An Update and My First Controversial Blog Post

Thanks for all the kind thoughts about my Dad.

Hope everyone had a nice Labor Day Weekend.

I'm sorry I haven't had a chance to respond to alot of the emails I've received as of late.

It's been a bit crazy over here in the Cowboy State with 50-hour work weeks, finishing up the huge time suck that is our front yard, and spending a lot of time on the phone with family back home.

Will hopefully be able to respond to everyone this week.

Thanks again for all the kind thoughts.

Tomorrow my Dad sees another oncologist in Boston and we should receive some definitive word on treatment.

The wait continues.

Now, on to the controversy that I've purposely decided to blog on today.

Many of you have heard about the Dover, PA Trial concerning the teaching of Intelligent Design or ID for short. The official name of the trial was Kitzmiller, et al v. Dover School District, et al.

I can hear the groans already. You're quickly reaching for the mouse, apt to click on to greener pastures in cyberspace.

One groan I imagine goes like this...

"Drew, why even bring this tired topic up, this ID thing in the first place? That issue is so 2005! What's the point? The Dover Trial was a victory for science! Let it lie!"

Well, believe me, I would love to let it lie. I would be more than happy to let it lie if I didn't think science and the scientific method in particular was under attack and being misrepresented yet again since the trial concluded.

Here's my side of the story...

I had a conversation a few weeks back with some very well meaning, cordial, nice, and highly educated people. These people I talked with believe wholeheartedly that the earth is only 6,000 years old based on the book of Genesis in the protestant Bible and geological evidence that proves the validity of the flood described in said book.

And I've been thinking about this conversation for many weeks now, not knowing quite how to deal with the unease I felt at what transpired.

I will refrain from naming any of the people I talked with on this subject. The discussion was civil, and as mentioned the people involved were extremely nice.

I don't have a problem with people believing what they want to believe. I have no more control over that than I do trying to prevent Bose Acoustic Tsunami Car Stereos being sandblasted onto my eardrums at routine traffic stops.

I know, I can just hear my wife over my shoulder saying, "Gettin' old there, Drew! Complaining about loud stereos. What's next? IHOP's not serving you dinner at 3:00pm?"

Har har.

People are for the most part going to believe what they want to believe, plain and simple.

Me included...with the caveat that if scientific data show me that I am wrong on a certain belief, I hope I am open to a reinterpretation of my old belief system. I think that I am.

In a way, that's what Albert Einstein had to do with his struggle to reconcile Newtonian physics with his physics of Special and General Relativity. And then further, he had to come to grips with the very unorthodox and messy world of Quantum Physics, which he hated.

By the way, how Einstein came to publish his results on Special and General Relativity is a fascinating story and one that, in my mind, is on par with any story put forth in the Bible, or any of the great literature books of the past 5,000 years for that matter.

Interested?

There is a wonderful PBS NOVA special on just such a story. It's entitled, Einstein's Big Idea, and it will change the way you view science, if you already don't exhibit wonder and awe each week at how science progresses our understanding of the entire universe.

Sorry, now back to the conversation.

The thing that really bothered me about the whole discussion I had was that science, and more specifically, the scientific method, was being grossly misrepresented and villified. I wasn't sure of this misrepresentation or villification at the time, as I hadn't read any of the papers cited by these individuals as proof that the Earth is of aforementioned date.

I voiced doubts about some of the findings in these papers, but for the most part I just listened.

After the discussion, I went home and looked up some of these papers that were cited during the conversation. None were peer-reviewed papers in scientific journals.

All of the evidence put forth for a 6,000 year old Earth came from mainly two sources, Answers in Genesis and the Institute for Creation Research, think tanks for the theory of Intelligent Design.

These sites do a very good job of making it LOOK like the papers they publish are scientific research. But in the end, all of the papers are not subjected to the same kind of scrutiny that a normal scientific paper sent to a respected scientific journal like Science or Nature would be.

One of the most beautiful, yet ruthless aspects of science is having other scientists from other educational institutions get a crack at trying to see whether what you have found actually agrees with the current body of scientific knowledge and whether you carried out your experiments correctly using correct methodology. In essence, peer-review.

Think red ink all over your 10th Grade english essays, but on steroids!

Not going through this process is at best, disingenuous, and worst, deceitful.

In essence, the papers that were cited to me completely circumvented the scientific method.

Not a good thing!

If you have a hypothesis about how a particular observable aspect in nature works, you test that hypothesis with a set of experiments. You collect your data. You analyze your data. You write up a paper describing in detail what you did and the conclusions you derived from the data you collected. Then, if you want to complete the process to make everyone aware of your work, you publish in a peer-reviewed journal like Science or Nature or any one of the 1000’s of other journals out there. It is this last stage where your peers doing research in your area have a chance to critique your work and make sure your conclusions are accurate with the data you present.

An example of this peer-review circumvention is located at the Answers in Genesis site. The article entitled, “Radioactive ‘dating’ failure” by Andrew Snelling appears on the site and can be viewed by clicking here.

Reading through this article, it all looks very scientific; charts, graphs, equations, discussion, conclusions. However, if you look closely at all the references and links to other pages cited within the article, you find no evidence of the research being subjected to peer-review at a respected scientific journal.

PLEASE, and I mean this in all sincerety, if I am wrong on this, Intelligent Design Theorists, show me where I can find peer-reviewed articles of original research done that backs up these claims of radioactive dating failures of the sort purported in the aforementioned Snelling article.

I really would like to see some of these articles if they do exist.

For the record, regarding the claims put forth in the aforementioned article, geologists are well aware of the problems with K/Ar dating of recent volcanic flows.

They acknowledge these problems by using an alternative Argon40/Argon39 (Ar40/Ar39) dating method to account for the excess Argon that is known to exist in these recent volcanic flows. Had the author of this paper submitted his paper for peer-review he might have been able to, at the very least, address this in his discussion, or at best, test his samples using this more reliable dating method.

Now I'm not so shortsighted to think that this lack of peer-review is the case with everything that the Intelligent Design theorists have put out. I could be missing something here in my cursory research of both the Answers in Genesis and ICR sites. I ask with sincerety for those who know of peer-review papers concerning ID that exist to post them to this blog site.

I would very much like to see them.

Think I will end it here for tonight.

Thanks for reading this very long and controversial blog.

Would love to hear any and all comments.

Drew