that follow, are the result of the cooling continuum, the fact that as a planet matures in empty space, it gradually cools off and the connection of cooling to gravity, which lessens as the planet cools. Species evolve with respect to the environment in which they exist, and when the environment is constantly changing with respect to its most important effect on species, temperature and gravity, species evolve to conform to the environment. Characteristics evolve, encoded in the genome and are passed down through the evolutionary chain. Any evolved characteristics are available if they are beneficial in working with other evolved characteristics or characteristics newly evolved to take advantage of the changing environment. For instance, the mammal used characteristics evolved prior to the evolution of mammals in conjunction with the newly evolved characteristic of temperature regulation.
The dead chains on the genome are merely dormant characteristics available if needed in any future evolution that might occur. Thus, evolution does have a direction, from simplicity to complexity, and that direction does have a purpose, not the creator driven purpose of religion or the design purpose proposed by one side of the current dispute, but rather the purpose simply of extending survivability. We start off as lichen dependent on the telluric currents of the particular locale, we evolve into trees and grass to take advantage of the electric flows moving between the earth and the atmosphere, which means we are no longer dependent on local electric flows, we evolve the ability to seed ourselves, which means even if we can't escape the forest fire, we can reseed the forest, we evolve mobility, which means we can flee the forest fire, and, because mobility demands that we have some way to move safely in the environment, we evolve a brain which not only allows us to form pictures of the environment in which we exist, but allows us to form pictures of an environment that doesn't exist thereby allowing us to alter the environment to extend our survivability. Instead of fleeing the fire, we can put it out and instead of huddling in caves, we can build cities against the darkness and plot how to extend our range of survivability into the universe itself.
Every stage of the evolutionary chain extends the survivability of animate matter and thus evolution does have a purpose, the purpose of life, to evolve the animate matter, animated by the electrical flows in the environment, so that animate matter, ourselves, can exist independent of the environment.
The intelligent design folks start off by taking advantage of a glaring error in empirical science. Empirical science was founded by Sir Isaac Newton at the beginning of the 17th Century to provide validity for his otherwise unprovable utterances concerning gravity and light, specifically that gravity was a property of and proportional to matter, that white light was made up of colored light and that the colors were ordered the way they emerged from a prism. At the beginning of the 17th Century, the notion of a physical God was ingrained in the minds of man. Newton viewed his work as uncovering the basic laws of the universe put in place by God, and indeed, empirical science today is one massive enterprise designed to uncover the ultimate law of the universe. The difference between empirical science today and the empirical science Newton created, however, is that empirical science today has no god. Empirical science, having written God out of the empirical enterprise as the creator of the laws, follows laws with no creator.
While this might seem to be a basic flaw in empirical science, empirical science does not pretend to be anything other than an ideology and thus ignores its basic flaws. Just as in the 17th Century, when everyone believed in God and therefore no one would question that there were basic laws of the universe just sitting there waiting to be uncovered, when everyone believes in underlying laws that have no source, no one is going to look for a source.
With the basic flaw in the empirical science that produces species evolution obvious, but invisible to its practitioners, the intelligent design folks then went the extra mile and attacked the very basis of empirical science, its absurd contention that it had devised a procedure that could turn a theory into a fact. It did this by demanding that textbooks expounding evolution carry the warning sticker: It's a theory, not a fact!
Now, I ask, what better wooden stake to pierce the bloodless heart of an empirical science that sucks the intelligence and creativity out of the very people in which it is charged with instilling it? The demand, which on its surface appears to be frivolous, actually raises the real issue: How can validity be given a scientific process that insists, just as ideologies and religions insist, on defining commonly used terms in a way that makes them uncommon indeed?
Empirical science rests on the absurd notion that its theories can be verified as fact by predicting a fact which is then subsequently found and when the procedure is applied after the fact, on the claim that the theory is fact because it is the only way to describe the reality the theory is designed to explain. Theories with which empirical science does not agree are merely theories. However, the theories that empirical science holds a consensus about are no longer theories, but are facts consistent with the facts of reality.
In short, if we agree that some made-up notion is a fact, then it is a fact, and any facts that contradict that made-up notion can not be facts or can be explained by falsifying the made-up notion (as noted in column 25-05, empirical science agrees against all evidence that species evolution occurs and when the geologic record shows it doesn't, but rather shows that evolution, like extinctions, occur suddenly, species evolution takes the course of punctuated equilibrium.)
Empirical science really has no way to defend itself against the claim that its theories are just that, theories, and its assumption, that the universe is grounded in laws created by nothing is absurd, so it simply absents itself from the scene of the discussion, claiming the discussion is beneath it. It then bombards local newspapers with its species defense, which, based on consensus belief, takes either the formal path for the thinking idiot or the less formal path for the simply idiot.
For the thinking idiot, actual empirical scientists write that as critical thinkers, observers and modest theoretical as well as practicing participants in American and international science, anyone expressing any doubt about Darwinism either does not understand or chooses to remain ignorant of reality. Scientists, the drift goes, are the most skeptical and self-critical humans on the globe. They routinely scour their paradigms, practices and consciences (consciences???) for subjectivity. The empirical system of cross-reference, peer-review and reproducible results (this last always give me a chortle - see column 23-05) results in cautious and careful inquiry and analysis. The letters then usually devolve into an attack on the paper or the paper's writer, which is in turn generalized into anything non-empirical being an ideology or a religion as opposed to actual, factual reality. The letters usually end up with the ringing proposition that there can be no debate about evolution, other than an internal debate among experts about its finer points and then have a number of canned paragraphs to select from, from pointing out that giving any credence at all to intelligent design is to do a disservice to readership, community, youth of the land, the legislature, take your pick and might even go on to explain to the paper what the nature of news actually is (whatever the empiricists claims is reality).
The second course for non-thinking idiots merely takes an interested citizen who points out the dearth of empirical credentials of anyone professing intelligent design and then points out the validity of Darwinism by pointing out that the National Academy of Sciences, the nation's most prestigious scientific organization, says that Darwinian evolution is "one of the strongest and most useful scientific theories we have" and its supported by an overwhelming scientific consensus (which of course, makes it a reality). The concerned citizen then points out that anyone who doesn't accept evolution (of the species type) is an arrogant biped who can't accept the fact that he's related to an ape/is god crazy/devaluing human intelligence, pick one or all. The content of these cloned letters is usually traceable to science definition in the Skeptic's Dictionary at http://skepdic.com/science.html. By the way, you'd think that a skeptic dictionary would approach the definition of science with, well, a little skepticism. Au Contraire, it's a living definition that grows as each new intelligent design argument appears. In other words, it's a definition designed to provide an argument against the opponents of science rather than those interested in reality.
While I don't agree with the intelligent design folks, their campaign against species evolution represents intelligent design opposing ignorance on a scale unseen since the dark ages.
Peter Bros is the author of the 9 volume Copernican Series and is President of The Far Museum of Dallas, an actual history museum, which will house its collection of 50,000 rare Eastern Mediterranean manuscripts and artifacts together with actual history displays and tours in a full-sized replica of the Egyptian Temple at Dendera to be built in the Dallas Ft. Worth area. Email:peterbros@therealskeptic.com