As I mentioned earlier, I love a good book review if it excoriates a stupid book. Norman Levitt, of Rutgers University, has an absolutely lovely piece of critical invective for Steve Fuller's defense of Intelligent Design here. Fuller is a sociologist philosopher* of science who seems to dislike science intensely, unless he does it. At the Dover Trial, he got a lot of money to write a fairly incoherent defense of ID, which seemed only to exacerbate the judge's final decision, and it seems he is cashing in again by putting out a book based on his "expert witness". Read Levitt's deflation of that ballon.
* Eli Gerson sent me a note:
Steve Fuller is not a sociologist, he's a philosopher. He doesn't pretend to do sociology either. Or any other kind of science. This one grew in your garden, and it would be nice if you didn't lay it on us.
I humbly apologise to all sociologists of science. But Wikipedia notes that he graduated in sociology and history and that he is better called a social epistemologist. I'm not sure I want to claim him for my own tribe, either.
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Excellent! About time someone called Fuller out on his ridiculous po-mo arguments.
For me, Steve Fuller was definitely the Most Annoying Talking Head presented in the PBS NOVA Judgment Day program. Unfortunately, he'll probably make a fair sum of money off his stupid, intellectually dishonest book, too.
Hmm...I got hung up on his critique of Fuller's explanations of randomness and complexity. I haven't read Fuller's book, but if he's arguing that creating a truly random number generator is not possible, in principle, that seems fine to me. Levitt then seems to go on to argue against creating a random number generator in practice, which would effectively stymie would-be cryptographers. Those seem like different issues.
I find it strange that someone advocating ID would use such an argument in the first place, because the logical ramification of the inability to truly generate randomness is that the universe is deterministic, right?
Also, I'm not that strong at math, but my radar went up at Levitt's back-of-the-napkin random number algorithm. If it's that easy to generate an impenetrable sequence, then why would there be a need for things like this?
I hate to say it, but much as I sympathise with Levitt's aims, that review gives me the impression that he's a pompous self-satisfied windbag. And when he started banging on about literary theory, womens studies, and cultural anthropology (etc.), it was all I could do to stop from rolling my eyes and putting the piece down. He has some good arguments (and impeccable aims), but that review feels like preaching to the converted -- it isn't likely to win converts, just make the author (Levitt) feel good about himself. Which is a crying shame, given the context...
It could have done with some more quotes from Fuller and I agree it is preaching to the converted, but thats the point, dammit- why else would it be published in the Skeptic society magazine.
I found this bit interesting:
"As Fuller would have it, Just as the ACLU helped to drive a wedge between the teaching of science and theology, the Discovery Institute would now drive a wedge between the teaching of science and the anti-theology prejudice euphemistically called methodological naturalism."
If that is a genuine Fuller quote, I would like to see the context, yet on the face of it it seems to be pure mince. I was under the distinct impression that the wedge between tehology and science was hammered in place a century or three ago, long before the ACLU became necessary.
"I find it strange that someone advocating ID would use such an argument in the first place, because the logical ramification of the inability to truly generate randomness is that the universe is deterministic, right?"
It depends on what definition of "randomness" you're using. Do you mean acausality? Indeterminism? Uncertainty? Incompressibility? I don't know if randomness is a hard concept in and of itself so much as an umbrella under which you place a bunch of loosely similar concepts. It's a mistake often made by IDers in their discourses against evolution.