(I started replying to Rus Bowden’s comment , but decided I shouldn’t waste the opportunity to create a new weblog post. I think we scientists can gain an insight into the gulf, at least):
Fun with ideas is (views the end of the sentence and chokes back the panic) fun.
However, in a place like this there’s no point in writing something unless you try to make yourself understood by the other person. When people are calling you a troll, or thinking “What the blazes are you trying to say, man?”, there’s a problem.
It’s called ‘communication’. Poetry is not communication in this sense — it does not invite dialogue. Not here on NN (and I disagree slightly with the sentiment that the audience should only be scientists).
But the rest of Rus’s comment deserves a civil response.
Scientists tend not to talk about ‘truth’. They prefer to think of things as ‘correct’, or ‘consistent with the evidence’. Evolutionary theory is consistent with the evidence, and is consistent with the philosophy of a rational, understandable Universe. It’s pretty difficult, these days, to think of an alternative to evolution that is scientific.
At least out-and-out Creationists don’t claim to be doing science, or have scientific backing for their (appalling) theology. I’ll grudgingly respect that position, as long as they don’t try to defend it scientifically.
Scientists do not study “the world poets have bequeathed to us”. Poetry is not amenable to measurement, to testing of hypotheses. Do we ask ee cummings to test his thankfulness? Since when did trees have leaping green spirits that could be observed with a microscope, or a LHC?
The thing, the real thing about science as a system is that it works. It makes predictions that can be tested, and gives us technology that does what we designed it to. The earth goes around the sun in a predictable fashion. All this talk of ‘dogma’ in context of something you don’t like probably reflects a failing of the public school system to get across the point that science is not about facts, but rather process. Talking about an “Age of Evolution” probably reflects a further failure — one of scientists to effectively engage poets (and sometimes the two come together in the one person).
I am not one of those who believes that science is the be-all and end-all. It is no substitute, and can not inform the things, the messy, sticky things like love and justice that make us human.
Science tells us how things work. Poetry (literature, faith) can tell us who we are.
Richard, we are drifting into philosophy of science here. You have described a good Popperian view of Science with the concept of a hypothesis being valid until disproved. Critics of evolutionary theory often try to argue that evolution cannot be disproved because there are too many get out clauses. e.g. holes in the evolutionary record may be filled later. Also because philosophy of science is the testing of hyptheses, they will argue that intelligent design is equally valid as a hypothesis and so must be given equal weight until it can be disproved too. They then invoke get out clauses involving the arbitrary hand of a creator to prevent disproof. A major problem scientists have, is that it can be quite difficult to explain the concept of the scientific method.
It is often argued that journalists in particular like yes/no answers and scientists and scientific spokesman do not like giving such straight answers because they need to include reasonable allowances for error and the unknown. It might be better if we started qualifying our statements with probabilities of outcomes.
Hi Richard,
Firstly, you have again crossed the bounds of your expertise, and again moved into territory that has to do with human discourse and communication. You have again tried to shape what style of communication that I, or anyone else, will use. By the time you wrote this new blog entry, I had already noted that you were not following that previous thread, and I had already shifted to a more analytical way of communication that would include you. (Note the playful use of repetition above, both a poetic and rhetoric device, but a basic one.) That’s okay. I will hold aside that you tend to want to be an authority on that which you are not, and address where it is you seem to be, common ground as we say.
You seem also to have a problem with my education, or rather, your mistaken view of what it must have been, speaking as if there is a failure in education if those who graduate do not agree with you. Yet, you have not pinpointed my disagreement. You do, however, assert that science works and I had already mentioned its utility, thus apparent common ground for us. Where we differ is in your too-confining fragment: fail to accept evolutionary theory as a mechanistic explanation for the immense beauty and variety of life around us. You may hold that viewpoint, and only that viewpoint, but there are other legitimate points of view, and many of us entertain a selections of them, but include the one you assert as well.
We are molded far more by poets than you want to believe. The known world as bequeathed is the total of the consciousness we apply to that apparently objective “other”, that “other” which is amenable to scientific study, an otherness that can stick us with sharp objects, send wild animals after us, but give us pleasure and food, and so forth. It can be anxiety producing for many reasons, this it is something that it would be for the collective good to get a handle on, the point where science comes into play.
But our experience, our consciousness, this experiencial existence that we know a priori to be true, each of our starting points into anything, that which contains all our shared values, beliefs, dogmas, archetypes, and so forth, the collective unconscious and collective conscious, all which is our collective experience, come into play before we ever apply scientific method to that otherness, such an otherness that we frame into existence as an objective world in and of itself, and even—at times—try to assert that our consciousness comes from. Possible? Make the assertion if you wish, and then pull the lever.
Yet, there is no pool of it, no source of it in the otherness, but I assume you have it too, this consciousness. It may be far more apt to say that we create that otherness, or that it comes from us just as our dreams do, than to say that we come from it. Possible? Sure, and if so or something like it, that is a form of creationism. Yet, that would only suggest where the objective world came from, not where out consciousness did. Plus, that objective world could still have evolutionary theory with its utility.
Scientific method is that scientists apply. This otherness gives back discrete data to us. Yet, we clothe this otherness with our collective theory of evolution. This theory, as it has evolved to us today, will be cast aside even by the community of scientists, if scientific method brings us beyond it.
Let me revisit the dogmatic statement that fueled my responses. We may say imaginatively creative things about this otherness, like: fail to accept evolutionary theory as a mechanistic explanation for the immense beauty and variety of life around us. Once you say that, I can then increase my appreciation of the beauty because of the thought you shared. The beauty is something we can share. If we discussed a poem by E.E. Cummings (and he requested we use the capital letters, btw), we may also increase the beauty we see in the world. So, evolutionary theory is not a theory we would apply in these cases. Thus, I began my initial response, “Oh God. I just went the entire day without accepting ‘evolutionary theory as a mechanistic explanation for the immense beauty and variety of life around us.’ How remiss.”
But you had this paragraph that actually sparked my response:
Leave name-calling to the tabloids. We scientists are people, and we get things wrong — gloriously so with any luck. We are not intrinsically better than anyone else — maybe blessed with more neurons or lucky enough to get the right teachers at the right time — but not _better, not more worthy of not being put up against a wall and shot. Those with whom we disagree, even if they are demonstrably wrong in some areas, are as worthy of respect as we are._
It is not that scientists have more neurons or have better teachers. Thus, I responded with a completely different style of communication that you would be used to. My neurons are fine, and so were my teachers. in that paragraph, you mentioned respect. Yet, you had just disrespected non-scientists and those who would disagreew ith you, especially the ones with maybe more neurons than you have, and who had better teachers than you did. You second point of disrespect came at the threat of waving the mod wand.
By the way, if someone had mentioned to you that I was a troll, it would have been respectful of you to make the correction. I am very searchable and accessible, and I use my real name. Plus, I was staying with the conversation and willing at all times to respond. Thus, the alluson that I may have been a troll, could have been left out of your article above. You assertion that some may be asking “what the blazes” am I saying, is not disrespectful, but a reflection of your conscious state. Some of this response may rememdy that.
Yours,
Rus
Gentlemen – I respectfully draw your attention to this article in which I quote Goethe (a poet, and no mean scientist). Goethe’s wide range of interests led to his being labelled as an amateur by contemporaries who had a narrowly scientific focus. In Goethe’s own words, his critics “forgot that science arose from poetry, and did not see that when times change the two can meet again on a higher level as friends”.
I thought Richard was arguing from the perspective of utility rather than a particularly Popper-like position i.e. a scientific theory’s value lies it in its usefulness not in its truth or even its ability to be falsified. But possibly that’s down to me skimming.
As a tangent I listened to an interesting radio program the other day about when in (Western) history the idea that it made sense to reason about natural causes gained currency. The argument was that the idea that there could be such a thing as a natural cause dates from around the 14th C and was considered heretical at the time because it was seen as limiting the power of god.
Yabbut as a biologist, aren’t I supposed to snigger at Goethe?
The argument was that the idea that there could be such a thing as a natural cause dates from around the 14th C and was considered heretical at the time because it was seen as limiting the power of god.
eh…
no. I ain’t going to touch that one yet. Not properly. The whole scientific enterprise was seen as trying to discover a rational God’s rational laws no no quick! Henry! Labradors!
The whole scientific enterprise was seen as trying to discover a rational God’s rational laws . . .
That’s really not a bad way of looking at it, though. Limit or shrink the world “rational” down to “cognitive” for instance for simple application. If we see ourselves as being created, or aspects of God, and the world coming from us and not vice versa, then the world that came from cognitive process can have its momentary clothing of evolutionary theory. The process goes God => us => otherness/”objective”-world or nature.
Couple Science with Art, and we have the phenomenon of this past century that has caused us to consciously try to escape forms of the past. In the past, there was Hope that all this Higher talk and investigation would lead to Higher living. We set our Faith in Democracy. We tended to make proper nouns with capital letters, to indicate Peace and such. This was all to be honored. What we were doing was supposed to be, in these high times, in synch with God.
But things changed with WWI and the atrocities of the 20th century. Instead of investigating and finding a way to keep people from being poked with sharp objects, we blamed ourselves for doing the poking, even as we followed what was suppose to be Higher purpose on Higher paths. In poetry, we wanted to get away from form, always finding some avant garde, trying to create something new, new purposes and paths where we might find beauty. Part of the idea was to eliminate whatever complicity there was in the atrocities, blaming esp. the Holocaust, but Stalin and so forth and so on, blaming it all on how we thought about and approached life, including how we had accepted God. We blamed God and His organizations, and worked at uncovering hypocrisies that would support framing the very idea of God as irrational.
Yours,
Rus
I was the one who had written that, generally, it’s not advisable to feed the trolls (it was here , the comment on 8 May 2008 – 14:20 GMT). And my implication was that Rus might be behaving like a troll (meaning for me, an idle provocateur); Richard is right in that you were not communicating your alternate intentions very effectively. But I also left you some benefit of the doubt.
If it matters to you, I’m fairly convinced, now, that you’re not. Also that you may not have access to Henry’s article via the link. If you like, I can send you a PDF (or probably, Henry can). This quote seems relevant:
“Of course, natural selection is not a force, like gravity. It is directionless with respect to history; if there is direction in evolution (perhaps biased by developmental constraint), it is not propelled by any inherent drive for improvement. So why have modern scientists and so-called science popularizers failed to establish this truth in popular culture?
An obvious reason is that the progressive view resonates far more strongly with our own vanity and inclinations than with the more abstract and austere concept of evolution by mindless selection. In less enlightened times, progressive evolution was used to justify racism and Nazism. We like to think that we have risen above such things, but the copywriters know better — when we see the canonical parade of evolving humans, we identify with and aspire to be the one at the top.” [my emphasis]
Did I write that? It’s bloody good.
Hi Heather,
Yes, please send me a link. lowelldude@aol.com Thanks.
On the troll issue. Please note that my objection has to do with leading this thread with the idea that I may have been a troll, the only service being that it would be a put-down I would need to overcome by communicating in the way Richard feels comfortable. (But I already had said “fine” to this for reasons previously noted.) Because of the communication style, a more creative street banter, I had no problem with staying with the conversation, and even continuing if others caught on, as might have happened, and did to a certain degree. But, the design was to ultimately address the issues, even if not resolve them—at least have fun with them. The mod wand shifted that necessarily to addressing the communication style instead, thus muddying the discussion. The best way to interrupt child’s play, is to have a parent come in and talk about rules. And I don’t think anyone completely misunderstood. We know how to do this, and it is a powerful way to come to solutions and resolutions, always has been. After all, I was riffing off what had already been said.
But, here I am, no troll, and thus not deserving of having been mistakenly suspected of being one, especially by the time this thread had begun, and it was quite clear I was not. So no, I have not stopped beating my wife (in fact, I am not married) and I am no troll either (as established in the previous thread), no moreso than anyone else involved with these threads.
On evolution of the species. Assume for a moment, that each species that is present right now, evolved from species that came before, that there is no such thing as creationism even just to muddy our thought-waters for a moment. The species that are here now with us would be the ones that survived. If there is currently devolution going on, of species in general, we would assume that such a wide devolution would be toward the inability to ultimately survive. Calamities, atrocities, oh, environmental destruction, and so forth, can eliminate “stronger” species and leave those tending more toward a devolution, sure. And, for instance, in sexual selection, our choices for mates may not lead to the very best and fit progeny, but the mechanisms within such processes has generally served to advance the species. (Thus the rise of sexy geeks.)
Sorry for typos again.
Yours,
Rus
Rus, your last paragraph brings up an interesting point. Survival is not necessarily of the “fittest”, if by fittest you mean strongest, fastest, biggest teeth, but of “the best fit”. What fits the environment the best depends on the nature of the environment. So “devolution”, which implies reversion to a weaker / more primitive state, is a meaningless term. It’s just evolution in a different direction.
To quote Henry again, “if there is direction in evolution (perhaps biased by developmental constraint), it is not propelled by any inherent drive for improvement”. And yes, maybe we haven’t done a good job of articulating this definition, which is where much confusion about evolution creeps in.
Hi Cath,
Like many terms, it comes down to definition, not disagreement. Yet, many arguments come down simply to definition. Here is what onelook.com displays:
noun: (biology) the sequence of events involved in the evolutionary development of a species or taxonomic group of organisms
noun: a process in which something passes by degrees to a different stage (especially a more advanced or mature stage)
That’s all I was really pointing out, the common use of the term, what reasonable people “hear” when they encounter the word.
Yours,
Rus
I just read Henry Gee’s good article “Aspirational Thinking”—thanks to Heather. (Henry, by the way, it is good to see you again.)
When I read this part (snatched here, significantly out of context) . . .
As the late J. Z. Young
wrote: “We shall expect to find in mammals
even more devices for correcting the possible
effects of external change than are found in
other groups … culminating in man with his
astonishing perception of the ‘World’
around him and his powers of altering the
whole fabric of the surface of large parts of
the earth to suit his needs.”
. . . I thought how it has been said that cockroaches will survive us as a species, how a roach years from now will write that, only replace “mammals” with “insects” and “man” with “Blattaria”.
Yours,
Rus
The copyright has expired, so I get to reread Bertrand Russell’s Mysticism and Logic tonight. I found this excerpt interesting, as we discuss how the concept of evolution has evolved:
Evolutionism, in basing itself upon the notion of progress, which is change from the worse to the better, allows the notion of time, as it seems to me, to become its tyrant rather than its servant, and thereby loses that impartiality of contemplation which is the source of all that is best in philosophic thought and feeling. Metaphysicians, as we saw, have frequently denied altogether the reality of time. I do not wish to do this; I wish only to preserve the mental outlook which inspired the denial, the attitude which, in thought, regards the past as having the same reality as the present and the same importance as the future. “In so far,” says Spinoza,[6] “as the mind conceives a thing according to the dictate of reason, it will be equally affected whether the idea is that of a future, past, or present thing.” It is this “conceiving according to the dictate of reason” that I find lacking in the philosophy which is based on evolution.
Evolution has changed somewhat. Either that, or the very same ballgame is still going on with the fielders taking their turn at the plate.
Yours,
Rus
I should hope that the concept of evolution has changed, if
was ever true.
The only correct use of ‘better’ in that context is in the phrase ‘better adapted (to the environment)’. ‘Progress’ (like ‘designed’ elsewhere) is a word that is too loaded to use here.
Hi Richard,
The essay ends thusly, with the final sentence attacking what was then the concept of evolution, or evolution when it had a bad attitude I suppose. Here is the whole last paragraph, because where I want to begin starts with “Scientific philosophy thus represents” and so requires what some of what the “thus” is about:
Human beings cannot, of course, wholly transcend human nature; something subjective, if only the interest that determines the direction of our attention, must remain in all our thought. But scientific philosophy comes nearer to objectivity than any other human pursuit, and gives us, therefore, the closest constant and the most intimate relation with the outer world that it is possible to achieve. To the primitive mind, everything is either friendly or hostile; but experience has shown that friendliness and hostility are not the conceptions by which the world is to be understood. Scientific philosophy thus represents, though as yet only in a nascent condition, a higher form of thought than any pre-scientific belief or imagination, and, like every approach to self-transcendence, it brings with it a rich reward in increase of scope and breadth and comprehension. Evolutionism, in spite of its appeals to particular scientific facts, fails to be a truly scientific philosophy because of its slavery to time, its ethical preoccupations, and its predominant interest in our mundane concerns and destiny. A truly scientific philosophy will be more humble, more piecemeal, more arduous, offering less glitter of outward mirage to flatter fallacious hopes, but more indifferent to fate, and more capable of accepting the world without the tyrannous imposition of our human and temporary demands.
There is a problem, by the way, with contricting the use of other people’s language. It will lead to stifling thought processes when successful, or narrowing the group. I caution against it. Never wise. Not good. Let people talk.
Yours,
Rus
You seem to have a problem with evolutionism, not evolution. Is that right?
For what it’s worth, I think Russell was talking cobblers . ‘Evolutionism’ is no more a philosophy of science than ‘gravitationism’ or ‘general relativism’. Anyone who extrapolates a moral or ethical philosophy from the fact of evolution needs swift re-education with a length of 2 by 4.
I will continue to “constrict” others’ use of language in so far as I find it confusing. I am a simple-minded person, and I value clarity and precision in language (except when it has comedic value).
Richard, just catching up here. Isn’t the construction “swift re-education with a length of 2 by 4” the same sort of analogy for which you so recently reproached Henry?
I’m glad someone’s still awake.
Hi Richard,
Just as “evolution” has the connotation of progress, we find that “evolutionism” does as well.
Here are the definitions from encarta: evolutionism
1. evolutionary theory: the theory of biological evolution
2. belief in evolution: belief in the theory of biological evolution_
Both are tied into whatever evolution is. And since it has been a century and more, we won’t be changing these connotations. We probably need a new word, a theory of adaptation and adjustment or something, as everywhere else you look, “evolution” entails development. And since it is the idea that is important, and not the word, some new way of terming it would flag the world that the progress and development inherent in the word “evolution” is no longer being considered as pertinent.
Precise language is hard to achieve, btw. Any poet will tell you that. Insisting that people not use tropes and other lexical devices is as if you want followers going down a specific road that you would like to travel, versus free and creative thinkers, what the rest of us would desire from our scientists.
Yours,
Rus
My hovercraft is full of turnips.
Can you get it off the ground?