doubting science helps science

The creationist documentary "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" sounds as controversial as the title suggests. No one expected too much havoc before its nationwide release on April 18, but the blogosphere has managed to beat the real world once again. Two nights ago, at the mac store in the Mall of America, biology blogger PZ Myers recounted how he was specifically targeted and expelled from an advanced screening of the film. Richard Dawkins, author of "The Selfish Gene", and famous proponent of evolution, was allowed to enter. The irony only deepens, if you're interested in the eye witness account.

What this situation as a whole exemplifies is not hypocrisy of religious leaders, or the hardheadedness of evolutionary biologists, or any stereotypes invoked by any belief. The lines of separation between major schools of thought are becoming more and more defined. To believe in one theory means casting all doubt for it, and turning a blind eye towards all other competition. Obviously, this is the case between evolution and intelligent design, but this pattern is being paralleled in many other parts of our world: political parties, nationalism, racism, even between different sects of the same religion. Many of these facets can be traced back to the the age old schism between science and religion.

In "The Meaning of it All", a national best selling collection of lectures given at the University of Washington in Seattle in 1963, Richard Feynman eloquently explains that the rift between science and religion is rooted in their respective philosophies. Science is based on doubt and constant uncertainty, whereas religion requires unquestioned faith, as illustrated by today's disagreements. Evolution is a theory, which can be disproved by only 1 anomaly. Creationism and Intelligent Design are religious beliefs, and are held to be the indisputable truth to its supporters.

This intrinsic disparity has been around since the first part of the seventeenth century, with Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes' treatise on scientific method and logic. Unsurprisingly, the dogma that everything revolved around the earth was disproved just around then as well. I would touch upon the disproof of the flat earth model by Columbus' voyage a century before, but this is a ccommon myth. The earth's spherical shape has been widely accepted since the second century BCE. The center of the universe, however, was heavily defended to be the earth by the Catholic church until 1757.

The geocentric system is a system in which the Earth is the center of the universe, and all other celestial bodies revolve around it. While is has long been shown to be false, an interesting study by Jon D. Miller in the New York Times determined that one in five Americans still believed the sun revolved around the Earth. While there is no doubt that the majority of those 20 percent were just ignorant, there are still a handful that take geocentricity as a simple god-given truth. Naturally, there is an official website and a few people on the web dedicated to advertising their arguments for the geocentric blogosphere. Naturally, complete faith and literal interpretation of the bible is required for agreement with their logic.

The day of judgment for geocentricism is often dated to the 17th century, when Galileo Galilei first found evidence for a heliocentric system. After drastically improving the telescope , Galileo discovered what he described as a few nearly invisible stars near Jupiter. He determined that they were orbiting the planet within the following days. Collectively, these moons are referred to as the Galilean moons. However, with the unforgiving white out that is the Catholic church against him, Galileo's ideas were tossed aside as impossible. Shortly thereafter, Galileo realized that every phase of Venus, our closest neighbor to the sun, is seen from Earth, a phenomenon that agreed with the Copernicus heliocentric system. Today, star's light aberration offers undeniable proof that the earth is not the center of the universe.

If you believe that the earth revolves around the sun, you are wrong. If you believe that the sun is the center of our solar system, you are wrong. The true rotation point is between the centers of the sun and the Earth, at an imaginary point called the barycenter. Because the sun is over 300,000 times the mass of the Earth, the rotation axis is very close to the center of the sun. Still, with precise enough measurements, the sun's wobble is discernible, as it rotates around the barycenter between itself and the Earth. Ex-planet Pluto and its former moon (now the second member in a double dwarf planet system), and double star solar systems clearly revolve around each other. So in reality, our entire solar system revolves around the barycenter created by the distribution of our planets.

This is only a nuance of a well understood system, but this and other subtleties of our world can remind us that even the most generally accepted ideas can stand to be questioned. I do not offer even a broad solution to the disagreement between creationists and evolutionists, but perhaps a little more humility can calm the drama. Whether one is right, or both are wrong, we all live on the same rock. By agreeing to disagree we can move on and understand more of the beauty in our world, whether God made it or not.

"We are not smart. We are dumb. We are ignorant. We must maintain an open channel." -Richard Feynman