Science

Overselling Science

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This post at Reason’s Hit & Run  links to a Pew study that shows a divergence between the views of scientists and the  laity  on such matters as evolution, global warming and nuclear power. The study also shows that scientists blame the general public’s ignorance of science for the divergence. I think that scientists themselves are to blame because they too often oversell weak science.  

The problem with polling “scientists” is that there is a wide divergence in the predictive power of different fields of study that we lump together as “science”. For example, physics has tremendous predictive power but sociology has almost none. Worse, scientists in highly predictive fields tend to project their own fields’ predictive power onto less predictive fields, and scientists in low-predictive fields try to parasitize the public’s trust in highly predictive fields.  

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The Evolutionary Function of Religion

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[Here’s a little light (1,900 words) reading for the weekend. I banged it out rather quickly so I apologize for any typos,  misspellings  or poor grammar. I’ll monitor this thread over the weekend so I don’t end up posting a hot-button topic and then ignoring it like I did last time.]

Robert Wright has a new book out “The Evolution of God“. [h/t Instapundit]  The Amazon description says:

In this sweeping narrative that takes us from the Stone Age to the Information Age, Robert Wright unveils an astonishing discovery: there is a hidden pattern that the great monotheistic faiths have followed as they have evolved. Through the prisms of archaeology, theology, and evolutionary psychology, Wright’s findings overturn basic assumptions about Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and are sure to cause controversy. He explains why spirituality has a role today, and why science, contrary to conventional wisdom, affirms the validity of the religious quest. And this previously unrecognized evolutionary logic points not toward continued religious extremism, but future harmony.

I haven’t read the book yet, but based on his previous works I can guess where he is going with this. I’ve been thinking about this subject as well for some time, and I ‘ve been writing up my thoughts on the matter in detail, but since Wright may have beaten me to the punch I thought I would try to get my tiny bit of priority in. (Besides, I owe him for that bar fight in  Tucson.)

I believe that religions and all other facets of human culture are subject to and created by natural selection.  Even though I am a  philosophical  agnostic and a functional atheist, I have come to a science-based understanding that religions serve an evolutionary purpose, and that they provide a vital mechanism for enhancing and maintaining cooperation that no secular mechanism can duplicate.  

Traditionally  atheists  have argued that religions cannot have any functional foundations because there are many different religions with so many different stories about how the universe works. They commonly point out that since most religions  contradict  each other, the vast majority of religions have to be wrong even if we were to assume that one is right. Science produces just one best  explanation  for each phenomenon. We don’t have hundreds of different, equally valid models of the solar system. How could religion be any different? Therefore, the existence of many different religions proves that religions are arbitrary, fictional, fabrications like novels. It follows that religion has little to teach us about life and cannot serve as any kind of rational guide for humanity.  

This seems like a plausible argument. I used to believe it myself but in the last 15 years my ongoing study of evolutionary theory convinced me that atheists have missed one crucial piece of evidence:    We don’t have a vast  variety  of  contradictory  religions, we have  a vast  variety  religions that all teach the same thing.  

In one critical functional area, all religions are identical.

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Those Disgusted Conservatives Vs. The Chicken F*ckers

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[Warning: This post uses sexual imagery and a satirical tone to make a serious point.]

The authors of the disgusted conservatives study I discussed earlier  reveal their ivory-tower bias when they sniff at the way real people make real decisions.  

Disgust seems to be particularly implicated in many of our moral judgements (Rozin, Lowery, Imada, & Haidt, 1999b). But should disgust play any role in these judgements? According to many liberal, educated Westerners, the answer is no. Whether a practice or behaviour is considered morally palatable or reprehensible should depend on whether that behaviour harms or infringes on the rights of another individual; disgusting but harmless behaviours do not deserve moral condemnation (Haidt, Koller, & Dias, 1993). According to this view, consuming faecal matter, engaging in sexual intercourse with animals, or masturbating to pornography is not immoral, as long as no other people are harmed by one’s behaviour (Bloom, 2004b).35  

Up until a few years ago, I would have agreed with that reasoning. (Except for the sex with animals part. Animals have a right not to be raped. Moo means moo.) I would have agreed with it for the same reasons that most “liberal, educated Westerners” would:  (1) I would have evaluated moral dilemmas using highly abstract models which ignored critical real-world information,  (2) I would have assumed that if I personally could not see any harm in a practice then it automatically followed that no such harm existed,  (3) I would have  assumed  that if a behavior did not cause a significant problem if one person did something then it would not cause significant problems if half of the entire population did it, and (4) I had no understanding that unarticulated, evolved, information encoded into cultures even existed.  

Let’s just talk about number (1) right now.

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Disgusted Conservatives

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Ever since the days of Karl Marx, leftists have tried to stigmatize the political beliefs of non-leftists as stemming from some irrational pathology.

Marxists developed the idea of “false consciousness”  to explain why everyone in the world didn’t immediately recognize the obvious correctness of Marxist ideas. Later, leftists of all stripes resorted to explanations based on Freudian pseudo-science to “explain” that conservatives rejected the obviously correct leftist ideas because of sexual repression or other Freudian mechanisms we now know to be without any scientific basis.  

Today, we see an increasing number of “studies” that seek to link non-leftist beliefs to mindless biological factors. The latest comes from political scientists at Cornel University.  

The press release from Cornel says:

Are you someone who squirms when confronted with slime, shudders at stickiness or gets grossed out by gore? Do crawly insects make you cringe or dead bodies make you blanch?
 
If so, chances are you’re more conservative — politically, and especially in your attitudes toward gays and lesbians — than your less-squeamish counterparts, according to two Cornell University studies.
 
Liberals and conservatives disagree about whether disgust has a valid place in making moral judgments, Pizarro noted. Conservatives have argued that there is inherent wisdom in repugnance; that feeling disgusted about something — gay sex between consenting adults, for example — is cause enough to judge it wrong or immoral, even lacking a concrete reason. Liberals tend to disagree, and are more likely to base judgments on whether an action or a thing causes actual harm.

This study [PDF]  clearly fits the historical pattern of stigmatizing conservatives as making political decisions based on thoughtless gut reactions while intelligent, educated leftists make decisions with emotionless logic.  

I can say a lot of things about this study and the obvious unconscious biases it reveals, but for the sake of brevity in this post I will confine myself to examining only the study’s basic methodology, the press release’s assertions, the obvious contradictory evidence.  

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