“The interest I have in believing in something is not a proof that the something exists.”
—Voltaire
I will try very hard to avoid calling Andrew Brown names in this piece, despite his ad hominem remarks about me and his obtuseness, which in this case is even more outrageous than he’s ever evinced in the Guardian. His latest essay, “There’s nothing wrong with Virginia Heffernan’s creationism,” defends technology journalist Hefferman’s explanation at Yahoo News why she prefers creationism over evolution. It’s because, she says, the Bible tells a better story than does evolutionary biology, and we get to choose what stories we believe.
While accepting the truth of evolution—reluctantly, I think—Brown nevertheless doesn’t like it because it’s a cultural flashpoint:
Evolution is a fact: it happens. It’s also a predictive theory: it explains why things happen and have happened in ways that allow us to find out more about the world. It is something that I find fascinating, but there are lots of things that fascinate me, from fly fishing to philosophy, which I don’t expect the rest of the world to take an interest in. In that respect, evolution is different. It has come to mean an explanation for everything, including all sorts of questions which were once, and rightly, treated as philosophical or ethical. Even more, it has come to be taken up as a banner in the American culture wars. In that context it is unattractive.
Yes, but precisely who took up evolution as a cultural banner? Not evolutionary biologists, who have simply fought the dismissal of their theory on religious grounds by nearly half the American public and a by large fraction of the rest of the world. Believe me, all of us would be delighted to stop fighting creationists and get on with our science.
And if evolution is unattractive because people don’t like its religious or moral implications, then so is global warming and geology.
As for the accusation of scientism—that evolution has “come to mean an explanation for everything”, well, that’s not right, either. Surely evolution can shed light on questions like “Why do we seem to have an innate sense of morality?”, but almost no scientist pretends that evolution has an answer to questions like “How should we live?” or “Is it right to torture one person to save a million?” or “Is Tolstoy better than Dostoyevsky?”
As if that isn’t enough, Brown then goes off on my own website, claiming that my stridency and “mansplaining” actually drive people away from evolution:
If you want to know why an educated American might decide evolution is untrue, spend some time at the website Why evolution is true, run by the Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne. The science there is great, but the tone of voice is something else: hectoring arrogant mansplaining with sputtering outbursts of extraordinary viciousness. If you don’t much care whether the science is true, this would convince you that there must be something wrong with it.
Here’s the definition of “mansplain” from Wiktionary:
Mansplain (colloquial, chiefly Internet) To explain (something) condescendingly (to a female listener), especially to explain something the listener already knows, presuming that she has an inferior understanding of it because she is a woman.
Andrew Brown has learned a new word from the internet, but he’s got it wrong! I suspect he thinks it simply means “a man explaining something.” And nobody has ever accused me of condescending to women. The rest I won’t bother to defend, except to deny the stupid accusation that I’m largely responsible for turning the American public away from evolution. I simply don’t have that kind of influence. This website started in 2009, and since then there has been no marked downturn in American acceptance of evolution—indeed, there’s been a slight uptick (from 9-15%) in the number of my countrymen who accept purely naturalistic (i.e., scientific) evolution.
The rest of Brown’s piece is devoted to showing two things: 1) there’s no reason why people should care why evolution is true, and 2) there’s nothing wrong with believing in what you want if it’s a good story.
Brown on why we needn’t care about evolution:
And, actually, it’s a bit hard to explain why anyone should care about the truth of evolutionary theory. It doesn’t make any practical difference in the life of a creationist that they are wrong. Modern civilisation is designed to be idiot-proof and only needs a few specialists to understand deeply what they are doing. We all rely on quantum physics every time we use a computer and almost all of us are bound to be badly wrong in our understanding of it. That’s fine, so long as the engineers who design the chips know what they’re doing.
To point this out goes against our self-image, and our belief that we ought to be generally curious about the world. But even if it’s granted that we ought to be omnivorously curious– certainly, I wanted my children to grow up like that – it’s humanly impossible to be equally curious about all of it. Life’s too short. And the question of what things we ought to care about most is not a scientific one and wouldn’t be even if it had a single answer.
But this entirely misses the point. I don’t expect everyone to share my enthusiasm for evolution. But I do expect them to share my respect for facts over fairy tales.
Why? Because if you don’t have good reasons for the things you believe, then you fall into errors, many of which can harm others. If you reject evolution because the Bible is a better story, then you’re more likely to reject any rational argument if you find superstition more appealing. And many of those superstitions, like the Bible that Heffernan finds so enthralling, are ineluctably entangled with moral codes—codes that, because they’re based on scripture and dogma rather than rationality, are often invidious. Think of all the harms done in the name of Catholic dogma: oppression of women, control of people’s sex lives, opposition to abortion, terrorizing children with thoughts of hell, instilling guilt into nearly everyone, promoting the spread of AIDS in Africa, and, yes, child rape—since I now see its coverup as an official policy of Catholicism. As Sam Harris has noted:
When we have reasons for what we believe, we have no need of faith; when we have no reasons, or bad ones, we have lost our connection to the world and to one another. Atheism is nothing more than a commitment to the most basic standard of intellectual honesty: One’s convictions should be proportional to one’s evidence. Pretending to be certain when one isn’t—indeed, pretending to be certain about propositions for which no evidence is even conceivable—is both an intellectual and a moral failing. Only the atheist has realized this. The atheist is simply a person who has perceived the lies of religion and refused to make them his own.
It’s more than an intellectual and moral failing, though: it’s also a social and political failing. If you believe what you want, and it’s that humans aren’t harming the ozone layer, then you’ll do nothing to stop the inevitable degradation of our environment. If you believe that fetuses have souls, then you’ll oppose all abortion. Picking and choosing your own stories, regardless of the facts, is the worst way to conduct your life, and a terrible way to run society.
At the end, Brown decides to go after science again, somehow managing to imply that the way it’s conducted sort of makes it a story, too. Have a gander at these convoluted paragraphs:
But both sides are missing an important point here. In popular culture, arguments about evolution are not clashes of facts against stories. They are the clash of two competing stories. And, in fact, this is what almost all arguments in society come down to. It’s perfectly possibly for facts to smash up stories. But it’s rare. And if it happens in argument, it requires a considerable social moral and intellectual effort to arrange.
The classic modern example is a scientific experiment, where you can prove or disprove a theory based on observations of fact. But the formulation of the theory and the choice of observation are neither simple nor straightforward. The great scientist is often one who can design wonderful experiments, rather than the drone who carries them out. Lots of things aren’t susceptible to that sort of experimental investigation at all. The disciplines then required to work out what is a fact and which stories it can test are then rather different – think of historical inquiry; the idea that there are large social clashes with all the facts on one side and all the stories on the other is not itself factual. It is a story which derives most of its power from the way that believers suppose that it is true. But it is profoundly unconvincing to anyone not taken in.
Now I’m not sure exactly what this means, but I think Brown, by using obfuscation, is trying to suggest that either nonexperimental science, like cosmology, much of evolution, geology, and “science construed broadly,” like history and archaeology, don’t have good ways of distinguishing between facts and stories. But he’s wrong. Experiment isn’t the only way to acquire reliable knowledge. Does Brown really think it’s just a story that the Holocaust happened, or that Julius Caesar existed? Yes, there are doubts about some historical questions that may forever be unresolved, like whether a historical Jesus really existed. But you don’t settle those by simply making up answers.
What it comes down to, apparently, is Brown’s view that made-up stories can give meaning to lives:
One response to that dilemma is to maintain that the scientific story is better, more wonderful, more uplifting, and so on, than all the others. This is the one taken by Professor Voldemort (who must not be named) and his followers. But of course it’s all balls. Does any adult really want to believe in a meaningless universe which is given sense only by our own heroic efforts? Love, courage, and all the other virtues actually exist. They change the world around them. How are they then not part of the universe, and how could a universe that contains them be called meaningless?
Remember, the man who wrote this is an atheist. He doesn’t share Heffernan’s belief in God or the Bible. Ergo, Brown, like the rest of us unbelievers, has already found meaning in his life, his work, his family, his friends and so on. What else is there for an atheist than to recognize that we must make our own meaning, weaving it from threads of our personality and the world in which we find ourselves? And of course things like love, friendship, satisfying work (and good noms!) are meaningful, and are certainly part of the universe. But how utterly stupid of Brown to conflate those natural objects and emotions with something ordained by God! Those last three sentences comprise some of the most wilfully confused thinking I’ve ever seen. They’re worthy of a theologian!
*****
Meanwhile, at the Telegraph, Tom Chivers has written just the palliative for Brown’s and Heffernan’s nonsense, an essay whose title is “You don’t get to choose your own facts“. (It’s ironic when the Telegraph is more rational than the Guardian!) Go have a look, but I’ll give an excerpt from Chivers’s hard-hitting piece:
I’m not going to debunk her utterly flatulent piece with its litany of non-sequiturs and logical fallacies. Others have done a better job of that than I could. But I am going to say that post-modernist “deconstruction”, the belief that we get to choose the reality we live in, is idiotic and harmful. It might be more aesthetically pleasing to you to think that Iranian dissidents aren’t oppressed, they’re just living under a different truth-regime which makes it OK to smash their ankles with hammers when they say things the ayatollahs don’t like. It might be more “amusing and moving” to you to hear a story in which a snake talks to a woman or a man flies on a winged horse than it is to read the careful breakdowns of why astrophysics points to a universe 13.8 billion years old, why the X-ray crystallography of genes, the geographic spread of species and comparative anatomy all point to the same history of evolution, why the heavy elements that make us and the Earth were created in supernovae billions of years ago. (Personally I find that all pretty moving, and utterly astonishing. But you are entitled to your opinions.) But your amusement does not make it true.
Humans evolved from a common ancestor with chimpanzees about 6.3 million years ago. A dozen strands of evidence point to this. How a grown-up can openly admit that they choose their facts on which ones they find more aesthetically pleasing I simply do not understand.
Brown’s flatulence is equally noxious, and, next to Chivers, his arguments are as sounding brass and tinkling cymbals.
h/t: Many readers who called this to my attention
I think Trolling Is Free only runs Andrew Brown pieces so we can delight in the rare occasion of a comment section so much better than the article. Particularly as Brown tries to defend himself and gets slapped down again.
The technology section is similar with an editor with rather partisan position. As a fan of good trolling it can be entertaining to read both the articles and the comments but would have thought counter productive for the Guardian as a whole.
It would be nice if Brown explained his beliefs more thoroughly. Seems to be an atheist who would really rather be a believer but cant take that step.
I wonder if he ever wonders if his stridency and vicious outbursts might drive people to become more outspoken atheists.
Very unlikely. I doubt he is actually capable of that.
He’s trolling us all. I think maybe it’s time to stop feeding him.
While accepting the truth of evolution (reluctantly, I think), Brown nevertheless doesn’t like it because it’s a cultural flashpoint.
50 years ago, if we’d had the interwebs, Dr. Coyne’s statement concerning Brown would have read: “While accepting the truth of racial equality (reluctantly, I think), Brown nevertheless doesn’t like it because it’s a cultural flashpoint.”
Odd, I was under the impression that truth and justice were timeless concepts; I didn’t realize that we aren’t supposed to speak out against falsehood and injustice if it upsets others.
Or how about this:
“While accepting marriage equality (reluctantly, I think), Brown nevertheless doesn’t like it because it’s a cultural flashpoint.”
Clearly, the man is in his dotage. How can he write the tripe that is his column without simply shrivelling up with embarrassment? And it is remarkable that the Telegraph is for once showing more reason than the Guardian, but that, I am afraid, is what has happened to the left. To quote Nick Cohen: What’s left?
Except that aesthetically displeasing theory has led us directly to numerous new medicines and foodstuffs.
I think if we made these people stop using all the things that we have been able to produce because of our knowledge of evolution they would change their tune rather quickly.
This is exactly where I have come to stand. You want to believe that evolution is just a story? Fine–rely on the medical practices available before, say, 1900. Atheists are often told that they will embrace religion when they face serious illness or death. This hasn’t been my experience. Yet when evolution deniers face the same challenges, they usually embrace science (at least in their actions, even if they don’t admit as much). It doesn’t make much sense to me, but I personally do have less problem with people who are religious but also accept science and accept other religions and atheists and don’t try to impose their own “moral” code on others. But I just have no time for self-declared creationists who happily make use of all our modern technology and medical advances but somehow rationalize that it all would have been available anyway even if the discoveries based on the scientific method had never happened. Creationists, not scientists, made this a cultural issue.
What saddens me, or perhaps “fatigues me” would be more accurate, is that there seems to be no end to humanity’s capacity for producing this sort of intellectual flatulence.
It is maddening, and depressing, when an adult adheres to the childish notion that reality is a fuzzy weave of various stories and the “truth” of the matter is whatever makes you feel the warmest and fuzziest inside. I take some solace in the fact the commenters savage the article pretty badly.
I think in some ways Brown is worse than Heffernan. Heffernan is at least ‘sincerely fuzzy.’ What Brown is advising is more using fuzziness as an ‘opiate of the masses.’ I tend to think that the person who is happy to take advantage of someone’s ignorance is a worse human being than the one who is ignorant (and, yes, probably even worse than a person who is willfully ignorant).
I think Brown needs to remember the full quote after which the Guardian site is named:”Comment is free, but facts are sacred”.
“Modern civilisation is designed to be idiot-proof and only needs a few specialists to understand deeply what they are doing. ”
Andrew Brown’s existence is proof of the falsehood of this statement.
I don’t see how proceeding on the assumption that modern civilization is “idiot proof” can lead to anything but disaster. An idiotic statement like that is just a call to revel in ignorance. And since he’s defending Heffernan, isn’t he at least insinuating that she’s an idiot here?
and that society “only needs a few specialists to understand deeply what they are doing”
Wow, so we should all just shut our minds, fade into the hoi polloi and let the grown ups look after us. THAT would be a productive society. Oligarchy much?
That is why the Church only said mass in Latin which very few could understand. They “knew better” and did it for the masses who were not worthy.
Brown seems to be in that same frame of mind. He is the “little dictator”. I bet he thinks he is far superior than everyone else.
Yeah and that worked out so well for everyone involved! I’d argue even the Church who directly benefitted by duping people (hey, we get hocus pocus from the people’s ignorance of Latin – it was really hoc est corpus so that shows how the regular folk thought the church was doing some magic show stuff) ultimately lost because its clergy had to live, along with everybody else, in a dangerous, confused, violent society.
I think he’s actually correct in that observation. Where I part ways with him is in characterizing such a situation as “fine”.
What with everything technology affords us currently, it’s very easy to breeze through life without really having to learn anything in any depth.
But somehow, we must instill the desire to learn anyway.
“Modern civilisation is designed to be idiot-proof” WTF?
Lots of idiots are doing lots of damage.
I’d take it a step further and inquire who precisely designed modernity… Not to say that a case couldn’t be made for that (reflexivity in the form of the Enlightenment thought informing the development of various institutions, etc.), but, “designed to be idiot-proof” strikes me as an odd choice of words in the current context.
The way I see it, modern civilization is hanging by a thread. On the edge of collapse. Skating on thin ice, etc.
We need reproduction rates to hold at 1.7 (or lower) for a couple hundred years – and we need people to live, not die in droves (as that tends to drive pop growth as societies destabilize).
All this means smarter people, better reasons for believing things, etc. The notion that a vanishingly tiny group of humans can do our thinking for us is so god-damned appalling to me… the only way I can describe it is a mounting, blinding rage at Brown and assholes like him.
Yes, I often shudder at how easily we could all be sent back to the caves, so to speak. One major wheat crop failure and we are well on our way. People are so quick to be informed by ignorant people and promote ignorant thinking that I cynically think we’re living in a Philip K Dick dystopia!
I don’t think there’s much reason to worry about crop failure these days. At least, not directly. Our train wreck is going to be more stately than a single growing season disaster.
We’ve basically run out of cheap oil, and it is cheap oil that has fueled global economic growth and prosperity for the past century.
There’s still lots and lots and lots of oil left in the ground. About as much, actually, as we’ve extracted to date. But that doesn’t mean we’ve still got a century’s worth of oil left — we’re using it up faster today than ever before; the only way to make it last a century is to ramp down usage at the same rate as we ramped it up.
Indeed, due to the rising costs of extraction and refinement, that’s basically what’s going to happen. Remember, the days that you had to be careful with a shovel in Texas lest you set off a gusher are long since past; today, oil wells with the wellhead a mile beneath the waves and deposits several miles beneath the wellhead through solid bedrock are profitable.
But that means that we can no longer power economic growth with oil. Either we’ll switch to some other means of powering our transportation infrastructure and fertilizing our crops (both of which are almost exclusively done with oil) or we’ll transport fewer things and fertilize fewer crops. In economic terms, a protracted period of contraction is a depression, and we’re facing the greatest depression imaginable. Imagine forty years from now being back to the oil consumption rates of the 70s, and eighty years from now the rates of the 30s.
One can fantasize about switching to alternate energy sources, but nothing is even theoretically as cheap and effective as oil has been.
Our only viable long-term solution is solar. It’s not cheap, but not only is it far more plentiful than anything else (just the residential rooftops in the continental US get enough insolation for the entire world’s electricity needs), it’s also by far the cheapest alternative — especially when you consider the cost to clean up the pollution (CO2 emissions and nuclear waste) of the closest competition. Worse, none of the alternatives — not a one — lends itself nearly so well to both transportation and fertilization as petroleum.
We can build a magnificent society powered by the Sun, with energy available beyond your wildest imagination to do all sorts of insanely wonderful things. But it won’t be cheap, it won’t be easy…and I don’t know if we can do it in the midst of the mother of all economic downturns.
b&
Mmm. Nuclear keeps being the obvious answer in theory, but keeps being sorta sucky in practice.
Nuclear can’t hold a candle to solar. Already, utility-scale solar is cheaper than utility-scale nuclear — and solar is getting cheaper while nuclear is getting more expensive.
Once we come up with an economical solution to provide baseload power with solar, nuclear will be toast.
Coal and natural gas will continue to be cheaper than solar so long as we permit the industry to pollute for free. Every other industry is required to clean up its own mess, but the hydrocarbon extraction industry has a blank check to dump far more pollution into the environment than is imaginable — and that’s with CO2, possibly the worst pollutant physically possible at large scales. If the price of cleanup was factored into the cost of coal, nobody would go near it.
Cheers,
b&
P.S. Wind and hydro are diluted solar and, as such, will always be niche players. Potentially important niche players, sure, but niche players nonetheless. b&
Yep. That’s the way I see it, too. One possible long-shot would be (solar-driven) extraction of fissile uranium from the oceans. (then nuked safely, with the most modern [expensive] reactor designs). Geothermal will continue to work great for a long time in the 3 or 4 tiny bergs on the planet where it is feasible.
And fusion will always be at least 20-200 years down the road. Depending on who you talk to.
Once we’ve got enough solar power to process seawater not just for the water (which, with climate change, is about to become a very urgent need) but for the uranium…well, that’s so far down the road that it’s not something worth worrying about today.
And that’s the other great thing about solar: it is fusion. And the reactor is already in operation, is easily accessible, is safely located a hundred million miles away (so we don’t have to worry about neutron flux turning the reactor and its facilities into crumbling radioactive waste), and is going to keep running at full power for at least a few billion years.
And all we have to do to tap into it is put some really big silicon chips on our roofs. No muss, no fuss.
And we really don’t even need any radical breakthroughs for baseload solar power. For example, you could use the Fischer-Tropsch process to turn atmospheric CO2 into hydrocarbon fuels (it’s a very energy-intensive process, but that just means building more solar panels). Those hydrocarbon fuels can be used everywhere they are today, and you can additionally burn them overnight for your baseload power.
The residential rooftops of the US have enough surface area with panels at today’s efficiency to provide electricity for the planet. Expand that to not just American residential rooftops but to all rooftops on the planet, and we’d have enough energy not just to replace all fossil fuel usage but to capture all the excess CO2 from burning, turn it back into liquid hydrocarbons, and pump it back underground. And then do the whole process again a few times over.
And that’s just rooftop solar with existing rooftops, completely ignoring large-scale operations….
Cheers,
b&
…and in related news, Hobby Lobby does its part to help out matters.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/19/us-hobbylobby-contraception-idUSBRE96I0SW20130719
As I noted above, it seems to me a tiny group does do the thinking for the rest of humanity.
I don’t like it, and I think we should work to change it, but am I wrong in my perception that that seems to be the case?
I not only agree with you, I fear that some not-insignificant portion of humanity is simply incapable of critical thinking and of mastering or even understanding scientific pursuits. And that these relative proportions of society (the few doing the thinking, the many that don’t) may be how the social animal that is us best survives.
There is truth in the statement that society has its specialists (I disagree with his adjective “a few”) so all members are not burdened with doing everything themselves. This is what it means to participate a successful culture. I’d be okay with this statement if it wasn’t used to modify the preceding sentence, “It doesn’t make any practical difference in the life of a creationist that they are wrong”. I disagree. Being wrong in this way has all sorts of direct, practical issues (rejecting vaccines is one and Jerry already listed many others).
However, what bothers me most about Brown’s statement is it’s underlying complacency. Just let the ignorant have their silly myths and ideas; they’re not hurting anyone! I think that while Brown may wrongly think that adopting a ridiculous world view is okay for the individual, he misses what it will do to society. I don’t think it works in a democracy. You don’t want the tragically ignorant voting because they most likely won’t vote for politicians that fund important scientific research that benefits society….and politicians will cater to the masses, which will be ignorant. The only way for this model to work is to move to an oligarchy where the ignorant are removed from participating in society. This is why I made my snide oligarchy remark above.
So, I agree that yes society has its specialists. It may be somewhat “fool proof” now but it it can easily become overrun by fools.
Yes, the above is more evidence that I suck as a proof reader! Apologies for the grammar and typos.
I agree that an expert in one field will probably not be an expert in very many (any) other fields. We’ve amassed too much knowledge for that to be feasible on a large scale.
But that’s not what I’m getting at. In my (yes, anecdotal) experience, there seems to be a majority who don’t know much about anything. But there really aren’t very many consequences for being in that group because of how liveable life has been made by a relatively few real thinkers.
As I noted in my reply to NewEnglandBob upthread, Brown’s complacency about this state of affairs is where I think he goes off the rails. I think he made an accurate observation, but drew a totally unwarranted conclusion.
I think we agree then.
IMO, Brown’s thinking is so confused that it is pretty difficult to determine whether his comment should be taken one way or the other. But given the overall dreadfulness of his writing I have a hard time giving him the benefit of the doubt.
Yeah, “Modern civilisation is designed to be idiot-proof?”
He must have slept through the George W. Bush presidency.
Hmm. Perhaps all the commenters who’ve struck on this quite are interpreting it differently than I interpreted it.
I interpret it not as “modern civilization has reached a point where it won’t produce idiots…somehow”. That’s obviously silly and wrong.
I think Brown meant “modern civilization allows idiots to get by…because of how quick and easy access to amenities are.”
quite = quote
I guess you hit a nerve for taking the micky out of his defence of Twindulgences. This latest piece, which hints at the relativism of post-modernism, is very puzzling. Heffernan prefers the story of Creationism, therefore believes Creationism, and Brown thinks that ‘makes good sense’. I’m not sure how to parse that: that people believe what they like rather than what is true ‘makes good sense’? If there is a target of new atheism wishful thinking like this may be it. But then what story does Brown prefer? Since believing his preferred story would make good sense, he says, one presumes he isn’t an atheist, because he’s made it very clear here he does not like its implications.
**
Well, Brown really enjoys hyperbole doesn’t he? First of all, he claims that “evolution has come to mean an explanation for everything”. Absolutes and questionable syntax notwithstanding, subtly invoking Social Darwinism is so 1940s and so clearly using creationist’s favourite exaggerated pejorative. Jeez, try harder Brown!
Brown continues with his favourite rhetorical device by invoking “culture war” which has been so exaggerated that its original meaning (where people were violently killed) has been almost lost. No Brown, opposing bad ideas is not the same as partaking in a culture war (even the current understanding of one)!
Then there is the final hyperbole that truly makes me mad, not only because it is a clumsy portmanteau but also because it is just so insulting – this is of course the “mansplaining”. In saying this, Brown sets it up so that any male who criticizes a female’s bad ideas is somehow sexist….yeah that’s the world I want to live in! I’ve been “mansplained” to before (an incompetent guy I work with does it….I call him schlemiel so often that my BlackBerry now knows that word and suggests it as I type) so I know the difference. It’s insulting to men and women to mis-use such a term improperly as it suggests men are paternalistic and women are too meek to defend their own ideas. What’s next – calling people racist if they criticize someone with a different ethnic background?
Brown should really look into other rhetorical devices when he writes his next piece. Hyperbole is meant to be used sparingly for effect but he has just abused this poor device so much it has nothing left to give to his writing.
Kudos to Jerry for holding back the insults because they would’ve been so satisfying to make! 🙂
Contra Brown, I don’t think Jerry Coyne looks at all like Ralph Fiennes.
Dear me.
The arguments made are so confused and self defeating and the consequences of them so absurd that it’s hard to credit that Brown can actually believe what he says.
Does he really believe that it doesn’t matter what non specialists believe about any so-called “specialist” subject? That I can believe that my TV runs on fairy power and my medicine works by magic so long as there is a specialist readily on hand to provide them? Is a world where the great mass of people are uneducated and illinformed really superior to one where we are educated and well informed ? In Brown’s world how does the poor, patronised “non specialist” make any sophisticated choice, for example whether to take the medicine prescribed by their doctor or that prescribed by their witch doctor?
The suggestion that underlines the whole line of argument, namely that we get to choose our own “reality” is so silly that it’s hard to see that anyone not clinically delusional (or a post modernist) can really believe it. At that point all rational argument becomes instantly pointless and we can forget about such mere details as science, history, evidence based medicine and whether or not we should get out of a car going at 70 mph.
By the way, Chivers’ blog is a beacon amongst the usual right wing opinionising on the Telegraph site and it attracts a predictably foaming response from the Telegraph readership.
I’ve read Origin and I’ve read The Bible, and I find the former to be much more aesthetically pleasing than the latter.
Two things surely follow: (1) the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis must be “truer” than any biblical account(s); and (2) I’m right, while Virginia Heffernan is wrong.
So why aren’t the mainstream media besieging me to write a column for them?
— pH
Indeed, Brown seems to confuse experiment with evidence. Easy to do, I know, what with them both being polysyllabic words starting with the same letter.
Andrew, since it seems likely you’re reading this: an experiment is an effort to gather evidence. And all experiments, even those badly designed and executed, provide evidence.
The key lies in the proper evaluation of the evidence.
For example, in my undergraduate physics class for non-majors, we did an experiment to determine the temperature of absolute zero. The apparatus was crude; it was basically just a partially-evacuated tube thermometer with water instead of mercury, and an ice bath, and we measured the changing height of the column and extrapolated from there. I don’t remember what numbers I came up with, but everybody in the room wound up with figures in the general range of a bit colder -300°C, which is right in the ballpark. I’d be a fool to use whatever figure I personally measured as the actual precise value of absolute zero, but I’d be even more of a fool to think that absolute zero is a myth or that its value is wildly different from that.
And that’s what it’s all about: assessing the evidence and determining the error bars to assign to it. In my example, the error bars are pretty freakin’ wide, but they overlap with much more carefully collected evidence.
Or, to use Jerry’s examples: we know that the Holocaust happened because we have copious amounts of evidence in the form of the remains of the dead, the killing factories, and documentary evidence from both the Nazis and the Allies. There’s no need to perform experiments because we’ve already got the evidence. We knew that Caesar was the first Emperor of Rome because, in addition to all the statues and monuments and archaeological digs that line up with Caesar’s autobiography and all the rest, you can buy for your very own collection a portrait of Caesar on a coin minted during his reign — we’ve got that much evidence.
Do we know what Caesar had for breakfast on his tenth birthday, or do we know what some random Holocaust victim’s lunch seven weeks before the Nazis murdered her was? No, of course not — but such gaps in knowledge do not invalidate the basic conclusions, that Caesar was the first Emperor of Rome and that the Nazis killed millions of those they deemed racially inferior.
And, frankly, that you are so eager to dismiss the value of apportioning belief in proportion to that suggested by a rational analysis of all available empirically-observed evidence means that, though you happen to have come to some proper conclusions, those conclusions are basically worthless and you’re as much of a gullible fool as the next religious idiot.
Cheers,
b&
Quibble: *Augustus* was the first emperor of Rome. Not Caesar.
Augustus was also Caesar. Note that the paragraph Ben quotes refers to the mere existence of Julius Caesar, with the name Julius included, while Ben’s own discussion shifts the emphasis to Caesar as the first emperor of Rome (which as you note was (Caesar) Augustus) without including the name Julius. So Ben may have meant Augustus within the context of his post. Of course, it’s also possible Ben meant Julius Caesar and thus was wrong in his mind.
In that case, Caesar wasn’t just the first emperor of Rome. He was every emperor of Rome, as it became a title.
No, what we have here is a failure to communicate. Ben has to get his mind right.
Um…what magster2 wrote…yeah, that’s the ticket.
(Alternatively, substitute “dictator” for “emperor.” Or I could point out that Suetonius wrote of the Twelve Caesars, with Julius as the first, or any other form of post-hoc obfuscation you might care to think of for me….)
b&
Just replace it with “Rome’s first dictator not to give up the role of dictator”. There, all fixed.
The prophet Douglas Adams spaketh thusly once, not so long ago:
‘This was the gist of the notice. It said “The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.”
This has led to some interesting consequences. For instance, when the Editors of the Guide were sued by the families of those who had died as a result of taking the entry on the planet Tralal literally…., they claimed that the first version of the sentence was the more aesthetically pleasing, summoned a qualified poet to testify under oath that beauty was truth, truth beauty and hoped thereby to prove that the guilty party in this case was Life itself for failing to be either beautiful or true. The judges concurred, and in a moving speech held that Life itself was in contempt of court, and duly confiscated it from all those there present before going off to enjoy a pleasant evening’s ultragolf.” ‘
Of course, Adams was being ironic.
Sadly, some people appear to have had their sense of irony surgically removed.
Excellent!
I’d forgotten that bit.
This passage needs to be read by all those who espouse postmodern ideas.
Brown has been writing crap like this for years now. His articles frequently have some negative reference to Richard Dawkins when there is no real association. If you look at the main page of the Guardian’s comment is free section you see how many comments each article has received so far. These stupid articles from A Brown almost always have more comments than any other article on the main page. When you read the comments under the article most people are pointing out the errors and stupidity but he then writes another article a few days later with all of the same tired points that have been refuted numerous times previously. It seems obvious to me that it is intentional trolling to get clicks so I now make a point of never reading any of his articles on the Guardian site itself.
Yes, he’s a professional Troll. It gets page hits and makes money for his employer, so that explains why he still does it. It’s quite embarrassing, though, for the Guardian. Readers should just stop clicking through. That’s the only way to make it stop.
I really do not understand how he is still employed by the Guardian.* And paid for this gibberish, too. Literally all of his posts are close to or exceed garbage. It blows my mind. At least he has had a week off from his daily Dawkins bashing – no surprise after the hammering he took on his last piece.
*Well, the hundreds of comments after every post telling him how foolish he is you’d think would count against him. But readers are readers I suppose. Nice to see the the Guardian placing readers above quality…
I struggle to understand what moral implications the theory of evolution has. It can be misrepresented as easily as any other theory, fairy tale or natural law but it was never intended to make any comment on morality. It’s a fact of nature, it’s how the physical system of life develops. It has nothing to do with the concepts of right and wrong than gravity does.
Honestly, what are the moral implications of the laws of gravity which allow a poor soul to be dashed to death when they fall from a tall building or smashes a plane full of people into the ground just because the engines fail or a wing falls off?
Oh and I forgot to laugh at the assertion that Jerry and this site cause people to turn away from evolution: Ha ha ha ha!
Yes, one should always reject scientific truth based on whether one likes the personality of someone else who advocates for this truth.
“I find my doctor annoying so I think I’ll NOT take the insulin he prescribed because he has completely turned me off the idea of diabetes as truth”, said no diabetic alive ever!
Yeah. This argument always deftly ignores that the problem lies with the person that is turned away from evolution and not with the offensive purveyor of accurate information about reality.
This is possibly the worst, most short-sighted defense of creationism I’ve ever seen. Its okay to be a practical hypocrite and use tools while repudiating their design principles, because the tool-makers will continue to take care of you despite your ignorance and bad behavior?
That defense is insulting to everyone. Its insulting to scientists, who he places in the role of technological babysitters. Its insulting to the creationists, who he both directly and indirectly calls idiots and ignorant. And, finally, its insulting to anyone who can understand the concept of hypocrisy. Most people realize that its not a positive personality trait to go through life using the fruits of other people’s toil while you tell them what a bad and fundamentally flawed job they are doing while they toil. Yet that’s what he’s fine with.
.
Of course understanding evolution is important to everyone. Until we embrace the fact that we are the product of natural forces (and not some external magic) and that our nature is largely defined by this, we cannot hope to begin to develop rational approaches to solving our problems.
The latest tactic in the culture wars when you are wrong – say, ‘oh well what difference does being right really make.’
How is it that athiests are considered the strident ones? The faithful take what they consider their moral and spiral high ground by engaginging in groundless attacks for which they feel they are immune from criticism. It would be remiss of use to not challenge their assertions.
“How is it that athiests are considered the strident ones? The faithful take what they consider their moral and spiral high ground by engaginging in groundless attacks for which they feel they are immune from criticism.”
Simply because the religions, and religious, enjoyed centuries of being able to make as many pronouncements as they wished and no-one challenged them because it was rude. Religion was treated differently, as sacroscant*, and above criticism. Thankfully them days are largely behind us and the religious can’t handle their belief system being analysed and criticised. Boo bloody hoo
Douglas Adams said it much better than I
http://sandwalk.blogspot.co.uk/2007/03/douglas-adams-speaks-about-religion.html
I also take issue with this. It regurgitates the old ‘great man’ trope and the dangerously wrong idea that implementing ideas successfully is nowhere near as hard or praiseworthy as thinking them up – when in fact the reverse is typically true.
Maybe I should just point out that – according to Brown’s logic – the great journalist was the one who thought up the idea of putting essays in papers, rather than the drones that write them.
Also, thinking = hard.
Noble lies help the little people to make sense of their lives. What could possibly go wrong?
Yeees, but the Little People™ need this “opium” to cope with their life.
Ugh, I can’t believe he hasn’t noticed how condescending he sounds.
I’ll never understand the accomodationists/fatheist stance. The way to get people to drop their magical explanations and adopt scientific explanations is…not to try to correct them and let them hang on to their magical explanations?
Trying to correct them is “being a dick.” And we’re not supposed to be dicks…for some reason. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Maybe one of the faitheists can try to mansplain it to us again. And at the risk of offending absolutely everyone, I’d propose that the appropriate comeback to “Don’t be a dick” is “Don’t be a pussy.”
No no no, the appropriate it response is, “well if I’m not being a dick, I’m being a pussy” ta dah!
Bunch of assholes, if you ask me….
b&
Ben gave us an earful!
There must be some corollary to Godwin’s law about the proportion of a conversation that include references to orifices….
b&
Yes, some variant I’m sure.
Aural sex?
I figured you could interpret it in a few ways. I guess you can say, I left it open 🙂
Clearly the man has never visited http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/ or he would have realized that, in comparison, this website is of the sweetest, nicest and purest poetry! (Again .. in comparison!)
Yes, I thought the same. And also, I may disagree with what goes on at PZ’s but that doesn’t mean that what PZ says about science is wrong! Jeez.
Nice to see that the quality of his writing is every bit as good as the clarity of his thought.
What Brown seems to be saying is that rational thinking is hard for the average person and it is therefore stupid and mean to criticize them for not even trying. Those average people that he is telling us we should leave in peace to believe whatever stories they want, those people should feel more insulted by this condescending drivel than Jerry does.
The point of view that we should just accept that most people will always be too fragile, or lazy, or stupid to learn decent critical thinking skills and how to apply them to better evaluate various types of claims, is highly cynical and fatalistic. Even our best societies are not so wonderful that we shouldn’t wish to strive to make them better. And the historical record clearly shows that it is possible for such effort to make a difference. Andrew Brown sounds like a bitter old man.
I stopped reading Andrew Brown very soon after I started reading him.
Me too. How many words did you get through?
Too many. About 1 1/2 of his columns.
“It’s ironic when the Telegraph is more rational than the Guardian!”
I must say that I find it very curious (and sad) that many who post here (including Jerry himself) assume that rationality is to be expected from those of the Left, and the left leaning press such as the Guardian, but not from the Right. Actually, it is the Left that is often in the thrall of Romanticism or its later incantations such as post-modernism, rather than it’s supposed natural tendency toward rationalism. Ideas and ideals of the Right are NOT merely represented in the example of American nut-cases as seen on Fox News, in Europe it is the more rational, scientific, reality based point of view as expressed for example, in yes – such right wing journals as the Telegraph.
Ahem.
While I 100% agree with you that rationality is not necessarily found in those on the Left – yes it does have a depressingly large number of post-modernist woo-ist anti-science tree-huggers in its ranks; I would be kind of cautious before I started touting right-wing Europe as the bastion of rationalism and scientific.
That is not the case in Ireland, or Greece, or France. Not Spain either. And even in the UK, you would be hard-pressed to make a case that all Right-leaning types care one jot for science or reason. Some individuals, sure. But it isn’t an emergent property of either side of the Left-Right divide.
In the UK, the right-leaning types don’t give a damn about mere reality as long as they can make money. Which appears to be the problem in the US as well.
On a side note: Jerry, I truly loved the title of this blog. It reminded me of the 18th-century penchant for all those goofy run-on chapter headings, and, with your Voltaire quote to prompt me, I googled “Candide” to download a free copy to reread this weekend. 🙂
(a typical chapter title from Candide: “How the Portuguese Made a Beautiful Auto-Da-Fé, to Prevent Any Further Earthquakes; and How Candide Was Publicly Whipped”)
“because, she says, the Bible tells a better story than does evolutionary biology”
Ah come on, Adam and Eva wandering around in the Garden of Evil versus Homo Sapiens wandering around the whole world and sometimes mating with Denisovans and Neanderthals?
The Great Flood vs. all those meteorites hitting the Earth several times, shifting magnetic poles, entire contintents (Antarctica!) freezing over?
A local kingdom in the Middle East versus developed civilizations in the America’s, India and China?
Add the Big Bang, the forming of the Solar System and everything I forget for the moment and it’s obvious that science, including evolution theory, provides the most fascinating story in the history of mankind.
Splendid!
“the belief that we get to choose the reality we live in”
All physicists like this one. Could all post-modernists please visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to tell the victims of the nuclear bombs they got to choose their reality they lived in in August 1945, including radiation and its effects?
I have it on good authority – a lawyer no less – there is no evidence for Einstein, none. It is all conjecture…
Strangely, those who would have us believe that facts are dispensible and secondary to pleasing stories are inevitably hypocrites. I imagine that if any such advocate of this view were to be falsely accused of a serious crime they would have little hesitation in re-discovering their love of facts and have little qualm in screaming for an investigation of the FACTS in order to clear their good name.
I say we should all believe in Tolkien mythology.
You see, there was the One God, who created everything. This guy had a plan! First, he created the Valar, spiritual beings of immnese power, and a bunch of Maiar, lesser but still way powerful beings to help them. Then, all together – get this – they created not just the Universe but the entire unfolding of its history in a great orchestral song they wove together in infinite interlocking themes. How freaking cool is that? But one of the Valar had his own ideas, and introduced discord into the song, creating evil and malice, forever changing the Universe.
The song created a physical, natural world, Middle Earth, and eventually sentient beings: Elves, Humans, Dwarves, Hobbits, Ents, etc. This place had it all: great beauty, epic battles, incredible acts of bravery, love and romance, really cool magical stuff. The Free Peoples of Middle Earth confronted evil in all its forms, from the brutally cruel to the seductively devious.
This story is better than the stories in the Bible. We should all just believe it instead.
Ummmm…tonque-in-cheek?
(Of course, but don’t tell anyone).
I have proof!
“How freaking cool is that?”
As I love music more than literature cool enough for getting me in – but only while I’m reading the Ainulindale.
Individuals are always going to hold nonsense beliefs right up until the point that our species is extinct. What’s disappointing for me is that what we’re dealing with is the idea that personal validity is an epistemology in its own right – that one’s ignorance is equal to a demonstrable epistemological framework. There’s a difference between saying that one is a believer in nonsense on aesthetic grounds, and making an argument that aesthetics is just as good an epistemology as science (or even trumping science).
I suspect that the reason people reject evolution has much more to do with religious beliefs involving eternal damnation for not believing the right magic story– rather than Jerry’s “viscious” tone.
(Say, is anyone else having “Tom Johnson” flashbacks?)
Interesting. I always found the tone of this site one of the positive things about it. It’s not as arrogant and condescending as some similar sites, there is substance rather than insults and even the comments are civil (a rarity online).