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Science as fashion and as literary genre
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| MrJiveBoJingles |
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/...ce-as-lite.html
| quote: | The X-Men comics use terms like "evolution", "mutation", and "genetic code", purely to place themselves in what they conceive to be the literary genre of science. The part that scares me is wondering how many people, especially in the media, understand science only as a literary genre.
I encounter people who very definitely believe in evolution, who sneer at the folly of creationists. And yet they have no idea of what the theory of evolutionary biology permits and prohibits. |
This is kind of an interesting point with regard to the sociology of belief. How many people have an extremely shallow understanding of science or scientific theories yet say that they "agree" with them simply so they can remain in step with what they perceive to be the intellectual fashion of their social group?
If someone asked you, could you explain the basic points of the scientific theories you say you agree with, or do you simply defer to "science" in general and think, "Well, those guys look really smart, so I'll just go along with whatever they claim to have discovered." |
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| Ygrene |
| Evolution is when you post a picture of a man trying to reach a pie and it eventually turns into a picture of said pie driving a Formula 1 car. |
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| david.michael |
| quote: | Originally posted by MrJiveBoJingles
"Well, those guys look really smart, so I'll just go along with whatever they claim to have discovered." |
Well, if people are not intelligent enough to discern things for themselves, then I suppose that they are better off agreeing with whomever seems to be intelligent enough to do so... rather than agreeing with whatever seems most pleasing, the status quo, whatever is easiest, whatever you were brainwashed to believe, etc.
It's not ideal, but it's understandable. |
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| david.michael |
| quote: | Originally posted by Ygrene
Evolution is when you post a picture of a man trying to reach a pie and it eventually turns into a picture of said pie driving a Formula 1 car. |
:stongue: :stongue: |
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| Meat187 |
And everybody should be ashamed who uses the wonders of science and engineering without thinking and having mentally realized not more of it than a cow realizes of the botany of the plants which it eats with pleasure.
- Albert Einstein
Apart from that, I agree with Ygrene.
Edit: I also believe that the real idiots are those who have no clue about science but choose to disagree with it. Unfortunately, there are a lot of those. |
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| Fledz |
| quote: | Originally posted by Ygrene
Evolution is when you post a picture of a man trying to reach a pie and it eventually turns into a picture of said pie driving a Formula 1 car. |
AHahahha, somebody link it! |
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| yukii |
what? :stongue: |
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| MrJiveBoJingles |
Bumped to post an old but interesting article about Carl Sagan and the popularization of science, related to this topic. Some excerpts:
| quote: | I first met Carl Sagan in 1964, when he and I found ourselves in Arkansas on the platform of the Little Rock Auditorium, where we had been dispatched by command of the leading geneticist of the day, Herman Muller. Our task was to take the affirmative side in a debate: "Resolved, That the Theory of Evolution is proved as is the fact that the Earth goes around the Sun." One of our opponents in the debate was a professor of biology from a fundamentalist college in Texas (his father was the president of the college) who had quite deliberately chosen the notoriously evolutionist Department of Zoology of the University of Texas as the source of his Ph.D. He could then assure his students that he had unassailable expert knowledge with which to refute Darwinism.
I had serious misgivings about facing an immense audience of creationist fundamentalist Christians in a city made famous by an Arkansas governor who, having detected a resentment of his constituents against federal usurpation, defied the power of Big Government by interposing his own body between the door of the local high school and some black kids who wanted to matriculate.
Young scientists, however, do not easily withstand the urgings of Nobel Prize winners, so after several transparently devious attempts to avoid the job, I appeared. We were, in fact, well treated, but despite our absolutely compelling arguments, the audience unaccountably voted for the opposition. Carl and I then sneaked out the back door of the auditorium and beat it out of town, quite certain that at any moment hooded riders with ropes and flaming crosses would snatch up two atheistic New York Jews who had the chutzpah to engage in public blasphemy.
Sagan and I drew different conclusions from our experience. For me the confrontation between creationism and the science of evolution was an example of historical, regional, and class differences in culture that could only be understood in the context of American social history. For Carl it was a struggle between ignorance and knowledge, although it is not clear to me what he made of the unimpeachable scientific credentials of our opponent, except perhaps to see him as an example of the Devil quoting scripture. The struggle to bring scientific knowledge to the masses has been a preoccupation of Carl Sagan's ever since, and he has become the most widely known, widely read, and widely seen popularizer of science since the invention of the video tube.
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Carl Sagan's program is more elementary. It is to bring a knowledge of the facts of the physical world to the scientifically uneducated public, for he is convinced that only through a broadly disseminated knowledge of the objective truth about nature will we be able to cope with the difficulties of the world and increase the sum of human happiness. It is this program that inspired his famous book and television series, Cosmos, which dazzled us with billions and billions of stars. But Sagan realizes that the project of merely spreading knowledge of objective facts about the universe is insufficient. First, no one can know and understand everything. Even individual scientists are ignorant about most of the body of scientific knowledge, and it is not simply that biologists do not understand quantum mechanics. If I were to ask my colleagues in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard to explain the evolutionary importance of RNA editing in trypanosomes, they would be just as mystified by the question as the typical well-educated reader of this review.
Second, to put a correct view of the universe into people's heads we must first get an incorrect view out. People believe a lot of nonsense about the world of phenomena, nonsense that is a consequence of a wrong way of thinking. The primary problem is not to provide the public with the knowledge of how far it is to the nearest star and what genes are made of, for that vast project is, in its entirety, hopeless. Rather, the problem is to get them to reject irrational and supernatural explanations of the world, the demons that exist only in their imaginations, and to accept a social and intellectual apparatus, Science, as the only begetter of truth. The reason that people do not have a correct view of nature is not that they are ignorant of this or that fact about the material world, but that they look to the wrong sources in their attempt to understand. It is not simply, as Sherlock Holmes thought, that the brain is like an empty attic with limited storage capacity, so that the accumulated clutter of false or useless bits of knowledge must be cleared out in a grand intellectual tag sale to make space for more useful objects. It is that most people's mental houses have been furnished according to an appallingly bad model of taste and they need to start consulting the home furnishing supplement of the Sunday New York Times in place of the stage set of The Honeymooners. The message of The Demon-Haunted World is in its subtitle, Science as a Candle in the Dark.
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Carl Sagan, like his Canadian counterpart David Suzuki, has devoted extraordinary energy to bringing science to a mass public. In doing so, he is faced with a contradiction for which there is no clear resolution. On the one hand science is urged on us as a model of rational deduction from publicly verifiable facts, freed from the tyranny of unreasoning authority. On the other hand, given the immense extent, inherent complexity, and counterintuitive nature of scientific knowledge, it is impossible for anyone, including non-specialist scientists, to retrace the intellectual paths that lead to scientific conclusions about nature. In the end we must trust the experts and they, in turn, exploit their authority as experts and their rhetorical skills to secure our attention and our belief in things that we do not really understand. Anyone who has ever served as an expert witness in a judicial proceeding knows that the court may spend an inordinate time "qualifying" the expert, who, once qualified, gives testimony that is not meant to be a persuasive argument, but an assertion unchallengeable by anyone except another expert. And, indeed, what else are the courts to do? If the judge, attorneys, and jury could reason out the technical issues from fundamentals, there would be no need of experts.
What is at stake here is a deep problem in democratic self-governance. In Plato's most modern of Dialogues, the Gorgias, there is a struggle between Socrates, with whom we are meant to sympathize, and his opponents, Gorgias and Callicles, over the relative virtues of rhetoric and technical expertise. What Socrates and Gorgias agree on is that the mass of citizens are incompetent to make reasoned decisions on justice and public policy, but that they must be swayed by rhetorical argument or guided by the authority of experts. |
http://www.drjbloom.com/Public%20fi...ntin_Review.htm |
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| winston |
| quote: | Originally posted by Meat187
And everybody should be ashamed who uses the wonders of science and engineering without thinking and having mentally realized not more of it than a cow realizes of the botany of the plants which it eats with pleasure.
- Albert Einstein
Apart from that, I agree with Ygrene.
Edit: I also believe that the real idiots are those who have no clue about science but choose to disagree with it. Unfortunately, there are a lot of those. |
please...
where is schroedingerwin when you need him :conf: |
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| winston |
| quote: | Originally posted by MrJiveBoJingles
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/...ce-as-lite.html
This is kind of an interesting point with regard to the sociology of belief. How many people have an extremely shallow understanding of science or scientific theories yet say that they "agree" with them simply so they can remain in step with what they perceive to be the intellectual fashion of their social group?
If someone asked you, could you explain the basic points of the scientific theories you say you agree with, or do you simply defer to "science" in general and think, "Well, those guys look really smart, so I'll just go along with whatever they claim to have discovered." |
HUH?! SCIENCE A FASHION? C'MON JIVE...SCIENCE IS A PRACTICE, STOP ROMANTICIZING AND CONTINUE CALCULATING.
:whip: |
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| Meat187 |
| quote: | Originally posted by winston
where is schroedingerwin when you need him :conf: |
I believe he posts as elFreak again. |
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| MrJiveBoJingles |
| quote: | Originally posted by winston
HUH?! SCIENCE A FASHION? |
I'm not saying that science is only a fashion, I'm saying that people treat it like one by trying to clothe themselves in scientific attire and terminology without understanding much of it. As Lewontin points out in the article I posted today, even for most educated people the belief in science ultimately amounts to trust in the honesty and intellectual rigor of scientists and the institutions they inhabit. |
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