Reading South Carolina’s letters-to-the-editor pages is probably bad for my blood pressure.
Here’s a letter sent to the Post and Courier by one Duncan Jaenicke, who has aparently written some book on extramarital affairs (if a quick Google search is accurate and this is the same guy).
The front-page article (Jan. 31) about including intelligent design in South Carolina’s public schools is a welcome addition to the process of democracy. I have been doing extensive research on this subject in preparation for writing a book, along with co-author Skip Owens, who is a pastor and leader at Charleston Southern University.
While I would love to see more “intelligent designing” of the South Carolina public school system (so that students would come to me with more well-developed reading comprehension and mathematics skills), I don’t think Mr. J is talking about the same kind of “intelligent design” as I am. I think he’s talking about the one that certain overly-religious people want to teach instead of teaching biology.
Mr J doesn’t say he’s researching the book with the aid of a scientist. I can’t wait to see how good his science is – although if this letter to the editor is any indication, the book will be a real knee-slapper.
I support Gov. Sanford’s belief that our schools should present a balanced and impartial “menu” of theories about life’s origins to our children.
I think it’d be fascinating for students to learn about the different hypotheses that attempt to explain how life might have originated on Earth. As a chemist, I find things like the Miller-Urey experiment and its relatives, which showed that biomolecules could be synthesized by nature from inorganic materials under conditions similar to the early Earth, to be fascinating. But that’s not what Mr. J means.
After all, no one was there at the “beginning” (even Charles Darwin), so they are all theories, not fact. There’s no good reason that evolutionary theory should have a monopoly on our science curriculum.
Here’s where Mr. J shows us that his “research” probably involved careful reading of the backs of a few cereal boxes. Evolution covers what happens after there are organisms around to evolve. If Mr. J’s problem is with the uncertainty of what happened before there were organisms, why rail against evolutionary theory?
The whole “no one was there” argument is a bit silly, too. How would Mr. J propose to solve any crime committed without witnesses? Would he deem it impossible to figure out with any degree of certainty whether a fire was caused by lightning or arson? These things leave evidence. That evidence that is sometimes very difficult to unravel, but it is evidence nonetheless. You don’t have to directly witness something to find out it occurred. (But you do need to find some other kind of evidence.)
While I’m at it, Mr. J doesn’t even know what a scientific theory is. (In science, it’s an explanation of some natural process that is backed up by extensive experimental support. It’s not a mere conjecture. Saying that evolution is bad because it’s “only” a scientific theory is like saying that Bill Gates is poor because he’s “only” one of the richest men in the world.)
I have to take issue with College of Charleston Professors Dillon and Dukes, as quoted in Chris Dixon’s excellent article. They throw rocks at intelligent design based on their assertion that it “isn’t provable by experimentation.”
It’d be a safe bet to assume that Dillon (biology professor) and Dukes (dean of sciences and a physics professor) have looked more closely at the issues than Mr. J. “Not provable” might be a bad way to phrase it, though. “Not testable” or “devoid of any useful content” might be a more useful way to think of intelligent design.
After all, what does intelligent design predict? What, for instance, might it tell us about how we should use antibiotics? Evolutionary ideas would tell us to be sparing with them, to avoid killing off all natural competition of some of the nastier antibiotic-resistant strains.
Intelligent design would say … what?
Pardon me, but the theory of evolution isn’t provable by experimentation, either.
You can certainly demonstrate that evolution happens. Scientific debate at this point seems to be about the relative importance of different mechanisms driving evolution.
In the laboratory you cannot swirl together non-living elements (as in their precious “primordial sea” concept) and have a red snapper or yellow-finned tuna appear.
… and if that’s what evolutionary theory actually predicted, Mr. J, you might have a point!
The two professors also make statements concerning the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that all matter tends towards “maximum entropy.” This is an inside-out way of saying that systems trend toward disorder, not order.
Let’s look at Gov. Sanford’s statements (given in this article).
Sanford said that “The idea of there being a little mud hole and two mosquitoes get together and the next thing you know you have a human being is completely at odds with one of the laws of thermodynamics, which is the law of, in essence, destruction.”
He then went on to say that “Whether you think about your bedroom and how messy it gets over time or you think about the decay in the building itself over time. Things don’t naturally order themselves towards progression, in the natural order of things. So it’s against fairly basic laws of physics […]”
This was a staggeringly uninformed thing for the governor to say. It clearly demonstrates a misunderstaning of basic evolutionary theory, common natural processes, and the laws of thermodynamics. As the professors rightly point out, we observe order coming from disorder all the time. Neither Mr. J nor Gov. Sanford seem to understand that this is not what the second law says cannot happen.
For example, the sandcastle built on Sullivan’s Island’s beach will eventually collapse (ie, go toward disorder, not the order it enjoyed after the child built it). Wind erosion, gravity and the tides will make it flat in a relatively short time.
Yet look at that same salt water from Sullivan’s Island. It contains many different kinds of free ions – two of which are the sodium ion and the chloride ion. When that salt water evaporates (a natural process), highly ordered cubic crystals of sodium chloride get left behind. Order from disorder.
What was Mr. J’s point again?
Or, take our bodies: after reaching adulthood, our bodies start on a slow-but-sure downward arc that eventually leads to death and decay (as in worm food) – clearly states of disorder.
And the process of growing up in the first place? Digesting food and using it to construct those bodies that Mr. J is observing the “death and decay” in?
Or, take the old Cooper River bridges. Time yields decay, as in rust and metal fatigue, thus proving the Second Law of Thermodynamics: if left alone over time, they would both fall into the harbor – in a profound state of disorder.
Plain old carbon, under intense heat and pressure inside the Earth, bonds together to form an extremely ordered and highly desired crystal called diamond.
The more I read Mr. J’s letter, the more convinced I am that he hasn’t really studied any of the laws of thermodynamics. Natural processes can produce both order and disorder, and don’t violate the second law.
Gov. Sanford certainly did not take that law “out of context,” as the professors claim.
If Gov. Sanford thinks that the second law of thermodynamics is some sort of problem for evolution, then he most certainly did take the second law out of context – and needs to take a thermodynamics course before putting his foot in his mouth again. The second law doesn’t say, as both Mr. J and Gov. Sanford seem to imply, that nature cannot create order from
disorder. If that were so, then it would be impossible for it to rain (liquid water forming from the more highly disordered gas) or snow (even more highly-ordered ice crystals forming from that same gaseous water). Frost would even be out of the question.
Intelligent Design deserves a seat at the table of public education’s science offerings, thus enriching our children as they consider what they believe, which is the essence of education itself.
Intelligent design deserves no such seat because it has done nothing to deserve such a seat. We have little enough time in science class to cover the established, tested science without wasting it covering every unsubstantiated fringe notion that comes along. If that means that we don’t teach astrology in physics class, alchemy in chemistry class, and intelligent design / creationism in biology class, then so be it. We need time to cover the stuff that’s given us real results! South Carolina’s children deserve to learn the good science, not the junk.