Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Attention, Science! Fans: People are Complicated
Over the past few election cycles, it’s become standard practice to ask the Republican candidates whether or not they “believe” in evolution, and to use their answers as a test to determine the candidates’ piety, critical thinking skills, and cultural values. I find the evidence for common descent and change over time to be incredibly compelling, so I think the question is useful, but its heuristic value as a shorthand for whether one “accepts science” is wildly overrated. People are complicated, and it’s generally foolhardy to evaluate someone’s thinking on a single metric.
As a case in point, consider the exchange last night over vaccines. Over the last decade — and again in the debate — Trump has repeatedly claimed that vaccines are the source of the “autism epidemic.” This is demonstrably false. The rise in autism diagnoses is overwhelmingly the result of broadening its definition and greater public concern and awareness. Moreover, the study that initially started the scare has been retracted by its publisher, and the ingredient (thimerosal) most commonly alleged to be the culprit hasn’t been in the standard childhood vaccination schedule* since around 2002. Diagnoses have continued to rise, regardless.
And who answered correctly? None other than creationist Ben Carson — albeit in a way-too-nice way. Most of the Science! fanboys would evict him from polite society without a second’s thought about anything else he might say or his being a pioneering and innovative neurosurgeon.
Just as the the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being, so too does the struggle for critical thinking play out within each person’s mind. Our candidates’ factual claims — on science, history, and all other matters — should be scrutinized, evaluated, and judged. When they’re wrong, they should be told so; and if their comments consistently indicate major blind spots, they should be disqualified.
But enough of the all-or-nothing nonsense.
* Editors’ note: The original version incorrectly stated that thimerosal was no longer used “at all” in vaccines. Though it has been removed from vaccines used in the common childhood schedule, it is still used in some flu vaccines, though non-thimerosal options are generally available as well. Regardless, there’s no reason to suspect it to be harmful.
Published in Science & Technology
Yes, always. Especially those working on highly-contagious diseases, like smallpox, ebola, or plague.
Nobel Prizes: Winners who experimented on themselves
Alright, for anyone else who finds this topic as amusing as I do:
“10 Scientists Who Experimented on Themselves”
Includes Isaac Newton and Jonas Salk, as well as the fellow who invented heart catheterization. I’d forgotten how Salk proved to the nation that the polio vaccine was safe:
Any such list should probably also include Marie Curie, but it does include the women who perfected x-ray photography. She died of cancer…
Isn’t that simply Monsanto’s trademark for DHMO?
;-)
What does it mean to “believe in evolution?”
It’s a theory. It fits some of our data beautifully and therefore seems proven. But there are other situations in which it can only be conjecture, because of the scarcity of data.
I believe that evolution is a theory;
I don’t believe that the theory explains every process that those who regulate our lives and behavior would like to have us agree that it does so they can work their manipulations.
It’s like saying you “believe in public education.” Well, there’s a big stupid looking building I pay property taxes to fill with union teachers and warehouse children for the day. So I can’t deny it. I’m not a denier! But I don’t think that’s what is actually believed in that proclamation.
I think people should be questioned as to what exactly it is they believe and why they believe it.
And then there are places where its proponents (commonly) commit blatant epistemological overreach, as when, for instance, they assert that the gradual changes from one species to another are the result of “random mutations.”
I agree completely that the Dawkins-like crowd are guilty as charged, though I quibble with this particular piece of evidence against them. Even under the most explicitly atheistic telling, that’s not quite right. The mutations are random, but selective pressure is not.
A minor correction. Thimerosol is in some vaccines, but not many. Several of the DT vaccines, one of the meningococcal vaccines, and the yearly flu vaccine all contain small (very small) amounts of thimerosal. It is important to note though that thimerosal contains ehtylmercury and not its more dangerous cousin methylmercury. Ethylmercury does not stick around in the body and is essentially harmless. A little understanding of chemistry goes a long long way.
Can you fill out that distinction for me, Tom? I’m not familiar with it.
Random genetic mutations occur in nature all the time either through copying errors or via environmental factors such as radiation. Some of those errors result in destructive mutations, like a clinker in the middle of a piano piece – Others (in a smaller proportion) result in mutations which are constructive and provide the offspring of an organism with some survival advantage relative to its unmutated species-mates.
Selection pressure generally drives out those creatures with mutations which are destructive, leaving only the creatures with the constructive mutations behind, and thus over the course of generations you can see genetic differentiation of populations of creatures that are isolated from one another become so extreme that at some point they are no longer able to successfully interbreed – this is speciation.
What Maj said.
A really good example within recent human evolution, is lactase persistence. Until about 10,000 years ago, all humans — like other mammals — generally lost their ability to digest dairy products as they grew older and their bodies stopped producing the enzyme lactase. On two occasions, a very simple mutation allowed some people to keep producing lactase into adulthood, which — with the domestication of cattle and other livestock — became hugely advantageous. Over the millennia that followed, the genes spread widely.
The mutation was random in the non-philosophical sense that it couldn’t have been predicted. The gene would never have spread had it not been for selective advantage it provided.
You’re entirely correct. I should have said that it was removed from common vaccines, such as MMR. Correcting the OP.
The trouble with being human is that our own lives are so brief relative to the sweep of geologic time that we really don’t realize that even we, as human beings are only a transitional form. Who knows what our descendants 100,000 generations from now will look like? Would they even be recognizably human to us or would they view us in the same way that we look at the remains of a Neanderthal or Australopithecus?
Given that bias towards short time scale observation it’s no surprise to me that the notion that man was created in his current form became a popular myth. We think we’re beautiful and that we sit at the pinnacle of creation (of course, I think we are as well) but in reality our consideration of our own beauty is an artefact of evolutionary selection – much in the way that a sentient puddle might get the impression that the container in which it sits was just perfectly designed for it to sit in.
The reality of course being that the container’s shape didn’t really matter at all – the puddle is inherently malleable and can be changed to fit basically any shape that it needs to. This is much the same as us, viewing how well-adapted we and many other creatures are to our surroundings. That isn’t because we and they were designed to fit into those surroundings, but because we grew to fit into them.
Thanks both of you for that.
If I understand it, my point still stands, right? There is and can be no empirical proof for the claim that “constructive mutations” are random. That’s an assumption.
I wouldn’t say that.
It depends upon how you define “constructive.” If the measure is “increasing the likelihood that a given organism’s offspring will survive,” we have ample evidence that random mutations routinely produce constructive mutations. The evidence for this is of course available in bacteria.
As we have made the environment (our bodies) for infectious diseases considerably more hostile over the past century via the use of anti-biotic agents, the bacteria have responded in a fairly predictable fashion: Those bacteria (whose replication rate is dizzying and are thus able to produce a lot of potential errors and mutations) that ended up with genetic sequences better able to cope with our anti-biotic strategies have out-competed their progenitors and have practically formed new species of “super-bugs.” We have sequenced the genome of these bugs and found that they are different from the previous bacteria’s DNA.
It isn’t a perfect analogy because bacteria reproduce asexually and are microscopic whereas macro-creatures are going to change genetically at a much slower rate (because of how quickly we reproduce) but the principle remains the same.
It should be pointed out as well that there is more than one type of DNA in our and in Bacterial cells – mitochondrial DNA is passed with high fidelity from mother to child organisms and is evidence of the fact that as an organelle, Mitochondria and its DNA probably evolved separately from our cell nuclei and make an interesting example of how simpler, single-cellular organisms might have begun to live symbiotically.
I’d say it depends more on “random.”
It’s “random” in the sense that there’s no way to anticipate which genes will mutate. That is, it’s unpredictable in the same way that rolling a die is.
Whether it’s “random” in the sense that “there is no possible teleology behind it” is a philosophical and religious question rather than a scientific claim.
This is an important thought, and I’d broaden it even further. This kind of thinking — that the way things are is somehow the way things should be — is an unspoken assumption that underlies most environmental alarmism. Freaking out about a global temperature change of a few degrees is absurd when you compare it to the huge shift in climate that have happened in the past, and will continue to happen whether we like it or not.
Similarly, I’ve never quite understood why extinction of a species is seen as the greatest tragedy in nature. Yes, it’s sad to lose something beautiful and unique, but that’s how evolution works. Species have always been dying off, while new ones appear to take their place. I’m not defending careless destruction by humans, but the mere fact of extinction by itself is not a disaster.
While I’m inclined to agree with your distinction, textbooks and popularizers often go a bit farther. My impression is that the most common view is that evolution is in fact random. Stephen Jay Gould wrote:
At the very least, the standard view is that there are no actual signs of teleology in the process of evolution, which renders any proposed teleology rather superfluous.
I prefer Hydrogen Hydroxide, personally.
Sounds much scarier if you call it DHMO. Dihydrogen Monoxide
One can also go with Hydric Acid, which sounds nicely sinister.
I’d put it that “Teleology is neither directly suggested nor directly contradicted by the evidence,” but I think we’re saying basically the same thing.
I’d say, “Scientific evidence can’t speak to teleology.” It emphasizes more the limits of science, as opposed to suggesting that religious people are making things up. (I don’t mean you, personally, suggest that, Tom. I mean science types often do. They often talk as if “no evidence” means “go ahead and believe it if you don’t care about being completely irrational.”)
There is plenty of metaphysical and other kinds of evidence that evolution is anything but random.
I would merely point out that Occam’s Razor would shave the assumption of teleology off of this thesis because because the assumption of teleology doesn’t add any explanatory power.
That’s only if you go by materialistic assumptions and exclusively empirical categories. From a metaphysical point of view, teleology explains quite a lot.
Works for me. :)
For any useful definition of “explain”, metaphysics explains nothing. If it did, it would be physics. People fight wars over metaphysics because there’s no other way to resolve disputes. No one fights wars over physics.
That’s just a function of its comparative lack of importance.
That’s hilarious. Oddly, the people who know physics tend to win those wars over metaphysics.
With respect, Tuck, I think you might be misunderstanding katievs. I’m an astrophysicist with a strong interest in philosophy. Katievs wasn’t saying that metaphysics itself explains something, but rather teleology makes sense in the context of metaphysics. Physics itself uses some strong metaphysical assumptions (like the repeatability of experiment, a subset of the idea that natural laws are constant in space and time). Without these, we couldn’t do physics as we know it. And quantum mechanics and general relativity are two areas in which we have very unresolved metaphysical problems to this day.
Both physics and religion have metaphysical contexts they operate within, and she’s saying (I think) that just because one rejects teleology in physics or some other natural science doesn’t mean you should reject it everywhere. It makes a lot of sense in other areas.