Where Left Is Right / The Old Site

The right-wing echo chamber is full of what used to be called evil humours (and no, that doesn't mean "sh!t" -- at least for the moment) and dissembling. But is there a bigger gasbag among right-wing "commentators" than Washington Times syndicated columnist Suzanne Fields?

No.

In her latest shot of marshmallow across our bows, Fields takes to task The Weasel's critics for his stepping into the intelligent design "vs." evolution debate:

...what the president actually said was hardly enough to shake the earth. He said he thinks it's important for children to understand what the endless argument over the Darwinian theory of evolution is all about. "Both sides should be properly taught... so people can understand what the debate is about. Part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought ... You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, and the answer is yes."

Let's ignore for the moment his assertion that exposure to "different ideas" is an experience with which he himself is familiar. Let's talk about this whole intelligent-design foofaraw.

One of the rules of civil discussion with which I used to belabor subordinates went something like this: "In any strong disagreement between intelligent people, nine times out of ten the disagreement comes simply from differing definitions of terms. Resolve the definitions and the fight goes away."

Okay, so this is kinda simplistic. (Among other things, it doesn't suggest how to resolve fights over the "right" definition.) But in the present case it does apply: All these discussions -- fights -- over evolution versus [fill in the blank] boil down to mismatched definitions of the word "theory."

Here's an analogy from my work. Computer users, even unsophisticated ones, speak glibly of the computer's "memory." If someone were to pick a fight over the term, arguing that a computer doesn't really remember anything in the way that humans do and therefore doesn't warrant the term "memory" -- in such a case, computer users, even unsophisticated ones, would look at the arguer like he'd lost his marbles. They know that the term "memory" when speaking of a computer's internal resources has a special meaning outside the common, everyday use.

What happens when intelligent-design/creationism apologists attack the "theory of evolution" parallels such an attack on the phrase "computer memory."

In particular, a scientific theory is not just a crazy-assed guess about the way some feature of the world works. The closest term to such a leap of possibility, in scientific discourse, is "hypothesis." Hypotheses are tested repeatedly, and the results of this testing may be any one of the following:

• The hypothesis can fail the scientific tests applied to it. (This is what happened, for example, to the "theories" -- that is, failed hypotheses -- of phlogiston and the luminiferous ether.)
• The hypothesis can repeatedly pass the scientific tests applied to it, and additionally can actually be shown to have some kind of application (however attenuated) in the real world. In this case, the hypothesis is elevated to the status of theory. Think gravity. Think quantum mechanics. Think, for that matter, of all of mathematics.
  
• The hypothesis can pass some scientific tests, but fail others. Depending on the extent of the failure, the hypothesis may be junked -- or it may be considered a theory with caveats. A revised theory, in other words. Think evolution.

What's happened during the "evolution of evolution" is that later scientific investigators have revised the theory in light of new scientific evidence. They have not found any scientific reason to question the basics. Darwin may not have foreseen every scientific test which could be applied to his theory, and I doubt that he ever claimed its infallibility in the form in which he proposed it. He expected it to be tested -- scientifically.

What would surely have appalled him (and, you'd think, all thinking people) is the notion that his scientific theory might be subjected to tests from branches of human understanding outside of science.

That's why Darwin (and his successors) never ventured into the realm of what (or whom) created life. His scientific theory describes -- not infallibly, but in ways which may be tested within science -- what seems to have happened to life, once created (by whatever means).

The proponents of intelligent design (et al.), I'll grant them this much, are consistent in their confusion (intended or not) of the term "theory" as used in rigorous scientific contexts with its loosey-goosey everyday use (as in "I have a theory why my teacher hates me"). But the theory of evolution is not "just a theory." It's not a "different idea," nor a "school of thought." It's a rigorous, over-arching description of a feature of the natural world, which has been subjected to rigorous examination and re-examination by people who know what the term "theory," as used in science, actually means. Intelligent design may or may not offer explanations -- satisfactory to one person or another -- of how the world came to be. But it explains nothing at all which can be tested scientifically, and therefore deserves no place next to evolution. Put it with Hindu beliefs about the cyclic nature of creation. Put it with Native American "theories" of the making of the world. Hell, I don't care -- put it on a pedestal next to Greek mythological tales of Chaos and the age of the Titans.

But stop, please, bullshitting the public with general terms properly used in specialized contexts.