This is pure idiocy, but it's a sports column so it's okay?

[BurtWorm]

:wtf:


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/28/AR2005082800964_pf.html


Just Check the ID

By Sally Jenkins
Monday, August 29, 2005; E01



Athletes do things that seem transcendental -- and they can also do things that are transcendentally stupid. They choke, trip and dope. Nevertheless, they possess a deep physical knowledge the rest of us can learn from, bound as we are by our ordinary, trudging, cumbersome selves. Ever get the feeling that they are in touch with something that we aren't? What is that thing? Could it be their random, mutant talent, or could it be evidence of, gulp, intelligent design?

The sports section would not seem to be a place to discuss intelligent design, the notion that nature shows signs of an intrinsic intelligence too highly organized to be solely the product of evolution. It's an odd intersection, admittedly. You might ask, what's so intelligently designed about ballplayers (or sportswriters)? Jose Canseco once let a baseball hit him in the head and bounce over the fence for a home run. Former Washington Redskins quarterback Gus Frerotte gave himself a concussion by running helmet-first into a wall in a fit of exuberance. But athletes also are explorers of the boundaries of physiology and neuroscience, and some intelligent design proponents therefore suggest they can be walking human laboratories for their theories.

First, let's get rid of the idea that ID (intelligent design) is a form of sly creationism. It isn't. ID is unfairly confused with the movement to teach creationism in public schools. ( :wtf: )The most serious ID proponents are complexity theorists, legitimate scientists among them, who believe that strict Darwinism and especially neo-Darwinism (the notion that all of our qualities are the product of random mutation) is inadequate to explain the high level of organization at work in the world. Creationists are attracted to ID, and one of its founding fathers, University of California law professor Phillip Johnson, is a devout Presbyterian. But you don't have to be a creationist to think there might be something to it, or to agree with Johnson when he says, "The human body is packed with marvels, eyes and lungs and cells, and evolutionary gradualism can't account for that."

The idea, so contentious in other contexts, actually rings a loud bell in sports. Athletes often talk of feeling an absolute fulfillment of purpose, of something powerful moving through them or in them that is not just the result of training. Jeffrey M. Schwartz, a neuroscientist and research professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, is a believer in ID, or as he prefers to call it, "intrinsic intelligence." Schwartz wants to launch a study of NASCAR drivers, to better understand their extraordinary focus. He finds Darwinism, as it applies to a high-performance athlete such as Tony Stewart, to be problematic. To claim that Stewart's mental state as he handles a high-speed car "is a result of nothing more than random processes coming together in a machine-like way is not a coherent explanation," Schwartz said.

[wtmusic]

1. Law Professors And Psychiatrists Agree

now, if we could just get those paleontologists on board

[Bill McBlueState]

2. and

and biologists, and astronomers, ...

[Sandpiper]

3. If one is going to use the Appeal to Authority fallacy

Couldn't they at least try appealing to an authority who is, I dunno, trained in the relevant field?

Law Professors and Psychiatrists?


Why not Carpenters, Electricians, and Plumbers too?


:eyes:

[wtmusic]

4. Love the term "legitimate scientists"

Wha, got something against illegitimate scientists???

[Dora]

5. My neighbor is an ID proponent

though I'm not sure he would call himself that.

He thinks that humans were deposited on Earth by aliens. "It's the ONLY explanation!"

[BurtWorm]

6. A Raelian!

Christian IDers loooooove Raelians 'cause they make ID seem so universal. :eyes:

[Maple]

10. Totally dumb article

However, the idea that aliens did it is not remotely exclusive to the Raelians, nor does it have anything to do with this current US bunfight about religion vs science.

Please...one war at a time.

[muriel_volestrangler]

7. But this does provide an insight into the minds of ID proponents

Assuming the article isn't a complete hoax (and I had to read the whole thing to make sure there wasn't a punchline), it does show that these people have a remarkably restricted viewpoint. They see someone good at a (man-made) sport, and then really do think "they have a God-given talent for it" - the guff about "I want to thank God for that touchdown" really does seem to be genuinely what they think, and not a bit of pious humbug designed to ingratiate them with religious fans (which is why I thought most of them said it). I suppose it would be nice to think that God was so concerned with our entertainment that it would arrange for a certain numbers of top athletes to emerge each year. A shame that that would also imply it's a split personality who cares more about sports than saving people's lives.

It hasn't occurred to them that the good sports performance is only a relative thing. They also haven't stopped to consider that "outstanding performance" may be because there is a bit of intelligent design involved - the sports have been designed for humans to play. Unless, of course, they believe the rules of baseball arrived inscribed on a few golden plaques.

It's amazing the article fails to mention that there's a lot of similarity between many sports and hunting, which is something that would exert evolutionary pressure - the ability to work in teams, run fast, judge distances and trajectories, anticipate the moves of your opponents/prey, etc.

[bemildred]

8. Conflates criticism of "Darwinism" with ID, which is wrong.

The alternatives are not Darwinism and Jeebus. There is plenty of room to criticize Darwinism and reductive genetic determinism, but the intellectual drivel masquerading under the name "Intelligent Design" has nothing to do with it. The cool thing is that complicated and highly adapted organisms and structures DO happen all by themselves, so to speak, they just grow.

[evermind]

9. This is just SO DUMB!

"Schwarz finds little or nothing in natural selection to explain the ability of athletes to reinterpret physical events from moment to moment, the super-awareness that they seem to possess."

So natural selection can't explain why an organism which is extremely responsive to physical events should evolve? Perhaps he should watch a few videos of cheetahs running down their prey and consider that the survival of both animals is very dependent on their extreme responsiveness and athleticism. Has this guy taken his Darwinism 101? Seems not.

As for the sublimity of athletes' experience and performance, it's an old, old, vacuous, argument: "This (thing) is just so so marvelous, it couldn't have come about naturally, could it?" The "argument" fails to establish anything because it can cite no evidence of any alternative means of coming about (unless you count various 4-6,000 year old fairy-tales as evidence, of course).

The concluding paragraph from the writer of the piece is no better:

But science class also teaches us how crucial it is to maintain adventurousness, and surely it's worthwhile to suggest that an athlete in motion conveys an inkling of something marvelous in nature that perhaps isn't explained by mere molecules. Johann Kepler was the first to accurately plot the laws of planetary motion. But he only got there because he believed that their movements, if translated musically, would result in a celestial harmony. He also believed in astrology. And then there was Albert Einstein, who remarked that "Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind."

Maintaining adventurousness is undeniably desirable. But let's remember that if Kepler believed in astrology and mystical geometry, his planetary laws were neither of these, and while Einstein may have had a healthy respect for the cultural value of religion, he noticably excluded all traces of it from his scientific hypotheses.

(On edit: It seems to me that the Einstein quote directly undermines the whole business of ID: "religion without science is blind" - in other words a religious doctrine that seeks to usurp scientifically founded beliefs about the natural world with idle fantasies has lost touch with reality and truth. Religion without truth is worthless. The value of religion to scientists is not in formulating theories, but in giving the practice of science a human, moral, and spiritual dimension. That's how I interpret his words, anyway.)