Yesterday I went to a talk Russell C. Eberhart was giving at the DCU School of Computing about Swarm Intelligence and specifically about the Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm. It was an entertaining and informative talk, even though parts of it went over my head.
But a disturbing episode during the presentation caught my attention. The speaker was giving an overview of evolutionary approaches to AI and at one point he used a weird disclaimer along the following lines:
It doesn't matter if you believe that evolution happened or not. We are talking about computer applications here, it's not about religion.He justified himself by mentioning that when giving a similar talk in one of the southern US states, he got comments concerning the reality of evolution, and he wanted to avoid any such questions. There were a few embarrassed giggles from the audience and the talk went on.
It's a small detail, but if you stop to think of it, a remarkable and disquieting thing has happened: An engineering professor addressing an audience of science and engineering faculty and postgrads feels obliged to give lip service to a quaint superstition and ends up sounding as if the biological evolution was a purely religious question, beyond the scope of science, rather than the solid scientific fact that it actually is. A sad cop-out on his part.
I just hope that creationism doesn't take root in other parts of civilized world any time soon. But seeing so many things spreading out from the US to every corner of the globe, maybe it's hoping for too much.
3 comments:
why do you claim the comment the lecturer made was so disturbing? It seems to me, that after having experienced some misunderstanding in the States, he just wanted to make things absolutely clear. Period. What is so controversial about it? Stay safe!
Well, evolution is a firmly established fact, so it's just strange for a scientist (or engineer) to say that it doesn't matter if it happened or not, as if that was somehow an open question. Wouldn't you think it strange if someone said that for their research it didn't matter if the earth was flat?
If the scope of his or her research would be, let's say, importance of being earnest, the flattness or roundness of our planet would indeed be as vital for him/her as my diarrea :-)
By the way, I am sure you are familiar with the Disc World's novels by Terry Prachet. After having read a few of them I am no longer so damn sure about the shape of the planet.
Cool blog anyway. Congrats!
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