Here’s an interesting essay on why people don’t accept evolution: it’s not simply a consequence of a conflict between religious teachings and the conclusion of science, but is also a conflict created by the nonintuitive way that evolution works — that a very small selective force operating over long periods of time can generate dramatic outcomes, often with no obvious, linear progression from one point to another. It’s well-said, but not an entirely new idea (thermodynamics and information theory seem to often throw people for a loop, and creationists seem utterly baffled by genetic algorithms)— we’ve often commented on how the concepts may be difficult to grasp, but once the ideas of thinking in terms of populations without individual change sink in, it does become obvious. It’s also one of those fields where, although some find it hard to believe, a solid understanding of basic math and statistics are indispensable.
The essay also feeds into an argument that some of us have made: education and learning all help correct the problem, it’s not just a matter of trying to accommodate people to a different worldview. Being able to turn on that little light-bulb of understanding is key to getting people to accept good science.
I’m glad evolution pretty well clicked in my head right after learning about the mechanisms.
There’s also the issue of a grasp of time…..I know that in my line of work (fire management) people have a hard time getting around the idea that things do change, and are not static snapshots. I try to use the example of what we see are just single frames in a long movie, and that sometimes works…..
I’m glad that someone instilled the tendency to think in trees in me at an early age. When I first read about evolution, it just made sense.
Is evolutionary theory any more counterintuitive than other scientific theories? The Newtonian laws of motion, for example, don’t make any sense intuitively; that is to say, they don’t tend to describe the world as we experience it. An object in motion stays in motion? And gravity, a mysterious force that Newton never explains that acts on objects at a distance.
Doesn’t Dennett say somewhere that the most intuitive description of the world remains Aristotle’s?
I agree.
Here is a good question:
Is it better to discover atheism 1st and then discover
evolution or round the other way?
For me, the latter sequence of doing things (science education 1st) accomplishes both simultaneously.
Otherwise, scientifically ignorant atheists seem to be empty handed, looking for an explanation.
“Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist” – Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker
I think what’s most counterintuitive about evolution is that “a cat gives birth to a dog” or some such thing. It’s easy to laugh at such BS, but on the other hand, given enough time a fish is ancestor to the bird, which could seem even less likely.
On the other hand, most of the evidences for evolution are in fact fairly intuitive, or at least are similar to other forms of not only scientific reasoning, but to everyday reasoning. The taxonomical hierarchies which creationist Linnaeus produced look like nothing other than genealogical trees (even though they don’t actually trace ancestry as such). That the same bones in our hand show up in the dolphin flipper, the bat’s wing, and even (with some losses) in the bird’s wing, seems to point to something other than design or the miraculous. And really, most of the medical experiments start out in mice, and they are actually a fairly good model for our own bodies? How can anybody miss the implications of that?
One should not, I think, discount the power of the religious drumbeat on the brains of their captives, then. I brought up what is immediately intuitive, the fact that as long as we’ve watched, dogs gave birth to dogs, cats to cats, humans to humans, but also noted what intuitively suggests evolutionary connections. The point is not, then, that evolutionary explanations are really counterintuitive once the evidence is presented, it’s that many shun the evidence while having the “dogs give birth to dogs” mantra pounded into them.
People could go beyond their first intuitions to more educated ones without much trouble, were it not for the lies told by the likes of Dembski and fundy preachers. I believe that the evidence presented for evolution is rather more intuitive than is most physics (as fardels bear points out, Aristotle’s “physics” is more intuitive than Newton’s), chemistry, and electronics.
But they have to be willing to listen, plus we need to actually present our evidence more and in better ways than we usually do, rather than to simply answer the BS put out by the DI as is often done. After all, the real purpose of Egnor’s and Dembski’s fallacious nonsense is not actually to persuade anybody along the lines of their “reasoning” (if people are stupid and biased to believe, they’ll accept it, and if not, they won’t), it is to put us on the defensive, and to give the illusion that evolution is questionable. We need to bring up questions they can’t answer more often, then, and to follow up with their inevitable ignoring of those answers with the observation that they have no answers.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
Agree with ‘fardels bear’.
Shades of Lewis Wolpert here; he has said that the scientific method, and scientific thinking, is unnatural. Human frames of reference tend our thinking towards the recent history, the near future, and the visible, tactile and audible.
Scientific theories are hard to grasp largely because they are counter-intuitive. Their frames of reference fall way outside our rather limited human one – a good reason to suspect anyone who claims to base their scientific arguments on ‘common sense’.
Actually I’ve found the basics of evolution easy to grasp. It is just RM/NS, random mutation plus natural selection. The rest is just details and evidence. Mountains of details and mountain ranges of evidence.
The way to present it is as easy and simple to understand. It is not obvious that the continents are moving around either but a few millimeters/year and before you know it, New Gondwanaland.
The common peppered moth story doesn’t help either. For some reason, an example using a drab lepidopteran insect doesn’t resonate very well.
Evolution is less like thermodynamics than it is like Game Theory or ‘real’ Economics (micro and emergent macro). In these fields, especially Game Theory, some people seem to ‘get it’ pretty intuitively, while others flounder and find them extremely difficult to grasp. It would be very cool (and useful) to figure out why this is so. It seems not to be a case of just level and quality of previous education.
I’d be so bold as to say that the all these ‘nonintuitive’ (though they are intuitive to some of us) topics are part of the same topic.
Complex Adaptive Systems
I’ve found (and more reliably, friends of mine who teach courses in these subjects have told me) that students either ‘get it’ and find it a breeze or muddle through with great difficulty mostly just ‘doing the motions’. Teaching is very tricky, trying to generate the rare moments where someone will have a flash and move from the latter column to the former, while still covering material to add to the knowledge of those that get it and avoid completely loosing those who don’t.
Anyway, good insight. Maybe we need to separate the problems of teaching about evolution (or complex dynamic systems in general) and teaching people to think in a way where they can have an intuition about such things in the first place.
Sorry, have to disagree. It should be all the more convincing because it’s so simple. On the other hand, it isn’t in the realm of ordinary experience, because of the timescales involved. What remains is a conflict stoked by religious adherence and the desire of other crackpots to be contrarians.
The idea that evolution (physics, whatever) is counterintuitive is predicated on the idea that the evo-deniers already have an ‘intuitive’ framework of thought.
So far I haven’t seem much evidence that they’ve thought at all.
Take that biscuit-head from The View. Is a round earth more counterintuitive than a flat one? Who cares? She admits she hasn’t thought much about it. I’ll give thousand-to-one odds that she hasn’t thought about evolution either.
I’m sorry, but I’d suggest that it is only a small percentage of deniers that do so on some basis of counterintuitivity.
The essay gives three examples of “the wisdom of crowds”. I gather that this is intended as a way of understanding how “random variation and selection” works. Myself, I think that at least a good analogy is seen in the development of languages.
In fact, there is an industry of people who see the “random variation” in languages as leading only to deterioration – the “language cops” who complain that, unless we work at it, our language is going to hell. When, as is obvious, this kind of random change in language has been going on for thousands of years.
In other words, the study of language history shows that “intelligent design” is not needed to produce something as complex as a language.
But there are also patterns of standardization and rigor that apply. Without selecting out the variations that don’t work properly, random change does lead to deterioration.
If you run an image through a photocopier over and over again, eventually you’ll have nothing but a page of static.
I’m going to go a step further and suggest that many people who think they understand evolution don’t. We are taught from a young age about this mysterious evolutionary tree of life, but the tree is misleads us into thinking in terms of more and less advanced organisms (or, as if we all have descended from bacteria). This is simply not true, and even many biologists make this mistake. Bacteria have been evolving for as many years (and for *many* more generations) as we have. We’re all the most highly evolved organism for our own niche.
Or, as Norman Pace says “If you think that a dog is more highly evolved than a Prochlorococcus bacterium, do the experiment. Take them both out and drop them in the middle of the Sargasso Sea and see which one survives.”
http://conspiracyfactory.blogspot.com/2007/05/i-am-pinnacle-of-evolution.html
TomS, the reason I concentrated on wisdom of crowds was because, for one, it is a field I am particularly interested in so I might have some unique insights to share (my hope being that people might learn something interesting about my own field, as well as gaining insight into the issue of teaching evolution), but also because it is something that I have detected the most resistance to (so it supports the hypothesis that counterintuitiveness is a major factor).
Travc mentioned game theory, which is probably my core interest. But I found less direct analogies to evolution there. (although game theory and “wisdom of crowds” go hand in hand)
But you are right that language is an excellent analogy (and one that I have another little essay on, but I have yet to polish it up enough for public consumption).
Interestingly, most Americans seem to think of languages much as they (wrongly) think of species…that there are a fixed number of them, with hard boundaries. In Europe, where languages blend into one another and it isn’t all that clear what is a language and what is a dialect (and you can even have “ring languages” where A can communicate with B, B can communicate with C, but C can’t communicate with A), it is much easier to see the evolution in progress.
Over fifty years ago, I read either Darwin’s ‘On the Origin of Species’ or ‘The Ascent of Man’, when I was about nine or ten years old. It was just a book in the bookcase, & on rainy days I read it. I still remember being tremendously impressed by Darwin’s thoroughness & breadth of investigations. By age twelve I’d become an atheist, & tore up my bible, without telling my parents. (I was a fairly ordinary student, by the way, so I reckon just about anyone can grasp the concept of natural selection.)
I recently read ‘On the Origin of Species’ & found it heavy going, because the language is rather archaic. It wouldn’t do for most people, I suspect. How about if someone wrote a modern ‘translation’, with footnotes to introduce concepts that were unknown to Darwin, in the field of genetics? That would be more digestible, & very compelling. (Go on, someone tell me it’s been done.)
I should also mention that as a creationist kid growing up, archaeopteryx scared the hell out of me. It’s amazing how well creationism can poison the well, meaning that even after I accepted the evidence for evolution, the homologies argument still seemed to me not to be very strong. But archaeopteryx? No one explained that bird satisfactorily to me, and I had to rely on some of the “proofs” that evolution could not occur.
I was seriously questioning creationism by 14 or 15, and out of it by 16. OK, but that’s me, and I was always interested in science, and could not long hold onto the “scientists are lying to us about evolution” nonsense while respecting what they did everywhere else. What I am saying here that probably does hold fairly universally among creationists/IDists, is that they have to ignore what in fact is plainly intuitive (that archaeopteryx looks for all the world like what would be expected from evolution by natural selection plus the other mechanisms) and rely on their “absolute proofs” that evolution could not occur, in order to bypass the fact that evolution becomes intuitive when the evidence is properly presented.
That’s why ID has its bogus mathematics. It doesn’t matter that Dembski’s math is “buggy”, and more importantly, not based upon empirical data. Your typical creo or IDist doesn’t understand it, but these people do know that they want proof against archaeopteryx and the apparently genealogical origins of the taxonomic system. They rely on “proving” evolution wrong, they must rely on “proving evolution wrong,” in order to keep from intuiting evolution from the evidence that we present.
The fact is that the science-minded found evolution to be intuitive after Linnaeus and others showed the relationships of organisms. Early in the 19th century, before Darwin and Wallace came up with a good supported theory, Coleridge disapprovingly noted how it was that intellectuals were considering evolutionary processes to explain the obvious relationships between organisms. And archaeopteryx quite visually and obviously moves the relationships back into deep time, in a way that no other transitional does or can do (at least not without substantial knowledge of comparative morphology).
It does take a bit of learning before evolution becomes intuitive, but even when I was a creationist (and before I had any decent education in evolution, I should add), the intuitiveness of the evolutionary explanation for archaeopteryx was inescapable to me. Creationism is hardly intuitive once a certain amount of data have been amassed, is my point (and I think that in, say, Europe, the intuitive nature of evolution becomes apparent to most school children without much trouble), and there is much that is intuitive about evolution, from the variation among siblings (and across “races”, btw, though, in the pedagogical sense, we’re unlucky in not being nearly as diverse as chimps are), to the obvious similarities we have with apes and monkeys (we’re drawn to the intuitive similarities between ourselves and our close kin), to the unavoidable transitional status of archaeopteryx.
No science is completely intuitive, as far as I know. Evolution is probably one of the more intuitive concepts in science, once it has been presented properly (many who read Darwin’s book asked themselves why they didn’t think of it). While we should not forget how evolution is culturally and religiously foreign, and thus non-intuitive, to certain segments of society, we should never sell evolution short, for it is actually one of the concepts in science which can be understood in fairly familiar ways.
If we did present the evidence for evolution in a way that appealed to its intuitive aspects more often, creationism might not be as great a problem as it is now. I am not denying that it would be a problem, I’m simply mentioning facts such as that older presentations of evolution in textbooks, and elsewhere, tended to be more intuitive and convincing to people who didn’t already understand and accept evolutionary explanations. Vestigial organs are not on the cutting edge of scientific research, and yet, something like the platypus’s juvenile teeth, and our body hair and its mechanisms for bristling at danger (we still raise our hackles at danger, even though it is no longer visible (or barely)), are far more intuitive evidence in favor of evolution than are the much more statistically meaningful evidences found in comparisons of DNA across the taxa.
We know far more about evolution than we did in 1920, but I believe that we know less about the pedagogy of evolution than we did in 1920. Many sectors of religion will continue to try to keep evolution from appearing to be as intuitive as it happens to be, however on our part, we need to do a better job of showing just how intuitive evolution is once the facts are known and ordered into the obvious patterns.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
I have a single data point regarding conversion from anti-evolution to pro-evolution–my 87 year old evangelical Christian mother. She was never taught evolution, but picked up through her years in the church that it was godless and therefore suspect. What changed her mind? I hate to say it, but Francis Collins The Language of God. In particular, the 99 point whatever percent similarity between various animal genomes. For her, I think it was very important to get the message from some one she trusted, one of “her own”.
The problem with the analogies to Wikipedia et al. is that all involve input or activity by intelligent agents. (Yes, the intelligence of the agents is logically beside the point, but pseudo-objections to evolution have never suffered among creationists for being logically beside the point.)
I agree, and when these contrarian crackpots conspire to undermine and devalue the education of impressionable minds that, to me is a tragedy. When the contrarian crackpots turn their attention to undermining and devaluing genuine scientific findings (AIDS, HIV etc) it then becomes criminal.
The answer is, of course, to maintain the highest standards of scientific education possible in the schools. By fighting those that would seek to impose their theology on scientific endeavour and by exposing them for the charlatans they are. Broadcasting to the world their deceit and sophistry and showing it for what it is, only then can we achieve the social concensus that, hey, that particular emperor has no clothes. Maybe then educators could concentrate on educating instead of worrying about what little Johnny has been told by his ‘True’ Christian parents.*
*Don’t even get me started on the subject of Evangelical Christian homeschooling. :((
That was a great article, PZ. Thanks for the link.
I would expand on the PZ’s post to claim that there are multiple groups that have difficulties with evolution or science in general. and multiple reasons behind this. It can be social, but also based in specific ways or problems of thinking.
And people do think differently. Good visual thinking seems like a necessary characteristic for a mathematician. Yet I heard the rumor that one of the best topologists rely solely on language based reasoning. (The specific case may be an urban math legend of course.)
Denialists are often incompetents, that is genuinely unable to acquire competence coupled with an inability to recognize it. < href="http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2005/10/you-cant-be-blamed-for-unknown.html">This is an observable effect.
Some people seem to have problems grasping the idea of abstractions. While others do it too easily and drown themselves and their poor listeners in bad analogies. Et cetera.
I would expand on the PZ’s post to claim that there are multiple groups that have difficulties with evolution or science in general. and multiple reasons behind this. It can be social, but also based in specific ways or problems of thinking.
And people do think differently. Good visual thinking seems like a necessary characteristic for a mathematician. Yet I heard the rumor that one of the best topologists rely solely on language based reasoning. (The specific case may be an urban math legend of course.)
Denialists are often incompetents, that is genuinely unable to acquire competence coupled with an inability to recognize it. < href="http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2005/10/you-cant-be-blamed-for-unknown.html">This is an observable effect.
Some people seem to have problems grasping the idea of abstractions. While others do it too easily and drown themselves and their poor listeners in bad analogies. Et cetera.
Drake said:
You are absolutely right, and that is one reason I suggest trying to teach the “way of thinking” prior to even bringing evolution into the picture. Don’t push the analogy, just let them ease their way into “getting” these similar sorts of things.
The way I look at it, this isn’t just about converting those who already take a strong stand against it, it is about helping along those who have yet to really form that much of an opinion, but whose brains struggle with the concepts moreso than yours or mine did.
How about if someone wrote a modern ‘translation’, with footnotes to introduce concepts that were unknown to Darwin, in the field of genetics?
Yep, it’s been done by UK geneticist/author Steve Jones:
Darwin’s Ghost: The Origin of Species Updated
…this 2001 rewrite preserves only Darwin’s chapter headings and abstracts, and rewrites all their content from a modern perspective.
For a version of the Origin more literally faithful to the original, this older (1982) abridgement by Rechard Leakey is attractive if obtainable: The Illustrated Origin of Species
(er, that’s Richard Leakey of course. The old bones guy.)
Btw, the article suggests that graphics will help make people comfortable with hard to visualize processes.
I think it is essentially a good idea, most peoples understanding is facilitated by visualization. Creationists will interpret any form of simulations or graphics as further evidence for ‘needed intelligence’, but outside the group of hardcore fanatics it should help.
Btw, the article suggests that graphics will help make people comfortable with hard to visualize processes.
I think it is essentially a good idea, most peoples understanding is facilitated by visualization. Creationists will interpret any form of simulations or graphics as further evidence for ‘needed intelligence’, but outside the group of hardcore fanatics it should help.
Oops. Updating the screen reveals that the ‘intelligence’ angle is already covered. Mea culpa.
Oops. Updating the screen reveals that the ‘intelligence’ angle is already covered. Mea culpa.
Evolution is like Global Warming.
If your desire to believe is strong enough – you can believe!
I don’t have enough faith.
Ross Nixon is sounding a lot like Stupid.
If he related his thoughts to each other, he could approximate cogency.
But he doesn’t.
OK, this is a little OT.
I am curious about the different races and how they evolved. Skin pigment goes from dark near the equator to light in the northern latitudes with a continuum in between. The dark skin helps prevent skin cancer in the equatorial regions and light skin absorbs more vitamin D in the northern latitudes. But can evolution account for this?
Assuming that those in northern latitudes evolved from African origins, is there enough time for random genetic changes to account for the differences in skin tone? And where did this genetic variation take place, in sperm, in egg, in the fetus, elsewhere?
I hypothesize something else is going on. There seems to be a positive feedback (not just natural selection) mechanism that somehow senses the need for more vitamin D and alters the DNA to compensate.
I can attest that unintuitive results from probability theory can generate debates almost as passionate as those from evolutionary biology.
I’m probably not the only one who has gone to great lengths to explain to others about the Monty Hall problem from Let’s Make a Deal:
– Given three doors, one of which has a car behind it
– Contestant selects one door, but Monty doesn’t open it yet
– Monty Hall opens one of the unchosen doors to show it does not have the car
– Contestant may choose to open the original selected door, or switch his choice to the remaining closed door
It’s not hard to prove taht the contestant doubles his chances of winning by switching to the one he didn’t choose; he will win 67% of the time if he always switches.
Be careful who you tell this to. Some people argue very strongly against this mathematical truth. I think it’s because people don’t intuitively understand probability theory, but they think they do.
http://mathforum.org/dr.math/faq/faq.monty.hall.html
I first encountered the problem on a final exam for an undergrad course in Artificial Intelligence. I arrived at the correct answer, and spent far too much time reviewing the work because I had trouble believing that answer could be right.
I felt quite the opposite while learning about it, evolution was quite intuitive. The word evolution was already there in language because its a process applied all the time in other things, and because we understand other things like culture, language, fashion or whatever and we understand evolutionary process in those many other contexts, biological evolution seems quite intuitive to me. Species were only the latest thing found to evolve.
I did not find that the examples he used were that any easier to understand than any of the others he was suggesting were harder to understand. All had at there root the effect of time. It seems to me that time is probably the simplest and the most difficult concept to deal with. I had studied basic biology and had a fair understanding of Evolution when I was introduced to the concepts of Charles Lyell in a basic geology course. That one event turned the light on how we started to think of time in a different way, helped make it clear that time is a moving horizon and extends in both directions.
most people live a life in a subjective world that started when they were born with only the experience of their personal now and personal history to go on.
Once an understanding of time as illustrated by simple geology is accomplished many other ideas some of which may be more challenging are much easier.
on another note I followed the discussion of the comment from the woman on “The View”. I was not familiar with her until I saw her on one of the late night talk shows. She is a comedian if she were blond she would be a joke much easier to understand. Who would expect someone who has spent her time being funny and entertaining would also be a deep thinker on weighter subjects. To be a comedian is to not be afraid of being taken for a fool but to embrace it. she is funny!
I did not find that the examples he used were that any easier to understand than any of the others he was suggesting were harder to understand. All had at there root the effect of time. It seems to me that time is probably the simplest and the most difficult concept to deal with. I had studied basic biology and had a fair understanding of Evolution when I was introduced to the concepts of Charles Lyell in a basic geology course. That one event turned the light on how we started to think of time in a different way, helped make it clear that time is a moving horizon and extends in both directions.
most people live a life in a subjective world that started when they were born with only the experience of their personal now and personal history to go on.
Once an understanding of time as illustrated by simple geology is accomplished many other ideas some of which may be more challenging are much easier.
on another note I followed the discussion of the comment from the woman on “The View”. I was not familiar with her until I saw her on one of the late night talk shows. She is a comedian if she were blond she would be a joke much easier to understand. Who would expect someone who has spent her time being funny and entertaining would also be a deep thinker on weighter subjects. To be a comedian is to not be afraid of being taken for a fool but to embrace it. she is funny!
Bronze Dog in comment #1 said “I’m glad evolution pretty well clicked in my head right after learning about the mechanisms.”
Are you confident that all the mechanisms are currently known? I am not saying that you implied that, but I am curious as to how many mechanisms you had to learn about before “it clicked.”
It does seem to me that I covered this in another comment, but: I think that creationists confuse the design, production and improvement of technology, which is sometimes characterised as an “evolution” with natural evolution. And since every one of those products, even the crudest, first attempts, had a designer or maker, so must the world. They cannot grasp that the process which has designed and improved those products, a process which they trust their lives to everyday, science, might be right about ferreting out some of the mysteries of how we, and the world developed.
They have got it, like, so backward!
Mango’s example bring up a pedagogical difficulty in teaching probability – absolute clarity and sufficient emphasis on the assumptions built into the system.
Mango’s statement “Monty Hall opens one of the unchosen doors to show it does not have the car”
This is an ambiguous and absolutely crucial statement. My assumption on reading this was that this was a chance event – 2/3 of the time the door would reveal no car and 1/3 of the time it would reveal a car. Given that it revealed no car each of the remaining doors has a 50:50 chance of having the car. Mango’s statement of 67% probability made no sense.
However when I followed the link I discovered that Mr. Hall has deliberately selected a door with no car – completely different situation from what I had assumed.
This is a common situation – there is an unshared assumption that hinders understanding.
The Monty Hall Paradox does require that after the contestant’s first choice, Monty opens an unchosen door that does not have the car.
Ross Nixon, the reason the Scientific Method had to be invented, was to overcome the tendency of all humans to let desire control belief. It’s sort of a fundamental flaw in our nature.
Whether it be faeries, plate tectonics or cold fusion, replicable experiments and predictive power go a long way to getting a hypothesis accepted.
I do have faith, if you can call it that, in the power of the notion that making an unjustified conclusion from the data will get my paper pwned by others just waiting to make a name at my expense.
Now, a valid criticism of Global Warming modelers might be that they didn’t predict how fast the North Polar Ice Cap would melt. The global warming critic who first offers a useful explanation for that gets to claim a real contribution to world knowledge.
I am confused as to which examples I said were easy to understand and which I said were hard to understand. I think I said that all the examples were hard to understand (that is, for many people, probably not for you and I).
BTW, several people said that they find evolution to be very intuitive. But I have to ask, do you find the other things in the article (wikipedia, prediction markets, recommendation systems) intuitive? Because if so, that means you are not in the set of people I am talking about that finds such concepts difficult. I have always found evolution intuitive also.
I looked at Rob Brown’s article and I have to confess that I don’t get his point. I’ve never found evolution by natural selection counter-intuitive in any way, shape, or form. Here’s a counter-example:
Baseball, when you think it about it, is exceedingly complex. The implications of a given situation in a game are dependent upon dozens of variables from the objective situation – how many runners on base, number of outs – to the statistical – the batting averages, the eras of the players – to the immediately subjective and/or random – the mood of the players, effect of playing out of town, a fan interfering with a play, etc.
Understanding evolution, as explained at the level of detalil that Darwin used, is an intellectual exercise not much more difficult than baseball. The Origin of Species is nowhere near the level of, say, Einstein’s 1905 physics papers in terms of comprehensibility. That’s why Huxley said how incredibly stupid it was not to have thought of natural selection!
Deeply held social/religious/moral objections to evolution seem to me the only serious issue here. If you can’t grasp the principles of evolution, you would have a lot of trouble following baseball. And mentalities who have that level of functioniong are not driving the christianist opposition to science.
Of course it’s the same on US soil. Is Chiricahua Apache a separate language from Navajo? The difference is just that this whole topic simply isn’t visible to the average American, who can travel through the whole country without noticing that there is any language other than English.
Already in Big L’s lifetime, Buffon came up with a theory of evolution. Big L explicitely rejected it.
Of course it’s the same on US soil. Is Chiricahua Apache a separate language from Navajo? The difference is just that this whole topic simply isn’t visible to the average American, who can travel through the whole country without noticing that there is any language other than English.
Already in Big L’s lifetime, Buffon came up with a theory of evolution. Big L explicitely rejected it.
You would also have a problem understanding evolution if you go the intuitive route of concluding that the process in which we get ever improving products and processes reflects the natural world. And of course, in that process, everything has a designer. I think they do it unconsciously, adopt material progress and abundance as a model for the natural world. They’re not the same. Tube radios do not mate and produce mutant offspring-with transistors.
There are a lot of us, like Huxley, who learn of evolution and our only reply is a slap to the forehead and a loud “Of course!” In that sense it is entirely intuitive to us.
However, I’ve talked to a lot of creationists, and that is not universally true. What we think is obvious they may find incomprehensible. Consider the ever popular “If evolution is true, how can there still be monkeys?” argument. We say “huh?” and can hardly believe they asked something so goofy. But to them, it is eminently logical and is an important question that must be answered, because they don’t understand even the simplest concepts in evolution.
Another example: I had a conversation a while back where I gave a rough outline of biological history, with humans in the last million years, and single celled organisms 700 million years ago, and I tried to explain how we find deep homologies in the genome. His question: Where was the human genome in the single-celled animal? Try as I might, I couldn’t get out of his head this idea that the entire range of human possibility had to be encoded in all of our ancestors, or evolution was false. There could be no new variants, only expression of a predetermined possibility.
With that level of misapprehension, it’s nearly impossible to get to Darwin’s argument.
I think too many of us assume that evolution deniers, at least some, are thinkers–people with an analyitical bent. Most are not. IMHO evolution spawns deniers in two ways: 1) It renders mankind and the Earth incredibly small, in fact, irrelevant, within the universe, and 2) The time spans of evolution are incomprehensible to a mind adapted to thinking in decades.
A corallary to the first point is that religion–almost all religion–is selfish and egocentric. The universe exists for me and my family–which by extension can include all humanity. Therefore god made the place just for me. Without even addressing the existence of a god or gods, evolution says otherwise. Deniers find that more unsettling than a Hitler or Pol Pot.
Given the 10^7 difference between life span of individuals and the Earth, people simply can’t mentally span the gap. To deniers history didn’t exist before humanity began recording it. Therefore the world and the universe is 5000 years old. Period.
Reason and evidence cannot and will not convince them otherwise–ever.
What is truly counter-intuitive about evolution, after one gets past deep time, is that it is non-teleological. A good half of S.J. Gould’s output for the layperson made this point in various ways.
The grade-school version of evolution, “The Earth is really old. First there were weird invertebrates, then there were fishes, then a fish wanted to go on land, then there were dinosaurs, then there were mice, some mice went up in trees and were like monkeys, some monkeys came out of the trees and then there was us!” is implicitly teleological, embracing a goal-driven ladder, rather than a branching bush. People find this intuitive because they understand that life has changed dramatically over unfathomable periods of time, and, hey, here we are, right, so the whole thing had a point.
What is counter-intuitive are the notions that all “transitional species” were in reality a finished product, a perfectly evolved organism for a given niche, and that all the macro-evolutionary transitions began as hum-drum minor variations leading to speciation events. People have trouble with confusing the retrospective view of a given lineage as a progression toward something with the reality of the ratchet of selection, operating in the many-times-multiplied selection of almost trivially minor variations.
I have a young son, and I find it incredibly difficult to explain evolution to him without leaning on teleological shorthand. The fact that basic primers do the same thing without explicitly noting that they are using shorthand for lucidity is a big part of the problem here identified. We grow up with evolution as a goal-oriented process and very few receive the education that can explain how it can be that it is not.
According to Dembski..
Got this quote off of a creationist’s blog linking to UD. Only a few posts beforehand the guy was arguing that evolution says that fish morph into whales.
*Groan*
Gents,
Please help this ol’ geologist. I have found Gould’s ‘drunk on a path with a road on one side & a brick wall on the other’ a useful tool in dealing, gently, with creos. The Random Mutation statement by IDiots implies “anything goes” and that’s certainly BS. I use a simple skin color example of a range of proteins that work. Presumably there are lethal randoms available that occasionally find expression and, of course, leave no progeny. Anyone got a fill out of of this argument? Could there be a “blue” that doesn’t indicate anoxia? That ‘brick wall’ is no reproduction and that’s an inefficient tool. Predators are tough enough. The “random” is an unobserved big lie.
It is counterintuitive because we are the dominant species on the planet and the most intelligent tool user. Since we select the criteria for the above, it fits us perfectly. So from our humanocentric viewpoint, evolution’s greatest success was to ultimately produce us.
The goal for all our history stretching back 3.6 billion years has always been to survive and reproduce better than the organisms around us. Which eventually led to intelligent tool users through a blind process.
I find the teleological thinking to be a minor error. At least they know the earth isn’t 6,000 years old, Noah had a Big Boat full of dinosaurs, and evolution can’t happen.
Duncan McMillan (#7) brought up philosopher Lewis Wolpert and The Unnatural Nature of Science, and I’ll bring up a similar book by physics professor Alan Cromer, Uncommon Sense: The Heretic Nature of Science. Both books argue that it’s not just the scientific concepts or theories that can be counterintuitive (like preferring Dennett’s skyhooks to cranes), but the process of science itself. The scientific method doesn’t work the way the human mind ordinarily thinks: it couldn’t, because it was designed over time to eliminate those intuitive biases and rules of thumb which we usually use to run our lives because, on the whole, they usually work.
One of the things that always strikes me about creationists is how cavalier they are when it comes to weighing viewpoints. A superficial, layman’s “common sense” opinion based on little study will override the consensus of well-educated experts who actually work in a field which has made successful predictions for over 100 years. The idea seems to be that people ought to be able to figure things out from their “own experience.” We prefer stories to statistics because personal insight is valued over a competitive system which goes outside of it. Therefore, the average person tends to regard scientific peer review as a popularity vote based on authority and trust. Cromer’s math students would sometimes complain about having to do geometic “proofs” — why should they, when they already believed it? Science is a totally different approach than we’re used to.
Cromer writes:
“Scientific thinking, which is analytic and objective, goes against the grain of traditional human thinking, which is associative and subjective. Far from being a natural part of human development, science arose from unique historical factors. And viewed against the thousands of years of human existence, science is very recent.”
The contentious, competitive, and critical social process of science could be another example of a gradualist self-corrective algorithm which builds on itself, like Wikipedia, and gets more accurate over time. I think Rob Brown’s right when he says this can be hard to grasp. It’s not what we usually do. What we do when we figure out the world is closer to technology. And as others point out, science is different than technology, which does work from intelligent top-down design. Technology seems to come more easily to the species.
I learned the basic concepts of evolutionary theory in early high school and my research involves using genetic algorithms, and though the ideas are very clear to me, I can certainly see how they are counterintuitive.
I think the stickler is the notion of design without intent. Take Paley’s old chestnut…When confronted with an entity that has a high degree of structure and complexity, is it more intuitive to conclude that:
A) It was designed and implemented by an intelligent agent.
or
B) That it arose through an extremely long process involving the change in gene frequencies in a population of individuals whose differential survival depended on the complicated expression of those genes through interaction with their environment into various phenotypes whose reproductive success depended in large part on their suitability to their environment.
I’m guessing A is a bit easier for your average person to grasp.
One more vote for intuitive!
Rob Brown said (at #23) “Don’t push the analogy, just let them ease their way into “getting” these similar sorts of things.”
It’s a fair point, Rob. I just think that to get rid of all the possible baggage, we’d want to include analogies to “natural” (in the sense that will be uncontroversial to anti-Darwinists) processes in which a high degree of order spontaneously develops, and in which there is no possible tincture of intelligent input. E.g., the formation of solar systems, diffusion-limited aggregation, self-organized criticality, and so forth.
I also appreciate Charley’s point at #18 above that mushy-middle theistic evolutionists like Ken Miller serve a vital social function, viz., serving as a trustworthy authority to those who would be resistant to the same evidence were it presented by an otherwise qualified atheist scientist. Pace P.Z., I really do think Miller and his ilk do far, far much more epistemic good than bad.
Duh. In re examples of self-organization, I obviously should have mentioned molecular self-assembly. Run an animation film of SAM-formation, for instance, then compare it to a row of seats coming together on a 747, and it’s well nigh Mission Accomplished as against Hoyle’s argument.
One more comment on intuitive vs. non-intuitive. Evolution is not so non-intuitive that creationists and IDists don’t understand organisms as changing, which is undeniable (and quite striking) when it comes to dogs and many food plants. Most will accept speciation, and often much more than that. Indeed, to save the “ark hypothesis”, many creationists have only one representative of “the cat kind” on the ark, with a breathtakingly swift evolution of cheetahs and lions out of that “kind”. This is usually understood to be undirected evolution, as well.
What is truly counterintuitive is that they can see certain kinds of changes occurring on the level of “microevolution”, or whatever they call it, then they see the same sorts of effects on the “higher orders” of evolution as well. Yet they deny that the latter changes happened by the same methods that they accept as the cause of relatedness coming from “microevolution”. Behe can’t even demonstrate any break in evolution, and yet he “calculates” that the evolution we see giving P. falciparum its resistance to drugs to be due to “Darwinism”, while the same kinds of changes happening at, perhaps, the family level, have to be due to “design”. Does it make intuitive sense that the same patterns of inheritance and taxonomy should be due to completely different causes?
See, this is the thing. Nothing is “intuitive” all by itself. It’s all contextual. If you’re taught one thing, it becomes difficult to “intuit” something quite different, especially if that other model happens to be “Satanic”. Of course humans’ tendencies to infer purpose is a well-known problem in the pedagogy of evolution, but this is true in most pedagogy of the other sciences as well. Nevertheless, people eventually get around a great many preconceptions, including our bias toward inferring purpose, yet many have great difficulty in doing so when it comes to evolution.
The source of this difficulty is in culture and religion, not in the basic inborn (in)flexibility of the mind. The fact is, as I argued above, that Behe and the other IDists and creationists cannot think intuitively about evolution simply because they have a barrier against accepting non-teleological evolution. Behe is not thinking intuitively when he denies similar processes produced similar effects over the course of evolution, he is brazenly non-intuitive in that context. Likewise with the hyperevolution that many creationists accept to save Noah’s ark.
Yes, in one sense Behe and the other creationistic thinkers are intuitive, simply because they have blocked off their ability to think in evolutionary terms and so nothing about MET can be intuitive. It’s not something that is an innate problem (not past a certain young age, anyhow), however, it is just due to a certain kind of debilitating socialization or acculturation, which they mean to pass on to the next generation. Because it is relatively easy to harm people as they intend to do, they are a serious threat to humanity.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
Okay, there was some unstated assumptions in this. So let us break it down.
First, while it is peripheral to the main question, does “races” exist? Races are certainly partly a social construct, there people selfidentify to different groups. But the question if it has a biological relevance doesn’t seem to be ascertained. p-ter at gnxp summed up his view of the current consensus in january:
But I have seen others claim that these are gradients more than clustering.
Second, is skin color distributed according to latitude? No, according to razib at Gene Expression (see the map), that runs a long series of posts on this:
Okay, there was some unstated assumptions in this. So let us break it down.
First, while it is peripheral to the main question, does “races” exist? Races are certainly partly a social construct, there people selfidentify to different groups. But the question if it has a biological relevance doesn’t seem to be ascertained. p-ter at gnxp summed up his view of the current consensus in january:
But I have seen others claim that these are gradients more than clustering.
Second, is skin color distributed according to latitude? No, according to razib at Gene Expression (see the map), that runs a long series of posts on this:
Hmpf. I’m sure that when they say evolution leads to nested structures they weren’t thinking of my abuse of blockquote tags…
Not in the context I live in. Teleology is very much alive in peoples native models of science and technology.
Personifying cars is cute and harmless, even helpful at times. (It is easier to remember and describe [insert name of your car] coughing engine than the odd engine noises of a nondescript car.) But when people buy in to the Disneyan/Aristotelian concepts, such as “recognizing the condition of falling/no motion without a force”, they are as hard to convince of observed physical processes and their causes as in other domains.
One simple test is to get people to choose between diagrams of canon projectiles. Very few get the trajectory correct. The same problem appears when they are asked to choose diagrams of collisions et cetera.
I would rather the sciences cooperate for best effect. That would imply biology doing its best to eliminate teleological descriptions, even if they are convenient in historical narratives.
Hmpf. I’m sure that when they say evolution leads to nested structures they weren’t thinking of my abuse of blockquote tags…
Not in the context I live in. Teleology is very much alive in peoples native models of science and technology.
Personifying cars is cute and harmless, even helpful at times. (It is easier to remember and describe [insert name of your car] coughing engine than the odd engine noises of a nondescript car.) But when people buy in to the Disneyan/Aristotelian concepts, such as “recognizing the condition of falling/no motion without a force”, they are as hard to convince of observed physical processes and their causes as in other domains.
One simple test is to get people to choose between diagrams of canon projectiles. Very few get the trajectory correct. The same problem appears when they are asked to choose diagrams of collisions et cetera.
I would rather the sciences cooperate for best effect. That would imply biology doing its best to eliminate teleological descriptions, even if they are convenient in historical narratives.
In my previous life, before the infernal computer grabbed my attention and ruined everything, I worked as a behavior analyst with adults and children with various disabilities. The operating paradigm was applied behavior analysis, which was a branch of Skinnerian psychology. As I progressed in my career, and began training other humans how to train other humans using behavioral analytic techniques, I found that the concept of “selection by consequences” was indeed a formidable one for my students to grasp. At least in terms of something that hasn’t happened yet “causing” a client’s behavior – it was very difficult for some people to internalize such an idea (a phrase which my trainer would have scorned – it was a difficult concept for the trainee to learn. period). We also fudged some of the finer points of the contingent relationship of environment and behavior, watering down our language with every day terms for technical jargon – we “rewarded clients for good behavior” instead of the more correct “reinforced the calm sitting behavior” – to make things more palatable and understandable to staff (many of whom, when the economy was booming and we enjoyed ‘full employment’ were often nearly indistinguishable from the clients they were supposed to be supervising – human services line staff positions are less valued than burger flipping).
So to the “intuitive” voters, remember that you and those who read this blog are smarter than the average pic-a-nic basket and you are much more able to understand concepts which the average human – that’s the hovering around the 100 IQ points guy with the crappy job type human – can grok. Selection by consequences takes some getting used to. It’s true, it happens, our behavior is shaped by it’s consequences as surely as evolution happens on a grander scale. But volition often gets snuck into evoltion as a short hand way of illustrating a point. The esoteric bits are dumbed down for a lay audience and for small but growing minds. It’s a big fat honkin subject that doesn’t fit into “survival of the fittest” or other tidy but incorrect phrases, just as “antecedents, behavior, consequences” is a caricature of Skinnerian learning. But one has to start somewhere. Behavioral selection by consequences – that we are controlled primarily by our environment – is true, it happens just as surely as the selection of species by the environment, but it is troublesome for some to think about when we start to mash it up with other concepts like freedom, responsibility, dignity, self-control and free will.
raven: It isn’t just that – as a poster above and as Lord Kelvin reminded Darwin. One needs the very “inhuman” timescales, as well. This is a general problem humans have faced – sizes of things so drastically outside of our experience. I remember well Aristotle’s argument against the atomist account of mixtures: he basically says – you’ve got to be joking – mixtures like wine-in-water are homogeneous, not like a bunch of grains threshed together. It doesn’t occur to him that the “bits of water” are so incredibly tiny that our ordinary experience doesn’t show them up.
robbrown: I had thought about ring languages once. Can you provide an example?
(Finally: I think the reason that many scientists say that science is like common sense is that it is like THEIR common sense …)
Re the Monty Hall thing.
I find people that don’t get this one often turn out to have misunderstood it – even if you explain it completely unambiguously (which is usually not done). [I suggest WRITING it down for them because many people will argue you didn’t say what you actually said.]
The way to get around the misunderstanding is not to try to explain it again, but is to actually set up a demonstration (such as hiding a prize – say a small coin – and two duds – washers or pebbles, under three bowls). Exchange the other person half the coins (say ten dimes for a dollar, so at any stage they can walk away with whatever coins they have left), and you take turns being Monty.
You should argue that since they think the chances are unchanged by the strategy, they should never switch, while you will take the other strategy of always switching – and if they are right, the game is to nobody’s advantage. In many cases as soon as they try to be Monty, their misapprehension of the conditions is *immediately* obvious (since they either realise they hadn’t thought about the circumstances clearly, or they show you they DIDN’T understand the conditions by revealing a box with the prize).
For the people who understood the conditions but don’t understand conditional probability, watching their money dwindle soon cures their delusion. Since it can take quite a while to win all the money, I suggest “25 turns each or when one of us loses all their coins, whichever comes first” as a reasonable stopping rule. If they’re still not conviced, just play them again another day. And another. It’s a slow way to get rich, but stupid people are cheap entertainment.)
Evolution pretty much made sense from the first I heard of it, though I never thought about it in all that much detail.
Until, that is, one day I was looking at a display of a whole variety of skeletons of various creatures (I don’t even remember exactly where now, but I don’t think it was a museum) – many, many dozens of skeletons. Included in the display were some apes, and a human skeleton. Right there, I could compare the structure of a fruitbat’s wing with a human hand, with a dog’s front paw, with a mole’s front paw, and with birds and lizards and frogs and so on. I could compare a human skull with a gorilla skull. I could compare the structure of a fox’s teeth with those of a domestic dog, and so on and on. I could see broadly similar stuctures across very diverse creatures, and, generally speaking, more and more similar structures among animals regarded as being more “closely related”.
It’s not like I was unfamiliar with how creatures looked or that some looked more alike than others. But being able to do direct comparisons between so *many* creatures all at once really changed something.
Suddenly the branching relationships leapt off the pages of the books I had read and became something much more immediate and visceral. I could see that everything I was looking at certainly looked related to a greater or lesser extent. Evolution (at the basic level I understood at the time) certainly seemed like a reasonable explanation, given sufficient time – and I was aware that for many of the creatures I was looking at, tens of millions of years separated them from their common ancestors, some far, far longer.
I learned a lot more about evolution after that, but nothing quite matched the effect of seeing so many creatures all together. When I go to a museum, I try to find if they have a similar display of many creatures all together (it doesn’t have to include mammals, or even vertebrates, but I still have a certain fondness for displays that do).
TomS wrote: “In fact, there is an industry of people who see the ‘random variation’ in languages as leading only to deterioration – the ‘language cops’ who complain that, unless we work at it, our language is going to hell. When, as is obvious, this kind of random change in language has been going on for thousands of years.”
caledonian replied: “But there are also patterns of standardization and rigor that apply. Without selecting out the variations that don’t work properly, random change does lead to deterioration.
“If you run an image through a photocopier over and over again, eventually you’ll have nothing but a page of static.”
Yes, if language didn’t adhere to these patterns of standardization and rigor, then just like trying to deciper a page of static, all of us wouldn’t be able to understand each other’s speech. Oh, wait….
I imagine variations in written or spoken language would tend to be more directional than much of the variation involved in evolution (e.g., I’d guess spelling variations would tend toward the contemporary phonic). However, the “selecting out” process for language, just like some of the selection processes involved in evolution, also has inescapable random components – England’s rise as an economic power as faster world travel becomes possible, native Americans’ lack of resistance to Old World diseases, etc.
#49-
A superficial, layman’s “common sense” opinion based on little study will override the consensus of well-educated experts who actually work in a field which has made successful predictions for over 100 years. The idea seems to be that people ought to be able to figure things out from their “own experience.”
I agree, and would take it a step further for some individuals to include egocentric thinking, i.e. “if I don’t understand it or know about it, it must be wrong, or it must not exist”. Egocentric thinking may be more of a problem with individuals who have college degrees or are considered experts in a non-scientific field, than with (for example) an elderly evangelical Christian who has a high school education.
I’ve encountered humanities PhDs who refuse to accept that mutations in non-coding cis regulatory sequences can lead to significant changes in the morphology of an embryo, for instance. “*I* have never heard of evo-devo or cis regulatory elements, and *I* have degrees XYZ from Elite U and Snob U…so how can that possibly be true?”
By the way, the intense melanization of equatorial dwellers’ skin is also an adaptation from the human norm. In this case, it is to reduce the UV degradation of folate; a nutrient whose deficiency leads to neural tube defects in development. Scientific American had an article on this a few years back.
To extend further the point made by Barn Owl above, people like to think they know something that is special and different.
Being in a select minority with special knowledge (okay, this does overlap substantially with many religious beliefs) feels good. It is like gnosticism. Anti-evolution feeds a kind of elitist, superiority-complex thing: ‘Just imagine, I know more than all those brainy but deluded scientists!’ Anti-evolution propaganda feeds directly into this desire.
Back when I was a creationist (when I was in my early teens, after going through a Christian school) I think that this was a big part of the appeal of anti-evolutionary thinking. Of course, it dissolved under the weight of a solid education in history and biology, but for many who are not fortunate enough in that respect, the idea that their knowledge is superior to that of the ‘expert’ boffins (who they may be predisposed to dislike anyway) is deeply appealing. Certainly, I’ve seen it in those with whom I’ve argued about this issue in recent times.
There’s one more issue involved in the “intuitiveness” vs. “counterintuitiveness” of evolution. To some it seems fairly simple and quite intuitive, for these just see how it all fits together, perhaps immediately. To others, there just isn’t any, or isn’t much, mental integration, whether through resistance or because they’re just not good at seeing the whole.
Evolutionary theory at its most basic may appear to be fairly simple, yet the evidence for it is not so simply pieced together, in fact (the breakthrough science was comparatively late, probably not simply due to religious prejudices either, though these were operative). True, putting comparative anatomy, taxonomy based on comparative anatomy, vestigial organs, fossil evidence for the succession and transitions of life, and today, the DNA evidence, is hardly the most difficult feat of integration in science. Yet it is not easily done by many people who have never been interested in or studied science (or who have been poisoned against evolution), and they just see rather unconvincing little bits and pieces that they’re sure scientists put together into evolutionary theory solely because they’re biased against God.
Even the latter concept is unevidenced (never mind that science tends to cause decline in religiosity and belief, that’s rarely why one is interested in the science) and clearly coming from nothing but reaction. Yet it’s an extremely common “explanation” for evolutionary theory’s existence. And that’s just it, you have a kind of “worldview” which is fairly self-consistent (though they can’t quite explain why they trust the results of science when such scientifically “prejudiced” people are doing it), and within that context the intuitions are the opposite of a layman’s scientific intuitions, for their own world is integrated and safe, while the “evolutionist’s” world is fragmented and incoherent in their own view.
The basics of evolutionary thought are not rocket science, and can be quite intuitive to the open and somewhat educated mind. However, if they never do see the importance of converging lines of evidence, and how really crucial it is to understand biology with a coherent model, anything that we say or write is to them simply a number of disconnected arguments (against God, usually) which mean so very little next to the obvious “impossibility of evolution”. Even the actual need for a scientific model in biology is foreign to these folk (don’t biologists just study animals, organs, and cells? Who needs a theory that seems so unimportant (to them) as evolution?), even as the vast importance of defending their religion is triggered every time that evolution is mentioned.
If they ever come to think in reasonably scientific ways they will almost always find evolution to be intuitive. But when God is the only thing holding their worldview together (however artificially), giving up this single integrating “fact” (even if only in the “natural world”) to believe in “evolutionary randomness” is hardly an intuitive move. They are in Plato’s cave, or maybe more pointedly, Yahweh’s cave, and many refuse to come out into the sunshine to see what’s “real”. Some who do come out won’t actually see what life is as a whole, as they’ve never come to an integrated view of the world. And those who do come out and perceive will indeed find biological science to be intuitive, either quickly, or after much seeking and arguing.
It’s thus more or less a given that the anti-evolutionists do not find evolutionary thought to be intuitive, while, of course, to us it is quite intuitive. We made the connections, we found the beauty, the explanatory value, and the sheer usefulness, of an integrated biology. The anti-evolutionists never have (I doubt that any who were “evolutionists” who went the other way had done anything but dully accept a theory taught in a class they weren’t interested in taking), and a good many never will.
The latter will continue to push for the Endarkenment of society and of any minds within their power, while the intuitiveness or counter-intuitiveness of evolutionary thought to any individual will hinge upon how successful those who lack appreciation and ability for integrating concepts and evidence are in spreading their own lack of curiosity and understanding.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
pluky wrote: “By the way, the intense melanization of equatorial dwellers’ skin is also an adaptation from the human norm. In this case, it is to reduce the UV degradation of folate….”
Those familiar with how evolution works realize “adaptation to reduce UV degradation of folate” is shorthand for “people with this random melanization variation had more kids that lived.” Those skeptical of evolution who’ve never bothered to learn how it works, or who have a vested interest in not believing that it works, may think it is a “just-so” story (equatorial peoples getting their pigmentation, as the leopard got his spots). The inference that evolution has some sort of direction – that adaptation is “to” or “for” some purpose – is one barrier to understanding.
… a conflict created by the nonintuitive way that evolution works…
PZ, you are getting old and soft. You are starting “to understand” the morons. Evolution working in a nonintuitive way? What a nonsense. Evolution works in a totally logical, easily understandable way. No mystery anywhere. You dont even need statistics to understand it. It is so obvious. We need teachers who dont accept “nonintuitive” bullshit and demand hard work and clear thinking. You used to be like that.
We need teachers who are don’t comprehend why their students are having trouble getting it?
Wow. I don’t even know what to say.
Evolution is indeed like global warming.
Once you have amassed the necessary knowledge and understood the necessary concepts, you will find the conclusion inevitable.
Science is the systematic attempt to figure out reality. Reality is that which does not go away if you stop believing in it.
Equating “race” and “skin color” is not a good idea in humans. Equating “race” with anything observable is not a good idea in humans…
Sure. Why shouldn’t there be?
Somewhere in the germ line, because otherwise it wouldn’t have been heritable. If you don’t know what precisely I mean by “germ line”, please look it up.
Neither is there any evidence for such a process, nor is it necessary to explain what we see. Thus, there is no reason to suppose that any such process exists. I don’t even need to mention the fact that it is… very difficult to imagine how any such process might possibly work.
Mutations happen; even siblings do not necessarily have the exact same skin color. (I am gleaming white, but in summer my brother looks more mediterranean.)
Selection is inescapable. Having too dark skin in too high latitudes means your children get rachitis (no vitamin D, no bone). Having too transparent skin in too low latitudes means your children end as miscarriages (no folic acid, no spinal cord or brain).
No. There is no goal. You have to look at it the other way around: those that didn’t survive and reproduce well enough have died out and are not among our ancestors or among the ancestors of anything else that’s still alive.
I’ve never encountered any such person, but let me guess anyway: you were dealing with a simple lack of knowledge. In the first example, tree-thinking is what’s missing. Explain that a population can split into two. Illustrate it: draw a few blobs for populations and a river or something… In the second example, what’s missing is any idea of what DNA is, and therefore of what a mutation is. Explaining that, and DNA replication with all that can go wrong in it, and probably transcription and translation too, would take awfully long, of course. Which is why there are still monke… creationists. :^)
Evolution is indeed like global warming.
Once you have amassed the necessary knowledge and understood the necessary concepts, you will find the conclusion inevitable.
Science is the systematic attempt to figure out reality. Reality is that which does not go away if you stop believing in it.
Equating “race” and “skin color” is not a good idea in humans. Equating “race” with anything observable is not a good idea in humans…
Sure. Why shouldn’t there be?
Somewhere in the germ line, because otherwise it wouldn’t have been heritable. If you don’t know what precisely I mean by “germ line”, please look it up.
Neither is there any evidence for such a process, nor is it necessary to explain what we see. Thus, there is no reason to suppose that any such process exists. I don’t even need to mention the fact that it is… very difficult to imagine how any such process might possibly work.
Mutations happen; even siblings do not necessarily have the exact same skin color. (I am gleaming white, but in summer my brother looks more mediterranean.)
Selection is inescapable. Having too dark skin in too high latitudes means your children get rachitis (no vitamin D, no bone). Having too transparent skin in too low latitudes means your children end as miscarriages (no folic acid, no spinal cord or brain).
No. There is no goal. You have to look at it the other way around: those that didn’t survive and reproduce well enough have died out and are not among our ancestors or among the ancestors of anything else that’s still alive.
I’ve never encountered any such person, but let me guess anyway: you were dealing with a simple lack of knowledge. In the first example, tree-thinking is what’s missing. Explain that a population can split into two. Illustrate it: draw a few blobs for populations and a river or something… In the second example, what’s missing is any idea of what DNA is, and therefore of what a mutation is. Explaining that, and DNA replication with all that can go wrong in it, and probably transcription and translation too, would take awfully long, of course. Which is why there are still monke… creationists. :^)
Often what we mean by counterintuitive is that someone has a fundamental misconception that interferes with getting the explanation across. That we don’t have those particular misconceptions means we don’t have a barrier to grasping the idea…but that doesn’t mean other people will have an easy time of it.
Here’s another, common example: evolution couldn’t have happened because the first individual of a new species wouldn’t have anyone to mate with. Or which came first, the male of the species or the female? Who did they have sex with?
You get the idea. Those are among the most frequent questions I get asked, and they error is so fundamental that we often don’t think to explain it when we’re discussing evolution. We might be saying A. afarensis gave rise to H. erectus, and here’s a load of fossils, and here are the anatomical differences and similarities, etc., and they’re sitting there ignoring you because they can’t imagine what the first H. erectus did, other than die celibate and alone…or that they ran around raping monkeys because they were evil godless primates.
This is an entirely serious question when chromosome splits/mergers lead to speciation. In those rare cases, it does often seem to be the case that the mutation needs to happen twice in individuals that then happen to mate. Which is, presumably, why it doesn’t happen more often in animals.
This is an entirely serious question when chromosome splits/mergers lead to speciation. In those rare cases, it does often seem to be the case that the mutation needs to happen twice in individuals that then happen to mate. Which is, presumably, why it doesn’t happen more often in animals.