A two-fer

A second shot at this article, as it answers a tirade launched from World Net Daily. Craige McMillan asserts the "Galileo Was Ridiculed" defense.

This got me to thinking about the effect such a decision would have upon us today, had it been applied to previous scientific discoveries. Louis Pasteur, for instance, was vilified by the scientific community of his day for suggesting that small, invisible organisms could actually cause human disease. "Bah, humbug!" said the surgeons of the day as they moved from patient to patient, using the same sponge to bath their wounds. Besides, what did Pasteur know about disease? He was a chemist. Too far out of the mainstream! Fortunately for us, in 1865, Joseph Lister read Louis Pasteur's wild microbial theories about how wine soured, and wondered if microbes carried through the air in hospitals might explain why so many patients survived surgery, only to die a short time later of "ward fever." At the time he was ridiculed; his views? "Too far out of the mainstream." Today, our medical schools refer to him as the "Father of antiseptic surgery."

The difference here is that neither Pasteur nor Lister tried to sneak their ideas into schools before they were proved. Instead, they proposed (and carried out) tests – tests that would go one way if their ideas were right, and a different way if their ideas were wrong.

There's a name for this method of defending an idea. It's called "doing science". This method is conspicously absent on the ID/IOT side of the "debate".

There is no court that decides when a scientific hypothesis graduates to become a theory and when a theory is accepted as a law. But if there were such a court the theory of evolution would be called the law of evolution. The assurance biologists (including me) place in Darwinian evolution is demonstrated when we regularly bet our careers on evolution being right. These bets take the form of basing new experiments on, among other things, principles from evolutionary theory. For example, I have spent years on experiments which derived from an idea that a brain memory mechanism found in rodents would be preserved, expanded and adapted in the monkey. I followed this line of work because I am convinced of the general correctness of Darwinian evolution. Such conviction is essentially universal among the professors at major national research universities. Now it is conceivable that all those biologists are wrong. Scientific revolutions have occurred before. The overwhelming bulk of attempts to overthrow established scientific law, however, come up empty, and usually with far less publicity than (say) Cold Fusion received. The key to this kind of revolution is to find some inexplicable experiment or fact which is utterly incompatible with the current scientific understanding. If the proponents of ID would actually demonstrate (instead of simply assert) that the flagella or some other structure is irreducibly complex and could not have evolved then they would have met such a test. In fact, the “irreducible complexity” of the flagella, while asserted by ID proponents, is not holding up well. One (nicely reduced) candidate component of the flagella, which has an important function of its own and could also serve as a ‘way station’ on an evolutionary pathway to the more complex flagella, is a secretory structure with substantial homologies, discussed here.

The ID/IOT side has a stake in making its ideas part of the scientific consensus. There are rules for doing this which every other idea has had to follow. The ID/IOTs should start playing by the rules.