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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 Moreover, the study that initially started the scare has been retracted by its publisher, and the ingredient (thimerosal) most commonly alleged to be the culprit hasn’t been in the standard childhood vaccination schedule* since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
“Creationist” is a word tossed around at any doubters of evolution. David Berlinski (Claire’s dad, I believe) gets called that despite being quite agnostic. You can write an entire book without a single quote from the Bible, using the latest scientific evidence, and you are a creationist. It’s a stick with which people on one side beat their opponents.
As for me, I’m trained in biochemistry, so I look at the immense intertwined complexity and level of information stored in the lowly bacteria on my computer screen, and I see evidence of an intelligent agent. (Science cannot specify who – I believe that a case could be made that the designer is evil or mad just as well as good) I think there is credible evidence of age and common descent, I just think natural selection is nowhere near as powerful as people make it out to be. (and utterly useless in explaining the origin of life)
Regardless, I fail to see how this view directly impacts politics outside of science funding. If I believe that the world was created by the direct will of Ahura-Mazda and Ahriman, that does not change my view on the proper role and size of government, the role of the United States in the world, or the ideal economic system for the US.
Fair point, thanks for clarifying.
The repeatability of experiment is empirical, though, not just an assumption. Sure, we may yet find that these sort of experiments are only repeatable so far, or in our local area, but it’s far more than a simple assumption. Like any physical theory, it’s only conditionally true absent future refutation.
Of course. But again, the useful development of physics is through empiricism, not metaphysics. Metaphysics is only useful to the extent it suggests experiments, to the extent that it conforms to empiricism.
That is the difference between metaphysics and fantasy, after all.
(Sorry, deleted completely irrelevant response. Comes from having too many tabs open.)
You’re welcome.
Well, it’s both, I’d argue. I don’t know how interested you are in the philosophy of physics, so I’ll try not to ramble too much, but there was a real blow to science itself with David Hume’s philosophy of skepticism. He questioned the idea that there were any “laws” of nature out there to be discovered. The repeatability of experiments, and the ways physicists extrapolated when making predictions, he said, may have been empirically observed so far, but that didn’t require that they would continue to, even under the same circumstances. For all we know, the next time we drop a penny, it might fall up. This nearly destroyed science and philosophy, until Kant rescued it, with his categories.
Anyway, yes: we inductively find physical laws empirically, from experiment. But then we deductively use those laws to predict what we will find in other, unobserved situations. The metaphysical assumption is that there really is a law that governs behavior. Yes, our understanding of that law is contingent, and we might find exceptions requiring us to modify it. But our metaphysics lets us operate with the assumption that nature behaves with some comprehensible, discoverable regularity.
I’m a computer programmer and system engineer, basically. So I deal with this sort of thing every day.
My biggest pet peeve is when the people I work with make an assumption, and fail to test it to make sure it’s valid. You can spend more time chasing your tail on an untested assumption than on anything else. Yet we’re constantly forced to make such assumptions, and assume some are laws, in the interest of time. Some of our assumptions are pretty reliable, but we continuously have to keep in mind that they’re contingent on empiricism.
So this has real-world consequences!
Not all assumptions are created alike. Some things (like that England is an Island) we assume to be true because we don’t have time to verify it personally. We have to rely on what we’re told. The metaphysical assumptions that underlie science (like that a thing can both be and not be at the same time and in the same respect) are of an entirely different order. They don’t require proof; they are self-evident, and all right-reasoning (whether deductive or inductive) collapses without them.
As Aristotle said, if everything had to be proven, nothing could be.
I think you got that wrong…