Let Them Debate College Students

I'm very skeptical of the value of TV debates. Why not just insist that any debates be conducted online, in text mode, in non-realtime? Then they can't claim that evilutionists refused to debate them, nobody has to go stand on stage under hot lights and time pressure in a situation where they have minimal access to informational resources (thus giving a huge advantage to Teh Stoopid), and there will be a nice searchable record of the discussion when it's over.

...which begs the observation that we have been debating creationists, continually, ever since they started poking their heads up; they just choose to ignore those past debates because of the inconvenient fact that they always lose.

So perhaps whenever they challenge someone to a debate, the appropriate response is "Sure! Send me your opening argument in writing, and I will respond similarly until one of us gives in. Anytime, anywhere." Do ya feel lucky, punk??

Here's what I think...

In-person debates are somewhat pointless, because someone can simply start lying their ass off and you won't be able to do the research in time to call them on it. Even if you know what they're saying is flat-out wrong, and you call them on it, your opponent can simply accuse you of being the one who has the facts wrong - and an audience that doesn't already know the truth won't have any way to tell the difference. The only kind of debates worth having are written debates.

For a creationist to publicly debate a college student is to admit that his or her status is roughly on par with that of a college student. Why would any creationist do that? And I'm sure they can come up with a better excuse than "I'm afraid to lose to a student."

Michael Behe seems to be a full professor. Has any professor ever formally debated a college student (excepting classroom instruction), in the history of academics?

The danger I see is that the college student will win on logic but lose on rhetoric; the public impression given may well be that the student lost. So the issue then becomes: who is to judge who won the debate?

The return of the dojo metaphor! And here I thought we had seen the back of it.

Personally, I would go a step further and say that debating popular ideas which are unworthy of debate might be a good way to train bright un-titled college students.

My grandmother, being time-rich and lacking for good conversation, never failed to invite door-to-door prosyletizers into her house, then spend hours telling them how ridiculous their beliefs were. Soon after this behavior became known, one told her he had been placed in charge of training new young missionaries, and asked if she would mind if he brought them around and seeing how they did against her. She didn't, so he did, and continued to until her health took its final turn for the worse.

Unfortunately, the anecdote ends there, so I don't know what the results of the experiment were, or if they are an actual argument for this trial by verbal fire. But I'm sympathetic to the guess that the practice would inculcate surety in those students who didn't give up mid-way: they would have the answers to the common lies "beaten" into them.

In every debate I've heard of, the pro-evolution people believe that the evolution side soundly thrashed the creation side and the pro-creation people believe that the creation side thrashed the evolution side.

This subjectivity over even who won makes debates eminently pointless for convincing anyone of anything.

Why would a high-status creationist have a motive to debate a low-status evolutionist?

And how would that play out? "The scientists aren't really interested in listening to us, all they'll send are college students." Would you agree to debate Behe's proofreader?

But for the purpose of actually getting scientists to hear out the crazy ideas (which are correct every once in a while (EDIT: ID/creationism not being one of those!)) without risking anything, I think this is a great idea.

I think it would be bad PR. Good science, bad PR.

So I've turned on the tv to watch a debate on evolution and creationism on CNN (or Fox News). The creationists have sent an older, respectable-looking gentleman in a suit, bible in hand. The evolutionists have sent a scrappy-looking college kid in jeans, barely out of his diapers and studying something fancy-shmancy at the University of Liberal Professors, Berkeley.

A priori, whose side will I be on?

How many people will think: "Is this the best guy the evolutionists have to offer?"

FWIW, I've tested out what it's like to debate random people (on YouTube) while taking the ID side. Even when I got people who were obviously intelligent and well-versed in biology, I had exchanges like this:

"If you reject evolution, what's your alternate theory?"

"Ignorance."

"Ignorance isn't a theory!"

"Considering that it predicts the data equally well [I had claimed evolution doesn't actually imply what we see] and has a lower Kolmogorov complexity, it most certainly is a theory, if for no other reason that its superiority to something you already deem to be a theory."

"What's Komogorov complexity?"

Note: the point is not that he hadn't heard the term, but that he felt qualified to talk about the epistemology of science without ever having encountered the term, and couldn't be bothered to look it up.

(Separate post to distinguish reasons for up/down voting.)

And if Michael Behe manages to defeat the college student, then he can go on to debate a PhD, and if that doesn't work, Behe gets to talk to P. Z. Myers, and in the unlikely event Behe manages not to get his butt handed to him by P. Z. Myers, he would have earned the right to debate Richard Dawkins.

And who decides the winner? I fear we would end up with something like this:

http://www.theonion.com/content/video/new_live_poll_allows_pundits_to :)

Doesn't it kind of defeat the purpose though, when you have to apply nearly as much filtering to the potential science representatives as a PhD program does?

(Btw, a lot of your hedging about qualified debaters seems inspired by my misgivings about taking a random TA.)

I'm a first-year grad student, and I'd be more than happy to take down any ID'er that crosses my path while dressed in jeans.

Jeans are comfy.

EDIT: Oh. I don't have a biology degree. Nevermind then.

I haven't sifted through the comments fully to see if it's been addressed, but I think it's very important to clearly separate the creationism amongst scientists vs. creationism in the public sphere. I am not at all worried about creationism making inroads amongst biologists, paleontologists, etc. What I am worried about is a bad idea catching on in the public arena where things like the education curriculum in public schools are decided. The perception of people not in the know could be that scientists are dodging the debate. It's all very tedious, but it's the situation we're in. So, yes, someone should debate these folks. My fear with sending underlings (sorry, undergrads) is that these debates aren't cool headed discussion of proofs and evidence. A person experienced in public speaking, even debating something that's incorrect, can do so with effective rhetoric and theatrical flourish that will overtake the other side's argument, at least in the mind of the audience. The advantage that materialists have in evidence is eventually insurmountable, but it still needs to be properly demonstrated to the people who don't yet understand it.

They could also let Myers speak, but also insist that Kasparov be invited to advocate "new chronology" or the like.

Do they really get that much mileage out of saying that they debated famous scientists? It's a nice rhetorical flourish, but what reason do we have to think it's a major driver of success?

Without debates, it is much easier for adherents of dogmatic philosophies to stay in an echo chamber of support.

Edit: just realized that the above comment by wedrifid gives pretty much a summary of mine.

Scientists are handicapped in these debates, whatever their status. Their goal is to convince the debate's audience using scientific facts and logic. The goal of the creationists, however, is to convince the audience by whatever means work best.

So they will lie, invent and suppress facts, avoid or ignore questions, use ad hominem attacks, and generally use every kind of psychological or rhetorical tactic they can. And they're quite good at this, so that only trained rationalists might be completely immune. The only way to combat this is to use similar Black Arts. Scientists don't do this because they fear it would subvert the honesty of their science or that people who notice their behavior won't trust them in the future.

Science is a rational process. The fight against creationism (as against some other things) is fundamentally a fight against explicit and deliberate antirationality. When some creationists see a debate where the scientist clearly wins, it only serves to strengthen their creationist faith. Others are clear-thinking enough to be swayed by argument and we should do everything we can to expose them to it. In between are those who will abandon creationism once enough of their peers (or auth. figures, media persons...) do so. Do we have an estimate of how many are in each category?

There's the specific sense of "debate," which are talking events where people on different sides of an issue argue with each other in front of an audience. Then there's the more general sense of "debate," which is a long-term public discussion in which people on different sides of an issue make arguments in various formats (books, blog posts, radio interviews, etc.) and respond to some of each other's arguments. "Refusal to debate" in the general sense seems like a bad thing - it's worth publicly knocking down their arguments to help the public learn the truth and to keep the marketplace of ideas open so that you don't mistakenly shield established views from accurate criticisms.

I'm not as clear on the problems with "refusal to debate" in the specific sense of not holding talking events. Is the idea just that debates (meaning talking events) are an essential component of the public discussion, without which we'd be worse at educating the public and testing established ideas? They don't seem like a great way to find truth, especially when one of the debaters is just trying to win the debate or create doubt or confusion. Among other things, audience members (who are the targets of the debate) have a limited amount of time to process information, the debaters can manipulate what they attend to, they can't access any independent sources of information, and their impressions are heavily influenced by the personal characteristics of the debaters (their charisma, confidence, and so on). Maybe it's all just about public perceptions of your willingness to debate rather than the debate itself, where you don't want to seem scared to debate but you also don't want to issue to seem like something debatable where a reasonable person could easily reach either conclusion.

Why do you think that someone will actually make this happen? Many sensible things do not happen because there is no party with the incentives to do it.

Find some bright ambitious young college student working toward a biology degree, someone who's read Pharyngula and the talk.origins FAQ.

I'm a first-year undergraduate at Grand Valley State University, and I am considering biology as a major. I could read both of those. What do you say?

I 95% agree with this argument. 

The one exception I'd make is... I think you under-estimate Behe. He already had a paper debate with Ken Miller, a professor flush with accolades, where Behe argued that the TTSC descended from the flagellum and Miller argued for the reverse. 

Additional research conducted after their debate seems to support Behe. Now granted, Miller really should have known enough to realize that an adaptation for parasitizing complex plants would not have evolved before complex plants, themselves, did. But he didn't and Behe scored a legitimate, predictive, falsifiable assertion, albeit one very narrow in scope. It underscores the point that, in discussing the evolution of complexity, we really should consider reductions in complexity (possibly preceded by duplication) and not resort first to a belief that complexity of all things increases monotonically over time (as Miller might have, in crafting his argument.) 

As an aside, I recognize that the term 'complexity' is very loaded to start with. I'm using the term to refer to a kind of functional elegance with high Shannon Information. If that makes sense.

So yes, 'debate college students' is a good way to have debates without giving too much credit to the conflict. But Behe, unlike 99% of creationists, is actually competent. He is a genuine gadfly on the scientific body politic. And it's dangerous, frankly, to underestimate a competent opponent. 

 

Debates of this kind are an exercise in effectively employing rhetoric, not reason. Let them debate college students that we weren't expecting to actually think rationally anyway.

A = y*noise - x*B + C

B = z*noise + C

Comes a day, when a creationist is hell bent on having a debate to prove how rationalists/biologists are ignorant, and that day, we will send a college-student-rationalist--there is no need to go out there and bat for Darwin, but we would act in defense if required to.

this would viscerally answer what the scientific community thinks of creationism

But is it good to viscerally express this opinion? Some people will get the scorn and react badly to it.

The point is not that we convince them of evolution. Who cares? The point is that they become full-blown rationalists who think for themselves. Let's set our standards a little higher and look at the fundamental causes of irrationality (the education system). Let's set our sights a little higher.

Creationists don't have to debate college students - they have Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christoper Hitchens, Sam Harris, P Z Myers, Robert Wright - who all seem quite prepared to stoop down to their level as part of some kind of "gutter outreach" program.