paleonet More ID

[Seth Finnegan <finnes01@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

This is from today's Washington Post (!!).  Its transparently
silly, if not flat-out stupid, but pertains to this morning's
discussion:


Just Check the ID

By Sally Jenkins

Monday, August 29, 2005; Page E01

Athletes do things that seem transcendental -- and they can
also do things that are transcendentally stupid. They choke,
trip and dope. Nevertheless, they possess a deep physical
knowledge the rest of us can learn from, bound as we are by
our ordinary, trudging, cumbersome selves. Ever get the
feeling that they are in touch with something that we aren't?
What is that thing? Could it be their random, mutant talent,
or could it be evidence of, gulp, intelligent design?

The sports section would not seem to be a place to discuss
intelligent design, the notion that nature shows signs of an
intrinsic intelligence too highly organized to be solely the
product of evolution. It's an odd intersection, admittedly.
You might ask, what's so intelligently designed about
ballplayers (or sportswriters)? Jose Canseco once let a
baseball hit him in the head and bounce over the fence for a
home run. Former Washington Redskins quarterback Gus Frerotte
gave himself a concussion by running helmet-first into a wall
in a fit of exuberance. But athletes also are explorers of the
boundaries of physiology and neuroscience, and some
intelligent design proponents therefore suggest they can be
walking human laboratories for their theories.
	

First, let's get rid of the idea that ID (intelligent design)
is a form of sly creationism. It isn't. ID is unfairly
confused with the movement to teach creationism in public
schools. The most serious ID proponents are complexity
theorists, legitimate scientists among them, who believe that
strict Darwinism and especially neo-Darwinism (the notion that
all of our qualities are the product of random mutation) is
inadequate to explain the high level of organization at work
in the world. Creationists are attracted to ID, and one of its
founding fathers, University of California law professor
Phillip Johnson, is a devout Presbyterian. But you don't have
to be a creationist to think there might be something to it,
or to agree with Johnson when he says, "The human body is
packed with marvels, eyes and lungs and cells, and
evolutionary gradualism can't account for that."

The idea, so contentious in other contexts, actually rings a
loud bell in sports. Athletes often talk of feeling an
absolute fulfillment of purpose, of something powerful moving
through them or in them that is not just the result of
training. Jeffrey M. Schwartz, a neuroscientist and research
professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, is a
believer in ID, or as he prefers to call it, "intrinsic
intelligence." Schwartz wants to launch a study of NASCAR
drivers, to better understand their extraordinary focus. He
finds Darwinism, as it applies to a high-performance athlete
such as Tony Stewart, to be problematic. To claim that
Stewart's mental state as he handles a high-speed car "is a
result of nothing more than random processes coming together
in a machine-like way is not a coherent explanation," Schwartz
said.

Instead, Schwartz theorizes that when a great athlete focuses,
he or she may be "making a connection with something deep
within nature itself, which lends itself to deepening our
intelligence." It's fascinating thought. And Schwartz would
like to prove it's scientifically justifiable.

Steve Stenstrom, who played quarterback for the Bears and
49ers, works as a religious-life adviser to athletes at
Stanford, where he organized a controversial forum on
intelligent design last May. "I don't think it's a reach at
all," he said. "Talk to any athlete, and if they really are
honest, they realize that while they have worked and trained,
and put a lot of effort into being great, they started with
some raw material that was advantageous to them, and that it
was meant to work a certain way. We all recognize that we have
a certain design element."

A strict Darwinist would suggest this is an illusion and point
out that there are obvious flaws in the body. Peter Weyand, a
researcher in kinesiology and biomechanics at Rice University,
observes, "Humans in the realm of the animal kingdom aren't
terribly athletic."

Racehorses are much faster, and, for that matter, so are
hummingbirds. We seem to have a basic quest to go higher,
farther, faster -- one of our distinguishing features is that
we push our limits for a reason other than survival, and
construct artificial scales of achievement -- but we have some
built-in debilities. Human muscle can only get so strong, it
will only produce as much force as it has area, about 3.5
kilograms of weight per square centimeter. "We're endowed with
what we have by virtue of evolution, and it's not like
engineering where we can pick materials and throw out what
doesn't work," Weyand said.

Our bodies break down a lot. If we were designed more
intelligently, presumably we wouldn't have osteoporosis or
broken hips when we get old. Some evolutionists suppose that
the process through which people evolved from four-legged
creatures to two, has had negative orthopedic consequences.

We are flawed cardiovascularly. Horses carry much more oxygen
in their blood, and have a storage system for red blood cells
in their spleens, a natural system of blood doping. Humans
don't. Also, while a lot of aerobics can make our hearts
bigger, our lungs are unique. They don't adapt to training.
They're fixed. We're stuck with them, and can only envy the
antelopes.

None of which satisfies Schwartz, or Stenstrom. "I don't think
we can attach athletic design to 'better' design," Stenstrom
said. ". . . Some people are designed with an ear for music,
others with a capacity to think deep thoughts about the world."

Schwarz finds little or nothing in natural selection to
explain the ability of athletes to reinterpret physical events
from moment to moment, the super-awareness that they seem to
possess. He has a term for it, the ability to be an "impartial
spectator" to your own actions. "The capacity to stand outside
yourself and be aware of where you are," he said. "Deep within
the complexities of molecular organization lies an intrinsic
intelligence that accounts for that deep organization, and is
something that we can connect with through the willful focus
of our minds," he theorizes.

Crackpot speculation? Maybe -- maybe not. ID certainly lacks a
body of scientific data, and opponents are right to argue that
the idea isn't developed enough to be taught as equivalent to
evolution. But Darwin himself admitted he didn't know
everything about everything. "When I see a tail feather on a
peacock, it makes me sick," he once said, before he understood
it was for mating. And try telling a baseball fan that pure
Darwinism explains Joe DiMaggio. As Tommy Lasorda once said,
"If you said to God, 'Create someone who was what a baseball
player should be,' God would have created Joe DiMaggio -- and
he did."

None of this is to say that we shouldn't be wary of the uses
for which ID might be hijacked. In the last year, numerous
states have experienced some sort of anti-evolution movement.
That makes it all the more important for the layman to
distinguish the various gradations between evolutionists,
serious scientists who are interested in ID, "neo-Creos," and
Biblical literalists. One of the things we learn in a grade
school science class is a concrete way of thinking, a sound,
systematic way of exploring the natural world.

But science class also teaches us how crucial it is to
maintain adventurousness, and surely it's worthwhile to
suggest that an athlete in motion conveys an inkling of
something marvelous in nature that perhaps isn't explained by
mere molecules. Johann Kepler was the first to accurately plot
the laws of planetary motion. But he only got there because he
believed that their movements, if translated musically, would
result in a celestial harmony. He also believed in astrology.
And then there was Albert Einstein, who remarked that "Science
without religion is lame; religion without science is blind."
Historically, scientific theorists are sandlot athletes,
drawing up plays in the dirt.

---- Original message ----
>Date: Mon, 29 Aug 2005 17:49:42 +0000
>From: Breandán MacGabhann <breandan@campus.ie>  
>Subject: Re: paleonet ID and function  
>To: paleonet@nhm.ac.uk
>
>In fact I think what would be argued in reply is the old
favourite: "just because YOU don't understand why it's
designed like that doesn't mean it's badly designed. The
Intelligent Designer is WAY more intelligent than you and it's
not surprising if you don't understand why he did things the
way he did".
>
>I've had that one thrown at me in the past, I'm sure I'm not
the only one. I don't really see the point of getting bogged
down in the details with them - this is a non-issue, their
arguments are facile and incorrect and if we start arguing
details like this with them we only lend credence to their
ideas by implying they're worth arguing against. Let's keep to
the simple straightforward arguments that their entire idea is
based on nonsense and misunderstanding, and that
ID/Creationism is not science, it's faith. 
>
>Breand�n
>
>-- 
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Seth Finnegan
Dept. of Earth Sciences -036
University of California
Riverside, CA 92521
Phone:(951)452-2759
Fax:  (951)787-4324