Evolution: Science, Pseudo-Science, or Both?

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Again, just for clarification, I'm looking at the overall paradigm or inspiration behind the search for truth -- not so much the experiments that were performed to test the hypothesis.

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Perhaps it's because I haven't read the thread carefully enough, but you seem to be to be advancing two rather different ideas. One is that the inspiration for a scientific theory may later prove to be incorrect or useless for science, as Galileo's astrology turned out to be. The other is that some large claims within a theory can turn out to be wrong, even while smaller claims turn out to be correct, as Galileo's heliocentric model of the universe proved to be wrong. I think it's important to distinguish the two points, since they have different practical implications. I don't care much, at least as a scientist, the extent to which Darwin's ideas rose out of the general philosophical and economic background of the time. I care a great deal whether the hypothesis of universal common descent is wrong.First, a comment about terminology: I don't find it at all useful to introduce the word "pseudoscience" here. Astrology today is pseudoscience, but it was not in Galileo's day. I don't know enough about the period to say whether astrology was treated scientfically or was simply the intellectual matrix in which scientists worked, but in neither case is there anything to be gained by projecting modern assessments of astrology back onto that period. The word for ideas held by scientists that later turn out to be wrong is "wrong"; "pseudoscientific" describes the methods used in exploring an idea, not whether the idea is right or not.On your more specific point, about whether large claims about common descent are correct or not, I'd have to say that the evidence that has accumulated since Darwing has been massive and overwhelmingly in favor of common descent being correct. (Whether common descent traces back to exactly one ancetral life form is difficult to determine, but that proposal wasn't advanced by Darwin.) Certainly, no alternative explanation for the genetic relatedness between current living organisms has been offered.

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I think we've already arrived there to a degree. In some ways, the findings of quantum physics have already eclipsed all of the a priori arguments against ID, and we may in fact wind up duplicating some direct engineering ID processes of creation.

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What a priori arguments against ID are you talking about? Most arguments against ID that I'm familiar with are some variant of "ID hasn't made a case for intelligent design." What arguments do you have in mind?

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When someone criticizes ID for positing non-material or non-natural means, they have already shown they are still clinging to an outdated classical paradigm of what material and physical reality consist of, imo.

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I don't criticize ID for positing non-natural means: I criticize it for positing more or less nothing. Nothing testable, at any rate. On the other hand, I find your attempted identification of QM with the non-natural to be quite odd. The reality described by QM has next to nothing to do with the kind of non-material realities that ID may or may not be talking about (but which they clearly have in mind). Once you get used to it, QM becomes just a way of describing a particular part of physical reality that behaves differently than the macroscopic objects most people are familiar with. There's nothing magic or non-physical about it. Physicists only study the physical -- it's in their job description.

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You are missing the point. The principles of QM are remarkably the same as principles taught in spiritual traditions about the true nature of reality.

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I'm not missing your point; I'm disagreeing with your point. I know a little about a variety of spiritual traditions and a fair bit about QM, and I see nothing but vague and superficial similarities, best appreciated by ignoring the real contents of both.

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You are missing the point. The principles of QM are remarkably the same as principles taught in spiritual traditions about the true nature of reality.

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Well, yes. That's rather the point of physics: to refine our understanding of the physical world. QM helped redefine our understanding of the physical, just as relativity, electromagnetism, Newtonian gravity and Copernican astronomy did before it.

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In fact, QM basically states that what we think of as physical is at root something non-physical, just as spiritual traditions have taught all along. QM presents the fundamental existence of particles as information, as patterns which contain or are held together as energy, and which manifest according to probability of the particle appearing according to a design in a certain manner.

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Um, no. QM nowhere syas that the root of the physical is nonphysical. All it says is that at certain scales, the physical has to be described by a probability function, rather than a deterministic one. It doesn't say that particles are fundamentally information. Some people choose to view them that way, which is fine, but that's one equivalent description among many, and it's just a description; the real stuff is still out there, stubbornly physical despite its odd behavior. It says that everything physical is characterized by its energy, sure -- but it also says it's characterized by its momentum, and its position, and its spin.Basically, you're spinning a nice web of words that has little to do with real physics.

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QM suggests that what material and physical objects first consist of are energy patterns.

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No it doesn't, not really. Energy is no more fundamental than spin, for example. How many spiritual traditions talk about spin? What traditions talk about parity nonconservation, or Lorentz invariance?On the other hand, many traditions do talk about gods and spiritual beings, about prophecy and revelation and prayer. QM has nothing to say about any of those topics.

Also, could you move back on topic a bit and explain your statement that QM undercuts arguments against ID? What arguments are you talking about?

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Take the comment of a "probability function." What does that mean?

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I suggest you go back and consider that that means. I didn't get this stuff from creationists or IDers, but from physicists.

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I have thought about what it means. I was an experimental particle physicist for ten years, and had to deal with the reality of QM every day. The wave function isn't a spiritual force, and it isn't an Idea matrix, and it isn't thought, or at least there's no reason for thinking of it as any of those things It's a model for how physical stuff behaves.Yes, Planck thought that there was a conscious mind behind matter. Einstein didn't. Neither conclusion is physics, and physicists have no special standing to draw philosophical conclusions. As it happens, I'm inclined to agree with Planck rather than Einstein, but I don't think it follows from the physics. Physicists who think QM requires an intelligence behind the universe are quite rare.

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The fallacy giving rise to such speculations,Wheeler explains, is the assumption that a photon had some physical form before the astronomer observed it. Either it was a wave or a particle; either it went both ways around the quasar or only one way. Actually Wheeler says quantum phenomena are neither waves nor particles but are intrinsically undefined until the moment they are measured.

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As I've already said, I don't like this formulation, since it makes much of physics nonphysical, and I doubt that Wheeler himself would use it consistently. Is an electron a physical thing? But Wheeler's basic point is correct, and basic to any understanding of QM: you simply cannot apply ordinary physical intuition about how stuff behaves at the quantum level.You might also note that Wheeler's belief that consciousness is important in quantum measurement is a decidedly minority, and shrinking, view among physicists. The trend is to understand measurement in terms of decoherence, not consciousness.

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Can you elaborate?

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The reason I ask is even when I hear someone explain how QM effects are not the way I see them, it always pretty much comes back to them obeying principles that were presented in another arena as "spiritual."

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Ok. In QM, an intrinsic property of particles is their spin. That is, particles can have a built-in angular momentum. The amount of spin is quantized, and is a property only of the type of particle: all photons have one unit of spin, while all electrons have a half unit, for example. All particles fall into two spin classes: fermions, which have half-integral spins, and bosons, which have integral spins. The two classes behave quite differently. Boson wavefunctions are always symmetric with respect to interchange of particles; that is, if you exchange the places of two bosons in a system, the wave function remains identical. Fermion wavefunctions are antisymmetric, which means that the wavefunction changes sign when two fermions are exchanged. Among other things, this fermion behavior leads to the Pauli exclusion principle, which prohibits two fermions from being in the identical state in a system, which in turn leads to electron orbitals and all of chemistry.Macroscopic physical intuition is pretty useless for understanding spin. Nothing is spinning to create the angular momentum, and spin exhibits the usual kinds of quantum weirdness, e.g. if spin is measured in one direction, then the spin in an orthogonal direction will be in a superposition of states. On the other hand, I really don't see any connection between the physics of spin and anything in any spiritual tradition that I've ever heard of.

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Let me ask you something to be more specific.

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Do you consider the comment I quoted from a prominent current QM researcher to be accurate?

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I think the statement is beyond the bounds of what physics can currently state. If "information" isn't just a metaphor here, then this qualifies as an interpretation of QM, one of many. Such interpretations aren't really science, since they all share the same set of observable predictions. They might, possibly, eventually lead to some new science, if they can be coaxed to produce divergent predictions of something measurable.