It’s snowing again. Pretty hard, actually. So, since it looks like I won’t be going anywhere today, how about I tell you about my recent travels?
My adventures started last Thursday. I hopped into the Jasonmobile around noon, and headed out to Baltimore. This entails driving on I-495, better known as “The Beltway.” When you hear folks in Washington DC described as living “inside the beltway,” that’s what they mean.
Now, let me tell you something about the Beltway. There is no good time to be driving on it. I’ve been there at midnight and found myself stuck in traffic. So I expected things to be slow-going on that part of the trip. What I had not counted on was that I-66 and I-95 were backed up as well, making a normally two and a half hour trip take more like four and a half. The accident on I-95, in which a big camper flipped over on its side, did not help. Happily, my choice of audio book was John Grisham’s new novel Grey Mountain, which turned out to pretty engaging. It definitely helped pass the time.
Even with the delays I made it to Baltimore in plenty of time for my talk to the Baltimore Ethical Society that night. It was quite a good turnout, especially considering that it was bitter cold, and the talk (which was based on my book) seemed to go over well.
The following day my hosts drove me over to the campus of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), where I gave two talks. One was to the local student chapter of Pi Mu Epsilon. The talk was about–surprise!–the Monty Hall problem. I thought it went well, and the students seemed engaged throughout.
I also gave a talk to faculty and graduate students called, “Pseudomathematics in Anti-Evolution Literature.” This was a brand new talk, and I was a little nervous about how it would be received. It went well! Everyone seemed engaged all the way through, and several were explicitly complimentary at the end of it.
An interesting aside is that all of the questions during the Q and A focused on religious aspects of the issue, even though my talk had nothing at all to do with religion. A Catholic faculty member wanted me to mention that the Catholic Church had no problem with evolution, which I duly affirmed. (Though I suppose Jerry Coyne would scold me for not mentioning that the Catholic Church also persists in believing in Adam and Eve.) I then discussed some of the polling data in this area. There was an Orthodox Jew in the audience as well, and I noticed him smiling when I mentioned, with some pride, that among major religious groups, Jews have one of the highest rates of acceptance of evolution. (But let’s not be too cocky, for reasons I discussed all the way back in 2005.)
As I have mentioned before, my talk focused on three families of creationist arguments: Those based on calculating the probability of a complex biological structure, those based on the No Free Lunch theorems, and those based on thermodynamics. Of course, these arguments have been thoroughly picked over in the anti-creationist literature, and I doubt if there’s anything original left to say on the merits of the arguments themselves. However, I did try to emphasize a point that I have not seen made often enough in the literature. Specifically, there is a common flaw uniting most of the mathematical arguments made against evolution. In each case, the mathematical formalism and jargon that is invoked contributes almost nothing to the argument.
For example, though creationists are happy to use lots of thermo-jargon in making their arguments, the fact remains that the machinery of thermodynamics, as described in textbooks on the subject, plays no role in their argumentation. Really they are just expressing incredulity that complex, functional structures can evolve gradually, and then using thermodynamics to add a patina of scientific nuance to their claims.
Likewise for Dembski’s use of the No Free Lunch theorem. The only role the theorem plays in his argument is to point out that the various evolutionary mechanisms biologists study are effective algorithms for searching genotype space only when the fitness landscapes they confront have certain properties. In other words, he is just making the fine-tuning argument with an irrelevant mathematical theorem thrown in as window dressing. Most of us did not need difficult theorems to understand that Darwinian evolution can only work when nature satisfies certain axioms, but working out why nature ultimately has just the properties it does is hardly a problem within biology’s domain.
I could say the same for the probability arguments. Once again, the argument is really just that they find it hard to believe that complex structures could evolve gradually. The probability calculations they perform are faulty for all sorts of reasons, but the main point for now is that they are always based on the premise that such structures have to evolve “by chance.” But no one is confused on that point. No one needs elaborate calculations to tell them that a complex, functional structure like an eye cannot simply pop into existence in one generation. Of course, the prolonged action of natural selection is too complex to be captured in a naïve probability calculation. The point, though, is that the machinery of probability theory does not actually add anything to their argument.
Though I didn’t discuss it in my talk, I could have said the same about creationist arguments based on information theory. There is plenty of hand waving, and casual references to Shannon and Kolmogorov, but not serious use of the actual machinery of information theory.
Anyway, that was the kind of thing I discussed in my talk. I have a vague idea for a book about math and God, one chapter of which would be occupied with creationist mathematics. I doubt I’ll ever write that book, however.
So ended the business part of my trip. And after business comes pleasure! So, I left Baltimore on Friday afternoon, got back onto I-95, crept my way up to the New Jersey Turnpike, then I-287, and finally arrived at the Parsippany Hilton.
Which is where the real fun began…
from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1vU0RQC
It’s snowing again. Pretty hard, actually. So, since it looks like I won’t be going anywhere today, how about I tell you about my recent travels?
My adventures started last Thursday. I hopped into the Jasonmobile around noon, and headed out to Baltimore. This entails driving on I-495, better known as “The Beltway.” When you hear folks in Washington DC described as living “inside the beltway,” that’s what they mean.
Now, let me tell you something about the Beltway. There is no good time to be driving on it. I’ve been there at midnight and found myself stuck in traffic. So I expected things to be slow-going on that part of the trip. What I had not counted on was that I-66 and I-95 were backed up as well, making a normally two and a half hour trip take more like four and a half. The accident on I-95, in which a big camper flipped over on its side, did not help. Happily, my choice of audio book was John Grisham’s new novel Grey Mountain, which turned out to pretty engaging. It definitely helped pass the time.
Even with the delays I made it to Baltimore in plenty of time for my talk to the Baltimore Ethical Society that night. It was quite a good turnout, especially considering that it was bitter cold, and the talk (which was based on my book) seemed to go over well.
The following day my hosts drove me over to the campus of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), where I gave two talks. One was to the local student chapter of Pi Mu Epsilon. The talk was about–surprise!–the Monty Hall problem. I thought it went well, and the students seemed engaged throughout.
I also gave a talk to faculty and graduate students called, “Pseudomathematics in Anti-Evolution Literature.” This was a brand new talk, and I was a little nervous about how it would be received. It went well! Everyone seemed engaged all the way through, and several were explicitly complimentary at the end of it.
An interesting aside is that all of the questions during the Q and A focused on religious aspects of the issue, even though my talk had nothing at all to do with religion. A Catholic faculty member wanted me to mention that the Catholic Church had no problem with evolution, which I duly affirmed. (Though I suppose Jerry Coyne would scold me for not mentioning that the Catholic Church also persists in believing in Adam and Eve.) I then discussed some of the polling data in this area. There was an Orthodox Jew in the audience as well, and I noticed him smiling when I mentioned, with some pride, that among major religious groups, Jews have one of the highest rates of acceptance of evolution. (But let’s not be too cocky, for reasons I discussed all the way back in 2005.)
As I have mentioned before, my talk focused on three families of creationist arguments: Those based on calculating the probability of a complex biological structure, those based on the No Free Lunch theorems, and those based on thermodynamics. Of course, these arguments have been thoroughly picked over in the anti-creationist literature, and I doubt if there’s anything original left to say on the merits of the arguments themselves. However, I did try to emphasize a point that I have not seen made often enough in the literature. Specifically, there is a common flaw uniting most of the mathematical arguments made against evolution. In each case, the mathematical formalism and jargon that is invoked contributes almost nothing to the argument.
For example, though creationists are happy to use lots of thermo-jargon in making their arguments, the fact remains that the machinery of thermodynamics, as described in textbooks on the subject, plays no role in their argumentation. Really they are just expressing incredulity that complex, functional structures can evolve gradually, and then using thermodynamics to add a patina of scientific nuance to their claims.
Likewise for Dembski’s use of the No Free Lunch theorem. The only role the theorem plays in his argument is to point out that the various evolutionary mechanisms biologists study are effective algorithms for searching genotype space only when the fitness landscapes they confront have certain properties. In other words, he is just making the fine-tuning argument with an irrelevant mathematical theorem thrown in as window dressing. Most of us did not need difficult theorems to understand that Darwinian evolution can only work when nature satisfies certain axioms, but working out why nature ultimately has just the properties it does is hardly a problem within biology’s domain.
I could say the same for the probability arguments. Once again, the argument is really just that they find it hard to believe that complex structures could evolve gradually. The probability calculations they perform are faulty for all sorts of reasons, but the main point for now is that they are always based on the premise that such structures have to evolve “by chance.” But no one is confused on that point. No one needs elaborate calculations to tell them that a complex, functional structure like an eye cannot simply pop into existence in one generation. Of course, the prolonged action of natural selection is too complex to be captured in a naïve probability calculation. The point, though, is that the machinery of probability theory does not actually add anything to their argument.
Though I didn’t discuss it in my talk, I could have said the same about creationist arguments based on information theory. There is plenty of hand waving, and casual references to Shannon and Kolmogorov, but not serious use of the actual machinery of information theory.
Anyway, that was the kind of thing I discussed in my talk. I have a vague idea for a book about math and God, one chapter of which would be occupied with creationist mathematics. I doubt I’ll ever write that book, however.
So ended the business part of my trip. And after business comes pleasure! So, I left Baltimore on Friday afternoon, got back onto I-95, crept my way up to the New Jersey Turnpike, then I-287, and finally arrived at the Parsippany Hilton.
Which is where the real fun began…
from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1vU0RQC
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