Evolution and its rivals – special issue of Synthese

Comments (11)

1. I’m reading your paper right now, but had to stop back here to tell you I enjoy the way you write; it’s always very clear, specially within a field that tends not to do so.

   (Damn. I’m being honest, but it really reads as half of the spam comments I get these days in my blog…)

   1. Thanks Roberto. When do I get my share of the €15million?

2. I’ll second Roberto’s comments about your writing being clear. I liked the paper very much. When I started reading it, the book ‘Mistake were made (but not by me).’ came to mind. I half way through it, so it was certainly not far from the ‘surface’, but also because it touched on similar terrain as your paper. Then about half way through, you mention Festinger and cognitive dissonance. Odd bit of ‘synergy’.

   Anyway, I wonder what path global warming denialists take in their cone? I mean, Ian Plimer isn’t prima fascie a science denier (I think he has a PhD in Geology) but he uses his inappropriate authority to deny AGM. Perhaps the fact he’s on some mining company boards might be involved or some political affiliation?

   Another thought. My son is 6 months old, and already exploring everything he can with his eyes, and limited motor abilities allow. Should I give him a chemistry set before he’s two, in order that he become scientifically minded? I’ve read somewhere that you think kids should be allowed to blow stuff up. Certainly I had fun trying when I was young.

   1. It is my opinion that what makes scientists is two-fold: one is a love of science fiction (about 80% of the scientists I poll on this took to reading SF, although it may be that is correlation, not causation), and the other is making things go boom. If your child likes making things, he’ll end up an engineer. If he likes things to go boom, he’ll be a scientist. If he likes to watch other people when things go boom, he’ll end up a psychologist or worse, a social worker.

      1. I like making things go boom, even guns. I was a frustrated bomb maker. Didn’t succeed. Anyway, I burnt a lot of stuff, but conflagration isn’t detonation. So I’m a frustrated bomb maker. I learnt later on that the materials I needed were all around in the country where I grew up. Urea, diesel. Also, I love to watch things go boom, when I was studying geology it was great to blow things into the sky with left-over powergel.

         I guess according to your schema that’s why I got a degree as a software engineer/computer scientist, then got another in psychology. Not quite successful at making things go boom, like to make things so somewhat engineer oriented, but not that good at it, and like to watch things go boom…..

         Hopefully my son is more specialized at making things go boom. Thus it’ll be a great day when he disintergrates the car with a few bags of fertilizer, some diesel and some-such percussive device. Then I’ll have a scientist…..

         Still I think I should give him some charcoal, sulphur, and saltpeter to better direct him…

         This comment is a little too much of a stream of conscious to be of any use.

      2. Oh wait, I’ve never been that into science fiction. I’ve never been into fiction, so unless you’re talking about Star Wars, Star Trek, Avatar and a few other exemplars, then perhaps that explains why I’m not scientific?

         1. Let’s just say that if I had finished high school and had the maths, I would also have ended up an engineer, not a scientist… many conflagrations, little actual explosions (on purpose, at any rate…).

3. Having read a large chunk of Kelly Smith’s paper. I find it interesting that Smith takes the pathological view, which I guess leads to the idea of a cure, which she offers some suggestions to change committed creationists whereas you take the view that they are being rational and thus there is no cure (in the majority of cases) as such and it’s the next generation we need to target before they rationally adopt creationism. It’s interesting in that the sickness or pathology view allows for rational convergence on the sane (as in healthy, not as in batshit crazy) ideal, against them being rational and already sane allows for little changes. Can we convince the rational creationists to allow us to educate their kiddies to be scientifically minded? Or alternately, should we cure the irrational creationists so that they allow us to educate their kiddies to be scientifically minded? I prefer in some sense Smith’s view, if only because it offers more hope, though I think your view is correct.

   Caveat: I’m not a profound thinker and perhaps haven’t paid enough attention, so apologies for any positions I’m accidentally misrepresented.

   1. In case it’s not obvious I meant to say ‘before they rationally adopt creationism [and instead adopt scientific thinking].’

4. Nice paper, but can I throw in a non-philosopher’s viewpoint? I feel that philosophers as a breed (which they do…) are so wedded to ideas of logical reasoning that they tend to be blind (or at least partially sighted) to non-logical reasoning and its all-pervading nature.

   You say on page 212 that “Each stage of a learner’s development is a fast and frugal inference from social cues.” Inference perhaps, but not in the sense used in logic. Our rationality is a veneer over a mammal’s mind, which functions mainly using association and emotion. (People without heavily impaired emotional responses due to localised brain damage have difficulty making any decisions at all, because they don’t “feel” an answer to questions like “do you want tea or coffee?”.) In this associative mind, the rule is that correlation is causation. This is shown by how- it can be very difficult, sometimes impossible, to train a pet out a fear that they have learned. Someone scares a horse once badly, that horse will always be scared of that person. If that person was wearing an unusual big black hat (say), the horse might instead learn the association between big black hats and fright and retain that, forever being scared of big black hats. And that’s how our minds work too, underneath the rational veneer.

   When scientists encounter novel problems or issues, their response is rarely to employ rational enquiry. Rationality is used for post hoc justification, and the fact that the scientific method is relatively modern shows how non-natural it is. When someone in their field expounds a novel idea, most scientists jump to a quick judgement using non-rational means, thinking “that sounds like a load of dingo’s dangly bits”, “wow! that sounds really neat, I hope it’s correct!” or the more agnostic “hmm, sounds plausible and interesting but I’m not sure yet”. Initial rational enquiry is usually geared towards justifying the early judgement, testing whether it fits or conflicts with other knowledge.

   Often that snap judgement is based on who said what, and on which camp they are from, “us” or “them”. And how they said it: a sincere preacher with an air of authority spouting creationist certainties is going to be more believable to many that a stammering scientist hedging his statements with caveats.

   The ID movement is partly trying to trade in on that rule of judging a message by the messenger in wrapping nonsense up in pseudo-scientific clothes, so it has the air of credibility. YEC for those who respect spouting preachers; ID for those who respect difficult looking equations and long words.

   The strength of the scientific method is its ruthless use of rational argument to justify hypotheses, explicitly discarding most of our built-in decision-making apparatus. In a scientific argument, it doesn’t matter how one feels about the topic or who it was who proposed it or how convincing they sounded, what matters is what we can demonstrate by experiment, observation and rational deduction. Rationality is highly unnatural.

   There is also a phenomenon described by Piaget (I think) that “we can only learn what we almost know already”. It’s a surprisingly good rule to use when trying to teach difficult topics, I find. Great big bolt from the blue “wow!” moments rarely work. Rather, the ground has to be prepared so that the “wow!” moment becomes a small step that prompts the student to understand how what they already have in their mind fits together. They remove a little ignorance rather than acquire knowledge.

   I think your last page or so broadly agree with this approach; you are (I think) suggesting that people should be exposed to a lot of science, and through that they will naturally absorb a scientific and rational world view. I think that is absolutely correct. Most people reflect the cultures they grow up in, however much they delude themselves into thinking they came to their views rationally. I’m not racist, but I suspect that if I had been born 100 or 200 years earlier I would have been.

   As you said (page 216), a few shells with arrows in a museum doesn’t work; it’s just a boring rational argument. Normal minds don’t take that in! But they will respond to piles of stuff, “hey, that’s a lot of shells! look at how varied they are, this one’s really neat!”.

   Digressing on the subject of knowledge, consider your statement “Nobody is born knowing much.” (page 210). Well, no. When I was born, I knew the entire Krebs cycle, I understood DNA repair and the functioning of telomerases, I knew how hair follicles work. It wasn’t in my brain, it wasn’t rational, but bits of me understood if perfectly and executed it brilliantly. In a very real sense, my little finger knows more biochemistry than any Nobel Prize-winning biochemist! My brain does too, my mind doesn’t

   As I said, nice paper, like it. Thank you for sharing it with us.

5. I enjoyed the paper but as a non-scientist switched off slightly due to the emphasis on science education.

   On Museums, I think they have a great deal of problems not all related to exhibition designers. I don’t think people do respond to the piles of stuff approach, as they are often presented out of context due to the turf wars of individual experts that go on in museums.

   We have a coin horde in our national museum that was found in a pot wrapped in what is the oldest example of tartan yet discovered.

   The textile expert, pottery expert and coin expert ensured that the objects were not displayed together in the context in which they were found but were presented exclusivly in their respective parts of the museum among large piles of similar things, in which they become lost.

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