Wednesday, November 16, 2005

Our family - 3,500 years old.

One of the arguments against creationism and ID is that they tend to be funded by organisations that have a religious agenda.

Ateleological organisations have the advantage that in some settings, philosophical naturalism is considered to be inherent in the definition of science. As I have mentioned before, this is incorrect - most of the people who shaped modern science weren't philosophical naturalists, and in fact they believed that the pursuit of science was possible because the order in the universe had been put there by God. But because a naturalistic approach has been accepted as inherent to science, it is now possible for an organisation to adopt a "neutral" sounding name - Scientific American, American Association for the Advancement of Science, New Scientist - and pursue an agenda which excludes the possibility of ID by definition. Not because work in ID is not science - but because a narrow definition of science is being used specifically to exclude this as an option.

Any organisation that doesn't exclude a priori the possibility that there may be such a thing as an "external other" can be defined as "religious" - because it doesn't presuppose philosophical naturalism. In fact, it is impossible to have an organisation which accepts the possibility of teleology which won't be considered religious. Even an organisation which remained agnostic on the issue would be effectively being open to the possibility - which is not a naturalist position, and could therefore be classed as religious.

However, cast it the other way. Think about the (US) National Center for Science Education - which is actually about "Defending the Teaching of Evolution in the Public Schools", rather than about science education in general (nice neutral title). It's supported by people who have an anti-teleological agenda - they want to make sure that no form of teleology is promoted in public schools. Do we deconstruct their comments because they have a prior commitment to the teaching of evolution? Do we say that their opinions are invalid because they are seeking to oppose presentation of a teleological perspective in public schools? No. We accept that they are going to present material that is consistent with their foundation - but then we deal with that material on its merits.

In the same way, it isn't valid to dismiss the arguments of ID or creationist proponents on the basis of their worldview - or even the worldview of the people who are funding their research. People are bound to present research that they believe in. The way of refuting research isn't to say that the author doesn't share your worldview - no matter how invalid you think the other worldview is - that is postmodernism, not science. It's to show that their methods or conclusions are flawed. You can show that people haven't made a scientific case for their position - and that's what I was trying to do by interacting with the Avida and AFGP papers (see the side bar). Forget the fact that they wrote those papers because they didn't believe that ID or creationism was necessary - the papers simply don't show what it's claimed that they show. In the same way, criticisms of ID or creationist work has no need to look at how the work was funded. It should be able to show that the work is just scientifically wrong.

Aaaanyway, whilst trying to find out more about Charles Simonyi, who endowed Richard Dawkins' professorship (which is used more to "bash religion" than to promote the public understanding of science - I have talked about the upcoming TV shows that Dawkins is preparing below) I happened across this paper, which I thought was interesting.
Abstract: Questions concerning the common ancestors of all present-day humans have received considerable attention of late in both the scientific and lay communities. Principally, this attention has focused on `Mitochondrial Eve,' defined to be the woman who lies at the confluence of our maternal ancestry lines, and who is believed to have lived 100,000-200,000 years ago. More recent attention has been given to our common paternal ancestor, `Y Chromosome Adam,' who may have lived 35,000–-89,000 years ago. However, if we consider not just our all-female and all-male lines, but our ancestors along all parental lines, it turns out that everyone on earth may share a common ancestor who is remarkably recent. This study introduces a large-scale, detailed computer model of recent human history which suggests that the common ancestor of everyone alive today very likely lived between 2,000 and 5,000 years ago. Furthermore, the model indicates that nearly everyone living a few thousand years prior to that time is either the ancestor of no one or of all living humans.

I don't remember the media making much of this, but what is interesting is that the common ancestor would thus be comfortably in the era after the biblical flood.

P.S. Thinking about it, doesn't research that show we share a common ancestor 3500 years ago rather undermine research that shows we share common ancestors tens to hundreds of thousands of years ago? Doesn't it suggest that maybe the accuracy of their findings was the odd order of magnitude out? Or that their methodology was flawed? ITWSBT.