14 ms·

Why We Don't Believe in Science

89 points by dwynings 14y ago

losethos 14y ago
You know St. Paul? I was an atheist. God says... pleasure in uprightness. As for me, in the uprightness of mine heart I have willingly offered all these things: and now have I seen with joy thy people, which are present here, to offer willingly unto thee. 29:18 O LORD God of Abraham, Isaac, and of Israel, our fathers, keep this for ever in the imagination of the thoughts of the heart of thy people, and prepare their heart unto thee: 29:19 And give unto Solomon my son a perfect heart, to keep thy commandments, thy testimonies, and thy statutes, and to do all these things, and to build the palace, for the which I have made provision. 29:20 And David said to all the congregation, Now bless the LORD your God. And all the congregation blessed the LORD God of their fathers, and bowed down their heads, and worshipped the LORD, and the king. ---- God says... what_a_nightmare completely If_had_my_druthers do_you_know_what_time_it_is comedy whatcha_talkin'_'bout
10dpd 14y ago
I've always been interested in the definition of 'science'. What makes one belief 'scientific' as opposed to non-scientific. In order to approach science, we must assume that nature is lawful, deterministic and understandable. Of course, we all know that there are certain 'laws' of nature that exist and have been proven beyond doubt, but the majority of science consists of findings that result from studies that rely on an arbitrary probability of 95%+.
- wcarey 14y ago
  The idea that there are laws of nature proven beyond a doubt doesn't accord with the history of physics. Newton's conception of natural law was held to be "true" until it was upended by Einstein. Karl Popper actually proposes a nice criterion to distinguish science from non-science. He argues (whether persuasively or no) that scientific claims are falsifiable, where non-scientific claims need not be. That allows us to distinguish between things like astrology, whose claims are generally not falsifiable, and mathematical astronomy, whose claims are falsifiable.
- tristan_juricek 14y ago
  A scientific idea is typically something that can be proved incorrect. :) (This would be opposed to a lot of religious beliefs, where you either have faith, or don't. You can't really prove God doesn't exist.) I'm not sure where philosophy lies. Somewhere between the two, it seems.
- DividesByZero 14y ago
  Science is not a belief system, it is a knowledge system and the distinction is quite precise and necessary. Science is a method for developing predictive models based on material observation and nothing else.
  - 10dpd 14y ago
    I wouldn't limit the goal of science to developing predictive models, to completely understand a behaviour we must also be able to describe, explain and control the behaviour.
    - DividesByZero 14y ago
      I would suggest that describing and explaining a behavior is the same as constructing a predictive model of that behavior, and that controlling it is in the realm of engineering, not science.
    - Xcelerate 14y ago
      The problem with that is that some things we currently regard as scientific can neither be described well or controlled. Quantum mechanics is a good example. The defining characteristic that still makes it science is that we can predict things using mathematical equations (although not as well as we would like). Which brings me to an interesting question. If a hypothetical alien civilization develops technology using different types of math than us, different analogies than us (particles/wave, etc.), and different beliefs than us, is it still science? I would argue yes. If they can create sophisticated technology that is predictable, the end effect is the same that we humans have. Which brings me to my last question. Is string theory science? Again, I would say yes. Because although its predictions are not currently capable of being tested, they are in principle capable of being tested with more sophisticated technology. There is a clear path to developing a test of its predictions. So I think "science" can best be described as the pursuit of prediction.
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- jshen 14y ago
  Here is the definition. Many of the ideas on the parent thread fall into the "you can not prove a vague theory wrong". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYPapE-3FRw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYPapE-3FRw I have no idea what you mean by "an arbitrary probability of 95%+"
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roc 14y ago
> "Why are some scientific ideas hard to believe in?" Because some scientific ideas are constantly derided and publicly ridiculed by moral, cultural and political leaders and institutions. If the church and half the country (still) held that heliocentricity were preposterous, it may still be as 'hard to believe in' as evolution is, decades after science considered it 'settled'.
- 10dpd 14y ago
  See my comment below - is there such a thing as a scientific 'idea'?
  - roc 14y ago
    Yes. An idea formed on a basis of scientific study. "Idea" is just shorthand to cover what we colloquially know as theories, natural laws, hypotheses that haven't yet been directly tested, etc.
moocow01 14y ago
Preface: I'm an Atheist The problem that I see is the way we frame these discussions. Does the question "do you believe God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years" preclude you from believing in science on any level?? In these discussions we throw everyone into one bin or another - you either believe in evolution or you believe God waves his/her magical hand for everything. I'd bet if you asked those same people the question "Do you believe God cooked your pop tarts this morning or do you believe the toaster cooked your pop tart through principles of electricity and heat" you'd get a much more interesting set of answers. (No doubt that you'd still get many that answer the former.) The problem with these questions is that what you are really asking people of faith is "Are you completely faithful to a religion that guides your daily life?" Most people use and come to religion to guide their day to day human interactions rather than using it as a tool to explore the principles of the universe. If we as humans want to make progress we have to stop pushing on the evolution lever - it just causes divisions. What we should be doing is approaching the topic of science for people of faith from a more artificial level meaning "if X causes Y then Z" sort of stuff. In other words we can approach and teach scientific principles without going down the rabbit hole. Some people will say this isn't possible but I just don't think thats true.
- ricardobeat 14y ago
  I don't see how "do you believe god created humans 10k years ago" can be answered affirmatively while simultaneously believing in evolution, unless you're thinking of a God unlike any of the generally known concepts. A yes carries the weight of rejecting enormous amounts of empirical evidence for evolution of the species and historical accounts.
  - Locke1689 14y ago
    While this may be true according to some conceptions of God (personified and material God seems to be a fairly common belief, especially among laymen) most philosophical descriptions of God tend towards a "First Mover"-theory. That is, God created the universe, and the universe played out according to his creation. This definition of God is certainly compatible with all scientific advances because, by definition, this God is beyond the measure of science. I happen to find this belief rather boring and derivative of Plato (a natural world and a supernatural world, each separate and uncrossable except that the natural world is really just a poor reflection of the ideal and perfect supernatural world? Where have I heard that before?), but it's certainly not incompatible with science.
zenogais 14y ago
The findings here seem fairly spurious. Intuitively true things are given more immediate access in the brain because the neural pathways are strong for them. Non-intuitive things take longer because the pathways are weaker. Equating this with instincts seems unreliable at best. Really the problem is people have a hard time grasping the unintuitive so long as it is not brought into alignment with more intuitive concepts. This is much more fundamental than "bad instincts" - it's really more that the vast majority of learning takes place outside of conscious perception and is not conceptual in nature.
benjohnson 14y ago
Full disclosure: I firmly believe in evolution and have faith that God created our souls. How could I answer this survey with those ridiculous answers that either pigon-hole me a as scientific illiterate, or someone who thinks that the entire universe is deterministic. There's a middle ground that I feel is wise: Trust the evidence you see, but remain hopeful that there's more to this world than a fleeting life, death, and permeant non-existance.
- jshen 14y ago
  do animals and insects have souls?
  - dhughes 14y ago
    I'm not religious but if you were cloned the clone wouldn't be anything like you, for one thing it wouldn't be your age until far into the future. Any animal is distinctly different from others and even a clone of itself, if that's not a soul maybe some other name would be better.
    - bermanoid 14y ago
      > Any animal is distinctly different from others and even a clone of itself, if that's not a soul maybe some other name would be better. Science won't disappoint here: we call distinguishing stateful substance a "brain".
      - dhughes 14y ago
        Not quite, a brain is just an organ. The brains of two twins are genetically very similar but different experiences as separate beings means they are unique.
  - adrianm 14y ago
    As one who lives a religiously observant lifestyle, I've always been a bit of an outlier on the topic of religiously motivated supernatural beliefs like these. I don't believe in souls for the same reason I don't believe in a Cartesian duality of the mind and body. Any rationally grounded support for such a belief vanished as soon as we developed reasonable alternative and scientifically motivated theories of the mind. However, for some reason my mind's stubborn refusal to let me believe in the supernatural has not eroded my sense of religious commitment. I think this is because I realized long ago that the crux, and contemporary import, of religion for me (and this is entirely my opinion, and mine alone) is not in instilling belief in any specific historical event or supernatural phenomena, but rather instilling the notion of belief, in the broadest sense, deep within every individual. This is ultimately what differentiates humanity from all other forms of life that we know of. That is, we are conscious creatures (mostly) capable of lofty pursuits, and there is value in exploring unknown territory and working together with other human beings to achieve great things. These are religious concepts at heart, because they are predicated on the belief that human achievement and the pursuit of knowledge are not merely the means to some material end. The journey itself is the point.
bithive123 14y ago
Daniel Kahneman gave a good informal talk about these different reasoning systems and why both are useful: http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/25/daniel-kahneman-on-the-trap-of-thinking-that-we-know/ http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/25/daniel-kahneman...
DanielBMarkham 14y ago
[in regards to the Big Bang] Why are some scientific ideas hard to believe in? I hate to wade into Intelligent Design but I'm feeling grumpy tonight so what the hell. First, I do not believe in some mythical deity who created the world 7 thousand years ago. Or even last week. I'm agnostic. Those things I do not know about, I do not know about. It is not logical to waste energy either believing or disbelieving in them. Having said that, we had a great piece on HN a year or two ago from a mathematician showing that we are most likely living in a simulated universe. I don't have the academic chops to comment on it, but I know that it's entirely possible that all of our sensory inputs are being manipulated in ways that mimic the universe we think we live in. When you think of billions of years of intelligence evolving all over the place, we're fairly simple creatures. Just like we could fool an ant into thinking his queen lives somewhere else, I don't think it'd be very difficult at all for some external entity to control us. Maybe as a game. Who knows. The point is: the idea that our sensory perceptions are fabricated and false in some way is a perfectly self-consistent and logical thing to believe in. Of course, it's a really stupid thing to believe in if you're a scientist, because if you can't trust empirical evidence, science kind of goes out the window. So yes, scientists can't believe that and have any kind of career at all, but there's nothing wrong with Joe SixPack believing it. I bring that up because of something good the author mentions: This means that science education is not simply a matter of learning new theories. Rather, it also requires that students unlearn their instincts This is true. Much like pilots have to learn not to trust their inner ear when flying, students of science have to unlearn many things they may consider "common sense". But you end up coming full circle. Even accepting science as the only light mankind has in the darkness, eventually you end back up wondering if the models we have are not just more fancy versions of the Ptolemy's Celestial Spheres[1]. You can take models that don't fit and do all sorts of magic with them to make them work. For a long time. I am concerned that we are "diagnosing" people as somehow in need of re-education, medication, or intervention simply because they think in a different manner from the rest of us. If my neighbor wants to believe he's living in a Matrix, more power to him. He's not going to be a rocket scientist any time soon. And even if he is, plenty of people manage to have deeply trans-rational beliefs about the way things work and they function just fine in the world in all sorts of intricate, complicated scientific endeavors. We are drawing distinctions where none may be needed. Science is provisional. In my opinion we should always approach it with humility. What I am seeing more and more is people who somehow feel elevated by science to be better than their peers. That's pretty cool when you're 20 and figure out how awesome it is that calculus and physics go together, but it's a really screwed up way to live your life or influence public policy. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_spheres http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_spheres
jayzee 14y ago
I wonder why people hate on believing that the sun revolves around the earth. It would make for more complicated equations of motion, but is not unscientific or wrong to believe that to be the case. It just turns out that the math is easier when you believe that the sun is at the center.
- gms7777 14y ago
  Especially when you consider that both are, in fact, "wrong". In a two-body system, they both revolve around around the center of mass. (Though truly our solar system is far beyond a two-body system).
  - jayzee 14y ago
    True. I think that people who think that they are scientific like to believe certain things just as much as people who are not scientific. I am sure that if you sat Jonah down and asked him to prove any of these things there would be a squirt in his 'A.C.C.' circuit!
- codebaobab 14y ago
  I heard once that the circles-on-circles construction of the motion of the bodies of solar system when Earth is taken as its center is merely the Fourier transform of the ellipses that describe the solar system with the Sun as its center. Unfortunately, I never saw the actual derivation, so that idea is basically hearsay.
  - Locke1689 14y ago
    I think you misheard. The epicycle system is, in essence, an n-termed complex Fourier series (not transform). The point that the person who told you this was trying to make was that any path can be represented using enough terms in a complex Fourier series, so it's a fairly bad system for deriving physical laws.
- Locke1689 14y ago
  It's certainly unscientific. Believing something to be true despite evidence to the contrary is fundamentally unscientific. Edit: Since people don't seem to understand my point, there is more to the theories of celestial mechanics than just path prediction. Our understanding of the path mechanics is derived through our understanding of gravity. To believe that the Sun revolves around the Earth one would have to completely upend our theories of gravity, which have been shown by experiment to agree with predictions in almost all cases.
polemic 14y ago
This is not about "is there a God or not". It's about the question of why rational beliefs are so easily overridden by 'common sense' or religion. As a counter-point: why does America, a liberal western democracy, still believe in God so fervently? Australia, New Zealand, the UK and Europe have all experience a significant decline in religion over the last 100 years. Why not in the US?
- tedunangst 14y ago
  Because England and Europe kicked out all the fervent believers unwilling to convert to the state religion du jour and sent them to America. Ironically, the separation of church and state means people can lose faith in the state but not the church.
- cschwarm 14y ago
  > Why not in the US? There are many reasons but the most important one, IIRC, is existential insecurity. The more one fears for one's wealth, health, and life, the stronger and widespread religious beliefs. The thesis goes back to Gregory S. Paul [1] and has been confirmed by others; for instance, by Inglehart and Norris (2004) [2]. See also the summery by Thomas Rees. [3] [1] http://www.gspaulscienceofreligion.com/ http://www.gspaulscienceofreligion.com/ [2] http://www.hks.harvard.edu/fs/pnorris/Books/Sacred_and_secular.htm http://www.hks.harvard.edu/fs/pnorris/Books/Sacred_and_secul... [3] http://epiphenom.fieldofscience.com/2009/07/why-some-countries-are-more-religious.html http://epiphenom.fieldofscience.com/2009/07/why-some-countri...
minegames 14y ago
This: "In 1982, forty-four per cent of Americans held strictly creationist views, a statistically insignificant difference from 2012." Incorrect use of the term "statistically insignificant" and other stat terms needs to stop.
- SometimesAlex 14y ago
  For real. I stopped reading the article once the author used "Begging the question" incorrectly. Not sure how I'm supposed to take any journalism seriously if the reporter can't even use simple English phrases correctly.
  - andreasvc 14y ago
    That's a very pervasive mistake, to the point where one could question if it may be simply snobbery to insist on it being a mistake (although I am strongly in favor of correct usage, the nature of language is such that people use terms which they believe others will interpret as they do, and the people who associate the "wrong" meaning already appear in the majority). On another note, I think it's generally nothing to be proud of when you "stop reading something", and I wish people would stop announcing it in this complaining manner--if you didn't read the article, there's not much to discuss so you might as well not make this known at all. There are lots of other informative points to be gleaned from the article if you look past these rather superficial errors.
jfoutz 14y ago
Maybe the numbers are stable because people who reject the theory of evolution have lots of kids that they homeschool.
scotty79 14y ago
> What makes the human mind so resistant to certain kinds of facts, even when these facts are buttressed by vast amounts of evidence? It's not human thing. It's USA thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Views_on_Evolution.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Views_on_Evolution.svg If you don't know Tim Minchin you might enjoy his take on this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9uIMR8yCPg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9uIMR8yCPg
scotty79 14y ago
I don't believe I would have to suppress theory that Sun revolves around Earth because I never had such theory because when I became curious why this bright dot on the sky appears on different places it was explained to me what revolves around what and how it is possible. I think I might have more trouble with the question "does the sun move across the sky" because when I look up I don't see any movement. It's not about the intuitiveness of a belief. It's about whether the right or wrong theory got to the child first. You internalize first good enough theory you hear not the one that's most intuitive or the one that explains all the data best.
- mturmon 14y ago
  I generally agree. I don't find evolution troublesome, for example, because the idea that "my cousin is an ape" is OK by me. The counterexample to this tidy situation is quantum mechanics. Its implications are confusing even to experts. We have so much experience with macro-level phenomena that runs counter to what QM says. It's hard to imagine a world where this mismatch could be averted at an early age.
  - scotty79 14y ago
    You could start by not telling kids matter is built out of little billiard balls that move like celestial bodies. It you described it more as fuzzy, wavey things reshaping and interacting you might give people better intuition. It's not harder to explain and it's no less attractive especially when you have things like computer graphics and touch screens now. I'd love to see "What's it all built of" for iPad and Android that's highly interactive and doesn't involve drawing single sharp circle.
- wvenable 14y ago
  I don't think it's that simple. Look at our language: the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Noon is when the sun is straight above us. All this basic language implies the sun is moving and the earth is stationary. Language is incredibly important to how we form thoughts.
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keiferski 14y ago
Sad to see no mention of Hume (in the article or comments). He figured out the limitations of science 300-ish years ago. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hume#Hume.27s_.22Science_of_man.22 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hume#Hume.27s_.22Science_... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction
- evincarofautumn 14y ago
  I find the problem of induction interesting. I’ve long had this strange doubt whether, for example, the natural numbers actually correspond to a natural phenomenon—or whether classical logic is anything more than an approximate model of whatever logic actually underlies the universe. Humans mostly understand counting intuitively, logic perhaps less so. But how can we make inductive statements about natural numbers if they’re merely a by-product of how our brains work? How could we use the “pure” language of mathematics to communicate with extraterrestrials if our understanding of mathematics is based on entirely different principles? As a pragmatist, I mostly just keep my head down and say “numbers and Booleans may not be anything, but we can use them to do things, and that’s good enough”.
zhoutong 14y ago
I'm agnostic, and I'm interested in Physics. I believe in science, and the belief itself is nothing different from the beliefs in god for some people. Science theories are all about proving older theories wrong, and humans naturally regard those older theories as "intuition". I don't think it has anything to do with being naive or not. Aristotle thought that bigger object falls faster, force is required to maintain motion, and air is made with one element. These are all great discoveries that hold for over one thousand years. They are science. And I don't think they are naive at all. Aristotle is one of the most intelligent people at his time, and so is Issac Newton, Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking. Yet today we regard the views of the elites as "truths" and all the rest as "naive intuition". These scientists all did the same thing: prove something wrong by discovering something that explains more things more accurately in more circumstances. The fundamental way they achieved this is empirical observations, which are simply endless. Therefore, there's nothing stopping us from proving Newton's laws or Relativity wrong. The way we come up with scientific conclusions has very similar characteristics with the way we know God. In school, we can reach conclusions by drawing a graph with 7 data points and observing some linear relationship with an imaginary straight line that somehow connects them. Boom! A conclusion of "truth". One major difference of scientific discoveries is that they involve mathematics, which is a priori by nature, and this makes "science" consistent and stable. It's perfectly understandable that not many people believe in evolution. It's a fact that evolution theories have more evidence than creationist beliefs, but it's never a human nature to chase the "more evidence". We make irrational and hence suboptimal decisions everyday, yet we humans as a whole are not necessarily disadvantaged by irrationalities. "More evidence" doesn't mean it's right and "less evidence" doesn't mean it's wrong. "More probable" doesn't mean it will happen, and "less probable" doesn't mean it won't happen. You get the idea. Or is it true that elites (minority of people) have more tenancy to believe in theories with more evidence, accept explanation that covers more circumstances and do things that have more probabilities of success? And everyone else is stuck with emotions, "naive intuition" and irrationalities?
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einhverfr 14y ago
One of the key things that gets lost in this that the piece tends to assume that unscientific beliefs are somehow bad and we'd be better off without them. I am not convinced that's the case. There are two reasons I think so. The first is that, as P. W. Anderson pointed out in his essay "More is Different" (published in Science magazine in 1972) reductionism doesn't work. With added complexity comes fundamentally new patterns. Just as chemistry is not just applied physics and biology is not just applied chemistry, I don't think life is just applied science and the real epistemological limits to what science can tell us are very real barriers. Heisenberg does a great job of mapping out these problems in his look at the history of scientific thought ("Physics and Philosophy"). When you look at verbomotor cultures and how they look a the world, their ideas of magic and religion aren't really filling the same roles as science today (see Ong, Walter "Orality and Literacy" and Eliade, Mircea, "Myth and Reality" See also Turner, Victor. "The Ritual Process" and Grimes ed., Ronald "Readings in Ritual Studies"). Instead, in a culture based on spoken discourse instead of writing, everything is based on re-usable patterns that can be flexibly applied. This is something greatly missing in religious thought today. The mystery of a story is not whether it happened in the past but rather how it happens today. From this perspective a story like the Fall from Eden isn't so much about the origins of sin as it is the model of leaving one's parents' house, getting married, having kids, and becoming an adult. I think these sorts of patterns are likely deeply ingrained in us and it's better for us to accept and use it than fight it in the quest to conform to science. For example, in the article, you have the idea that people naturally think of heat as a substance. This works fine for many applications. One can think of heat exchangers as not being fundamentally different than the system of oxygen exchange in the body or vice versa. They do work the same way on a metaphorical level and these metaphors as Heisenberg shows (again "Physics and Philosophy") are also at the core of the formation of scientific theories. I therefore wonder if we'd have any scientific progress if our scientists had no unscientific beliefs. Additionally you have issues with the quest to be more scientific often eating the tail of, well, science. For example, it is worth noting that countries in Western Europe who use midwives as the routine primary care for childbirth have better outcomes than Western European countries that do not. Yet there is a fear that by doing this in, say, the US, we will be backing away from our commitment to science. Why is following emperical data seen this way though? Is it that we really worship technology in the guise of science?
waterhouse 14y ago
I am irritated by the use of the word "we" in the title, "Why We Don't Believe in Science". The article begins with three paragraphs discussing the widespread belief in creationism. It appears to the reader (that is to say, me--I clarify just whom I'm speaking for, unlike the author) that this is intended at least as a prominent example of "us not believing in science". In fact, this appears to be the focus of the article. However, the author talks as though he sees creationism as obviously false, calling the 46% statistic "a stark blow to high-school science teachers everywhere", and asking, "What makes the human mind so resistant to [...] facts [...] buttressed by vast amounts of evidence?" Furthermore, the author does not provide any arguments against creationism, instead proceeding as though it were obviously false to his audience as well. Well, if neither the author nor his intended audience is a creationist (when evolutionary alternatives to creationism appear to be the "Science" that "We Don't Believe In"), then just who is "we"? The word seems quite inappropriate. All the article manages to establish about "we" is that, when we're processing and reasoning about physical systems, if they don't map well to visceral intuition, then we use an extra part of our brains; and that this appears to cost some kind of effort and slow us down. I expect even that last effect could be mitigated with practice or by developing a certain mindset; but ignoring that, all it would establish is "We Think More Slowly About [Certain Kinds of] Science", not "We Don't Believe In [Certain Kinds of] Science". Just learn to think slowly and carefully in certain situations; I think I, for one, have that reflex built into my bones. Anyway, it being difficult to think about something is clearly insufficient explanation by itself--how many people "don't believe in integral calculus"? If you actually want to know why the people who believe in creationism believe in creationism, then you should probably investigate them. Let's see. We have idea A (creationism--really this refers to a category of many specific beliefs), and competing idea B (human evolutionary theory). Both ideas are sufficiently complex and detailed that it is unlikely that many of the people we're interested in came up with it on their own. So let's see when and how they're exposed to both ideas, and how they reason about the ideas on their own after exposure. At this point, for a journalistic article worth publishing, you would probably want to present some research. Find some creationists, ask them some questions about their background, figure out some patterns, do some large-scale sampling to see if you've found all the common patterns, and do detailed interviews of a few representative people from each pattern. (Probably the biggest pattern is "grows up in a religious, creationist family; is exposed to human evolutionary theory either not at all, or just a little in high school, and is told by parents and priests or other authorities that it's all bunk, and accepts this; takes a career path that doesn't involve studying human genetics or biology in detail; and doesn't find a need to seriously question creationism at any point in the rest of their life." If evolution were easier to reason about, it might increase the rate at which people decided on their own--after having been exposed to evolutionary theory--that humans evolved. But... I find evolution easy to understand and reason about--at least in simple cases of obvious improvements to an organism; the evolution of behaviors that are useful only in a group or in a family with certain structure is much more difficult, because it's hard to know what hominid societies were like; but most of the obvious changes between humans and more primitive mammals--getting taller and more dexterous and brainy--are easy to at least decide to be plausible. I think it really just doesn't come up often in these people's lives, except as something like "Another godless rant from a misguided intellectual", which is easily dismissed. I conclude that the scientific content of this article--the studies involving observing how people and their brains respond to "nonintuitive" physical situations--is probably in fact irrelevant to the stuff about creationists.) Once you've learned why creationists are the way they are, then you might learn what might be good ideas for how to change them. But! Any moral principle that justifies you using any means to try to change them can justify them using the same means to try to change you. Anyone who advocates compulsory, tax-funded public schooling, and then complains about the fact that they're being forced to send their kids to be taught anti-science and to pay for the same disservice to be done to other kids--I consider you to have brought your problems upon yourself and I have no sympathy for you. (Nor do I sympathize with creationists in favor of compulsory public education. A plague on all your houses, dammit!) If you feel the need, then put your efforts into civil, reasoned argument, hopefully in a not-annoying way. This result about people apparently having to "push back against their instincts" is an interesting thing. I'd be interested to hear more detailed and careful investigation on the subject: can you establish exactly what things are hard to reason about? does it vary from person to person? can you improve by thinking about such situations more, and would this make it hard to do repeated measurements with the same people? etc. This would have been good as a standalone science article. Unfortunately, it was cast as an article about evolution vs creationism, with an annoyingly incorrect (and possibly condescending) title and a probably misleading conclusion. On the other hand, it'll probably attract a lot of traffic. If that is the author's job, he's probably done it well. I want to go live in a private little world now... Well, I don't know. Maybe backlash from people like me can have some effect. There's probably a reason they don't put up even more linkbait-y stuff. Some people would decide to read other stuff. Even those who eat up the linkbait, they're probably not discriminating, and they could easily switch to another linkbait source that might happen to give them better content once, or be more convenient once. I guess maybe I can hope for competition and a race to the bottom to wipe out stuff like this. (Come to think of it, that is happening. But this newspaper probably has some highbrow content as well, neh? Hmm... It's possible that an editor (with detailed observation of readers), or the author, might figure out that linkbait eventually loses readers and reputation, and eliminate the column from the paper, or the technique from his writing repertoire. Possible. For now, I'm still going to my private little world.)
saurik 14y ago
So, I /am/ a scientist (computer, but still: I was in the PhD program for a long time, and am mainly interested in theoretical issues in parsing and type systems) and most of my friends are as well (everything from chemists and physicists to public health researchers), and even I don't "believe in science" (to mean, if someone sais to me "science claims X", and even shows me a bibliography with quotes from the authors, that I now believe X). If it weren't for my background and experience knowing that science could actually work, or having not spent the time to look into and learn the individual arguments being made and seeing that some of them actually are sound, I could easily see myself discounting something like evolution as a passing fad. The problem is that 99% of your average person's interaction with "science" is by way of newspaper articles claiming "scientists say red meat is bad" and then three years later "scientists say red meat may be good". Another three years go by, and they see "scientists say red meat is bad for you after all". In reality, some scientists demonstrated an interesting correlation with a single marker (and often later studies are talking about correlations to something else entirely) that may or may not actually be causative, and either the media is spinning it into "a story" or some public health bureau is playing a numbers game that leads to the behavior "if it has any effect at all we should recommend it". But, what the public sees is: "scientists say X" followed by "scientists say Y, previous scientists were somehow wrong", followed by "scientists claim that second scientists were wrong and they were right the whole time". We are actively training the public so that when we hear "scientist say X" the response is "engh: they're probably wrong". Hell, this article and my reading it is an interesting example: it's chock full of references to published journal papers and actual psychologists, but I honestly don't even care anymore as every time I've gone and pulled the research articles like this are based on I've come up with tenuous conclusions based on flawed experiments that are being trumpeted as the new truth. Worse, much of the "science" being cited isn't really science at all: a cohort study, for example, has no controlled experiment and can't really be used to show anything definitive; it is, at best, a way to come up with interesting hypotheses on which to later run actual experiments. However, a good number of the "scientists say X" that people hear are from health research, where controlled experiments in humans are sufficiently rare and tied up in ethical conundrums that many of the statements being made (and almost all of the ones involving diets) come from new cohort studies or meta-analyses of previous cohort studies. It is no wonder, then, that every three years we hear something different. ;P Now, with that in mind, imagine the average person hearing "scientists claim evolution is true". They often respond with things like "it's just a theory: one of many". I will contend that they do that because to them "scientists claim evolution is true" only has as much evidence behind it as "scientists claim red meat is bad for you" or "scientists now claim salt may not be bad for you after all" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4069613 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4069613) and the result is now that they don't trust us: we can tell them anything we want, but they have no reason to believe us anymore, as we were continually wrong to them every time it mattered to them before. I will then claim that if we want to be credible, we need to stop reporting every paper that comes out to the public as "scientists say X" and even further be careful about what we call "science" in the first place. It should be that when we claim that something is true, it is because we have sufficiently strong theoretical models and experimental evidence that can really claim "this is knowledge that may be imprecise, but is not inaccurate" in the way that newtonian mechanics is a little imprecise (it doesn't take into account relativistic or quantum effects), but isn't so wildly inaccurate that we should ever expect to see a newspaper headline "scientists report we were wrong all along: objects of greater mass actually repel each other".
shirro 14y ago
There are plenty of people outside the US, religious or not, who have no problems with science. Religion only seems to be anti-science in the USA and amongst a tiny minority in the Islamic world. I wonder if religion is really the issue. Is there some political imperative that is served by keeping the voting population ignorant about science? Perhaps business, politics and media have worked to create a society turned away from science and then those people turn to religion to fill the gaps.
- molmalo 14y ago
  > Is there some political imperative that is served by keeping the voting population ignorant about science? Certainly there is. Maybe not in an evil way like "hey! let's keep all the people ignorant so we can control the world", but mainly to keep the status quo. Consider this: Science teaches to question everything, so you can understand the rationale about how and why something happens the way it does. But... having a bunch of people questioning everything, even the very fabric of our society, is usually not something very amusing to the ones that happen to be the current rulers. That's why, from the ancient world to this days, the higher studies where reserved to the elites... the less likely part of the population that would turn against the current structure of society. For example, during the Dark Ages, the church saw science as the works of the devil (and sadly, some of them still do [1]).... or more specifically, something that would make people question about their doings, their position it society, and so on... And usually, things doesn't go so nice to the people in power, when more and more people starts questioning their world. Look at what happened to Luis XVI, Nicholas II, or more recently in the Middle East. Or looking even closer... the anti-globalist movements and the environmental movements, as (not-so-extreme) examples of people questioning the status quo. Finally, in some countries it's very public that some politicians think and say that is much easier to handle an ignorant population, than a well educated one. [Edit: Added] [1] A few years ago, when I asked a very religious fellow student about the existence of fossils, his answer was that some where the remains of the animals that lived before the great flood, and the older ones where there just to "test our faith".
confluence 14y ago
Why? Because humans reason inductively and not deductively. We use short cuts, quick heuristics, analogies and similes. We anthropomorphize, we look for direct causes and effects over linear time scales. That's just the tip of the ice berg. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases - That's a pretty comprehensive list. Memorize and comprehend all of those, and even then you won't get a handle around how badly humans reason - because you are human yourself! It's also why humans find programming difficult (logic is very unnatural to a inductive reasoner). All swans are white programmers will quickly smash into the error caused by unpredictbale black swans coming into the system. Hence that's why you need exceptions, conditionals and containers to deal with the most absurd inputs (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/04/working-with-the-chaos-monkey.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/04/working-with-the-ch...). Humans are animals, with a bunch of neurons in their heads that look for and extract statistically significant patterns from correlated data over short term linear time scales. We mistake correlation for causation thanks to all the mental shortcuts that were used to keep us alive in a less complex world. Why don't we believe in science? The same reason we eat food, drink water and socialize with our peers - to stay alive. Science is deduction from first principles (backed by evidence of course). And that is very, very unnatural. Note: Proud reductionist here! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction
sopooneo 14y ago
I found myself wincing at "pressure produces heat". For the purpose and context of this article, that is probably close enough. Because the subtlety of energy spent increasing pressure being converted to thermal energy is too finicky. But it's also more correct. And this relates to a problem I've run into whenever you try to talk to an expert about something. People come up to me with fanciful ideas about physics and you have to stop them every five seconds to clear up what they mean by "power" or "energy". Or (as a favor) just listen all the way through and see if you can get a notion of what they mean so you can discuss their idea. Same thing happens when I try to ask lawyers about something. I'm always getting asked, "Do you mean a law, or a statute?" or having things like "well, that's a legal term-of-art" given back to me. The point being that it's hard to jump into thinking about anything that others have spent a long time considering and carefully defining.
huma 14y ago
> At the present rate, the Darwinian revolution, at least in America, will take just as long. I would say that it's exclusively an American problem :) I get rather annoyed stumbling on the creationist articles. It's like reading on flat earth in 2012. What's even more entertaining is that people try to explain it in A.C.C. and D.L.P.F.C. terms. Just "get your shit together", folks :)

89 points by dwynings 14y ago

You know St. Paul? I was an atheist. God says... pleasure in uprightness. As for me, in the uprightness of mine heart I have willingly offered all these things: and now have I seen with joy thy people, which are present here, to offer willingly unto thee. 29:18 O LORD God of Abraham, Isaac, and of Israel, our fathers, keep this for ever in the imagination of the thoughts of the heart of thy people, and prepare their heart unto thee: 29:19 And give unto Solomon my son a perfect heart, to keep thy commandments, thy testimonies, and thy statutes, and to do all these things, and to build the palace, for the which I have made provision. 29:20 And David said to all the congregation, Now bless the LORD your God. And all the congregation blessed the LORD God of their fathers, and bowed down their heads, and worshipped the LORD, and the king. ---- God says... what_a_nightmare completely If_had_my_druthers do_you_know_what_time_it_is comedy whatcha_talkin'_'bout

10dpd 14y ago

I've always been interested in the definition of 'science'. What makes one belief 'scientific' as opposed to non-scientific. In order to approach science, we must assume that nature is lawful, deterministic and understandable. Of course, we all know that there are certain 'laws' of nature that exist and have been proven beyond doubt, but the majority of science consists of findings that result from studies that rely on an arbitrary probability of 95%+.

wcarey 14y ago
The idea that there are laws of nature proven beyond a doubt doesn't accord with the history of physics. Newton's conception of natural law was held to be "true" until it was upended by Einstein. Karl Popper actually proposes a nice criterion to distinguish science from non-science. He argues (whether persuasively or no) that scientific claims are falsifiable, where non-scientific claims need not be. That allows us to distinguish between things like astrology, whose claims are generally not falsifiable, and mathematical astronomy, whose claims are falsifiable.
tristan_juricek 14y ago
A scientific idea is typically something that can be proved incorrect. :) (This would be opposed to a lot of religious beliefs, where you either have faith, or don't. You can't really prove God doesn't exist.) I'm not sure where philosophy lies. Somewhere between the two, it seems.
DividesByZero 14y ago
Science is not a belief system, it is a knowledge system and the distinction is quite precise and necessary. Science is a method for developing predictive models based on material observation and nothing else.
- 10dpd 14y ago
  I wouldn't limit the goal of science to developing predictive models, to completely understand a behaviour we must also be able to describe, explain and control the behaviour.
  - DividesByZero 14y ago
    I would suggest that describing and explaining a behavior is the same as constructing a predictive model of that behavior, and that controlling it is in the realm of engineering, not science.
  - Xcelerate 14y ago
    The problem with that is that some things we currently regard as scientific can neither be described well or controlled. Quantum mechanics is a good example. The defining characteristic that still makes it science is that we can predict things using mathematical equations (although not as well as we would like). Which brings me to an interesting question. If a hypothetical alien civilization develops technology using different types of math than us, different analogies than us (particles/wave, etc.), and different beliefs than us, is it still science? I would argue yes. If they can create sophisticated technology that is predictable, the end effect is the same that we humans have. Which brings me to my last question. Is string theory science? Again, I would say yes. Because although its predictions are not currently capable of being tested, they are in principle capable of being tested with more sophisticated technology. There is a clear path to developing a test of its predictions. So I think "science" can best be described as the pursuit of prediction.
- deleted 14y ago
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jshen 14y ago
Here is the definition. Many of the ideas on the parent thread fall into the "you can not prove a vague theory wrong". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYPapE-3FRw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYPapE-3FRw I have no idea what you mean by "an arbitrary probability of 95%+"

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roc 14y ago

> "Why are some scientific ideas hard to believe in?" Because some scientific ideas are constantly derided and publicly ridiculed by moral, cultural and political leaders and institutions. If the church and half the country (still) held that heliocentricity were preposterous, it may still be as 'hard to believe in' as evolution is, decades after science considered it 'settled'.

10dpd 14y ago
See my comment below - is there such a thing as a scientific 'idea'?
- roc 14y ago
  Yes. An idea formed on a basis of scientific study. "Idea" is just shorthand to cover what we colloquially know as theories, natural laws, hypotheses that haven't yet been directly tested, etc.

moocow01 14y ago

Preface: I'm an Atheist The problem that I see is the way we frame these discussions. Does the question "do you believe God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years" preclude you from believing in science on any level?? In these discussions we throw everyone into one bin or another - you either believe in evolution or you believe God waves his/her magical hand for everything. I'd bet if you asked those same people the question "Do you believe God cooked your pop tarts this morning or do you believe the toaster cooked your pop tart through principles of electricity and heat" you'd get a much more interesting set of answers. (No doubt that you'd still get many that answer the former.) The problem with these questions is that what you are really asking people of faith is "Are you completely faithful to a religion that guides your daily life?" Most people use and come to religion to guide their day to day human interactions rather than using it as a tool to explore the principles of the universe. If we as humans want to make progress we have to stop pushing on the evolution lever - it just causes divisions. What we should be doing is approaching the topic of science for people of faith from a more artificial level meaning "if X causes Y then Z" sort of stuff. In other words we can approach and teach scientific principles without going down the rabbit hole. Some people will say this isn't possible but I just don't think thats true.

ricardobeat 14y ago
I don't see how "do you believe god created humans 10k years ago" can be answered affirmatively while simultaneously believing in evolution, unless you're thinking of a God unlike any of the generally known concepts. A yes carries the weight of rejecting enormous amounts of empirical evidence for evolution of the species and historical accounts.
- Locke1689 14y ago
  While this may be true according to some conceptions of God (personified and material God seems to be a fairly common belief, especially among laymen) most philosophical descriptions of God tend towards a "First Mover"-theory. That is, God created the universe, and the universe played out according to his creation. This definition of God is certainly compatible with all scientific advances because, by definition, this God is beyond the measure of science. I happen to find this belief rather boring and derivative of Plato (a natural world and a supernatural world, each separate and uncrossable except that the natural world is really just a poor reflection of the ideal and perfect supernatural world? Where have I heard that before?), but it's certainly not incompatible with science.

zenogais 14y ago

The findings here seem fairly spurious. Intuitively true things are given more immediate access in the brain because the neural pathways are strong for them. Non-intuitive things take longer because the pathways are weaker. Equating this with instincts seems unreliable at best. Really the problem is people have a hard time grasping the unintuitive so long as it is not brought into alignment with more intuitive concepts. This is much more fundamental than "bad instincts" - it's really more that the vast majority of learning takes place outside of conscious perception and is not conceptual in nature.

benjohnson 14y ago

Full disclosure: I firmly believe in evolution and have faith that God created our souls. How could I answer this survey with those ridiculous answers that either pigon-hole me a as scientific illiterate, or someone who thinks that the entire universe is deterministic. There's a middle ground that I feel is wise: Trust the evidence you see, but remain hopeful that there's more to this world than a fleeting life, death, and permeant non-existance.

jshen 14y ago
do animals and insects have souls?
- dhughes 14y ago
  I'm not religious but if you were cloned the clone wouldn't be anything like you, for one thing it wouldn't be your age until far into the future. Any animal is distinctly different from others and even a clone of itself, if that's not a soul maybe some other name would be better.
  - bermanoid 14y ago
    > Any animal is distinctly different from others and even a clone of itself, if that's not a soul maybe some other name would be better. Science won't disappoint here: we call distinguishing stateful substance a "brain".
    - dhughes 14y ago
      Not quite, a brain is just an organ. The brains of two twins are genetically very similar but different experiences as separate beings means they are unique.
- adrianm 14y ago
  As one who lives a religiously observant lifestyle, I've always been a bit of an outlier on the topic of religiously motivated supernatural beliefs like these. I don't believe in souls for the same reason I don't believe in a Cartesian duality of the mind and body. Any rationally grounded support for such a belief vanished as soon as we developed reasonable alternative and scientifically motivated theories of the mind. However, for some reason my mind's stubborn refusal to let me believe in the supernatural has not eroded my sense of religious commitment. I think this is because I realized long ago that the crux, and contemporary import, of religion for me (and this is entirely my opinion, and mine alone) is not in instilling belief in any specific historical event or supernatural phenomena, but rather instilling the notion of belief, in the broadest sense, deep within every individual. This is ultimately what differentiates humanity from all other forms of life that we know of. That is, we are conscious creatures (mostly) capable of lofty pursuits, and there is value in exploring unknown territory and working together with other human beings to achieve great things. These are religious concepts at heart, because they are predicated on the belief that human achievement and the pursuit of knowledge are not merely the means to some material end. The journey itself is the point.

bithive123 14y ago

Daniel Kahneman gave a good informal talk about these different reasoning systems and why both are useful: http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/25/daniel-kahneman-on-the-trap-of-thinking-that-we-know/ http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/25/daniel-kahneman...

DanielBMarkham 14y ago

[in regards to the Big Bang] Why are some scientific ideas hard to believe in? I hate to wade into Intelligent Design but I'm feeling grumpy tonight so what the hell. First, I do not believe in some mythical deity who created the world 7 thousand years ago. Or even last week. I'm agnostic. Those things I do not know about, I do not know about. It is not logical to waste energy either believing or disbelieving in them. Having said that, we had a great piece on HN a year or two ago from a mathematician showing that we are most likely living in a simulated universe. I don't have the academic chops to comment on it, but I know that it's entirely possible that all of our sensory inputs are being manipulated in ways that mimic the universe we think we live in. When you think of billions of years of intelligence evolving all over the place, we're fairly simple creatures. Just like we could fool an ant into thinking his queen lives somewhere else, I don't think it'd be very difficult at all for some external entity to control us. Maybe as a game. Who knows. The point is: the idea that our sensory perceptions are fabricated and false in some way is a perfectly self-consistent and logical thing to believe in. Of course, it's a really stupid thing to believe in if you're a scientist, because if you can't trust empirical evidence, science kind of goes out the window. So yes, scientists can't believe that and have any kind of career at all, but there's nothing wrong with Joe SixPack believing it. I bring that up because of something good the author mentions: This means that science education is not simply a matter of learning new theories. Rather, it also requires that students unlearn their instincts This is true. Much like pilots have to learn not to trust their inner ear when flying, students of science have to unlearn many things they may consider "common sense". But you end up coming full circle. Even accepting science as the only light mankind has in the darkness, eventually you end back up wondering if the models we have are not just more fancy versions of the Ptolemy's Celestial Spheres[1]. You can take models that don't fit and do all sorts of magic with them to make them work. For a long time. I am concerned that we are "diagnosing" people as somehow in need of re-education, medication, or intervention simply because they think in a different manner from the rest of us. If my neighbor wants to believe he's living in a Matrix, more power to him. He's not going to be a rocket scientist any time soon. And even if he is, plenty of people manage to have deeply trans-rational beliefs about the way things work and they function just fine in the world in all sorts of intricate, complicated scientific endeavors. We are drawing distinctions where none may be needed. Science is provisional. In my opinion we should always approach it with humility. What I am seeing more and more is people who somehow feel elevated by science to be better than their peers. That's pretty cool when you're 20 and figure out how awesome it is that calculus and physics go together, but it's a really screwed up way to live your life or influence public policy. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_spheres http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_spheres

jayzee 14y ago

I wonder why people hate on believing that the sun revolves around the earth. It would make for more complicated equations of motion, but is not unscientific or wrong to believe that to be the case. It just turns out that the math is easier when you believe that the sun is at the center.

gms7777 14y ago
Especially when you consider that both are, in fact, "wrong". In a two-body system, they both revolve around around the center of mass. (Though truly our solar system is far beyond a two-body system).
- jayzee 14y ago
  True. I think that people who think that they are scientific like to believe certain things just as much as people who are not scientific. I am sure that if you sat Jonah down and asked him to prove any of these things there would be a squirt in his 'A.C.C.' circuit!
codebaobab 14y ago
I heard once that the circles-on-circles construction of the motion of the bodies of solar system when Earth is taken as its center is merely the Fourier transform of the ellipses that describe the solar system with the Sun as its center. Unfortunately, I never saw the actual derivation, so that idea is basically hearsay.
- Locke1689 14y ago
  I think you misheard. The epicycle system is, in essence, an n-termed complex Fourier series (not transform). The point that the person who told you this was trying to make was that any path can be represented using enough terms in a complex Fourier series, so it's a fairly bad system for deriving physical laws.
Locke1689 14y ago
It's certainly unscientific. Believing something to be true despite evidence to the contrary is fundamentally unscientific. Edit: Since people don't seem to understand my point, there is more to the theories of celestial mechanics than just path prediction. Our understanding of the path mechanics is derived through our understanding of gravity. To believe that the Sun revolves around the Earth one would have to completely upend our theories of gravity, which have been shown by experiment to agree with predictions in almost all cases.

polemic 14y ago

This is not about "is there a God or not". It's about the question of why rational beliefs are so easily overridden by 'common sense' or religion. As a counter-point: why does America, a liberal western democracy, still believe in God so fervently? Australia, New Zealand, the UK and Europe have all experience a significant decline in religion over the last 100 years. Why not in the US?

tedunangst 14y ago
Because England and Europe kicked out all the fervent believers unwilling to convert to the state religion du jour and sent them to America. Ironically, the separation of church and state means people can lose faith in the state but not the church.
cschwarm 14y ago
> Why not in the US? There are many reasons but the most important one, IIRC, is existential insecurity. The more one fears for one's wealth, health, and life, the stronger and widespread religious beliefs. The thesis goes back to Gregory S. Paul [1] and has been confirmed by others; for instance, by Inglehart and Norris (2004) [2]. See also the summery by Thomas Rees. [3] [1] http://www.gspaulscienceofreligion.com/ http://www.gspaulscienceofreligion.com/ [2] http://www.hks.harvard.edu/fs/pnorris/Books/Sacred_and_secular.htm http://www.hks.harvard.edu/fs/pnorris/Books/Sacred_and_secul... [3] http://epiphenom.fieldofscience.com/2009/07/why-some-countries-are-more-religious.html http://epiphenom.fieldofscience.com/2009/07/why-some-countri...

minegames 14y ago

This: "In 1982, forty-four per cent of Americans held strictly creationist views, a statistically insignificant difference from 2012." Incorrect use of the term "statistically insignificant" and other stat terms needs to stop.

SometimesAlex 14y ago
For real. I stopped reading the article once the author used "Begging the question" incorrectly. Not sure how I'm supposed to take any journalism seriously if the reporter can't even use simple English phrases correctly.
- andreasvc 14y ago
  That's a very pervasive mistake, to the point where one could question if it may be simply snobbery to insist on it being a mistake (although I am strongly in favor of correct usage, the nature of language is such that people use terms which they believe others will interpret as they do, and the people who associate the "wrong" meaning already appear in the majority). On another note, I think it's generally nothing to be proud of when you "stop reading something", and I wish people would stop announcing it in this complaining manner--if you didn't read the article, there's not much to discuss so you might as well not make this known at all. There are lots of other informative points to be gleaned from the article if you look past these rather superficial errors.

jfoutz 14y ago

Maybe the numbers are stable because people who reject the theory of evolution have lots of kids that they homeschool.

scotty79 14y ago

> What makes the human mind so resistant to certain kinds of facts, even when these facts are buttressed by vast amounts of evidence? It's not human thing. It's USA thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Views_on_Evolution.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Views_on_Evolution.svg If you don't know Tim Minchin you might enjoy his take on this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9uIMR8yCPg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9uIMR8yCPg

scotty79 14y ago

I don't believe I would have to suppress theory that Sun revolves around Earth because I never had such theory because when I became curious why this bright dot on the sky appears on different places it was explained to me what revolves around what and how it is possible. I think I might have more trouble with the question "does the sun move across the sky" because when I look up I don't see any movement. It's not about the intuitiveness of a belief. It's about whether the right or wrong theory got to the child first. You internalize first good enough theory you hear not the one that's most intuitive or the one that explains all the data best.

mturmon 14y ago
I generally agree. I don't find evolution troublesome, for example, because the idea that "my cousin is an ape" is OK by me. The counterexample to this tidy situation is quantum mechanics. Its implications are confusing even to experts. We have so much experience with macro-level phenomena that runs counter to what QM says. It's hard to imagine a world where this mismatch could be averted at an early age.
- scotty79 14y ago
  You could start by not telling kids matter is built out of little billiard balls that move like celestial bodies. It you described it more as fuzzy, wavey things reshaping and interacting you might give people better intuition. It's not harder to explain and it's no less attractive especially when you have things like computer graphics and touch screens now. I'd love to see "What's it all built of" for iPad and Android that's highly interactive and doesn't involve drawing single sharp circle.
wvenable 14y ago
I don't think it's that simple. Look at our language: the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Noon is when the sun is straight above us. All this basic language implies the sun is moving and the earth is stationary. Language is incredibly important to how we form thoughts.
- 14y ago

keiferski 14y ago

Sad to see no mention of Hume (in the article or comments). He figured out the limitations of science 300-ish years ago. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hume#Hume.27s_.22Science_of_man.22 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hume#Hume.27s_.22Science_... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction

evincarofautumn 14y ago
I find the problem of induction interesting. I’ve long had this strange doubt whether, for example, the natural numbers actually correspond to a natural phenomenon—or whether classical logic is anything more than an approximate model of whatever logic actually underlies the universe. Humans mostly understand counting intuitively, logic perhaps less so. But how can we make inductive statements about natural numbers if they’re merely a by-product of how our brains work? How could we use the “pure” language of mathematics to communicate with extraterrestrials if our understanding of mathematics is based on entirely different principles? As a pragmatist, I mostly just keep my head down and say “numbers and Booleans may not be anything, but we can use them to do things, and that’s good enough”.

zhoutong 14y ago

I'm agnostic, and I'm interested in Physics. I believe in science, and the belief itself is nothing different from the beliefs in god for some people. Science theories are all about proving older theories wrong, and humans naturally regard those older theories as "intuition". I don't think it has anything to do with being naive or not. Aristotle thought that bigger object falls faster, force is required to maintain motion, and air is made with one element. These are all great discoveries that hold for over one thousand years. They are science. And I don't think they are naive at all. Aristotle is one of the most intelligent people at his time, and so is Issac Newton, Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking. Yet today we regard the views of the elites as "truths" and all the rest as "naive intuition". These scientists all did the same thing: prove something wrong by discovering something that explains more things more accurately in more circumstances. The fundamental way they achieved this is empirical observations, which are simply endless. Therefore, there's nothing stopping us from proving Newton's laws or Relativity wrong. The way we come up with scientific conclusions has very similar characteristics with the way we know God. In school, we can reach conclusions by drawing a graph with 7 data points and observing some linear relationship with an imaginary straight line that somehow connects them. Boom! A conclusion of "truth". One major difference of scientific discoveries is that they involve mathematics, which is a priori by nature, and this makes "science" consistent and stable. It's perfectly understandable that not many people believe in evolution. It's a fact that evolution theories have more evidence than creationist beliefs, but it's never a human nature to chase the "more evidence". We make irrational and hence suboptimal decisions everyday, yet we humans as a whole are not necessarily disadvantaged by irrationalities. "More evidence" doesn't mean it's right and "less evidence" doesn't mean it's wrong. "More probable" doesn't mean it will happen, and "less probable" doesn't mean it won't happen. You get the idea. Or is it true that elites (minority of people) have more tenancy to believe in theories with more evidence, accept explanation that covers more circumstances and do things that have more probabilities of success? And everyone else is stuck with emotions, "naive intuition" and irrationalities?

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

einhverfr 14y ago

One of the key things that gets lost in this that the piece tends to assume that unscientific beliefs are somehow bad and we'd be better off without them. I am not convinced that's the case. There are two reasons I think so. The first is that, as P. W. Anderson pointed out in his essay "More is Different" (published in Science magazine in 1972) reductionism doesn't work. With added complexity comes fundamentally new patterns. Just as chemistry is not just applied physics and biology is not just applied chemistry, I don't think life is just applied science and the real epistemological limits to what science can tell us are very real barriers. Heisenberg does a great job of mapping out these problems in his look at the history of scientific thought ("Physics and Philosophy"). When you look at verbomotor cultures and how they look a the world, their ideas of magic and religion aren't really filling the same roles as science today (see Ong, Walter "Orality and Literacy" and Eliade, Mircea, "Myth and Reality" See also Turner, Victor. "The Ritual Process" and Grimes ed., Ronald "Readings in Ritual Studies"). Instead, in a culture based on spoken discourse instead of writing, everything is based on re-usable patterns that can be flexibly applied. This is something greatly missing in religious thought today. The mystery of a story is not whether it happened in the past but rather how it happens today. From this perspective a story like the Fall from Eden isn't so much about the origins of sin as it is the model of leaving one's parents' house, getting married, having kids, and becoming an adult. I think these sorts of patterns are likely deeply ingrained in us and it's better for us to accept and use it than fight it in the quest to conform to science. For example, in the article, you have the idea that people naturally think of heat as a substance. This works fine for many applications. One can think of heat exchangers as not being fundamentally different than the system of oxygen exchange in the body or vice versa. They do work the same way on a metaphorical level and these metaphors as Heisenberg shows (again "Physics and Philosophy") are also at the core of the formation of scientific theories. I therefore wonder if we'd have any scientific progress if our scientists had no unscientific beliefs. Additionally you have issues with the quest to be more scientific often eating the tail of, well, science. For example, it is worth noting that countries in Western Europe who use midwives as the routine primary care for childbirth have better outcomes than Western European countries that do not. Yet there is a fear that by doing this in, say, the US, we will be backing away from our commitment to science. Why is following emperical data seen this way though? Is it that we really worship technology in the guise of science?

waterhouse 14y ago

I am irritated by the use of the word "we" in the title, "Why We Don't Believe in Science". The article begins with three paragraphs discussing the widespread belief in creationism. It appears to the reader (that is to say, me--I clarify just whom I'm speaking for, unlike the author) that this is intended at least as a prominent example of "us not believing in science". In fact, this appears to be the focus of the article. However, the author talks as though he sees creationism as obviously false, calling the 46% statistic "a stark blow to high-school science teachers everywhere", and asking, "What makes the human mind so resistant to [...] facts [...] buttressed by vast amounts of evidence?" Furthermore, the author does not provide any arguments against creationism, instead proceeding as though it were obviously false to his audience as well. Well, if neither the author nor his intended audience is a creationist (when evolutionary alternatives to creationism appear to be the "Science" that "We Don't Believe In"), then just who is "we"? The word seems quite inappropriate. All the article manages to establish about "we" is that, when we're processing and reasoning about physical systems, if they don't map well to visceral intuition, then we use an extra part of our brains; and that this appears to cost some kind of effort and slow us down. I expect even that last effect could be mitigated with practice or by developing a certain mindset; but ignoring that, all it would establish is "We Think More Slowly About [Certain Kinds of] Science", not "We Don't Believe In [Certain Kinds of] Science". Just learn to think slowly and carefully in certain situations; I think I, for one, have that reflex built into my bones. Anyway, it being difficult to think about something is clearly insufficient explanation by itself--how many people "don't believe in integral calculus"? If you actually want to know why the people who believe in creationism believe in creationism, then you should probably investigate them. Let's see. We have idea A (creationism--really this refers to a category of many specific beliefs), and competing idea B (human evolutionary theory). Both ideas are sufficiently complex and detailed that it is unlikely that many of the people we're interested in came up with it on their own. So let's see when and how they're exposed to both ideas, and how they reason about the ideas on their own after exposure. At this point, for a journalistic article worth publishing, you would probably want to present some research. Find some creationists, ask them some questions about their background, figure out some patterns, do some large-scale sampling to see if you've found all the common patterns, and do detailed interviews of a few representative people from each pattern. (Probably the biggest pattern is "grows up in a religious, creationist family; is exposed to human evolutionary theory either not at all, or just a little in high school, and is told by parents and priests or other authorities that it's all bunk, and accepts this; takes a career path that doesn't involve studying human genetics or biology in detail; and doesn't find a need to seriously question creationism at any point in the rest of their life." If evolution were easier to reason about, it might increase the rate at which people decided on their own--after having been exposed to evolutionary theory--that humans evolved. But... I find evolution easy to understand and reason about--at least in simple cases of obvious improvements to an organism; the evolution of behaviors that are useful only in a group or in a family with certain structure is much more difficult, because it's hard to know what hominid societies were like; but most of the obvious changes between humans and more primitive mammals--getting taller and more dexterous and brainy--are easy to at least decide to be plausible. I think it really just doesn't come up often in these people's lives, except as something like "Another godless rant from a misguided intellectual", which is easily dismissed. I conclude that the scientific content of this article--the studies involving observing how people and their brains respond to "nonintuitive" physical situations--is probably in fact irrelevant to the stuff about creationists.) Once you've learned why creationists are the way they are, then you might learn what might be good ideas for how to change them. But! Any moral principle that justifies you using any means to try to change them can justify them using the same means to try to change you. Anyone who advocates compulsory, tax-funded public schooling, and then complains about the fact that they're being forced to send their kids to be taught anti-science and to pay for the same disservice to be done to other kids--I consider you to have brought your problems upon yourself and I have no sympathy for you. (Nor do I sympathize with creationists in favor of compulsory public education. A plague on all your houses, dammit!) If you feel the need, then put your efforts into civil, reasoned argument, hopefully in a not-annoying way. This result about people apparently having to "push back against their instincts" is an interesting thing. I'd be interested to hear more detailed and careful investigation on the subject: can you establish exactly what things are hard to reason about? does it vary from person to person? can you improve by thinking about such situations more, and would this make it hard to do repeated measurements with the same people? etc. This would have been good as a standalone science article. Unfortunately, it was cast as an article about evolution vs creationism, with an annoyingly incorrect (and possibly condescending) title and a probably misleading conclusion. On the other hand, it'll probably attract a lot of traffic. If that is the author's job, he's probably done it well. I want to go live in a private little world now... Well, I don't know. Maybe backlash from people like me can have some effect. There's probably a reason they don't put up even more linkbait-y stuff. Some people would decide to read other stuff. Even those who eat up the linkbait, they're probably not discriminating, and they could easily switch to another linkbait source that might happen to give them better content once, or be more convenient once. I guess maybe I can hope for competition and a race to the bottom to wipe out stuff like this. (Come to think of it, that is happening. But this newspaper probably has some highbrow content as well, neh? Hmm... It's possible that an editor (with detailed observation of readers), or the author, might figure out that linkbait eventually loses readers and reputation, and eliminate the column from the paper, or the technique from his writing repertoire. Possible. For now, I'm still going to my private little world.)

saurik 14y ago

So, I /am/ a scientist (computer, but still: I was in the PhD program for a long time, and am mainly interested in theoretical issues in parsing and type systems) and most of my friends are as well (everything from chemists and physicists to public health researchers), and even I don't "believe in science" (to mean, if someone sais to me "science claims X", and even shows me a bibliography with quotes from the authors, that I now believe X). If it weren't for my background and experience knowing that science could actually work, or having not spent the time to look into and learn the individual arguments being made and seeing that some of them actually are sound, I could easily see myself discounting something like evolution as a passing fad. The problem is that 99% of your average person's interaction with "science" is by way of newspaper articles claiming "scientists say red meat is bad" and then three years later "scientists say red meat may be good". Another three years go by, and they see "scientists say red meat is bad for you after all". In reality, some scientists demonstrated an interesting correlation with a single marker (and often later studies are talking about correlations to something else entirely) that may or may not actually be causative, and either the media is spinning it into "a story" or some public health bureau is playing a numbers game that leads to the behavior "if it has any effect at all we should recommend it". But, what the public sees is: "scientists say X" followed by "scientists say Y, previous scientists were somehow wrong", followed by "scientists claim that second scientists were wrong and they were right the whole time". We are actively training the public so that when we hear "scientist say X" the response is "engh: they're probably wrong". Hell, this article and my reading it is an interesting example: it's chock full of references to published journal papers and actual psychologists, but I honestly don't even care anymore as every time I've gone and pulled the research articles like this are based on I've come up with tenuous conclusions based on flawed experiments that are being trumpeted as the new truth. Worse, much of the "science" being cited isn't really science at all: a cohort study, for example, has no controlled experiment and can't really be used to show anything definitive; it is, at best, a way to come up with interesting hypotheses on which to later run actual experiments. However, a good number of the "scientists say X" that people hear are from health research, where controlled experiments in humans are sufficiently rare and tied up in ethical conundrums that many of the statements being made (and almost all of the ones involving diets) come from new cohort studies or meta-analyses of previous cohort studies. It is no wonder, then, that every three years we hear something different. ;P Now, with that in mind, imagine the average person hearing "scientists claim evolution is true". They often respond with things like "it's just a theory: one of many". I will contend that they do that because to them "scientists claim evolution is true" only has as much evidence behind it as "scientists claim red meat is bad for you" or "scientists now claim salt may not be bad for you after all" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4069613 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4069613) and the result is now that they don't trust us: we can tell them anything we want, but they have no reason to believe us anymore, as we were continually wrong to them every time it mattered to them before. I will then claim that if we want to be credible, we need to stop reporting every paper that comes out to the public as "scientists say X" and even further be careful about what we call "science" in the first place. It should be that when we claim that something is true, it is because we have sufficiently strong theoretical models and experimental evidence that can really claim "this is knowledge that may be imprecise, but is not inaccurate" in the way that newtonian mechanics is a little imprecise (it doesn't take into account relativistic or quantum effects), but isn't so wildly inaccurate that we should ever expect to see a newspaper headline "scientists report we were wrong all along: objects of greater mass actually repel each other".

shirro 14y ago

There are plenty of people outside the US, religious or not, who have no problems with science. Religion only seems to be anti-science in the USA and amongst a tiny minority in the Islamic world. I wonder if religion is really the issue. Is there some political imperative that is served by keeping the voting population ignorant about science? Perhaps business, politics and media have worked to create a society turned away from science and then those people turn to religion to fill the gaps.

molmalo 14y ago
> Is there some political imperative that is served by keeping the voting population ignorant about science? Certainly there is. Maybe not in an evil way like "hey! let's keep all the people ignorant so we can control the world", but mainly to keep the status quo. Consider this: Science teaches to question everything, so you can understand the rationale about how and why something happens the way it does. But... having a bunch of people questioning everything, even the very fabric of our society, is usually not something very amusing to the ones that happen to be the current rulers. That's why, from the ancient world to this days, the higher studies where reserved to the elites... the less likely part of the population that would turn against the current structure of society. For example, during the Dark Ages, the church saw science as the works of the devil (and sadly, some of them still do [1]).... or more specifically, something that would make people question about their doings, their position it society, and so on... And usually, things doesn't go so nice to the people in power, when more and more people starts questioning their world. Look at what happened to Luis XVI, Nicholas II, or more recently in the Middle East. Or looking even closer... the anti-globalist movements and the environmental movements, as (not-so-extreme) examples of people questioning the status quo. Finally, in some countries it's very public that some politicians think and say that is much easier to handle an ignorant population, than a well educated one. [Edit: Added] [1] A few years ago, when I asked a very religious fellow student about the existence of fossils, his answer was that some where the remains of the animals that lived before the great flood, and the older ones where there just to "test our faith".

confluence 14y ago

Why? Because humans reason inductively and not deductively. We use short cuts, quick heuristics, analogies and similes. We anthropomorphize, we look for direct causes and effects over linear time scales. That's just the tip of the ice berg. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases - That's a pretty comprehensive list. Memorize and comprehend all of those, and even then you won't get a handle around how badly humans reason - because you are human yourself! It's also why humans find programming difficult (logic is very unnatural to a inductive reasoner). All swans are white programmers will quickly smash into the error caused by unpredictbale black swans coming into the system. Hence that's why you need exceptions, conditionals and containers to deal with the most absurd inputs (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/04/working-with-the-chaos-monkey.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/04/working-with-the-ch...). Humans are animals, with a bunch of neurons in their heads that look for and extract statistically significant patterns from correlated data over short term linear time scales. We mistake correlation for causation thanks to all the mental shortcuts that were used to keep us alive in a less complex world. Why don't we believe in science? The same reason we eat food, drink water and socialize with our peers - to stay alive. Science is deduction from first principles (backed by evidence of course). And that is very, very unnatural. Note: Proud reductionist here! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction

sopooneo 14y ago

I found myself wincing at "pressure produces heat". For the purpose and context of this article, that is probably close enough. Because the subtlety of energy spent increasing pressure being converted to thermal energy is too finicky. But it's also more correct. And this relates to a problem I've run into whenever you try to talk to an expert about something. People come up to me with fanciful ideas about physics and you have to stop them every five seconds to clear up what they mean by "power" or "energy". Or (as a favor) just listen all the way through and see if you can get a notion of what they mean so you can discuss their idea. Same thing happens when I try to ask lawyers about something. I'm always getting asked, "Do you mean a law, or a statute?" or having things like "well, that's a legal term-of-art" given back to me. The point being that it's hard to jump into thinking about anything that others have spent a long time considering and carefully defining.

huma 14y ago

> At the present rate, the Darwinian revolution, at least in America, will take just as long. I would say that it's exclusively an American problem :) I get rather annoyed stumbling on the creationist articles. It's like reading on flat earth in 2012. What's even more entertaining is that people try to explain it in A.C.C. and D.L.P.F.C. terms. Just "get your shit together", folks :)