I have in the past hammered home the point that mathematicians, engineers, lawyers etc have little business critiquing evolutionary biology (see here, for example). Over at Evolutionblog, Jason, himself a mathematician (and responding to the DI lawyer Casey Luskin), hits the nail on the head:
There is absolutely nothing in a mathematician's training or professional work that qualifies him to discuss evolution. Unless you are one of the very small percentage of mathematicians who actually work in mathematical biology, evolution is not something that ever arises in your graduate school courses or in your professional research. A PhD in mathematics by itself is, therefore, no more of a qualification than a degree in English for speaking intelligently about biology. Anyone perusing the DI's list would be right to sneer at the large number of signatories with no training in biology.
But that doesn't mean that a mathematician (or any non-biologist) is therefore forever excluded from discussing biology. It means simply that their professional training gives them no authority for doing so. Whether you should accord any weight to their pronouncements depends entirely on the specific arguments they make in defense of their views.
Here! Here!
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Isn't part of the point of science an inherent anti-authoritarianism? That is, merely being a scientist gives one no authority. The authority is found in the reasoning (and evidence) one provides. The problem, of course, is when journalists and lawyers enter the fray and that just isn't how they think. Thus the travesty of people with PhDs paraded as if they are experts when in fact they are quacks. (Reminds me of a recent National Geographic special on using meditation to levitate - one of the folks they interview is a Physicist with a doctorate but that hardly makes him an expert on the issue)
You might want to check out this post by your neighbor, "Good Math, Bad Math". Mathematicians do indeed have something useful to add to the subject :-)
I have to respond to the comment about lawyers. As a trial and appellate lawyer, everything that I do is about evidence and reasoning. It isn't that lawyers don't know how to reason, but that frequently they choose not to. But that is true of many people in just about any group, including doctors, engineers, accountants and, yes, journalists.
bad jim:
I wasn't saying that mathematicians have nothing to add. In fact, Jason's post makes the point that they do (provided they actually take the time - as Jason has - to understand evolutionary theory).
catherine:
I agree.
It is acutely embarrassing to a math teacher like me to see mathematicians like Dembski and Berlinski using their mathematical training to confuse others with great stinking gobs of symbolic nonsense. They know that most people are not fond of math, even to the point of fearing it, and consequently are inclined to give undue deference to those who make a show of using its symbology. We're fortunate that Mark Chu-Carroll is willing to devote as much time as he does to unraveling their nonsense. It's intellectual bullying, a point I've addressed a couple of times in separate posts on Dembski and Berlinski.
"Isn't part of the point of science an inherent anti-authoritarianism? That is, merely being a scientist gives one no authority. The authority is found in the reasoning (and evidence) one provides. The problem, of course, is when journalists and lawyers enter the fray and that just isn't how they think. Thus the travesty of people with PhDs paraded as if they are experts when in fact they are quacks. (Reminds me of a recent National Geographic special on using meditation to levitate - one of the folks they interview is a Physicist with a doctorate but that hardly makes him an expert on the issue)"
Posted by: Clark Goble
Yes and no. Science, within a field, will look at reasoning and evidence. Presumably they'll also look at background, not being fools. For example, if I (a statistician) were to walk up questioning the biochemistry of DNA, I'd get much less of an opening than a biochemist, or a biologist who'd studied that.
Outside of one's field, one is *forced* to work off of authority much more, of course.
Heck, if we let anyone shoot their mouth off about anything we'll get people at the patent office reinventing physics!
Keith:
You mean those people in patent offices who actually *had degrees* in physics and were re-inventing physics as opposed to the guys in patent office with degrees in mathematics trying to re-invent biology?