Author: David Opderbeck

For those who are interested in the arcana of legal scholarship, my article on international patent law and access to medicines has been published in the Vanderbilt Law Review. In addition, tonight I will participate in a panel discusson of a paper by Siva Vaidhyanathan of New York University. My notes are online.

You can keep track of such news, if for any reason you might want to, on my home page.

Today’s New York Times features a well-balanced article about the differing perspectives of two different groups of rafters floating through the Grand Canyon. One group was a “young earth” creationist tour, the other a tour organized by evolution apologists.

I was pleased to see an article in the Times that presented “fair and balanced” reporting of the different views in play. The YEC (young earth creationist) folks didn’t come across as backwoods yahoos or right wing nutcases, but rather were presented as sincere religious believers who were trying to make sense of their faith. I’m glad for that.

Yet, I ultimately found the article depressing for what it says about the evangelical subculture’s relationship to both the Bible and science.

Well, ok, it was best ball, but I did hit a few good shots.

There was an interesting editorial in the October 1 New York Times by Kenneth Woodward that essentially suggests religious believers should accept evolution as explanatory of everything but ultimate questions of causation concerning origins. I’m glad to see a NY Times editorial that doesn’t bash religion, but unfortunately Woodward’s arguments are confusing and confused.

There’s a debate raging in the U.S. about teaching “intelligent design” in schools. Although I find ID promising, I’m not sure ID is ready for the public schoolhouse yet, and I’m even less sure that it’s good stewardship to spend resources on litigation and lobbying to force ID into the public school curriculum. Regardless, the nastiness of the debate is startling. Take a look for example at a recent post on Evangelical Outpost and the resulting comments, in which yours truly is called an “illiterate moron,” a “pathological liar,” “deluded,” and “dopderdoink,” among other things (by one of the commenters, not by the site’s proprietor, who is sympathetic to ID). The same guy also suggested I “engage in something called self-reflection for the first time in many years,” which is particularly amusing if you know me at all (a lack of painful introspection, most definitely, is not one of my problems).

The ID debate seems to illutrate the tenacity of scientific paradigms. The tenacity of a paradigm seems for many to correlate with its inherent merit. That doesn’t square with history. Every scientific theory we now reject — from heliocentrism to Netwonian science — was held tenaciously in its day.

I’m also interested in the tenacity with which many people on the anti-ID side of the debate seem to hold a particular theory about theories — that is, the theory that Popper’s falsifiability criterion is the sine qua non of “science.” I’ve begun reading Imre Lakatos, and I think this rings true: “[i]s, then, Popper’s falsifiability criterion the solution to the problem of demarcating science from pseudoscience? No. For Popper’s criterion ignores the remarkable tenacity of scientific theories. Scientists have thick skins. They do not abandon a theory merely because the facts contradict it.” (Lakatos, “Science & Psudoscience,” in “The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes” (Cambridge 1978, Vol. 1)), at p. 4.) In the same essay, Lakatos states that “As opposed to Popper the methodology of scientific research programmes does not offer instant rationality. One must treat budding programmes leniently: programmes may take decades before they get off the ground and become empirically progressive.” (Ibid. at p. 6.)

It’s fascinating, and frustrating, to observe the vehemence with which some oppose ID on supposedly objective grounds. As Kuhn and later Lakatos demonstrated, those grounds aren’t in any event objective, but any pretense of objectivity is abandoned by some when a new theory relating to natural history proposes some intelligent agency.