ID podcast
Nov. 21st, 2005 12:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sawylSeems there's a podcast of a debate between Jack Cohen and Steve Fuller on the subject of Intelligent Design. What will those crazy academics think of next?
Updated: It's actually quite an interesting podcast, although the two debaters seem to be talking at slightly cross-purposes. Fuller argues that it's better to teach a variety of theories using a dialectical method to assess the benefits of each one and that the value of ID comes from it's use as heuristic tool with which to investigate the world, Cohen argues that ID is the fundamental product of intellectual laziness and that it is basically equivalent to claiming, "we can't explain this, so it must have been designed by a supernatural power."
In general, I don't think the debate does Fuller any favours. He seems willing to justify teaching a theory that appears to be both scientifically and philosophically weak on the grounds that it's not entirely clear what constitutes an accepted theory and that it is useful for high school kids to debate the issues, even though he accepts that this is something that was explicitly ruled out by the Dover trial (the outcome of which, he claims, is "better than nothing").
Cohen acquits himself rather better, agreeing with Fuller that in a lot of cases the teaching of evolution is significantly out of date and talks in turns of a single species and period mutations, whereas he prefers the metaphor of a species as "a number of hand built cars, not identical model T's, each tuned to a similar specification" He argues against ID on the grounds that there probably isn't time in education to teach a theory with so few merits and that most of the arguments in favour of ID are simply lazy and introduce additional complexity.
Updated: It's actually quite an interesting podcast, although the two debaters seem to be talking at slightly cross-purposes. Fuller argues that it's better to teach a variety of theories using a dialectical method to assess the benefits of each one and that the value of ID comes from it's use as heuristic tool with which to investigate the world, Cohen argues that ID is the fundamental product of intellectual laziness and that it is basically equivalent to claiming, "we can't explain this, so it must have been designed by a supernatural power."
In general, I don't think the debate does Fuller any favours. He seems willing to justify teaching a theory that appears to be both scientifically and philosophically weak on the grounds that it's not entirely clear what constitutes an accepted theory and that it is useful for high school kids to debate the issues, even though he accepts that this is something that was explicitly ruled out by the Dover trial (the outcome of which, he claims, is "better than nothing").
Cohen acquits himself rather better, agreeing with Fuller that in a lot of cases the teaching of evolution is significantly out of date and talks in turns of a single species and period mutations, whereas he prefers the metaphor of a species as "a number of hand built cars, not identical model T's, each tuned to a similar specification" He argues against ID on the grounds that there probably isn't time in education to teach a theory with so few merits and that most of the arguments in favour of ID are simply lazy and introduce additional complexity.
