Wednesday, February 09, 2005

"...the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose"

A recent NY Times Op-Ed by Michael J. Behe outlines his ideas behind the "theory" of intelligent design. I don't find any of his arguments persuasive. Behe lays out four claims behind the argument for intelligent design. The first two claims, namely that "we can often recognize the effects of design in nature" and that "the physical marks of design are visible in aspects of biology", are "uncontroversial", according to Behe. I don't find them uncontroversial at all. A letter in today's paper echoes my sentiments:

The basic principle of intelligent design is that life is just too complicated to occur by chance, and thus there must be some intelligent entity guiding the process.
A much more likely explanation is that our inability to comprehend these phenomena that appear "designed" merely reflects our own limitations as a species.

A further likely explanation is that subjective concepts such as "design" and "complexity" are not quantifiable. The "I know it when I see it" test, while perhaps useful in identifying porn, is not a scientific test. The point is that precisely because our own intuition sometimes fails us, we have to rely on the scientific method to objectively find the answer; we can too easily fool ourselves. Another recent opinion found in Reason also takes issue with Behe, who seems to have nothing new to say.

Tuesday, February 08, 2005

Thank you Carla

One opinion in The Onion's "What Do You Think?" section perfectly expresses my feelings on a proposed lifting of the ban on people using their mobile phones on flights:

If they lift the ban on cell-phone use, they better lift the ban on passengers beating the shit out of each other, too.

Carla Sparks, you're a wise woman.

Monday, February 07, 2005

Fermi and Bose walk into a bar...

Continuing to beat a theme to death, I'm ashamed to admit that as a physicist I had forgotten two words (common in physics anyway) that derive from proper names: "fermion" (Enrico Fermi) and "boson" (S.N. Bose). For the interested, the former describes a particle that posseses half-integer spin and obeys Fermi-Dirac statistics and the later describes a particle with integer spin that obeys Bose-Einstein statistics. In music, to match this duo, there are also "saxophone" (Adolphe Sax) and "sousaphone" (John Philip Sousa). In fashion, there is the facial hair contribution of Anthony Van Dyck (Vandyke) with "vandyke" and Henry Havelock's contribution to headware: the "havelock".