HI !!! The biggest disappointment for me in the Intelligent Design (ID) movement, as exemplified by the Dover debacle, was the blatant intellectual cowardice (IC) of its proponents. They proposed no great and useful new paradigms to do science with, they just wanted to highlight the element of doubt in the current systems of thought. In a nutshell, they wanted creationism-by-any-other-name.
I know what I wanted when I first heard about Intelligent Design. I wanted to see Information Theory move to the center of the science class and build a nice system of thinking and organizing content that could bridge physics, chemistry, biology and psychology. I wanted to have the class ask real questions like What is intelligence? What is lower intelligence? What would higher intelligence be? Could there be such a thing? What would it be like? What could we know about it? How could we get in touch with it? Would it care about us, or would we just be like bugs, only allowed to exist because it isn't quite aware of us? And coming up with real answers to those questions the old-fashioned way, by trying stuff and seeing what blows up.
But id wasn't that, not at all. So if we want something like that we are going to have to make it ourselves, starting with what we have. We need a new theory that can supersede intelligent design and incorporate all that fun actual science that ID was sadly lacking. And it needs a nice acronym that recognizes the fact that it is just an introductory specimen that is probably going to have to be able to mutate a lot if it's going to survive even in the lab (HI).
The point of view I will be taking is, I think we should have a lot of discussion about stochastic ("random") processes. I think they are the real meat of the question and they are also perfectly suited to provide a framework for studying statistics, mutation, natural selection,and even rocket science. Those are just the sort of thing we are supposed to be learning in this class! But I welcome all viewpoints, I value your contributions, I have good jobs for each of you.
My thesis is that the human nervous system is a complex stochastic process; that intelligence appears to be an emergent property of this process at very high (but calculable) levels of complexity; and that evolution itself is also a very complex stochastic process.
My theory is that evolution, considered as a stochastic process, is significantly more complex, and therefore at least exponentially more intelligent, than any individual human being.
Something that bold ought to be easy to test. Prepare to attack both fore and aft, I will get started fishing for hypotheses rooted in this proto-theory that can make falsifiable predictions. You know the rules, if it is science, it needs to be disproved, improved, and reproved.
Is It Science?
* If we end up having enough spacetime in the thread I will work on introducing the Doctrine of the Trinity. That's right, into the science class! (I also run with scissors.) Shout out to all Higher Power fans \m/
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