January 15, 2013 ** Introduction to the Politics of Evolution ** - Topics I. Characteristics of the human mind II. Creation myths III. What is science? IV. The political implications of science V. What I expect of students in this class - Important vocabulary - Essentialism - Magic - Teleology - Pareidolia - Creation myth - Empiricism - Induction - Deduction - Replication - Implication UNIT 1 - I. Characteristics of the Human Mind - The human mind was not designed (or, rather, did not evolve) to think scientifically - Essentialism: the idea that everything, especially every living thing, has some essence that defines them - For instance, a cat is a cat because it has some essence of cat-ness; it s can t be more cat or less cat or be on its way to being a cat or be a not-cat - In the theory of natural selection, there is no essence to a species - According to biologist, there is no place at which a cat is a cat because it conforms to the ideal of a cat - Personalism: human beings tend to see agency behind things that happen - When a tsunami wrecks a village, there is no human-like agency, if you re a scientist - Some may view it as the act of an angry god, for instance - Humans are more inclined toward the angry god explanation than the natural cause explanation - Magic: some sort of force or power that we cannot explain scientifically or naturally; most magic is personalistic - Human beings, in general, are born believing in magic; we all believed in magic when we were three years old - Magic is the fallback explanation for everything that happens in the world - If we can t explain it, then we give it some sort of magical explanation - Teleology: the belief that things have purposes; they re not just randomly moving through the system; we tend to think of things as having intentions and final destinations
- For instance, water seeks its own level, the ivy is trying to tear down that wall, the stock market is attempting to extend its gains, the electron wants to jump to another quantum level, etc. - Mostly harmless, but when talking about evolution, it s something we want to avoid - Pattern recognition: seeing images in the clouds, on tortillas, etc. - Psychologists have found that human beings have a very strong psychological need to see patterns in everything - This tendency is good in that it helps us to understand the world, but it can be bad in that we also tend to see patterns that aren t there - The tendency to see patterns that aren t there is so strong that it has a name: pareidolia (which is Greek) - The tendency to see patterns in often religious - NYT: In 1977, a woman making burritos in Lake Arthur, N. M., saw the face of Jesus in the pattern of skillet burns on a tortilla. She built a shrine to house the Jesus tortilla, which was blessed by a priest, and thousands of people from across the country came to gaze and pray for its divine assistance in healing their ailments. - Not just Christians, other religions, too, like Islam; followers of Islam have seen the Arabic script for Allah or Muhammad on fish scales, chicken eggs, lambs, and beans. - The tendency to see patterns where there aren t any is especially a problem when combined with how we tend to personalize nature! conspiracy theories - Loose Change: - A series of films released between 2005 and 2009 which argue that the September 11, 2001 attacks were planned and conducted by elements within the United States government, and base the claims on perceived anomalies in the historical record of the attacks - Leads to superstitions; a baseball team not changing their socks when they re having a winning streak, thinking being in a certain room makes your team lucky because they win whenever you are there, etc. - Part of learning to think scientifically is unlearning these things; unlearning the tendency to see patterns, unlearning magic, etc. - The need for narrative - In all cultures, people tell stories - People use stories to explain something - For instance, telling someone you broke your leg when it was cold out and you forgot your boots so you had to go back and get them and then since you were in a hurry, you slipped and fell; turning the event into a story to tell - The story of how we got from there to here in 3.8 billion years - The need for metaphor - A metaphor is a comparison between two things (not using like or as); a comparison between a thing we know or feel we know and something we re trying to explain - For instance, her beauty hit me like a bolt of lightning; the administration is trying to keep the economy from melting down; watch out for him, he s a snake in the grass; etc. - Scientists used to try to avoid metaphor because they believed it detracted from the scientific side of things
- Recently, scientists and psychologists have decided people cannot think without metaphor; a lot of the things we learn we learn by comparing things we do know to things we don t know - Darwin s book is full of metaphors - Natural selection is even a metaphor (and he recognizes it as such); Darwin is comparing nature to someone who makes choices - Part of what we have to do here is unlearn these things, or at least look at them critically - Are people looking for patterns that aren t there? - Are they personalizing? - II. Creation Myths - Myth (according to anthropologists): a story that tells us import things about human life, but is not literally true; may be symbolically true - Creation myth: the stories cultures tell themselves to explain how they go where they are and explain their places in the universe - Creation myths combine a lot of the aforementioned tendencies - The need for narrative - Full of magic - Are always highly personal; about people or people-like entities that do things, make decisions, and act - Their purpose is to tell a story that tells the reader how they and their family and their people got there - Primary focus is the Judeo-Christian creation myth from the Book of Genesis - Also gives an explanation for all life on Earth - There are many, many other creation myths in the world - Emergence myth: a type of creation myth; a magical being or beings pass through a series of worlds in which they change until they reach the present world - The Navaho creation myth (from Kidepede website): - People didn't always live here, where they live now. First they walked through four different worlds. These other worlds were inside the earth. It was dark there. First people would get along, then they would fight and so the people would leave and go to another world, and then the whole thing would start over. Four times this happened. Then they walked up a reed from the bottom of a lake and that's how they got into this world. First Man and First Woman led the people to this world, and they brought along their two children, the Changing Twins. When First Man and First Woman and the twins got to this world, it was all covered with water. But winds came and blew the water off of some of the land, so people could live on it. Then First Man got help from the spirit people to make all the things on earth. He had a sacred medicine bundle and he took out the things in the bundle one by one and sang to it, and so he turned it into a mountain, or a tree, or an animal, or a time of day, or something else. - Cosmic egg or embryo myth: a type of creation myth; the people come out of some sort of cosmic egg or embryo - The Finnish creation myth (from Wikipedia, Creation Myths ):
- In the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic, there is a myth of the world being created from the fragments of an egg laid by a diving duck on the knee of Ilmatar, goddess of the air: One egg's lower half transformed And became the earth below, And its upper half transmuted And became the sky above; From the yolk the sun was made, Light of day to shine upon us; From the white the moon was formed, Light of night to gleam above us; All the colored brighter bits Rose to be the stars of heaven And the darker crumbs changed into Clouds and cloudlets in the sky. - Creation ex nihilo: a type of creation myth; creation out of nothing - The Judeo-Christian creation myth from the Book of Genesis - Things to remember about creation myths: - All over the world, more people believe creation myths than believe a scientific explanation - From a scientific point of view, all creation myths are equally fictional; there is no evidence that would give a scientist reason to believe them true - People can believe their creation myths as literally true or as allegorical, a symbolic story people tell that satisfies something we want satisfied - To people who believe in allegorical creation myths, there is no conflict between the creation myth and the theory of natural selection/evolution - It is only the people who believe their creation myths to be literally true who have trouble with the scientific theory of natural selection/evolution - There is no conflict in general between religious beliefs and Darwinism, only between fundamentalist religious beliefs and Darwinism - III. What is Science? - There is no universally accepted definition of science - No universally accepted scientific method - Scientists cannot agree on what science is, what it can tell us about the world, etc. - One way of thinking about science is that it s the opposite of all the natural tendencies of the human mind (above); no magic, non-personalist, etc. - Science does look for patters, but because human beings tend to find patters even if they re not there, science has developed controls on thinking - Scientists often use metaphors and sometimes use narratives, but there are rules as to how they can be used in order to try to keep scientific narratives from going over the cliff into magic - In all sciences, including biology, there are strong disagreements over theories, how to interpret evidence, methods, etc. - First section of the class: Darwin - Second and third sections of the class: disagreements between evolutionary scientists
- There is no one true scientific truth that we have to learn to get it; can only say you ve learned two arguments on each side and can now talk about them - The main think that distinguishes science from everything else is empiricism - Empiricism: the belief that all theories must rest on and be tested by observable phenomena - There are two basic ways scientists go about being empirical - Induction: scientists make a number of observations about the world and then make a theory to explain those observations - But anyone can do this - For example, you can think that the world is getting colder because there have been three cold days in your city - So you have to test your theory; induction alone is not enough - Deduction: if my theory is true, what else must be true? - If my theory about the world getting colder is true, what else can I test that will prove this? - Look at other testing stations around the world and temperatures over the past 150 years, etc.! turns out you re wrong; the world is getting warmer, not colder - Induction to create a theory, deduction to test it - Your results must be replicable; we tend to see what we want to see, so all science must be replicable - Replication: in scientific method, the act of repeating a test to see if one can get the same results as on previous tests - IV. The Political Implications of Science - Implication: something people believe was caused by something else, but they can t prove it; something that is not actually stated but may follow from some sort of fact or belief - A lot of scientific findings and beliefs have political implications - For example, among Evangelical Christians, there is an argument about the big bang theory, the idea that 13.7 billion years ago there was nothing and then there was a huge explosion that created the universe - Some like it; God said let there be light and there was - Some don t like this because science changes and they say that people shouldn t hitch their wagon to this theory because where will they be if science changes and discovers something new; we shouldn t draw any implications from science and need to stay separate - Argument of whether we should draw political implications from science or not - The big bang theory controversy is not even close to the theory of evolution controversy - Sometimes science does not have any political implications, but it often does have political implications, more so than some would like to admit January 17, 2013 ** Reasoning, Argument, Fallacies, Propaganda ** - Topics I. Introduction II. Argument III. Asking the wrong question IV. Errors of reasoning
V. Errors of the use of evidence VI. Rhetorical excesses VIII. Propaganda - Important Vocabulary - Premise - Equivocation - Ad hominem - Spurious correlation - Propaganda - I. Introduction - Understanding, evaluating arguments - Darwin once described his book as one long argument - Arguments give you reasons to come to a conclusion; some have to do with evidence and some have to do with the rules of thinking - II. Argument - Logically, an argument is true if its premises are true and it s - A premise is something that you start from and that you say is true - You don t argue to a premise - You assume that something is true - Syllogism: I. All As are Bs. II. All Bs are Cs. III. All As are Cs. - Can be used to make a factual argument: I. All men are mortal. II. Socrates is a man. III. Socrates is a man. - Can also make a moral argument I. Murder of a human being is morally wrong. II. Abortion is murder of a human being. III. Abortion is morally wrong. - Logically, the argument is sound. You cannot argue against the conclusions. You have to reject one of the premises, in this case B. - You start with a premise. One of the ways to analyze an argument is to either accept or reject a premise. - For instance, in the Origin of Species, Darwin s first premise is that there is no difference between varieties (breeds) and species. - If you keep breeding Rottweilers together, for instance, for ten thousand years, then they will eventually be so Rottweiler-y that they cannot breed with other dog breeds and will be considered a different species.
- III. Asking the Wrong Question - Ways to spot bad arguments: asking the wrong question - Substituting one premise for another without - For instance, Discriminating in favor of blacks is good because in the past the University of Texas discriminated in favor of whites. - How do you get from the first clause to the second? - How does the logic flow? I. If group A has acted unjustly to group B, then it is morally appropriate for group B to act unjustly toward group A. II. Group A has acted unjustly to group B. III. It is morally appropriate for group B to act unjustly toward group A. I. Material equality should be the most important goal of American society. II. Equalizing racial access to college admissions will create material equality III. The most important goal of public policy should be equalizing access to college admissions. - Sometimes the reader has to fill in these lines of reasoning if they are not clear - Darwin is surprisingly good at outlining his reasoning - IV. Errors of Reasoning - Equivocation: the use of the multiple meanings of words to present a confused line of reasoning and therefore obscure what your line of reasoning is - For example, America was attacked by terrorist in 9/11. Saddam Hussein of Iraq supported terrorists. to remove Saddam Hussein from power is to remove one of our 9/11 attackers from power. - Equivocation comes in with the word terrorist - The terrorists who attacked 9/11 were different from the terrorists Saddam Hussein supported - Saddam Hussein supported anti-israel terrorists and the terrorists who attacked 9/11 actually hated him. - Ad hominem: to the man; an argument isn t made of the point of discussion, you don t try to refute someone else s argument, you just attack the moral standing of the speak so that the audience will reject the speak without actually considering his or her argument - For instance, Rush Limbaugh - Also, Thomas Sole: When Al Gore was in the Senate, he twice beat out Ted Kennedy for the title of Congress biggest spender. However, when it came to spending his own money, his income tax records showed that his charitable donations were quite restrained, to put it mildly. - The argument is that whatever Al Gore is, you should reject because he is a hypocrite because he was generous with tax money, but not his own money to charity and therefore he is a bad person and you should reject what he said.