There is some poetic arc in finding Copernicus' grave, in that we would not have known until recently if it had been found. The discovery, you see, has to be tested with DNA techniques - something that, until a few years ago, would not have been able to sort out the likelihood that this skull was related to others.
Copernicus is, rightfully, credited with being a crucial figure in the history of western science, and its long crawl out of the dark ages. He was also a hero to those who would come after him - sticking to his models, speculating with his imagination - and using the power of the printed word to press for a better world view. Reading his work now, we realize how far he had to go, but that is the reality of pioneers.
At the same time, the system which Copernicus is a hero for is under siege, and it is under siege by the same forces that Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo were to battle through their entire lives. Not merely the reactionary forces that demanded that the universe conform in its physical details to the needs of dogma, but to another, equally pernicious force - that of secular power which decides not to confront superstition, but to catter to it.
It is ironic that the technology that will allow us to identify Copernicus' body is also under attack. After all, if there is an unseen designer, what is to stop him from simply twiddling a few base pairs here and there, and cloaking the past in darkness. Why is it he doesn't shift DNA to protect rapists from discovery? The Ignorant Denial movement not only recycles old arguments, they have floated the big three of creationism: teleological fallacy, lack of intermediate forms and astronomically low probabilities - they have covertly hidden the problem that all such world views have: namely that the nature of the world is ineffable. One is left to sit around guessing why the omnipotent presence never hides murderers by altering the DNA found, but allows earthquakes to kill a hundred thousand people.
If you look at these three pillars of creationism: they don't really have anything to do with Darwin at all. Any theory of evolution would fall prey to exactly the same attacks: we know design when we see it, we don't have perfect knowledge of the past, and the volume of space occupied by life is extremely tiny compared to the whole.
The IDiotian movement isn't an attack on Darwinism, but an attack on the larger pillars of the modern, in the sense of post-medieval, world.
What are those pillars? Empiricisim, expressability, uniformity, comprehensibility, relativity.
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Empiricism came first. Empricism says that we can, mostly, trust our senses and that we can remember and apply logic to what we apprehend with them. Empricism isn't blind trust of what we see, because it can be emprically shown that the ear, the eye, the memory and the mind can be fooled. The empiricist is, ipso facto, a skeptic.
The figure who we point to as the founder of empricism is Francis Bacon, but he is part of the great Renaissance movement known as humanism, which argued that facing the facts was crucial, and that the human mind could encompass knowledge without having axioms before the fact. Machiavelli, Erasmus, Michelangelo - are all icons of humanism, because they took the world by the horns.
However, empricism burns and dies out, a single human mind lasts, by definition, a single human life time. When it falls apart through death, so too does the unique understanding that it had of the outside world.
For the empirical to be more powerful, it must be expressible. Just as the Renaissance was creating a need to deal with the world through realism, it was also creating a tool that would explode the dissemination of knowledge: moveable type and the printing press.
The Chinese had had movable type, but the problem with the Chinese character system is that there are too many subsidiary characters, and the radicals - the basic roots of chinese characters - change too much. The character for "man" - shows up in several different shapes as it is part of other characters. Think of a alphabet where A has a dozen different forms, and there are many more letters. And the total number of complete characters runs in the thousands.
This was related to the use of writing in China - to hold the empire together. To be admitted to writing, was to be admitted to power. Hence, one not only needed to learn to read and write, but one needed to learn the entire host of biases that came with it. In short - knowledge was linked with something other than knowledge.
What made Europe ripe for the printing press was that writing wasn't the key to temporal control, but spiritual control. And the period just after the renaissance had a radical theory about spiritual knowledge.
It was expressible.
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Expressibility simply states that what we know, we can express. There is no knowledge that occult or requires a special spiritual state of the recipient. This goes against most old religion, because all religions state that you have to have a particular spiritual state to receive knowledge. The unique idea of the Reformation, one rooted in "religions of the book", is that being exposed to knowledge can spiritually transform the reader. In short, rather than having to be the right kind of person to have a revelation, revelation will make you the right kind of person. But expressibility, while it would be driven by religion, was explode out into every other kind of knowledge. We don't have dance manuals from 1300 - we do from 1500. The printing press may have been the technology that revolutionized the West, but it was because the West was ripe for revolution that it did so.
Expressibility means that knowledge can be transmitted by only two steps: teaching people how to understand the symbols, and then reading the symbols.
Copernicus is a hero, because he accepted expressibility's first implication: that which is better expressed, is also more likely to be true. Astrology was expressible knowledge to the extent that it tried to predict the positions of the heavans, or divine what they would have been at a previous moment in time. But the method for calculating in Copernicus' time required that orbits be perfect circles - for dogmatic reasons - and that the earth be the center of the universe. Again, for dogmatic reasons. It was kind of like everyone having to use Microsoft Windows is now, it is less efficient than other ways of doing things, but, that is what everyone did, and the Church had a way of dealing with its rivals. I'm not the first person to call Microsoft a Church by the way. Nor even the 100,000th.
Copernicus put aside the geo-centric, that is earth centered, universe. Instead he pointed out that with the sun at the center of the system, the calculation was greatly simplified. What was real in the numbers, was real in the world. There was a Poul Anderson story that neatly turned around this point - a traditionalist society blocked the teaching of advanced mathematics by outside traders, because one of its leaders recognized that people who deal in symbols will believe them to be true. The same effect exists in the real world: opposition to symbolic knowledge comes, not from a naïvite of the power of symbolic knowledge, but the reverse: a fear of the hold that it has on people's minds.
The post-structuralist movement attacked the idea of expressibility from the other side: stating that teaching people to read the symbols was necessarily teaching people other things about power and hierarchy, and that the act of reading was an act of filling in the gaps between the symbols. From this many post-structuralists turned their attack on science - and were soundly thrashed.
You see, expressibility is only the first step to knowledge of the modern kind. Aristotle could express knowledge, as could Plato, as could the ancient myth making process. Expressibility only hits overdrive when it is combined with mathematics. Mathematics is rooted in symbols which remain the same under transformation. That is 2 + 3 = 5, so 1 + 2 + 2 = 4 + 1. The allowable rules of transformation, and the symbols that are used for a "calculus" in the language of Goedel.
But this implies something about what they express - something beyond merely expressibility. They imply uniformity.
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Uniformitarianism, as a principle, emerged in the late 18th century and was codified in the early 19th century. The idea of uniformitarianism, in its final form, is rather simple: the same fundamental rules apply everywhere at all times. Also the converse: where the rules we understand do not apply, we do not have understanding. Both parts of this idea are important, and both are attacked by Ignorant Denial and superstition in general.
Uniformitarianism replaced a different idea, one which is, on the surface, closely related. That earlier idea was that of a steady state universe. Newton believed in expressibility, but he was not a uniformitarian - he believed, for example, that the solar system had to be created in its present form, because he could see no way that gravity would allow the formation of planets. It was Kant, who would take Newton's own rules and come up with a theory of solar system formation - namely, that planets came together from a cloud of gas and dust.
And from this idea came another implication - that creatures had to change over time, and that as the solar system changed and came from one cloud, so too must all creatures come from one source, and that source was not the hand of creation. As soon as Goethe argued that all animals and plants had to come from a single ancestor, the race for how was on.
This break, between a universe whose state is constant, and one whose rules are constant, is the large contribution of the Enlightenment to science. Empiricism is not enough, expressibility is not enough - the world must be constant and stable, so that if we manipulate our symbols, the result will be something that makes sense in the outside world.
This two way street - we can express observation as mathematics, manipulate the mathematics, and make a prediction about what we will see - closes the loop between abstract and emprical knowledge: an observation is not an observation until it can be reduced to symbols, and symbols are not a theory until they can be converted into an observation that they imply.
When people hear that Ignorant Denial is not a theory, this is what is meant - ignorant Denial cannot convert an observation into a number, and then work with that number to produce an observation that should be seen that has not been. This is a "scientific prediction".
However, most predictions turn out to be wrong, or at least, not as accurate as the mathematics. One could conclude that knoweldge is impossible. Or one could conclude something else: namely that a knowledge system must be able to express any possible effect, and work through all of their interactions.
It must, in otherwords, be comprehensive, and comprehendable - so that it is possible to work through the details.
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Comprehensibility was a vision that struck the Western world with Newton - for the first time, a huge class of seemingingly different things could all be expressed in one form. For the first time since the Greek's, it seemd like all knowledge could fit in one view of the world.
The struggle to make Newton's theory comprehensive is one that takes two centuries. There were numerous effects that had to be measured and taken into account. Cavendish had to measure the force of gravity with his famous experiment that suspended weights from a thread that twisted back and forth - he then moved heavy blocks of stone, and found, that, yes, the force of gravity's gossamer breath it seen even in the every day. It took Joule's measurement of the rate of conversion between mechanical energy and heat. It took Maxwell's equations, which showed that the electro-magnetic force, like gravity, diminishes with the square of the distance. It took the work of astronomers who search for a hard measure of distance. You see, Kepler and Newton provide the ratios between the distances of the planets, but one needs at least one hard number. Hence the race to measure the transit of Venus.
It was the late 19th century that could make comprehensiveness a goal that seemed close at hand. While it had been dreamt of, only in the last years of the 19th century could it seem possible to have all of mathematics expressed in one form, all of science in numbers that would translate one to the other. Into this moment stepped Charles Darwin. By providing a empirical, expressible, uniform, and comprehensive explanation for how creatures change, how they fit together in an environment, how certain traits appear and remain, and why organisms behave as they do - he made it so that biology became a science like any other.
Science no longer applied only to dead things, but to life itself. It would take decades before ideas of "vital forces" separate from the rest of physics would finally die out. And not only among the ignorant. The effects that produce life are so complex that they seem magical until two other discoveries in the theory of knowledge occur. Darwin is hated not because he discovered evolution, he didn't, but because he joins life to not-life, and robs human beings of the wall that separates them from all else.
And this is the other side of uniformitarianism. Not only is what we observe uniform, but where there is no uniformity, there is no understanding. Thus a physicist will say "we don't understand quantum gravity, thus, we don't know what the universe is like beyond this boundary, or beyond this point in time." The IDiotian movment wants to attack this idea, and say that we can still live in the world, even though we cannot, ever, understand how it works. That this should be acceptable to people even though events occur that cannot, ever, be understood.
And this is because IDiotianism is completely untroubled by the great concept that the 20th century has added to the chain of the theory of knowledge.
Relativity.
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So far this brings us to the cusp of the 20th century - emprical, expressible, uniform and comprehensive knowledge seemed to be almost possible. Then a series of discoveries would shatter this view, challenging it. Some people ran screaming back to the world of superstition, and there they remain - because only by assuming away the discoveries of the early 20th century is it possible to live in an orderly universe.
But there is at the heart of this chain a conflict. The emprical world reaches only as far as our senses, while the symbolic world reaches into our imagintion. This power has driven the process, because it allows us to imagine a world beyond what we have seen. But it also must be reigned in - because it is easy to imagine things that are quite hard in reality. Turning lead to gold is easy in the imagination, they are so much alike. But turning lead to gold in the real world is an energy intensive process. Travelling backward in time is easy in the mind, because we have memory, but doing it may well be impossible on large scales.
The 20th century slammed into several realizations that made this marriage very rocky indeed. One is that there were limits to measurement - we could not simply look at smaller and smaller details. Another was that the universe finally bit back at Newton - we didn't see something that we were supposed to see. Another was within the realm of mathematics itself - it turned out to be both completely consistent, and completely comprehensive at once.
In short, knowledge had to have what Einstien would end up calling "relativity". In every framework - it must make sense, it must be have certain physical laws which seem to apply. But beneath these emprical laws - which one will always observe in any one frame of reference, there are deeper principles at work, ones which will show themselves at the extremes of observation. In the case of physics - at high speeds, large acceleartions and very large and very small scales.
Relativity doesn't argue that there is no relation between to frames of reference - it isn't in the casual sense that anything I like is unrelated to anything you like - but instead it argues that any two frames of reference can be harmonized by taking only measurable factors into account, and then translating between them.
This concept is abhorent to IDiotians. And their hatred of it is very, very very dangerous. It is abhorent because it is not just in phsyics - but in every day life. When two people meet, they have to find common ground, so that they can express what they think and feel. In a relativistic world, the assumption is that even if we can have different points of view and frames of reference, that there is a way to translate one to the other.
The idiotian social view is that this is impossible, that instead, for communication to occur, everyone must have the same framework - just as Newtonian mechanics requires an absolute time and an absolute space. For the IDiotian, the idea that two different frames of refrence might yet work is anathema, because, they root their most important argument for social rigidity against it. The Bible and the other props of civic religion, such as The Flag, The Troops, The President, The Founding Fathers - must all be there, because only if everyone believes them can their be a functional society. Even if they aren't true, we have to pretend they are.
But this assertion, that only one frame of reference can exists for people to exist, is not only false, but pernicious as well.
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You see, the ultimate expression of the relativistic nature of knowledge is not in physics, but in biology. It was with the understanding that DNA provides the blueprint for organisms, and that there is one, and only one, code for life on earth - that relativistic knowledge becomes most important.
You see, every organism would seem to be a unique world. We can't graft a person on to a horse and get a centaur, even though people and horses are very much alike compared to other organisms. We can't breed a human and a chimp. However, we can move individual genetic pieces from one organism to another. And as one would expect, once the change is made, the same protien is produced - even though it does not have the same effect in the new creature as in the old.
This is a crucial understanding, and it is crucial because the relativity of biology means that viruses can take over cells, and make them into virus factories, even though viruses, themselves, cannot make anything. To understand why 1918 influenza is so dangerous requires not only natural selection - that is the accumulation of genes that allow a virus to spread and survive, and the dumping of genes that make it less likely to survive - but the entire scientific revolution of the 20th century is in play.
That revolution says that if information exists in two places, all that is required to move it is the translation from one framework to the other. That means that information built up in the genetics of birds can be used by the virus to infect humans, as soon as it acquires one simple ability - the ability to jump from humans to humans as it jumps from bird to bird.
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This is a long journey, a journey of how each idea forced the acceptance of the next idea. Really it should be a book with all the footnotes, anecdotes, quotes and citiations. However, it is also not done yet. There is, now, another idea that is coming forward, one that is as threatening as any of the previous ideas, and yet, as organic and natural an outgrowth of the previous ideas.
That idea? The idea of a non-linear and complex knowledge, one that is not linear in its inputs and outputs. Of a xaotic universe, where small changes mean very large differences in result. This view is dangerous, not merely to dead end darwin deniers, but to a much larger host of people whose income and power rests on the linear illusion of cause and effect.
The reason this idea is important is because more and more of the dangers we face are not from general problems - as in "can we get enough to eat this year?" But from results which while they are rare, are devastating. Hurricane Katrina is not a high probability, but her occurance has had large consequences for those who feel it. The same will be true with many of the problems we are facing now, the mistake is to think that they will produce a general disaster. Instead, they will express themselves as increasing catastrophes for those hit by them - as global warming is now.
But talking about this is something for another day, rather than at the tail end of an already long post.