Speaking of religion and debunking mythology, I came across this article on “the Global Consciousness Project”, who claim the following:

1. To have a “black box” which generates a random string of ones and zeroes;
2. That “[a]gain and again, entirely ordinary people proved that their minds could influence the machine and produce significant fluctuations on the graph, ‘forcing it’ to produce unequal numbers of ‘heads’ or ‘tails’.”
3. That these boxes, operating around the world, act as sort of psychic seismographs, allegedly detecting ‘disturbances in the force’ (for lack of a more obviously dismissive term on my part). The project claims to have registered many recent traumatic events, namely Princess Di’s funeral, 9/11 and the Indian Ocean tsunami.

Pretty amazing, no? No. Some of the more helpful trollers over at Slashdot found a November 2002 Skeptic Report article on the GCP. After closer inspection (read the whole article to get the full explanation), the ‘scientists’ behind this hoax aren’t holding their findings to the strictest experimental standards:

Another serious problem with the September 11 result was that during the days before the attacks, there were several instances of the eggs picking up data that showed the same fluctuation as on September 11th. When I asked Radin what had happened on those days, the answer was: “I don’t know.”

I then asked him – and I’ll admit that I was a bit flabbergasted – why on earth he hadn’t gone back to see if similar “global events” had happened there since he got the same fluctuations. He answered that it would be “shoe-horning” – fitting the data to the result.

Checking your hypothesis against seemingly contradictory data is “shoe-horning”?

Basically, the GCP guys check their data after they read the newspaper, and then find a random fluctuation near the time of the event they want to retroactively “predict.” (Don’t take my word for it, just look at their site, with all the data publicly available.) It’s the kind of wishful thinking that has a long Western tradition, starting with the Enlightenment. Ever since the Church put the smackdown on Galileo for stating the obvious (as Magellan said later, “I have seen the shadow of the earth upon the moon, and I have more confidence in the shadow than I have in the church”), reasonable religious folks have been trying to bridge the gap between science and religion.

It’s a valiant effort, though wholly misguided (more about this in a minute). The problem with efforts like this one is that they’re usually based on faulty science. The Global Consciousness people are basically rehashing the Bible Code method of producing revelations: given a sufficiently large amount of data, you can find any number of arbitrary patterns to support your hypothesis. The same prophetic math that supposedly foretold major world events in the Bible can be replicated with any similar-length book, like War and Peace, or the Quran. Seek and ye shall find.

Not that the Project is necessarily religious in nature, but their obvious focus on proving the existence of an actual “global consciousness” shows that they’re trying to reconcile a vague spiritual idea with science. And how does one do that? Find some data, make a foregone conclusion, and hope people don’t look too closely.

A similar technique is writ large as “intelligent design,” and is making the rounds of America’s schoolrooms instead of evolutionary science. And what exactly is “intelligent design,” I hear you cry? Since Bible-thumping won’t work as well today in court (or the school-board meeting) as it did for William Jennings Bryan 80 years ago, creationists need to coat their creation myths with the patina of scientific validity. Some make more effort than others–to quote another article on Skeptic Report:

For example, the public school edition of Henry Morris´ textbook, Scientific Creationism, published by Creation-Life Publishers, states: “It is precisely because Biblical revelation is absolutely authoritative and perspicuous that the scientific facts, rightly interpreted, will give the same testimony as that of Scripture. There is not the slightest possibility that the facts of science can contradict the Bible.”

It’s strange that they make such an adamant and unmistakable assertion, especially since the Biblical account of creation actually contradicts itself

.

Here’s a fun party trick that will either make you a few bucks or punched in the face: ask someone whether Genesis says man was created before the animals. No matter what they say, bet them that the Bible says the exact opposite.

How does it work? Before going to the party, tear out the first two chapters of Genesis and produce them after you’ve confirmed the bet with your bookie. The Bible actually starts off with two competing and irreconcilable accounts of creation. I mean, if the Bible can’t even get its shit together, how are we supposed to believe its pseudo-scientific apologists?

I recall looking this up in junior high school, after one of my classmates insisted that science basically agreed with Genesis’s account of creation, if you assume that ‘a day’ is not a fixed length of time. It sounds almost reasonable, but I’d have a real problem saying trees were created before the sun, no matter how long the interval between the third and fourth days. People have a powerful desire to believe that religion and science can play nice, which is how we get things like the Global Consciousness Project.

The Bible’s creation stories aren’t the real problem with intelligent design. In fact, there are two major problems here, issues of much broader scope than the Darwin debate. As I’ve been intimating throughout this article, what we have here is just deficient science. We have assertions instead of testable hypotheses, pronouncements with a side of cooked data. Would that creationism were the only place this is happening, but the truth is that what we’re seeing here science going “post-modern.”

Operatives and culture warriors like Karl Rove understands that the way to combat the scientific establishment is to hire scientists to come to your own counterfactual conclusions. The tobacco industry pioneered this approach, which the White House has been using in the fight against global warming regulations. In a world where the media’s idea of ‘fairness’ is to present a point-counterpoint on any issue, it doesn’t matter if 99 scientists say ‘X’ and 1 says ‘Y’, because they’ll both get the same amount of airtime on FOX News. Even before the paid-punditry scandal came to light, it was obvious that when Bush decides he needs to pay ‘the truth’ some lip-service, he relies on the market to provide him with at least one professional willing to buck ‘conventional wisdom.’

I say “post-modern” because the right-wing media has really taken the rejection of the notion of objectivity and run with it. News isn’t composed of facts anymore, it’s just someone’s opinion. It looks like they’ve extended this line of reasoning to the point where they see ‘scientists’ as fancy pundits. Global warming is a myth–just ask this guy we found. He’s a doctor or something.

Let’s return to intelligent design for a moment, because there’s an interesting facet of the theory which explains how the whole apparatus works. The crux of the intelligent design argument is what they call “irreducible complexity,” which ID advocate and author Michael Behe sums up as follows:

“By irreducible complexity I mean a single system which is composed of several interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, and where the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning. An irreducibly complex system cannot be produced gradually by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system, since any precursor to an irreducibly complex system is by definition nonfunctional.”

I will let others with stronger backgrounds in biology sort out the details of how complex systems evolve. The larger issue is, irreducible complexity isn’t just wrong; it runs counter to the very idea of science.

Irreducible complexity isn’t just ignorant of the science it claims to base itself upon (of the many usable examples, I could use mitochondrial DNA as evidence that evolution created the ‘irreducibly complex’ cell), but that the whole theory is based on a distinct lack of curiosity.

If Intelligent Design advocates aren’t intelligent enough to delve into the biology of something, they declare it irreducibly complex and that science cannot possibly hope to understand it. ID isn’t breaking any new ground here–this is how religion has always functioned; to present explanations for things we cannot understand. Our ancestors could understand the workings of the world up to a point, and beyond that point lay supernatural forces. It’s like the old maps of the Atlantic Ocean–we’ve explored up until here, and beyond that “thar be monsters.” (“What do you mean, there’s no monster? It’s right here on the map!”)

The remarkable thing about Intelligent Design is that it’s actually a campaign to push the borders of our understanding backwards. Evolutionary biologists, stop looking at the evolutionary development of organs! If we’ve told you once, we’ve told you a thousand times, they’re irreducibly complex. Stop reducing their complexity, it’s making us look bad.