Flexible Reality: A Proud Member of the Reality-Based Community

From TPMCAFE: ID Discussion

Re: Unintelligent Design (5.00 / 1) (#18)
by calguy on Oct 13, 2005 -- 12:57:26 PM EST

A few remarks. First, as a science professor at research universities for 20 years, I have seen a falloff in applications of talented students from Korea, India and China exacerbated by the governments visa restrictions post 9/11. There is a contributing factor--so many top students who received PhDs in the US have gone back or are going back to their home countries that they can now teach their own students at the cutting edge of research. We used to call Seoul National University the ``Harvard of Korea'' and I would joke that in the not too distant future we might call Harvard the ``Seoul National University of the US''. This is happening. It is not unprecedented--post WWII the Japanese used to send many of their young scientists to the US for study until their universities came up to speed, so to speak. Now you rarely if ever see a Japanese grad student here.

To this end, it might be interesting for TPMCafe to invite Robert Laughlin as a book guest--he is interesting for several reasons--he is a Nobel Laureate in physics, he has written an intellectually intriguing book that has relevance to the ID issue in a broad sense, called `A Different Universe', and he is president of the Korean Institute for Science and Technology, the MIT of Korea. He is also a good, provocative writer and intellectual bomb thrower.

Second, on the ID strategy. Scientists do have a problem. I showed my most successful article (physics) to a former girlfriend who was a PhD student in social science. She got stuck at the first sentence. This is in fact the reason that the NYU professor could get his hoax article accepted in a postmodern journal--no one on the journal board could assess the validity of his arguments because the language was completely inaccessible. (His point of course, in part, was that the postmodernist practitioners are guilty of generating arcane and inaccessible language of a different variety...). My point here is that if my scientific prose could not reach a very intelligent and well educated person like my ex, then we have serious communication barriers to overcome. In reverse, IDers like Dembski and Behe can dress their articles up in what looks like science and fool the bejeezus out of many, many people who have science and math phobia. Heck, that is what Murray and Hernstein did with The Bell Curve!

So, we need in the scientific community to work much, much harder on outreach and education of the public, and in making the point that accepting the evidence for evolution or the big bang needn't preclude ANY particular religious belief. It astonishes me, frankly, that the belief in creationism is little shifted from the time of Scopes. THat tells me that it is not just a matter of doing more outreach, but seriously examining the efficacy of our means of outreach and pedagogy--if seventy years with ever more accessible media could not budge those numbers our approach has serious flaws.

Final remark: Jerry Springer of all people had a great show yesterday on Air America covering ID. He had a terrific question: how do you really build a curriculum out of ID? The first day you say ``eyeballs could not have been designed without an underlying intelligence.'' Then what do you do the second day?