Things I would talk about at greater length and erudition if I were a man of independent means, rather than someone who supposedly works for a living. Also, today is my birthday; instructions on how to honor this auspicious occasion appear at the end of the post.
First, Henry Farrell of Crooked Timber has an eloquent article about academic blogging in this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education, “The Blogosphere as a Carnival of Ideas.” The final paragraph sums it up:
Both group blogs and the many hundreds of individual academic blogs that have been created in the last three years are pioneering something new and exciting. They’re the seeds of a collective conversation, which draws together different disciplines (sometimes through vigorous argument, sometimes through friendly interaction), which doesn’t reproduce traditional academic distinctions of privilege and rank, and which connects academic debates to a broader arena of public discussion. It’s not entirely surprising that academic blogs have provoked some fear and hostility; they represent a serious challenge to well-established patterns of behavior in the academy. Some academics view them as an unbecoming occupation for junior (and senior) scholars; in the words of Alex Halavais of the State University of New York at Buffalo, they seem “threatening to those who are established in academia, to financial interests, and to … well, decorum.” Not exactly dignified; a little undisciplined; carnivalesque. Sometimes signal, sometimes noise. But exactly because of this, they provide a kind of space for the exuberant debate of ideas, for connecting scholarship to the outside world, which we haven’t had for a long while. We should embrace them wholeheartedly.
This business about certain academics viewing blogs as an unbecoming occupation is more true that I’d like to admit (although it is far from universal). And it extends to all kinds of pretentions to public-intellectual engagement, not just our daily interventions on the internets. Which is why it’s important to emphasize that true scholarship entails two tasks, both equally crucial: discovering new things about the world, and letting people know what it is we have discovered. The first is called “research,” while the second is sufficiently undervalued that we don’t even have a good name for it. Part of it is “education,” part is “outreach,” part is engaging in public debate. But whatever you want to call it, it is just as important as research itself. You might say that, without research, there wouldn’t be anything to outreach about. True, but if we never told anyone what we had learned, there wouldn’t be any reason to do research, at least not in intellectually-driven fields like cosmology and history and literary criticism. It’s like asking whether, in baseball, the bat or the ball is more important. Without either, the whole thing becomes kind of pointless.
Next, Abhay Parekh at 3quarksdaily asks what it is that makes people disbelieve in evolution. He points the finger of blame at the “decent with random modification” part of natural selection:
My explanation is simply this: Human beings have a strong visceral reaction to disbelieve any theory which injects uncertainty or chance into their world view. They will cling to some other “explanation” of the facts which does not depend on chance until provided with absolutely incontrovertible proof to the contrary.
I’m sure that’s part of it, although I suspect the truth is a complicated mess that varies from person to person. Others chime in: Lindsay at Majikthise thinks it’s about disenchantment and an absence of meaning in purely naturalistic theories of the universe; Amanda at Pandagon chalks it up to a need to feel superior to other species; PZ at Pharyngula points to the psychological drive to be part of something bigger. I think all of these are likely part of it, and would add another ingredient to the cocktail: resentment at being told what to think by arrogant elites. When people use “local choice” as an excuse to allow school boards to decide to teach all sorts of nonsense, defenders of evolution generally treat it as simply a tactic to further their religious agenda. For the Discovery Institute et al. that is no doubt correct; but for people on the streets who are speaking at the school board meetings, I suspect a lot of it it really is about local choice. They don’t like to be told by some mutiple-degreed Ivy League east-coast intellectual types that they should think this and not that. There is a particularly American cast to this kind of resentment, which helps explain why this poor country is so much more backward about these issues than our peers in Europe.
Finally, speaking of Lindsay, she has recently embarked on quite an adventure: inspired by the experience of reporting on-location in the aftermath of Katrina, she’s quit her regular job to become a full-time stringer. But she needs some help at the early stages, so this week she’s asking for donations in turn for by-request blogging! This sort of bottom-up structure is alien to us here at Cosmic Variance, where we figure we’ll write about what we think is best and you’ll like it, or learn to. But it’s an interesting experiment. And while you have your PayPal account handy, you could drop by to Shakespeare’s Sister, who was recently hit by a double whammy when she was laid off from her job and had her property taxes increased by 100%. She’s one of the most passionate and articulate bloggers we have, and if you like what you read there, don’t be shy about dropping off a couple of bucks.
That would make me a good birthday present.
Happy birthday! Feel any older and wiser yet?
Nice gesture, btw.
Best wishes on your birthday…
w00t! Happy BD Sean! Did your students buy you a cake?
Happy Birthday Sean!
-cvj
Go out and do something wild to celebrate!
This is a good compromise Sean, considering the article in articulation.
I understand there has to be this “internal motivation” beyond what education would request of good paying students, who languish in boredom, and lack excitement for what others might feel as wonderful.
Past times, on bloggery that make them feel part of a dynamical whole?
So what are these deeper interests of students who wish to continue and learn all kinds of wonderful things? How often would you stop and talk to the “pizza man” knowing that he would like to engage you in what he could only dream of.
Your “accessibility” has changed the way those of us caught on the periphery of society have been welcomed into the family of ideas espoused by educational leaders of the scientific realm.
There is lots of “new blood” out there(links to probable futures), as essentially, their intentions are good and they “might” hold degrees of all kinds( the lurkers who visit for a day), but have found survival better in a paying job as a plumber, then what they could have ever gained by academic continuance.
It’s unfortunate, and life indeed through circumstances as evidence by your support for another here, reminds us that being a plumber can also “afford us” time spent here. Bring “new ideas” to the table. This is a option, of talents used in other ways?
Oh, Happy Birth day:)
Many happy returns!
May your wisdom increase exponentially with time. 😉
Happy Birthday!
Happy Birthday Sean!
And now back to the salt mines…
“My explanation is simply this: Human beings have a strong visceral reaction to disbelieve any theory which injects uncertainty or chance into their world view. They will cling to some other “explanation” of the facts which does not depend on chance until provided with absolutely incontrovertible proof to the contrary.”
This is a very interesting point that does not appear to be limited to the mob.
Steven Pinker, who’s spent quite a bit of time trying to probe what’s behind “human nature” and has, for his pains, been slandered by people of all political stripes, has pointed this out. He notes that while it is true that many many human characteristics have about a .5 degree of correllation between identical twins raised in the same environment, and that while .5 is a long way from 0 it is also a long way from 1. The conclusion would appear to be that while genes have a large effect on a person (including on the their personality), so does the environment you were raised in, AND, (and this is the piece that never gets mentioned) so do apparently stochastic events of all sorts that occur just as part of the chemical process of building a human body.
One could perhaps include in those stochastic events random things that happened outside the body: Joe gets a word of praise from a stranger when he’s three years old, while Jake, looking in the other direction at the time, does not. There’s a whole industry devoted to the claim that each of these trivial events has the potential to alter not only your life, but the fate of humanity (eg _Run Lola, Run_; _Sliding Doors_), though personally the idea strikes me as as stupid as any of the other projection of physics terms (relativity, QM ideas) into a totally unrelated field.
The essential point remains: in all the screaming and shouting about nature vs nurture, no-one that I know of (till Pinker) has stood up to say “this is all BS unless you add a third, stochastic, component”.
Happy Birthday Sean.
Along with anti-intellectualism sentiment I would add to the cocktail – the rise of religiosity in the U.S., paticularly Christian fundamentalism which correlates with peoples’ fears that the nations’ values deficit and lack of moral authority is to blame for a myriad of societal ills such as abortion, homosexuality, youth violence, etc. Evolution is viewed as a part of this “war against God.”
Furthermore, by pitting God-fearing, blue-collar folk against the community of scietific elite, the Intelligent Design proponents are perceived as the persecuted and censored which further assists the cause of those with a religious agenda. This is just another corollary of the “culture wars,” I suppose.
All the best on your birthday.
and with which were you serenaded? The Beatles White Album rocker, the Marilyn Monroe ooh so provacative JFK balled, or the standard off key, out of tune but communally inspired — Happy Birthday Sean
Happy Birthday!
Regarding what makes people disbelieve in evolution, it depends on which people. E.g., I don’t know the answer on the average Hindu stance on evolution, but I do know that in Hindu cosmology, humans are not created for any particular purpose. So, e.g, a Hindu disbeliever in evolution could not disbelieve it because he wanted to feel a part of a larger purpose.
Similarly, in Hindu cosmology, the universe has no meaning, so rejection of evolution by a Hindu cannot be because of the lack of meaning in a naturalistic explanation of the universe.
While the human is the only form that can achieve enlightenment, Hindus believe that they can be reincarnated as any living thing, and all living things have the same essence (soul, if you like) and so the psychological need to feel superior to other species would not be a cause for a Hindu to reject evolution. In fact, the avatars of Vishnu include the fish, turtle, boar, and half-lion/half-human. (Anyway, a Hindu, and I suspect most people, are really more interested in feeling superior to other people, than they are in feeling superior to the rest of creation.)
The dislike of randomness – yes, that might apply to Hindus. The doctrine of karma cuts both ways, actually. By saying every effect has a cause, whether you know the cause or not, it cuts out randomness. (The cause could have arisen in a previous life). On the other hand, the cause being unknowable does reintroduce randomness in way (like black hole entropy). I can’t say much more about this version of why one might reject evolution.
The last thing I’d like to say is that the idea that having/not having a belief confers some moral distinction is a very much an feature of the monotheistic religions; likewise the idea of the meaning of life and purpose/teleology. They typically do not exist elsewhere. In monotheism, the One God makes all of these things objective. Any atheism that contains these ideas is an outgrowth of the monotheism and is, in that sense, religious as well.
Maynard Handley wrote:
The environment one is raised in is taken to include all sorts of random effects. Secondly, the 0.5 correlation is not significant by itself, it has to be compared to non-identical twins raised in the same environment, non-twin siblings raised in the same environment, etc. E.g., (I don’t know the numbers) if non-identical twins correlate at 0.4 or if non-identical twins correlate at 0.1, the conclusion about the influence of genes would be different in the two cases.
Happy birthday! (And thanks.) 🙂
Happy birthday! Thanks for the suggestion.
Arun — That’s what I’ve always assumed, that both “environment” and “biology” include an element of randomness. That’s why I find “nature vs. nurture,” though a cute phrase, to be a bit misleading: “nurture” implies something purposeful, but that’s not really a good summary of the “it’s the environment” position.
Happy Birthday, Sean! Glad you liked Abhay’s piece…
Happy birthday, Sean.
Many of the reasons that have been suggested for why people don’t like to believe in evolution here are rather dismissive of the intellectual abilities of the disbelievers. I’d like to make an argument that from their point of view, they have a logical and sensible reason to distrust the type of people who support evolution and secular people in general.
The reason is that we generally don’t trust people who appear to be lying to us. It is mainly the religious right in America who oppose evolution, and they regard secularists as a single group who shouldn’t be trusted because they’re clearly lying on several issues. Consider abortion, for example. Most secular people make their peace with the idea that abortion is acceptable even though it involves killing a foetus. However, if a person who has grown up around anti-abortionists comes to find out what the pro-choice people have to say on the matter, they find that the pro-choice people talk about choice but try to avoid the central issue – namely that it involves killing something which might feel pain. If the person was open-minded and intelligent and willing to give a fair hearing to both sides of the argument, they will find that the secularists are in denial about something which is obviously true, while the anti-abortionists are, from all appearances, being completely honest.
With science more generally, and with the materialist philosophy which, as you explained in your article “Why cosmologists are athiests”, is widespread among scientists, there is another issue on which, from the point of view of a religious but open-minded person, the materialists appear to be in denial. That is the issue of subjective experience and the mind. The view adopted by materialists is that the objective physical world is “all there is”. This is in stark contradiction to the fact that people have experiences. The church can use this to its advantage against scientists since its doctrine of the soul as a being separate from the body is something which makes more sense to people than the materialist view that the mind either doesn’t exist or is somehow to be disregarded as unimportant compared to physical matter. The common practice among materialists is to dismiss subjective experience with a short comment, saying either that is is merely a part of the body or it is the same as the brain or it “corresponds to” the brain or some part of it.
Science does not lead to a dogmatic denial that subjective experience exists, and science does not lead to the idea that subjective experience is a consequence of the behaviour of physical matter. Science has nothing at all to say about subjective experience or the mind, because science can only investigate objective things, such as the behaviour of matter. However, materialism is common among scientists for the following reason. If we spend our lives studying the behaviour of matter, and bear in mind during this that that includes the entire universe, then it is easy to slip into the assertion that the physical world is all there is. If I spend all of my life studying bicycles I’ll think bicycles are important and won’t devote much thought or time to, for example, grapefruit. In science we almost never spend time reflecting on how bizarre it is that we have any experience at all, and yet, for anybody who cares to devote a little time to the matter, that is clearly as much of a mystery as why there is a physical universe. Scientists devote little thought to this, slip into materialism, and will seem to an intelligent open-minded religious person to be in denial about something very obvious.
I’ve had more than one PhD physicist tell me that he didn’t know what experience is. Talk about the mind to a physicist and he’s likely to accuse you of believing in spirits. The confusion of respect which is owed to the scientific method (which is a method, and a good one) with some belief in materialism (which is a particular assertion, namely that the physical word is “all there is”) is very widespread, and has even confused most twentieth century philosophers. There’s a philosopher called Daniel Dennett who claims that he doesn’t have experiences.
Usually when I try to present these arguments people react by trying to insist that pro-choice people or scientists don’t make the mistakes that I’m talking about. That is irrelevant, though. The point is that an open-minded religious person will see things the way that I describe, and the battle for hearts and minds will have to be won by being honest and eliminating dogmatism.
This following doesn’t seem terribly honest on the part of the religious:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050314/lerner
ruadan, it seems to me you misunderstand what scientists are trying to communicate on science. Asyou say, science doesn’t claim to know everything. But if neuroscience can describe parts of the mechanism in the brain without discovering a ‘mind’ it can only truthfully say so.
And that “the pro-choice people talk about choice but try to avoid the central issue – namely that it involves killing something which might feel pain” must be wrong. I remember vaguely that it is observed (this year?) that such young foetuses pain signals does not even reach what is to become a brain. The mechanisms for feeling and especially feeling pain are not there yet. So there is no issue to avoid.
“Usually when I try to present these arguments people react by trying to insist that pro-choice people or scientists don’t make the mistakes that I’m talking about.”
No doubt. 🙂
“That is irrelevant, though. The point is that an open-minded religious person will see things the way that I describe, and the battle for hearts and minds will have to be won by being honest and eliminating dogmatism.”
But from the point of view of science it is honest. And since it is willing to observe and change, the dogmatism must be on the other side. It is a dilemma.
Hi Arun and Torbjorn,
First, you both missed my point. I believe this is because of “us versus them” thinking, where you see that I’m not giving the established party line and identify me as somebody who needs to be convinced to be less critical of scientists and more critical of religious people. I am actually a physicist and an athiest and I’m working on theoretical neuroscience. I also advocate abortions for all (OK, well not quite).
What I’m trying to do is point out a communication failure. Ask a physicist do people have souls and he’ll say that that’s a ridiculous notion comparable to the idea of ghosts or spirits. Now think about how that sounds to somebody who identifies the soul with subjective experience. It sounds like the physicist is saying that people don’t have experiences. That makes the physicist seem a little deranged.
Now once again, what I’m not trying to do is say that physicists are bad and religious people are good, so please don’t try to convince me that physicists are good and religious people are bad.
With regard to abortions, you both missed the point there as well. I am not saying that religious people are good or that the poor little babies have an unpleasant experience. I am saying that if you go to, for example, prochoice.org, with the intention of finding out what these people have to say about the experience (or lack of it) that the foetus might have, you will find that they studiously avoid the subject. They will appear, to a religious person for whom that may be the most important question, to be avoiding giving an honest answer. Torbjorn, you say that the answer is that they shouldn’t worry and everything is fine. Maybe, but the point is that they appear to be hiding something. To go along with the pro-choice bandwagon, you have to deliberately ignore that question, and that is why these people appear dishonest in comparison to the anti-abortionists.
‘But if neuroscience can describe parts of the mechanism in the brain without discovering a ‘mind’ it can only truthfully say so.’
Yes, but as Sean mentioned in his article, most scientists are materialists. There is a difference between saying “Subjective experience cannot be subjected to scientific study” and “Science has discovered that the mind doesn’t exist.” The first statement is true and the second is false. In fact, the second statement is absolutely ridiculous. Materialism happens when we confuse what “everything that we can study scientifically” with “everything that there is”. Specifically, the basic statement of materialism, namely that the physical world is all there is, is quite obviously wrong because we have experiences.
It is because we, as scientists, spend so much time investigating the physical world that we forget that there is such a thing as experience. Having forgotten that, it is easy to say that the physical world is all there is.
Ruadhan, I certainly missed your original point.
But, at one time, I was a physicist, and I’d never do this. Maybe that has something to with why I’m no longer a physicist :).
And I’d be shocked if anything but a minority of physicists confuse everything that we can study scientifically, with everything that there is. I doubt very much that among male physicists anyone has approached “She loves me/she loves me not” as a scientific problem!
Physicsts will say that what we can know with some reasonable degree of objectivity and certainty is almost completely within the realm of what we can study scientifically. There may be some that say they don’t care about anything beyond that realm; but I doubt many will say that that is all there is.
Here are two links of physicists talking about something other than physics:
http://www.sawf.org/Newedit/edit03192001/musicarts.asp
http://www.sawf.org/Newedit/edit02192001/musicarts.asp
-Arun
“What I’m trying to do is point out a communication failure.”
Got that. 🙂 But a communication has two agents, ‘us versus them’ not withstanding.
“Torbjorn, you say that the answer is that they shouldn’t worry and everything is fine. Maybe, but the point is that they appear to be hiding something.”
No, I did not. I must confess to being naive about US abortion politics. But I said that maybe pro-choicers do not discuss the point of feeling pain because there is no such point. If someone raise the point and are willing to listen, it seems easy enough to answer, at least as of todays knowledge. But here you are the expert.
On materialism I did not understand your first post, probably because this must be a minority point of view, as Arun says.