Archimedes’ Hot Tub

J. Scott Turner, a biologist, writes in the June 12 issue of Christian Century that the Intelligent Design movement is not a front for Christian Creationism (genuine Creationists hate ID, because it affirms evolutionary biology). Instead, he says,

…designing agents are in fact everywhere, if only you know how to spot them. The ubiquity of these designing agents may make evolution a far more purposeful phenomenon than neo-Darwinists have been willing to allow.

This puts intelligent design into what I believe is its proper perspective: it is one of multiple emerging critiques of materialism in science and evolution.

His essay goes on to challenge the academic orthodoxy on ID, without abandoning evolutionary biology. Instead, Turner says that academia has become a “tedious intellectual monoculture where conformity and not contention is the norm.” Worse, he says, the Dover trial was not a victory for science. Rather,

…we have affirmed the principle that a federal judge, not scientists or teachers, can dictate what is and is not science, and what may or may not be taught in a classroom. Forgive me if I do not feel more free.”

Unfortunately, Christian Century does not provide the text of his article online.

Paul Kvinta has written a terrific piece about a man who aims to preserve the future of Kabul by saving its past. It’s a great read, and the man, Rory Stewart, may be a modern-day hero. The piece is called Can Rory Stewart Fix Afghanistan?

I’m back from Cambridge, England, where I obviously did not blog on what I was hearing every day in a series of generally excellent seminars (perhaps more on those later, though).

I got back to the U.S. in time to see my article on scholastic chess in Massachusetts, Young Knights, arrive on newsstands in the Boston Globe magazine. I liked a lot of things about this piece, not least the boys I wrote about themselves, all of whom must make their parents very proud. One of my favorite lines put chess in context with hockey:

Chess is a blood sport, but all the bloodshed happens in the brain – which may explain why chess players always seem to be holding their heads in their hands. Think of it as the intellectual version of hockey: You bash each other’s brains out, and when you’re done, you shake hands and go home.

It also gave me a chance to look at the academic benefits of playing chess, which turn out to be more anecdotal than hard scientific fact, in part because it turns out there hasn’t been all that much research.

Mark Bowden has a column in the Philadelphia Inquirer today (with a nod to Romenesko, which featured it).

I think Bowden has made some strong and probably
true statements in this column about the future of news, especially daily news, specifically the likelihood that almost all of it will shift online, and will combine the best aspects of broadcast and print media.

Unfortunately, these comments were true 10 years ago, and it’s hard to say when
they’ll shift from the vision he describes to every day reality.

Inc. has posted my piece on Sam Ewen, the guerrilla marketer whose Aqua Teen Hunger Force campaign sparked an uproar in Boston. Sam had talked some to the press in the wake of that event, but he had not given a detailed interview on what you do when your business runs into a completely unexpected event.

My Prototype column this week looks at an entrepreneur trying to reinvent the venerable shoe. See The Shoe Changes, But the Fit Doesn’t. He Can Explain.

I don’t know much about what I’m getting into. George Johnson of the New York Times has written this piece on neurotheology, God is in the Dendrites, which refers to a moment in the 2005 seminars. In the wake of the 2005 seminar, Johnson also wrote Agreeing only to disagree on God’s place in science, and on The Edge has made general references to how much he enjoyed his time here. Jeff O’Brien, who was at Wired when he was a fellow in 2006 and has since moved to Fortune, kept a blog, though it doesn’t end up dwelling much on the seminars.

I suspect there’s not a lot of time to blog about what goes on here. I’ve posted thoughts on a few of the readings that have been suggested, but I’ve read several more books and just haven’t had time to post on them. We’ll see what happens as the next two weeks unfold. Maybe people are too busy reliving their college lives to post — tonight after a group dinner I went over to Trinity College to the Singing on the River, an annual event where the Trinity College Choir sits on punts in the River Cam and serenades anyone who wants to come sit or stand on the banks. It’s fabulous, just fabulous. At about 11:30 their punts shove off and they meander down the river, still singing…

We’ve had our orientation for the Templeton-Cambridge journalism fellowships, held here in Cambridge England at Queens’ College. We had a ripping fine tour by a Cambridge historian, Mark Goldie, who talked about the three phases of the University’s history (Medieval, Renaissance and modern (since 1850). He described Cambridge as being about the service of the Church in Medieval [med-i-E-val] times (1200-1450), the service of the state in Renaissance (re NAY zance] times (1400 to 1750) and the service of the economy in modern times (since 1850).

He gave us some background on the loose confederation that is the university, which comprises 31 colleges (the biggest and best-endowed is Trinity, with about 900 students). Each college has its own chapel, apparently (there are a ton of churches here. You really can’t go a block in the university area without running into one), though Churchill college, which was founded in 1960 with a science and tech specialty, has a chapel that is at the college but not of the college (Francis Crick resigned from its board in protest over the chapel being included).

Mark took us around to a variety of notable sites, and gave us great background on them. How else would we know that on one little street, we were looking at rooms that might have been Marlowe’s at Corpus Christi, and that the rooms were there when Marlowe was, since Corpus Christi’s courtyard is one of only three at Cambridge that date back to the founding of the school (in this case 1352). Meanwhile, across the street is the old home of the Cavendish Lab, where the atom was first split, and where Crick and Watson would figure out the double helix structure of DNA.

We also got the lowdown on the church of St. Edward King and Martyr, which has a sign claiming that it is the cradle of the English Reformation. Mark said that was a bit over the top, but did talk about the Lutherans who preached there before it was acceptable and England, some of whom were burned for their efforts.

We got to tour Caius [keys] college, including a walk up the fellows stairs (fellows are appointed to teach at the college and get their own set of stairs up to the dining hall. Students take the student stairs). Caius has had luminaries like Crick as students, and he now has his own stained glass window, along with several other notable graduates of Caius. Stephen Hawking’s portrait is the largest in the dining hall. Behind a drape is a box with the flag Scott took to the South Pole (a Caius graduate was with Scott on that ill-fated trip).

We also toured Trinity’s massive courtyards, with the magnificent Wren library on one end and the ‘chariots of fire’ courtyard on another.

If I have time and figure out how to do it, i’ll post some pictures from the tour.

Biologist Lewis Wolpert on the evolution of belief. He likens belief in the human mind as an outgrowth of our ability to create tools, which is the foundational expression of conceptual reasoning, which is what makes us human (he cites Kenneth Oakley’s 1949 work Man the Toolmaker).

Wolpert’s title comes from Alice in Wonderland, but he has, in effect, his own six impossible things that many people nonetheless believe in: general false beliefs (confabulations, urban myths, mental illness), the paranormal, (i.e., ESP or flying saucers), religion, medical beliefs (miracle holistic cures, for instance, or Freudian psychiatry, which he dismantles on page 182), morality and ethics, and science itself (Wolpert actually argues that science is the most realistic way to experience our world, but it’s clearly impossible in at least two ways: one being that scientific experiments often show what intuitively seems true is not — for instance, if you throw a bag of rocks into a pool, the water level will actually go down. The other is that we often invoke science to create false beliefs, say around marketing drugs, or the Nazi effort to argue that Aryans were superior and Jews in particular inferior (which led to particularly egregious behavior by scientists)).

His chapter on science was exceptional and should be studied by schoolchildren. It does a terrific job of explaining why science is so difficult to get, and also special amongst human thought.

It’s a clear-headed book, unlike the screeds of other learned atheists. Wolpert says specifically that “people have the right to hold whatever beliefs appeal to them, but with a fundamental provision that those beliefs must be reliable if they lead to actions that affect the lives of other people.” His own son factors in the book, as someone who has found faith and been the better for it.

Wolpert also cautions early on that much of what he has to say is speculative, in part because scientists have not devoted much study to belief.

Random things that caught my interest: Westerners tend to believe they have control over their environment and view the world in parts, while Easterners think relationships cause things, so murder is a failure of the social order in China, but a kind of mental instability (his words) in the U.S.

He raises the question of why, if we evolved with a propensity for religion (the Jungian notion of the collective unconscious), people seem to do just fine without it (a question that has vexed the religious forever, as we can see from Psalm 13 http://www.carm.org/kjv/Psalms/Psalm_13.htm). He doesn’t suggest that science has anything to do with this, but rather the development of complex technologies and industrial society, “where prayer and religion play a less clear role.”

He notes that even the Greeks, who invented science, didn’t for the most part take the necessary step towards experiments that now defines scientific observation (though he does give props to Archimedes, this blog’s namesake) weren’t prepared to do experimental science, for instance. That had to wait for the Renaissance and Galileo.

I’m off on my fellowship. By far the shortest of the suggested readings is from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. We were asked to read 6.44, which reads

It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.

I find 6.432 more interesting:

How things are in the world is a matter of complete indifference for what is higher. God does not reveal himself in the world.

Also 6.52:

We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. Of course there are then no questions left, and this itself is the answer.