Mopping Up

Just a few thoughts that I couldn't find a place for in yesterday's post.

One of the other ironies about attempts to defend inarticulate feces-flinging as an expression of Deep Manhood is that critical reason, science, philosophy, and the entire enterprise of the critical intellect has traditionally been claimed as a male preserve.  Women who tried to intrude into this sanctum sanctorum were warned that they were unsexing themselves.  I didn't quote all of that "subculture" comment; here's more of the context (emphasis added):

I think you can describe it as that Sarkeesian launched a attack on a subculture using her style of rhetoric and that many people from that subculture responded with attacks using a style of rhetoric common to that subculture.

As far as I can tell, Sarkeesian's "style of rhetoric" could be called a male style of rhetoric, not her own.  I don't consider any style of rhetoric to have a sex, but intellectual women have often been accused of having or aspiring to have male minds.  Sometimes they are complimented for it, but in any case the assumption is that rationality is a male trait and practice.  I don't deny that vituperative abuse and threats are deployed by women as well as men; but that makes the defense of these tactics by men all the stranger.  Aren't these emotional outbursts kind of ... girly?  I don't think they are, remember; it's masculists who think so, except when it suits them to think otherwise.

Some feminists have bought into the masculist characterization of rationality as a guy thing, so let me stress again that I don't think critical reason has a sex.  But one of the hallmarks of the American mythopoetic men's movement of the 90s (which seems to have faded away, though maybe it only gets less press now) was a rejection of critical reason, on some rather dubious grounds.  Around the turn of the century, I had an online altercation with a self-styled mythopoetic, who accused feminists of rejecting reason.  I pointed out that so did the mythopoetics, and he indignantly denied it but didn't refute it.  His own style of argument was short on reason and evidence, long on homophobic and misogynist abuse.  But that's not because he is male; it's because he's human.  And that's only an explanation of his behavior, not a justification.

In connection with all this, I remembered a useful quotation from Mary Midgley's Evolution as a Religion (Methuen, 1985):

The effect [of specialization] is to leave many of today’s physical scientists rather unpracticed in general thinking, and therefore somewhat naïve and undefended against superstitions which dress themselves up as science.  Creationism, for instance, cuts no ice at all with humanists and social scientists.  Nobody trained to think historically is in any danger of taking it seriously, least of all theologians.  It makes its academic converts among chemists and physicists – sometimes, alarmingly enough, even among biologists [24].

Midgley's correct about the intellectual and professional base of Creationism and Intellectual Design, and I think she's correct about many of today's physical scientists' weakness in the area of  "general" or, as I'd call it, critical thinking.  There's a popular kneejerk reaction to any criticism of scientific claims among many science cultists, whether lay or priestly, that such criticism is the doing of religious nuts or ideologically-driven irrationalists in the humanities.

But there are plenty of religious nuts in the physical sciences today, as David F. Noble has shown (see his The Religion of Technology, Knopf, 1997), and scientific racism / sexism comes from the sciences.  It's true that the criticism of scientific racism comes largely (though not exclusively) from the humanities, from the anthropologist Franz Boas onwards, but that's an indictment of the physical sciences, especially when you consider that apologists for the latest brand of scientific racism admit that earlier brands were discredited but prefer not to admit by whom.  When physical scientists do criticize scientific racism, they frequently are accused of not being scientists, and the accusations are framed in almost paranoid terms.  A prime example of this was my liberal law-professor friend (her background includes doctorates in statistics and computer science) who, when I mentioned the historian of science Thomas Kuhn, snapped that Kuhn had no scientific training.  When I pointed out that Kuhn had a doctorate in physics, from Harvard, she boldly changed the subject.  It was like arguing with a Creationist, and now I understand why.  (I've seen denials of Kuhn's scientific training before, so I surmise it's an item of folklore among scientific fundamentalists.)  If someone is properly positive and uncritical about science, on the other hand, he or she needn't have any scientific training at all.  Again, this corresponds to religious piety.  As long as you respect duly constituted authority, you don't need to know anything, and no one will criticize you for your ignorance.

Another amusing example of this tendency was an academic geneticist who fumed that a paper claiming that human beings are progressively becoming less intelligent was "Arts Faculty science."  As it happened, the author of the offending paper was also a geneticist.  While some humanities faculty do indeed hold and express risible views of science, the true fount of this kind of wackery is the physical sciences themselves.  I imagine that the accusation was a kneejerk, less-than-fully-rational reflex against the supposedly woolly-minded arts and humanities.  Far from being Arts Faculty Science, Crabtree's paper is Science Faculty Science.  Recognizing that would be too painful to bear, I suppose.

I'm not saying that all scientists are irrational or that all humanities faculty are rational; of course they aren't.  But scientists who use the humanities and even religion as a straw man on which to blame attitudes they dislike are being irrational.  It's entirely possible for a person to be brilliantly rational in one domain, and bouncing-off-the ceiling irrational in others.  Think of Edward O. Wilson's pitiable cry, "multiculturalism equals relativism equals no supercollider equals communism."  Notice that Wilson here blamed declining funding for the supercollider on multiculturalism rather than on changing post Cold-War conditions, let alone on its cost overruns and the failure of the damn thing to work.  It would not be out of line to notice too that "communism," in the Soviet Union spent lots of money on scientific research and technology.  (In the good old days, cutting-edge technology pretty much got a blank check, especially if it might have military applications.  Today's scientific revivalists miss those great days.  There were giants in the earth then, or at least giant science budgets.  Now we can only show children Star Trek reruns and hope they'll catch the fire.)  Much of the wackiest (and sometimes harmful) ideas come from the science departments, though, and get published in peer-reviewed journals.

As with religion, I often must ask whom I am to believe among those who claim to speak with authority.  What if the teacher points to his miracles, his mighty acts of power, as proof of his authority?  As a layman, I'm not supposed to evaluate religious or scientific claims; I must simply believe.  Those who Fucking Love Science point to their authorities, but jeer at those who point to theirs.  And vice versa, of course.  Even worse, yesterday the curators of a liberal Facebook page linked to a Slate article which marshalled statistics to show that states with stricter gun laws have few gun deaths, and added their own judgment: "This is not a conversation. You are not entitled to a different opinion. These are FACTS."  It is a conversation. People are entitled to a different opinion, always. Only an authoritarian dirtbag says otherwise. Statistics, especially about social phenomena and policy, are always open to question and disagreement.  For example, on the most elementary level, are we talking about correlation or cause here?  This is not the way to settle a question, or even to discuss it.

I'm presently reading Feyerabend and Scientific Values: Tightrope-Walking Rationality by Robert P. Farrell (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003), which is quite interesting.  Farrell shows that many (most?) critics of the philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend misunderstand and misrepresent him.  (Like Kuhn, Feyerabend had training in physics, though unlike Kuhn he didn't complete a degree in it.)  This can't be entirely excused by the fact that Feyerabend wasn't always consistent, though like any philosopher, let alone human being, he wasn't always consistent.  Farrell shows that at one point in his career, in Science in a Free Society (Verso, 1978) Feyerabend did adopt something like that radically relativist position he was often accused of.  But the accusations also refer to (and misrepresent or misunderstand) the work he did before that book.  Granted, philosophy isn't easy at best, and I wouldn't necessarily blame a lab physicist for misunderstanding Feyerabend.  But I do blame other philosophers and historians of science, who should have been able to follow what he was doing: that is their job.

One conundrum I wasn't able to disentangle in F. G. Bailey's discussion of the moral mind in The Tactical Uses of Passion  (Cornell, 1983) was how much the public outbursts of emotion he describes are involuntary and how much they are conscious, willed performances.  For example:

Projecting from the way he has behaved in similar situations in the past, he is “beside himself” or “not himself” or “unlike his normal self” if he conducts himself as others would not have predicted: the calm man who flies into a rage, the irascible woman who remains passive when provoked, the bold person who shows fear, or the coward who confronts danger.  (Of course, if such displays happen often enough, then the definition of that particular “true self” is likely to be modified.)  Second, we may look not at the person and his unique and individual history, but at the status he occupies.  Profanity from the headmistress and sentimental tears from the sergeant major are evidence that these people are “beside themselves” or “not themselves” [51].

Supposedly people who are "not themselves" or "beside themselves" are "out of control."  The politician, the preacher, the salesman, may walk a fine line between being "carried" away by emotion and managing very carefully his or her effects.  Sometimes, however, those outbursts are surely deliberate, theatrically so:

It is a tradition, at least in the British army and I presume in others, that the drill sergeant should taunt the recruits, heap abuse upon them, and so conduct himself that, off the drill square, any normal person would reward him with a black eye.  Recruits are compared to pregnant ducks. They are told that if the Queen saw them, she would certainly abdicate. The trooper whose hair is the length of toothbrush bristles is asked if his head hurts, and, compelled to reply loudly and clearly that it does not, is told that it should, because the sergeant is standing on his hair.  All these things are formalized provocations, and the individual must learn not to fight back, not to get angry, not to show himself as an individual.  The training is generally effective. Very few people do fight back (at least openly – there are all kinds of interesting ways of doing so covertly), and those who fight back openly are heavily punished and generally judged by their peers to be stupid rather than brave ... In this performance not one iota of emotion is encouraged, unless it is collective and stage-managed.  For example, a drill was used at the funerals of important persons.  At the command “Rest on your arms reversed!” one placed the muzzle of the rifle on one’s toe, bowing one’s head.  We were told, “Look sad, you buggers!”  We were like hired mourners at a funeral, and no one expected us to feel sad.  There was also a drill for giving three cheers, laying down where the cap should be grasped (easier with the old peaked cap than the floppy forage hat), where it should be held during the “Hip! Hip!,” and the appropriate duration of the “Hurrah!”  The only occasions on which “genuine” emotion was enjoined were simulated encounters with an enemy: when thrusting a bayonet into a sandbag, one was required to shout with anger and exultation [52-3]

I think Gamergaters also walked this line: Oh, I was so angry to have my subculture vilified by that man-hating bitch that I saw red, I totally lost it, I was out of control.  And perhaps paradoxically, the person who claims to be basically rational expects to be congratulated for becoming irrational in the face of such provocation.  What else could I do, Your Honor?  The bitch was asking for it!  This is the rhetoric of the lynch mob.  The best thing about it is that if you weren't yourself, you don't have to make reparations to your victims afterward.  (The destruction was mutual: they failed to obey our orders, which was emotional violence on a vast scale, so we bombed them into the Stone Age.  It balances out!)

There's no shame in misunderstanding a complex discussion, and none in getting angry at someone for holding opinions you dislike.  But it's one thing to yell "You suck!" at the book you're reading or the post on your computer screen, and another to go public with the same words, to post them to the author's Twitter account; let alone to send the person threats of death and dismemberment.  Or, if I may speak allegorically, there's no shame in losing control of your bowels -- it happens to all of us sooner or later if we live long enough, and of course we all began our lives as incontinent, wailing babies.  There is shame in taking up those feces and hurling them at someone, and even more in defending such behavior as essential to your "subculture" or an inevitable result of your genetic makeup.  Feelings are, we were taught at the telephone crisis line where I volunteered for several years in the late 1970s; they aren't necessarily reasonable, and there's no reason why they should be.  What we do with them, how we act on them, does need to be reasonable.

Take the BS by the Horns

Today while I was on my break at work, I sat in the wrong place, surrounded by conversations that distracted and annoyed me, but there wasn't another suitable place for me to sit.  It didn't help that I'm currently reading a novel that I'm very ambivalent about, which I may write about some other time.  That ambivalence made it even harder to concentrate.

Just a couple of feet away from me, two undergraduates were having an animated conversation about artificial intelligence and its implications.  "If you really believe in evolution," said one, "you have to believe that computers are going to get smarter and smarter until they're smarter than humans."  And so on, in that vein.  I gave up trying to concentrate on my book and spoke to them.  Computers, I told them, like culture, don't "evolve" according to Darwinian theory: they "evolve" according to Lamarckism, the transmission of acquired traits.  They acknowledged me, I shut up and went back to trying to read, though I continued to be distracted by their conversation.  The kid who'd talked about computers evolving said he knew about evolutionary psychology, and then chuckled, saying that he'd read a textbook.  His friend asked what his major was, and he replied Informatics, Philosophy, and something else.

I went back to work a few minutes early since I couldn't concentrate on my reading and couldn't give the kid the dope slap he so clearly needed.  It suddenly dawned me that Lamarckianism wasn't the proper way to think about computers.  The proper way was Creationism.  I'd remembered a science fiction story by James Morrow, "Spelling God with the Wrong Blocks," that I read about twenty years ago:*  Two science missionaries travel to a planet inhabited by androids, the product of an experiment many years earlier by some sociobiologists at Harvard.  The androids use Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man as sacred scripture, and accordingly believe that they evolved, like every other living thing.  The missionaries, scandalized, tell the androids that they didn't evolve, they were created.  Unwilling to tolerate heresy, the androids execute the missionaries.

The story is a satire, with numerous targets.  But how odd that I encountered a real-life devotee of the same cult, who believes that computers evolve like organisms, rather than being created like artifacts.  From other things I've read, I know he's not alone. Indeed, my university has harbored one of the cult's prophets.

*"Spelling God with the Wrong Blocks" can be found in Morrow's collection Bible Stories for Adults, Harvest Books, 1996.

When the World Was Square

Yesterday a DJ on our local community radio station played Andrew Vasquez' idiotic recitation about "the days when the world had four corners --

the age when the young maiden
and the distinguished warrior defined
the perfect union

which I hadn't heard in a few years, and it wasn't long enough.

Then today I was reading Kenneth L. Feder's Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaelogy (7th edition, McGraw-Hill, 2011), which I'd stumbled on at a library book sale.  The book was written as a college-level textbook, and it's not bad, despite Feder's simplistic picture of science.  He even surprised me pleasantly by referring respectfully and accurately to the historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, who's something of a bogeyman among scientific fundamentalists.  On the other hand, Feder also refers constantly to biblical "literalism"; well, nobody's perfect.

But Feder also answered a question that has been on my mind ever since I read Scott Richard Lyons's X-Marks: Native Signatures of Assent (Minnesota, 2010).  Lyons, an Ojebwe/Dakota professor of English at Syracuse University, recalled 

.. several arguments I had as an instructor at Leech Lake Tribal College with culture cops who wanted to shut down our science programs because they taught evolution. "Nothing in our oral traditions says that we came down from trees." Science was considered suspect because its origins lay outside an Ojibwe epistemology; because the latter was deemed suspect and pure, it had to be protected from contamination. My side eventually won the day, though not (as one might expect) through our claim that we needed to teach science to produce more local doctors and nurses. It was only after we successfully argued that our clan origin story could be read as a kind of proto-evolutionary theory that the culture cops backed off [96].

This story made me wonder about the existence of Native American Creationism, a traditionalist rejection of Darwinian theory, not because it teaches that "we came down from trees," but because current evolutionary theory has concluded that human beings originally emerged in Africa, and current archaeology concludes that human beings migrated to the Americas across a land bridge between present-day Siberia and present-day Alaska.  That would conflict with American Indian creation myths, which put human origins in the Americas.  And according to Feder, sure enough,

Some Native Americans object to the Land Bridge scenario because, as one told me directly, "It makes us immigrants, no different from you and your ancestors."  Maybe that is the case, but the most conservative scientific view places Native Americans in the New World more than 13,000 years ago -- "immigrants" they may be, but certainly not latecomers! [109]

(Have I mentioned that Feder has the same hearty chalk-talk style I've complained about before in certain academic writers addressing a lay audience?)

Indian activist, author, and historian Vine Deloria, Jr. (1995), made this issue the core of his book Red Earth, White Lies.  His argument was that the Bering Land Bridge model cannot be proven.  Besides, Indian religion maintains that native people in the New World have always been here; they were created here and did not come from anywhere else.

Feder points out that there are many different Native American creation myths, so which one is the true one?  He quotes Deloria's answer to the question:

Tribal elders did not worry if their version of creation was entirely different from the scenario held by a neighboring tribe.  People believed that each tribe had its own special relationship to the superior spiritual forces which governed the universe.  (Deloria 1995: 51-52)

I'll have to read Red Earth, White Lies.  (It's in the public library!  And it looks like Deloria took on the subject of creation vs. evolution more than once.  This could be interesting.)  Deloria, who's most famous for Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969) and God Is Red (1975), is right that the Land Bridge hypothesis can't be proven -- scientific knowledge, unlike mathematics, is never proven with absolute certainty -- but there's no more reason to take Indian creation stories as fact than there is to believe their many Old World counterparts.  And if the discrepancies between differing "versions of creation" can be dealt with, I don't see why the myth of a Bering Land Bridge represents a problem.

Years ago, in the 80s I think, I heard a Lakota elder on a PBS program declaring sententiously, "God gave the land to the Human Beings."  I gave him credit for saying "God" instead of "Great Spirit," but noticed the ethnocentric use of "Human Beings" for his own nation as opposed to others.  (You can find the same ethnocentrism in the biblical book of Daniel, where the evil pagan kings are symbolized by beasts, and the faithful remnant of Israel is the One Like a Son of Man.)  It was the first time I realized that indigenous religion is no more respectable than that of the European invaders.  Which doesn't justify the invaders' cruelty and violence, of course.  But indigenous Creationism is no answer to it. 

This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

A couple of days ago I got into it with my liberal law-professor friend, who'd shared a meme on Facebook purporting to be a quotation from Benjamin Franklin: "We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid."  Now, I agree with the sentiment -- it reminds me of a line from one of Robert Heinlein's sf novels, where one character asks another, "Were you born stupid, or did you have to study?"  But the version attributed to Franklin doesn't sound like eighteenth-century English, and I couldn't find an actual source on the web, so I feel confident in regarding it as bogus.  (The conclusion, "to remain stupid," is also problematic, because it implies that we are also born stupid -- maybe that being stupid and being ignorant are the same thing.  So it's not a particularly felicitous way of stating what someone wanted to say.)

I commented along these lines, and my friend complained.  So what? she said, I like the sentiment, and it sounds right.  (It doesn't sound right, though, as I said.)  It could have been Franklin.  Besides, I like it, and I don't have time to check every little quotation, and I wasn't talking about you anyway.  What, I asked her, does it matter whether you were talking about me?

That was the end of that exchange, but a day or so later, she posted a quotation about the US Congress, attributed to Mark Twain, that was more or less authentic, and taunted me about it.  I didn't really get the point of the joke, and said so.  I couldn't decide whether to add that I'm at about the limits of my patience with people who don't care whether they're telling the truth or not -- especially when they're clearly proud of not caring.

As my friend has by now made abundantly clear, she's such a person.  The first time we really clashed, last summer, she informed me that Thomas Kuhn, the historian of science and author of the influential The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, had no scientific training, and so could be disregarded.  In fact, as I told her, Kuhn had a doctorate in physics from Harvard.  Sure, anyone can be ignorant of such things, though I'd like to know where she got that misinformation; I've run into it before, so it must be circulating in science-cultist circles.  But her reaction was revealing.  Instead of admitting that she was mistaken, or challenging my information, she simply tossed out an irrelevancy: that Kuhn hadn't become famous for work in that field.  I began to recognize the pattern of argument she was using.  I'd encountered it in the past when debating Creationists and Christian apologists: you never admit that you were mistaken about a fact, nor do you try to defend a fact that your opponent has challenged. Instead you reach into your store of file cards and pull out another one, repeating this process until the time is up.  You save the cards for the next match, hoping that your future opponents won't be as well-informed.

This is why real critical thinking is so threatening to authoritarians in whatever field.  They want students to learn by rote, not questioning anything the teacher says, not learning how facts are put together to make knowledge.  That's harder to learn, of course, but until you can do it you don't really understand anything about the subject you're learning.

Today I received email from one of my readers, with a link to an article at Mother Jones.  The article, by Dana Liebelson, is about a bill that just passed through the Oklahoma Common Education committee, which "would forbid teachers from penalizing students who turn in papers attempting to debunk almost universally accepted scientific theories such as biological evolution and anthropogenic (human-driven) climate change."  The article is titled "Insist That People Co-Existed With Dinosaurs ... and Get an A in Science Class!"  My corresponded turned it into a rhetorical question in his email message.

Gus Blackwell, the Republican state representative who introduced the bill, insists that his legislation has nothing to do with religion; it simply encourages scientific exploration. "I proposed this bill because there are teachers and students who may be afraid of going against what they see in their textbooks," says Blackwell, who previously spent 20 years working for the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma. "A student has the freedom to write a paper that points out that highly complex life may not be explained by chance mutations."

Stated another way, students could make untestable, faith-based claims in science classes without fear of receiving a poor mark.

Color me baffled.  Look: I can see that Blackwell doesn't understand Darwinian evolution; and his bill probably is intended to function as moments of silence do vis-a-vis school prayer -- to get around inconvenient Constitutional principles against an establishment of religion by opening a blank space in the classroom.  Given the widespread belief in Creationism in this country, teachers are probably more likely to use this bill -- assuming it passes into law -- to enforce religious orthodoxy, penalizing students who insist that "Darwin (or Dawkins) said it, I believe it, that settles it!" while giving a pass to those who advocate Creationism.

Evidently Liebelson feels no need to to describe the contents of the bill, since it's self-evidently thoughtcrime in the uttermost degree, but from what is in the article, HB1674 doesn't really say very much, and it wouldn't mandate an A for a student who insisted that dinosaurs and people co-existed.  I realize that standards for high-school papers are probably not very high, but a mere insistence on anything shouldn't get you an A in any subject.  (Should it?  I've been out of school too long.)  Liebelson quotes Eric Meikle of the National Center for Science Education, who "says Oklahoma has proposed more anti-evolution legislation than any other state, introducing eight bills with academic freedom language since 2004. (None has passed.) 'The problem with these bills is that they're so open-ended; it's a kind of code for people who are opposed to teaching climate change and evolution,' Meikle says."  If these bills are so open-ended, they should also provide cover for students who defend Natural Selection against Creationism.  In practice they probably won't, but such students would have no protection against authoritarian teachers anyway.  (I noticed this about right-wing honcho David Horowitz' Academic Bill of Rights from a few years back: on the surface it was unexceptionable.  Its eight principles should mainly offend rightwingers like Horowitz himself.)

A teacher would still be duty-bound to downgrade a science-class paper which cited the Bible as authority for the origin of species, and it may well be that parents would protest, citing HB1674 (assuming it passes) that students should 'not be penalized' for advocating Creationism.  Again, this will be a problem in many communities whether the law passes or not.  But a student who wants to advocate Creationism in a science paper would need at least to use Creation-Science or Intelligent Design material, not the Bible, as sources; nor is the teacher bound to be uncritical of how that material is used.  Very much the opposite.

This problem turns up in many other contexts, you know.  I've often run into racists and other bigots who protest that they're just being vilified because they don't go along with the Politically-Correct Feminazi Homosexual Agenda, not because of anything they've said.  They may well be incapable of understanding the difference, but that incapacity isn't limited to the Far Right.  This is one reason why I feel it necessary to demolish the bad arguments and misinformation of people who are (nominally at least) on my own side: a bad argument is a bad argument, and misinformation is misinformation, regardless of the position it's being used to advance.  And my alleged allies don't take correction any more kindly than their right-wing counterparts, on the whole.  Some friends, trying to be conciliatory, have stressed this to me: you can't be surprised, they tell me, that those people get mad at you for telling them they're wrong.  I'm not surprised, I reply: but throwing tantrums doesn't prove that they're right.  They need to give me some reason to believe I'm wrong.  Evidently they don't know how to do that, and that's evidence of something gone wrong in their education, not just their temperaments.

One reason I don't think the bill is likely to pass is that it amounts to the legislature telling teachers what to teach and how to evaluate their students.  That should arouse opposition even from teachers who favor Creationism, but don't want students or parents threatening them with legal action over the grading of a paper.  Teachers get quite enough of that sort of thing already.

This is interesting, though:

"Students can't say because I don't believe in this, I don't want to learn it," Blackwell says. "They have to learn it in order to look at the weaknesses."

I don't believe Blackwell is being entirely candid there; he's probably just trying to look reasonable.  But I think he should be held to what he's said.  Maybe he doesn't realize it would backfire on him and his supporters.  The idea that one shouldn't have to study what one doesn't believe in is widespread in the US, all over the political spectrum, and I consider it anti-intellectual in the extreme.  At face value, what he's saying is what I just said: a teacher is not obligated to give a student a high grade simply because he or she "insists" that something is the case.  By contrast, the Darwinians in this tale come across as unselfconsicously authoritarian.

"An extremely high percentage of scientists will tell you that evolution doesn't have scientific weaknesses," says the NCSE's Meikle. "If every teacher, parent, and school board can decide what to teach on their own, you're going to have chaos. You can't deluge kids with every theory that's ever been considered since the beginning of time."

Meikle's first statement is false: any complex scientific theory has "scientific weaknesses," and Natural Selection is no exception.  The rest is a distraction and a straw man: no one seems to advocate "delug[ing] kids with every theory that's ever been considered since the beginning of time."   More realistically, much of science education below college level is science history, which is essentially a litany of failed theories -- Ptolemaic astronomy, Aristotelean physics and mechanics, Galen's medicine, the theory of humours, phlogistion chemistry -- with a linear narrative of inevitable Progress misleadingly imposed on it.

But just to keep things on a practical level: almost half of Americans, including those with college degrees, say they believe in some version of Creationism.  Even though I reject it myself, I don't think Creationism can be dismissed as a fringe, crackpot belief on the order of Flat-Earthism or geocentric astronomy -- not in this country, not in the real world.  You aren't going to be able to teach science in the United States without dealing with people who believe in Creationism.  Therefore, the burden of argument lies on the science teacher.  (Bear in mind, I feel the same way about gay issues, which are quite personal for me.  I see a lot gay people who, when confronted with bigotry, also want to scream "The Devil told you that!" until their faces turn blue.)  The question then becomes clear: What is the best way to persuade them of the truth of Evolution?  It seems obvious to me that calling people names -- stupid, superstitious, fundamentalist, Bible-banging, irrational, anti-science, etc. -- has not been effective.  Like it or not, authoritarianism can only be used by people who have overwhelming social consensus to back them up.  When you don't, you have to use reason and argument.  It's revealing, and scary in my opinion, that so many science advocates don't want to use reason and argument, and worse, they react to opposition with extreme, panicky irrationality.

More and Better Scientists

The Gallup organization reported earlier this month that 46% of Americans "hold [a] creationist view of human origins," and a number of pundits have reacted predictably enough.  Katha Pollitt was representative, though an Alternet post by Amanda Marcotte covering the same issue was republished at Salon today.  (It's not just an issue in the US: the Hankyoreh ran a story about science textbook controversies in South Korea the same day Pollitt's column appeared.)

Pollitt wrote that the "worst thing" about the poll results was "that the proportion of college graduates who are creationists is exactly the same as for the general public. That’s right: 46 percent of Americans with sixteen long years of education under their belt believe the story of Adam and Eve is literally true. Even 25 percent of Americans with graduate degrees believe dinosaurs and humans romped together before Noah’s flood. Needless to say, this remarkable demonstration of educational failure attracts little attention from those who call for improving our schools."  She might also have mentioned that 41 percent of Democrats believe in creationism, which is less than the 58 percent of Republicans who do, but still.  Only nineteen percent of Democrats are strict evolutionists, compared to five percent of Republicans.  That's a significant difference, but it shoots down any pretense by Democrats to be the party of rationality.

One thing that occurs to me about this is that Gallup reduced the creation/evolution debate to human origins.  Which is kind of like asking whether you believe that the earth is the center of the universe, while letting the rest of the planets orbit the sun.  Darwin's theory isn't just about human origins, it's about the origin of all species -- microbes, plants, animals.  It's the question of where people came from that seems to worry people more.  As Richard Lewontin pointed out years ago, there doesn't seem to be a corresponding drive to revise physics texts on the age of the universe -- which contrary to what Pollitt says, is not really a part of Darwin's theory.  The focus is on biology textbooks.  I'd say the same about the neo-Copernican synthesis: the Bible is pretty clear that the sun moves around the earth, but there's no religious drive in the US to give equal time to Biblical astronomy, or even Ptolemy's.

Marcotte inadvertently got closer to the nub of the matter, I think.  Her thesis is that we're seeing polarization in the politics of American science education, just as we are in other areas, though I'm not sure that follows from the Gallup data.  What's the middle ground here?  The number of people who believe in "theistic" evolution is higher -- twice as high, on the whole -- than the number of strict Darwinists; why aren't they the Truth That Lies Somewhere in Between the Two Extremes?  I'm sure that's how they largely see themselves, as reasonable moderates.

Anyway, Marcotte notes that at the same time as the number of Creationists has risen slightly,

there’s been a steady rise in people who believe that humanity evolved without any supernatural guidance, and now stands at 15 percent. What this seeming conflict suggests is that the issue is getting more polarized, as people feel they either have to pick Team Evolution or Team Creationism.

But she only really develops that insight where "Team Creationism" is concerned.  Team Evolution, she implies, judges the issue rationally, based on the evidence.

The theory of evolution isn’t being rejected on its merits by the people who don’t buy it. It really can’t be by someone who is honestly assessing the evidence.

We don't seem to have any evidence on why people accept the theory of evolution.  I'm certain that their reasons aren't as simple as an honest assessment of the evidence.  After all, one of the big issues at stake is what will be taught in the classroom.  When I took high school biology as a freshman in the mid-1960s, the class consisted of primarily memorization of classifications, and the dissection of a crayfish, then of a frog.  I don't remember covering Darwin and I doubt we did, since the teacher was a right-wing ideologue who wasted a lot of class time talking about the Communist threat, exemplified by Martin Luther King.  I never took any college science courses, but from the people I talked to who did, as well as what I've read about science education, the evidence for the theories underlying Chem Lab was not on the syllabus.  You learn science by doing science, not by studying its history.  Which is fine, but it means that the picture of people accepting evolution because they honestly assessed the evidence is not quite accurate.

That's what most advocates of teaching Darwinism have in mind, from what I've seen: they want students to be indoctrinated with the right theory.  Whenever I get the chance, I advocate the approach of teaching the conflicts, which is what is actually meant by assessing the evidence.  This generally infuriates the Darwinists I talk to.  Sometimes they point out that creationists have advocated the same thing, as though that mattered: that the Ku Klux Klan appeals to freedom of speech doesn't invalidate the First Amendment.  A more valid objection, to my mind, is that most high-school and probably college-level -- science teachers aren't competent to cover the evidence even for evolution, let alone the opposition.  That's not an indictment of science teachers, just a reminder that a sober assessment of evidence isn't involved in this controversy.

(Look at the comments under Marcotte's article at Salon.  There's a lot of endorsement of critical thinking, but precious little on display.  The same is true of religion vs. atheism, as I've said before: atheists are generally very misinformed about religion, but since they have the Truth they don't need no stinkin' information.  Attacking straw men is extremely common in scientific controversies, as in Steven Pinker's attempt to reduce the debate over the biology of behavior to a conflict between reasonable scientific evolutionary psychology on one side, and crazy "blank slate" dogma on the other; or Aaron Gillette's schema of evolutionary psychology vs. "behaviorism.")

I'd also like to know how many adherents of Darwin against creationism are actually Spencerians, who out of ignorance reject Darwin's actual theory of Descent with Modification by Natural Selection in favor of the inevitable progressive movement of the Life Force up the Great Chain of Being, from microbes to Man.  I'm sure it's a lot of them, maybe even most: Spencer's theory was especially popular in the US at the end of the 19th century, and his influence is still very much with us.  The trope of the "next step in evolution" turns up a lot in liberal discourse, along with the notion of evolution as forward progress, as with President Obama's "evolution" on same-sex marriage.  (The "next step" in evolution is often extinction, but few people like to dwell on that.)  To say nothing of the anthropomorphizing of Nature, or of the Earth.

Pollitt also flounders when she tries to explain why this bothers her so much.

One reason is that rejecting evolution expresses more than an inability to think critically; it relies on a fundamentally paranoid worldview. Think what the world would have to be like for evolution to be false. Almost every scientist on earth would have to be engaged in a fraud so complex and extensive it involved every field from archaeology, paleontology, geology and genetics to biology, chemistry and physics. And yet this massive concatenation of lies and delusion is so full of obvious holes that a pastor with a Bible-college degree or a homeschooling parent with no degree at all can see right through it.

For evolution to be false wouldn't logically entail that scientists who accept it are "engaged in a fraud"; they might just be drastically mistaken about it (because of their secular bias, creationists claim).  It wouldn't be the first time that the scientific consensus on a subject has been disastrously wrong.  Since fraud doesn't follow, I think Pollitt here lets slip that she believes Creationists are self-aware frauds, which I don't believe they are either.  A fundamentally paranoid worldview underlies a lot of anti-creationist rhetoric. "An inability to think critically" isn't involved either; everybody's critical thinking is partial at best, as Pollitt showed by her embrace of Obama in 2008.  And does Pollitt realize that what she wrote there echoes a common talking point of Christian apologetics?  Think of all the wise men over thousands of years who found Christianity to be reasonable and true; yet she thinks that a few malcontents can see right through it, and call gazillions of sincere Christians liars or fools.

Pollitt's fallen into the comfortable fallacy of the false antithesis, as she has before where science is concerned: if someone is critical of some aspect of contemporary science (except for anti-feminist biological determinism, of course), that means that they are anti-Science and don't believe that human beings are clever enough to learn anything about the world.  She knows better, but she shares the scientific triumphalism over primitive superstition that many atheists, especially of our generation, learned to take for granted as the inevitable next step in human progress.  Scientists have contributed a lot to human culture, but science still must be regarded critically, especially when it tries to claim authority outside its very limited realm.

It would be so much simpler if religious belief rendered a person totally incapable of functioning in the modern world, or in the sciences.  Yet fundamentalist Christians have had a powerful presence in the US space program since at least the 1950s, which didn't keep the US from beating the atheist Russians to the moon, and as the Gallup poll shows, many people simply blend theism and Darwinism together.  I reread the philosopher Mary Midgley's Evolution as a Religion (Methuen, 1985) this weekend, and she points out:

The effect [of academic specialization] is to leave many of today’s physical scientists rather unpracticed in general thinking, and therefore somewhat naïve and undefended against superstitions which dress themselves up as science. Creationism, for instance, cuts no ice at all with humanists and social scientists. Nobody trained to think historically is in any danger of taking it seriously, least of all theologians. It makes its academic converts among chemists and physicists – sometimes, alarmingly enough, even among biologists. Equally, the attitudes which will most concern us in this book – faith in future superman-building, faith in the mysterious force of bloody-minded egoism, fatalistic faith in chance, and various sub-faiths accompanying these – owe their success to the making of scientific-sounding noises without serious substance. This is a different group from that of scientists, but unfortunately it overlaps with it quite widely [24].

It's also a mistake to suppose that evolution has to be true, because of all the evidence around it.  Nineteenth-century physics was also a great achievement of human rationality, and its practitioners were sure of its truth.  It all came tumbling down when Einstein's theory of relativity superseded it, but that didn't mean nineteenth-century physicists were frauds or fools.  The mass of scientific knowledge was simply reorganized, under new management as it were.  The overturning of classical physics didn't mean a return to a geocentric Aristotelean cosmology, and when Darwinian theory is radically revised again (as it was in the 1930s), it won't prove that the Creationists were right all along either.

None of this means that I think Creationism is true, or that Darwinism shouldn't be taught in schools, or even that I'm not at all bothered by my fellow Americans' stubborn ignorance about science.  But they're ignorant about a good many things, including the religions they claim to love so much.  Pollitt brushes these considerations aside, but I don't see why.  The US still produces more scientists than it needs; if American corporations are hiring a lot of Asian scientists and engineers (whether trained here or in their home countries), it's because they're cheaper, not because of any shortfall in domestic production.  Pollitt and Marcotte both change the subject to climate change and global warming and OMFG the Republicans are anti-science!

Two things need to be borne in mind here: first, Democratic politicians have done no better than Republicans on environmental issues, undercutting world efforts to lower carbon emissions and the like; second, a lot of secular adherents of science agree that climate change is a problem, but they share Pollitt's confidence in Science's unlimited ability to fix our problems.  We don't need to scale back our energy consumption, they say, because soon we'll master cold fusion or some other technology, get rid of fossil fuels, and Presto! no global warming.  Anyone who lacks faith in this outcome is like people who laughed at Columbus or the Wright Brothers.

There's so much irrationality among the people who are nominally on my side that I can't get as excited as they want about the irrationality of the religious nuts.  A lot of their concern strikes me as a distraction.  We secularist self-styled rationalists need to work harder at putting our own house in order.