Oh my....

I'm posting a lot this week, but here goes...

In case you missed it, Glenn Beck claimed on his radio show that the theory of evolution is ridiculous and that he's never seen a half-man half-monkey before.

Now, call me old-fashioned, but I do so love when people who clearly have no clue what methodological science is all about pretend that their opinion of scientific theory matters. Let me explain something to you: scientific theories are arrived at and adopted by the scientific community. There are loads of criteria that determine their acceptance of any given theory: falsifiability--the logical possibility that the theory make a prediction that comes out false, fecundity--the property of a theory to create new avenues of research, explanatory value--the property of a theory to account for (at least as much, if not) more phenomena than its predecessor, & ontological cost--the number of things that the theory requires us to say exist in order to use it. That's a short list. (See Phillip Kitcher's "Believing Where We Cannot Prove" for more).

Now, when it comes to what we teach in our schools, the choice ought to be no choice at all. If we're teaching science, we teach what scientists use. We do this because we are preparing children for reality beyond elementary and high school. If your school board decides to teach Intelligent Design rather than Evolution, or alongside Evolution, as equivalently valid, when you get to a university and learn that Intelligent Design doesn't follow logically, requires that the Theory of Evolution be true, and isn't taken seriously by hardly anyone in the scientific community, you'll be in for a rude awakening, from a pragmatic point of view.

What the rest of the world thinks is irrelevant. What percentage of people accept evolution is irrelevant. If you'll pardon the vacuities, science is science, and opinion is opinion.

To teach anything but evolution (at least for the time being, barring the eventual replacement of Evolution by some other theory that better satisfies the criteria on the above list) is reprehensibly irresponsible.

Likewise, it is irresponsible to argue via a straw man against evolution. There is no claim that humans evolved from monkeys, or even apes. The contention is that we share common ancestry. We also share common ancestry with sewer rats.

One other point I'll make, regarding another idiotic thing Beck says in that clip: yes, it absolutely was difficult to convince people that the earth is round. Aristotle's cosmology is a concentric sphere model, which was a prevailing model between Ptolemy and Copernicus, yet still, in 1492 CE, the lay person thought the Earth was flat, scholars couldn't convince them, and people are still lied to about Columbus' grand vision of a round planet. Then again, between Copernicus and Newton, people were killed over claiming that the Earth revolves around the sun.

One more: look up the history of Einstein vs. the early quantum theorists, and that famous quote of Einstein's, "God does not play dice."

Yes, people are extraordinarily resistant to further developments in scientific theory. Luckily, science isn't interested in your opinion, it amounts to diddly-squat.

Jimmy McMillan Remix:

The Great Manipulation

It is truly a sad thing to have to acknowledge, but it's time we stopped laughing at the Tea Party, and started to think seriously about what's going on. It could be that people such as Christine O'Donnell are making a mockery of running for the Senate. Or, it could be a genuine grass roots movement made up of people with genuine beefs with our government. Or, it could be a way of manipulating people.

Today, I'd like to consider the possibility that the Tea Party is just a way of manipulating people. Let me be clear, though, on what I mean by manipulating, because it is obvious that we are all manipulated in all sorts of ways on a nearly constant basis: there are peer pressures, societal pressures, gender norms, advertisers, and so on. Being manipulated in this sense isn't always bad, e.g. educators manipulate the minds of their students, or a well-written novel plays your heartstrings like a harp (and no, anti-feminist Twilight novels simply don't cut the mustard).

But I mean the more insidious sort of manipulation. These people--the followers, the people attending the rallies, and not the pink-faced speechmakers--are being manipulated.

That sure seems obvious. Especially when you ask these people questions about their criticisms, and you find that the criticisms are vague and targetless. However, the charge of manipulation is much easier to make than it is to substantiate.

What is clear, is that our attitudes and beliefs are influenced and manipulated by all sorts of things. What is also clear is the link between what we believe and what we do. What is less clear, is any specific causal relation between a particular influence and a particular action. Unless, of course, you specifically cite Glenn Beck as the reason for your action. Even in that case, there is a problem with the reliability of self-reporting. It's terribly easy to lie to yourself about your motivations.

So, we're left with open questions. If these people are being manipulated, who is manipulating them? And to what purpose?

None of that is really clear. Nevertheless it is a very effective accusation to make, given the state of our discourse, because no one wants to think that they're being manipulated. We all like to think that we're in the driver's seat of our own lives. We all like to think the best of ourselves, and when you have a vague sense that something is wrong in the world, and someone hands to a pre-packaged diagnosis of what's wrong, there is a strong pull to go with that diagnosis. You shouldn't, you should think critically about what you've been told. Clearly, people don't do this.

I am sticking with manipulation. It is otherwise too great an irony for these people to be paying for tickets to hear Palin tell them how the government is taking their money.

False or Trivial?

Monday night, Sam Harris was on the Daily Show promoting his new book on how science can help us to determine our moral values: The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. I wanted to say a bit about this because I'm disappointed in Harris.

There are two ways of taking what it seems that he's arguing for (I confess, I haven't read the book, but only seen interviews with him about it). The first way of taking his thesis is what I wrote above, that science can determine our values for us. This isn't what he seems to be talking about in the interviews, however. He seems to be speaking, rather of using science as a tool for determining what the best methods for maximizing our moral values are, specifically, human well-being; the old utilitarian standard.

Now, in the first case, there is a rather serious problem known as "the naturalistic fallacy" or sometimes the "Is/Ought" fallacy, first argued for by my boy David Hume in A Treatise on Human Nature when he was a lad of my age, or younger in the 18th century. It is a widely accepted principle. Simply put: you cannot derive normative statements from descriptive ones. Or, to make it stronger: you cannot derive any single normative statement from any set, however large, of descriptive statements. It can't be done. In which case, Harris' thesis would be a non-starter.

The second possible thesis is much more reasonable. So reasonable, in fact, that it has been argued for over and over again for nearly as long as the naturalistic fallacy has been known. Most recently, in The Life You Can Save Peter Singer has argued for it. In which case, Harris' thesis gives us nothing new at all.

Dubious options, indeed.

I can only speculate about what Harris' intentions are for writing this book. So, what follows is nothing more than speculation. What it seems to me is that the only purpose of this book is to run afoul of people who adhere to theologically-grounded moral theories, rather than to challenge the theories themselves (although, I'm sure he does a bit of that, too). My conjecture is that Harris (and Dawkins and Dennett and Hitchens) feel as though the remaining bits of the picture need to be filled in for a comprehensive atheism. But secular ethics has been around for centuries. That's nothing new.

Perhaps the attempt is to further raise the authority of science. But, as I say, it must have it's limits. They are logical limits, and cannot be broken.