7 ms·

Richard Dawkins' response to “What scientific idea is ready for retirement?"

101 points by __Joker 12y ago

IvyMike 12y ago
> Yet so entrenched is our essentialist mind-set, American official forms require everyone to tick one race/ethnicity box or another: no room for intermediates. On both the 2000 and 2010 census forms, I put "Other" and filled in "human".
- jaimebuelta 12y ago
  I always find this need to totally categorise "race" as an absolute as something very curious about the American culture...
  - DanBC 12y ago
    English diversity forms can have complex listings of categories. Here's the English census, which might be mildly interesting to US readers because it has no mention of any American races: Well, I'd like to copy paste an URL here. I go to Google and type "English census form" into the box. First non-advert hit is the one I want. Right click, copy link address, switch tab, paste. Look at this fucking blob: http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CDsQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2F www.ons.gov.uk%2Fons%2Fguide-method%2Fcensus%2F2011%2Fthe-2011-census%2F2011-census-questionnaire -content%2F2011-census-questionnaire-for-england.pdf&ei=4aQDVO-SE6ek0QXs4oHwAQ&usg= AFQjCNGAEFRjZVqTLVgB0m9zxbbIcrcoBg&sig2=lPEfOAzhMhA0EO3GG9T19w (I added linebreaks to prevent breaking the HN page.) http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CDsQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ons.gov.uk%2Fons%2Fguide-method%2Fcensus%2F2011%2Fthe-2011-census%2F2011-census-questionnaire-content%2F2011-census-questionnaire-for-england.pdf&ei=4aQDVO-SE6ek0QXs4oHwAQ&usg=AFQjCNGAEFRjZVqTLVgB0m9zxbbIcrcoBg&sig2=lPEfOAzhMhA0EO3GG9T19w http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&... NO GOOGLE. NO PERSON WANTS THAT FUCKING URL. EVERYBODY WANTS THIS URL: http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/guide-method/census/2011/the-2011-census/2011-census-questionnaire-content/2011-census-questionnaire-for-england.pdf http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/guide-method/census/2011/the-2011-... (Section 16 - Copy from a multi column PDF is painful. Sorry. Trying to select text from that made me want to smash up my computer.)
    - quesera 12y ago
      Google has been serving those wanked URLs in search results for years, but only to logged-in users. Even if you turn off all search history settings. They apparently use the data to measure the strength of their ranked results. But that doesn't explain the logged-in vs not disparity.
      - qu4z-2 12y ago
        My favourite bit is the bait-n-switch where they show the correct url, then change it under you as soon as you click. That seems very underhanded to me.
    - andreasvc 12y ago
      Try e.g. https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/clean-links/ https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/clean-links/
  - IvyMike 12y ago
    I'm actually kind of being a dick when I answer "human". In theory, the data is used to answer questions about "how racist/inequitable is America these days", and given some of the uglier bits of our history, this is an important question to answer. I just wish we did not have to ask it.
  - thaumaturgy 12y ago
    The U.S. has a history of disenfranchised minorities. Surveys and censuses provide data (when given by participants...) that can be used to e.g. correlate median household income to racial demographics. Then, people who want to make the U.S. more egalitarian have data to work with.
- smsm42 12y ago
  Did the same, in a futile hope that if everybody did that, maybe some sanity could be injected in this topic. I know it is futile but one can hope.
  - MichaelGG 12y ago
    Ideally, the census would sample DNA and use that for aggregate statistics. (Pretending we could somehow do this while keeping privacy.) It'd be useful knowledge to know how certain clusters of genetic traits relate to socioeconomic ones.
baddox 12y ago
That's something that has always bugged me about taxonomy in general, or at least the way it is portrayed both in the media and in the broad amateur research I have done on the subject.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  That's something that actually bugged me about Object Oriented Programming, especially the way it was taught at the university (with Java and UML diagrams). Taxonomy is often a useful tool, but the closer you get to hairy real-world problems, the more likely it is that your hierarchical object representation will come around to bite you.
btipling 12y ago
This "essentialism" applies to gender as well. Not just gender but sexual orientation and even biological sex which some sociologists and anthropologists distinguish as different from gender. These are not binary, but actually gradients. We like to classify people as either male or female, and have that mapped perfectly to the biological sex they were born with, and likewise mapped to their sexual orientation, but it hides a subtler reality. This goes with sexual orientation as well. We want to map people into straight or gay, but that is also a gradient where, like gender, people fall in in various parts of the gradient. When I brought this up with a friend, we were talking about the new women.com yc startup and how they only accepted "women", he responded with that there are two distinct peaks in this gradient, like if you mapped this as a graph. I think you can actually blame these peaks not in small part on the immense social pressure to conform to either being male or female (which bathroom do you go into?), or even being straight or gay. It doesn't have to be that way, and there are ways other cultures solved this problem, like some Native American groups actually had a third gender[1]. I find the concept of "essentialism" interesting and intuitive to think about, including its flaws, which as Dawkins points out can be quite destructive. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_gender http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_gender
- jiggy2011 12y ago
  I don't know, if this were the case you would expect more sexual experimentation than you see. A majority of straight men never have sex with other men or watch gay porn, just as a majority of gay men have no interest in sex with a woman. Anything in between we call "bisexual" which is an imprecise definition. For this to be true you would need to believe that most straight men have repressed homosexual desires and most gay men have repressed heterosexual desires.
  - btipling 12y ago
    It would still be a gradient even if the distribution of where people fit into it isn't even. The way my sociologist professor explained it in school was that the gradient is for "attraction" and like some appreciate the attractive qualities of one gender while not actually having any desires attached to that appreciation.
brandonmenc 12y ago
> But any evolutionist knows there must have existed individuals who were exactly intermediate. Is this not still up for debate, re: macromutation? Can someone more knowledgeable clear this up?
- the8472 12y ago
  A much simpler counterexample would be hybridization creating a new species, such as the new mexico whiptail. Nature has exceptions in store for most of its rules.
- tinco 12y ago
  More from reason than from any experience in biology: I don't think macromutation has any statistical chance of being a significant factor in branching of species. The chance of a 'macromutation' both occurring and being successful enough to not only let the spawn survive but even let it thrive as a branched species is vanishingly slim. Perhaps complex characteristics might evolve as functions with simple gene input, like perhaps the shape of an organ or the structure/color of a fur or even the size of a mammal all expressed by a few genes. This would allow that the species as a whole could adapt quicker to environmental changes. Then the gene mutation would be 'micro' but the resulting change could be 'macro'. Perhaps paedomorphism is like that?
belovedeagle 12y ago
Frankly, Dawkins didn't answer the question, which was about a /scientific/ idea "ready for retirement". But Dawkins is so blinded by his ridiculous, anti-intellectual scientism that not only did he find himself unable to discredit just one single scientific idea (which, by their sheer quantity and variety, /must/ contain among their number some failure), but he can't even distinguish the boundary between science and philosophical positions which haven't been popular (in their entirety) in millenia. As such, while Dawkins would have provided a convincing (to me) opponent for Plato, in this context, his essay is pure poppycock.
- bradfordarner 12y ago
  Agreed. This is a great example of a "straw man attack". He sets up an intellectually shallow definition of a philosophical ideal and then somehow manages to connect it to Florida politics...Brilliant! He deals so fluently in generalities that he starts sounding like a new-age prophet predicting the next earthquake that will blight humanity.
- Crito 12y ago
  Feel free to substitute "scientific idea" with "idea within the scientific community". Challenges to any strictly "scientific idea" as you are thinking of them are not going to come in this form of article. They will come in the form of scholarly papers and studies published in major journals. They won't be prompted by these sort of fluff questions for celebrity scientists, they will naturally arise through research. Dawkin's answer was not off; your expectations for what this question was asking and how it could be answered were off.
- alexandros 12y ago
  It's a bit of an impossible ask though. If a "scientific idea" is one which is supported by the balance of the evidence at this time, then no current scientific idea is ready for retirement. Scientific ideas don't "have to" contain some "failure". If they do, we don't know about it yet. When we do, we retire it proactively. Unless you zero in on one idea where the balance of evidence has very very recently shifted against it, you have to look a bit further than the "current theories/hypotheses" space, into the philosophical ideas, which is what Dawkins is doing. What would you suggest as a scientific idea ready for retirement?
lkozma 12y ago
"The world is divided into those who get this truth and those who wail,..." Is Dawkins making a joke here, or is he falling into the same fallacy he is deriding in the article. Clearly the world is not "divided" into these two camps, there is a continuum in between and the same person can also hold one view at a time, a different one later, etc.
- msellout 12y ago
  I think it's a joke.
- callum85 12y ago
  Ha good point :) I don't think it's a joke, I think he is falling into the same fallacy himself. To be fair, the article acknowledges it's a difficult trap: "We seem ill-equipped to deal mentally with a continuous spectrum of intermediates. We are still infected with the plague of Plato’s essentialism." He would probably agree, if someone pointed it out to him, that his phrasing here was an example of exactly what he's talking about. I think it is just a fault of phrasing though; it doesn't really undermine the sentiment of the article. It almost vindicates it!
  - smsm42 12y ago
    >>> We seem ill-equipped to deal mentally with a continuous spectrum of intermediates. We are still infected with the plague of Plato’s essentialism. This is contradictory. If we have some kind of mental handicap that not allows us to perceive spectra properly, it's wrong to blame Plato for this. If, however, Plato is the one who steered the whole civilization wrong, that means we are capable of doing better - we just don't do it right now. Of course, it could be that it's both but Plato and mental handicap together wouldn't allow us to realize it :) Recursion is recursive.
    - lutusp 12y ago
      > If we have some kind of mental handicap that not allows us to perceive spectra properly, it's wrong to blame Plato for this. I think Dawkins is simply using Plato's idea as an intellectual roadsign, not assigning moral responsibility. If I refer to Karl Popper when discussing falsifiability, I might simply be providing a convenient reference to the idea, not holding Popper responsible for the idea (which he isn't).
acex 12y ago
How can someone like this call himself an intellectual or be called a leading world's intellectual. I think that an intelligent design is an insult to both, intelligence and design and I as well think that circle (more than a triangle) arise from a biochemistry and as a part of the same evolution. Dawkins in the same piece uses the same argument to claim that the evolution came late in the development of human mind. Late compared to what? Evolution? Millions of yeas compared to a few thousands years of a written word or since we invented a more persistent method to pass the knowledge than story or since a man drew some of the first inscriptions on a wall of a cave. And this is no allegory. Let us get rid of the PI formulas then. It does fit the model. Since we can only approximate it we cannot use it. The world is a better place today than it was hundreds or thousands of years ago. The idea that it can be better is the very idea of ideal and abstract types we are never to reach and should always aspire to. Essentialism, from an evolutionary standpoint, relatively is no less correct than some other approximation of what a certain species is in some period. The evolutionary traits are the same for hundreds of thousands of years for a species. Mutations take place rarely and only on extreme environmental changes. The nature (or the evolution) is perfect there. Its every 'design' has a function perfected through many centuries. This is essential (sic) problem with the certain type of scientists (those of celebrity type) is that they not count in how short is human experience on this world. We say Earth is 4.5 billions years old and that we know that and those people who claimed differently are in wrong as if we as a human race posses our own memory since primordial soup. In a shallow struggle against those 6 thousands years we tend to forget that ideas and their shapes were experience of the world. Colours are not wrong, we experience the colours the same way as thousands years before. And will experience them in the future in a broader spectre. Like we always did with everything. The very world we experience, even when we do it with our best tools is no more than an approximation of a world more perfect (or less measured and computed).
- msellout 12y ago
  I think you're using a different definition of "essentialism" than Dawkins is. Dawkins was not arguing against improvement, but against the idea of clear boundaries between concepts.
  - 12y ago
analog31 12y ago
Looking through the entire list of essays, I was struck by how few I was willing to acknowledge as "scientific" ideas. Many seemed like straw men, and the entire list might give a false impression that scientists are blinded by bad ideas.
wsxcde 12y ago
Dawkins seems to be a good example of the Peter principle at work in a large social movement. Clearly he's a smart guy and at some point in his career he did have interesting and original insights to share with the rest of us. But it seems like the new atheists [1] have elevated (promoted) him into near demigod status and he's now being socially pressured into producing new and original insight on a regular basis. Unfortunately for him, he doesn't have an infinite well of wisdom and insight and so he ends up producing drivel of this sort. [1] I am a new atheist and some of blame for what has happened here probably falls at my feet as well.
- lclarkmichalek 12y ago
  This image comes up pretty commonly on r/badphilosphy when something he says (or drama surrounding something he says) is discussed: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BpXAZGuCMAA21xA.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BpXAZGuCMAA21xA.jpg I wouldn't go quite so far as to absolve him for his opinions due to social pressure, but there is truth in what you say.
  - wsxcde 12y ago
    I'm not absolving him of his opinions by any means. I was just pointing out that he's been elevated to this status where he can't (won't? is unwilling to?) do what most other reasonable people would have done if they were asked this question. He could've just said, "that's a really interesting question and I don't have an answer" but instead it appears he's compelled to answer with a lot of verbiage and little actual content.
pella 12y ago
All answer: http://edge.org/responses/what-scientific-idea-is-ready-for-retirement http://edge.org/responses/what-scientific-idea-is-ready-for-...
smsm42 12y ago
I don't see anything about science in this essay. Philosophically, it may be a valid critique of essentialism, in the meaning that primitive conclusions Dawkins is drawing - as for rabbits or state politics - are indeed looking invalid. But nobody currently advocates such concepts - i.e. nobody really builds a scientific theories based on the fact that rabbits literally represent the "ideal rabbit" and nobody actually thinks all Florida residents are Democrats or Republicans. We may act as if they are, in order to simplify certain things, such as deciding who will be the president or which pills to give to a specific rabbit, but we know they really aren't. OTOH, if you drop the concept entirely, then you'd need to throw a significant part of modern science out of the window. Modern science bases on the fact that there are some laws of nature, which are universal and fixed, and by doing certain actions and making certain conclusions using certain techniques we can discover these laws and thus discover how ideal Platonic objects would behave, and by reasoning about those objects we could derive the useful conclusions about real world objects. If you reject this method, then you'd have to make a scientific theory anew for each object, which would be kind of hard to make practical. Modeling is necessarily idealization, and if you reject idealization, not much is left of the scientific method. What Dawkins seems to argue is that one should realize the map is not the territory, but isn't it obvious to everybody by now?
jqm 12y ago
Best Quote of the article... "Essentialism rears its ugly head in racial terminology. The majority of "African Americans" are of mixed race. Yet so entrenched is our essentialist mind-set, American official forms require everyone to tick one race/ethnicity box or another: no room for intermediates." Yes, this has driven me nuts for years. I had to fill out a form a few days ago with the "race" check box (optional of course...). I keep scratching my head and wondering how one exactly determines this and what difference it makes and most of all... why would somebody put such an unreasonable and fallacious question on a form?
- MichaelGG 12y ago
  What's wrong with it, besides the very limited answer space? They should let you check of multiple boxes or fill in rough percentages. That allows finding things like "people with 15% or more X ancestry tend to do better on Y". It's not unlike asking "What culture are you?" Providing useful answers may be difficult, but it's not fundamentally a wrong thing to ask.
runeks 12y ago
Very interesting article. > Essentialism rears its ugly head in racial terminology. The majority of "African Americans" are of mixed race. Yet so entrenched is our essentialist mind-set, American official forms require everyone to tick one race/ethnicity box or another: no room for intermediates. I thought about this as well some time ago. It's odd that the child of a black and a white parent is black, and not "neither black nor white" or "both black and white".

101 points by __Joker 12y ago

> Yet so entrenched is our essentialist mind-set, American official forms require everyone to tick one race/ethnicity box or another: no room for intermediates. On both the 2000 and 2010 census forms, I put "Other" and filled in "human".

jaimebuelta 12y ago
I always find this need to totally categorise "race" as an absolute as something very curious about the American culture...
- DanBC 12y ago
  English diversity forms can have complex listings of categories. Here's the English census, which might be mildly interesting to US readers because it has no mention of any American races: Well, I'd like to copy paste an URL here. I go to Google and type "English census form" into the box. First non-advert hit is the one I want. Right click, copy link address, switch tab, paste. Look at this fucking blob: http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CDsQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2F www.ons.gov.uk%2Fons%2Fguide-method%2Fcensus%2F2011%2Fthe-2011-census%2F2011-census-questionnaire -content%2F2011-census-questionnaire-for-england.pdf&ei=4aQDVO-SE6ek0QXs4oHwAQ&usg= AFQjCNGAEFRjZVqTLVgB0m9zxbbIcrcoBg&sig2=lPEfOAzhMhA0EO3GG9T19w (I added linebreaks to prevent breaking the HN page.) http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CDsQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ons.gov.uk%2Fons%2Fguide-method%2Fcensus%2F2011%2Fthe-2011-census%2F2011-census-questionnaire-content%2F2011-census-questionnaire-for-england.pdf&ei=4aQDVO-SE6ek0QXs4oHwAQ&usg=AFQjCNGAEFRjZVqTLVgB0m9zxbbIcrcoBg&sig2=lPEfOAzhMhA0EO3GG9T19w http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&... NO GOOGLE. NO PERSON WANTS THAT FUCKING URL. EVERYBODY WANTS THIS URL: http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/guide-method/census/2011/the-2011-census/2011-census-questionnaire-content/2011-census-questionnaire-for-england.pdf http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/guide-method/census/2011/the-2011-... (Section 16 - Copy from a multi column PDF is painful. Sorry. Trying to select text from that made me want to smash up my computer.)
  - quesera 12y ago
    Google has been serving those wanked URLs in search results for years, but only to logged-in users. Even if you turn off all search history settings. They apparently use the data to measure the strength of their ranked results. But that doesn't explain the logged-in vs not disparity.
    - qu4z-2 12y ago
      My favourite bit is the bait-n-switch where they show the correct url, then change it under you as soon as you click. That seems very underhanded to me.
  - andreasvc 12y ago
    Try e.g. https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/clean-links/ https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/clean-links/
- IvyMike 12y ago
  I'm actually kind of being a dick when I answer "human". In theory, the data is used to answer questions about "how racist/inequitable is America these days", and given some of the uglier bits of our history, this is an important question to answer. I just wish we did not have to ask it.
- thaumaturgy 12y ago
  The U.S. has a history of disenfranchised minorities. Surveys and censuses provide data (when given by participants...) that can be used to e.g. correlate median household income to racial demographics. Then, people who want to make the U.S. more egalitarian have data to work with.
smsm42 12y ago
Did the same, in a futile hope that if everybody did that, maybe some sanity could be injected in this topic. I know it is futile but one can hope.
- MichaelGG 12y ago
  Ideally, the census would sample DNA and use that for aggregate statistics. (Pretending we could somehow do this while keeping privacy.) It'd be useful knowledge to know how certain clusters of genetic traits relate to socioeconomic ones.

baddox 12y ago

That's something that has always bugged me about taxonomy in general, or at least the way it is portrayed both in the media and in the broad amateur research I have done on the subject.

TeMPOraL 12y ago
That's something that actually bugged me about Object Oriented Programming, especially the way it was taught at the university (with Java and UML diagrams). Taxonomy is often a useful tool, but the closer you get to hairy real-world problems, the more likely it is that your hierarchical object representation will come around to bite you.

btipling 12y ago

This "essentialism" applies to gender as well. Not just gender but sexual orientation and even biological sex which some sociologists and anthropologists distinguish as different from gender. These are not binary, but actually gradients. We like to classify people as either male or female, and have that mapped perfectly to the biological sex they were born with, and likewise mapped to their sexual orientation, but it hides a subtler reality. This goes with sexual orientation as well. We want to map people into straight or gay, but that is also a gradient where, like gender, people fall in in various parts of the gradient. When I brought this up with a friend, we were talking about the new women.com yc startup and how they only accepted "women", he responded with that there are two distinct peaks in this gradient, like if you mapped this as a graph. I think you can actually blame these peaks not in small part on the immense social pressure to conform to either being male or female (which bathroom do you go into?), or even being straight or gay. It doesn't have to be that way, and there are ways other cultures solved this problem, like some Native American groups actually had a third gender[1]. I find the concept of "essentialism" interesting and intuitive to think about, including its flaws, which as Dawkins points out can be quite destructive. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_gender http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_gender

jiggy2011 12y ago
I don't know, if this were the case you would expect more sexual experimentation than you see. A majority of straight men never have sex with other men or watch gay porn, just as a majority of gay men have no interest in sex with a woman. Anything in between we call "bisexual" which is an imprecise definition. For this to be true you would need to believe that most straight men have repressed homosexual desires and most gay men have repressed heterosexual desires.
- btipling 12y ago
  It would still be a gradient even if the distribution of where people fit into it isn't even. The way my sociologist professor explained it in school was that the gradient is for "attraction" and like some appreciate the attractive qualities of one gender while not actually having any desires attached to that appreciation.

brandonmenc 12y ago

> But any evolutionist knows there must have existed individuals who were exactly intermediate. Is this not still up for debate, re: macromutation? Can someone more knowledgeable clear this up?

the8472 12y ago
A much simpler counterexample would be hybridization creating a new species, such as the new mexico whiptail. Nature has exceptions in store for most of its rules.
tinco 12y ago
More from reason than from any experience in biology: I don't think macromutation has any statistical chance of being a significant factor in branching of species. The chance of a 'macromutation' both occurring and being successful enough to not only let the spawn survive but even let it thrive as a branched species is vanishingly slim. Perhaps complex characteristics might evolve as functions with simple gene input, like perhaps the shape of an organ or the structure/color of a fur or even the size of a mammal all expressed by a few genes. This would allow that the species as a whole could adapt quicker to environmental changes. Then the gene mutation would be 'micro' but the resulting change could be 'macro'. Perhaps paedomorphism is like that?

belovedeagle 12y ago

Frankly, Dawkins didn't answer the question, which was about a /scientific/ idea "ready for retirement". But Dawkins is so blinded by his ridiculous, anti-intellectual scientism that not only did he find himself unable to discredit just one single scientific idea (which, by their sheer quantity and variety, /must/ contain among their number some failure), but he can't even distinguish the boundary between science and philosophical positions which haven't been popular (in their entirety) in millenia. As such, while Dawkins would have provided a convincing (to me) opponent for Plato, in this context, his essay is pure poppycock.

bradfordarner 12y ago
Agreed. This is a great example of a "straw man attack". He sets up an intellectually shallow definition of a philosophical ideal and then somehow manages to connect it to Florida politics...Brilliant! He deals so fluently in generalities that he starts sounding like a new-age prophet predicting the next earthquake that will blight humanity.
Crito 12y ago
Feel free to substitute "scientific idea" with "idea within the scientific community". Challenges to any strictly "scientific idea" as you are thinking of them are not going to come in this form of article. They will come in the form of scholarly papers and studies published in major journals. They won't be prompted by these sort of fluff questions for celebrity scientists, they will naturally arise through research. Dawkin's answer was not off; your expectations for what this question was asking and how it could be answered were off.
alexandros 12y ago
It's a bit of an impossible ask though. If a "scientific idea" is one which is supported by the balance of the evidence at this time, then no current scientific idea is ready for retirement. Scientific ideas don't "have to" contain some "failure". If they do, we don't know about it yet. When we do, we retire it proactively. Unless you zero in on one idea where the balance of evidence has very very recently shifted against it, you have to look a bit further than the "current theories/hypotheses" space, into the philosophical ideas, which is what Dawkins is doing. What would you suggest as a scientific idea ready for retirement?

lkozma 12y ago

"The world is divided into those who get this truth and those who wail,..." Is Dawkins making a joke here, or is he falling into the same fallacy he is deriding in the article. Clearly the world is not "divided" into these two camps, there is a continuum in between and the same person can also hold one view at a time, a different one later, etc.

msellout 12y ago
I think it's a joke.
callum85 12y ago
Ha good point :) I don't think it's a joke, I think he is falling into the same fallacy himself. To be fair, the article acknowledges it's a difficult trap: "We seem ill-equipped to deal mentally with a continuous spectrum of intermediates. We are still infected with the plague of Plato’s essentialism." He would probably agree, if someone pointed it out to him, that his phrasing here was an example of exactly what he's talking about. I think it is just a fault of phrasing though; it doesn't really undermine the sentiment of the article. It almost vindicates it!
- smsm42 12y ago
  >>> We seem ill-equipped to deal mentally with a continuous spectrum of intermediates. We are still infected with the plague of Plato’s essentialism. This is contradictory. If we have some kind of mental handicap that not allows us to perceive spectra properly, it's wrong to blame Plato for this. If, however, Plato is the one who steered the whole civilization wrong, that means we are capable of doing better - we just don't do it right now. Of course, it could be that it's both but Plato and mental handicap together wouldn't allow us to realize it :) Recursion is recursive.
  - lutusp 12y ago
    > If we have some kind of mental handicap that not allows us to perceive spectra properly, it's wrong to blame Plato for this. I think Dawkins is simply using Plato's idea as an intellectual roadsign, not assigning moral responsibility. If I refer to Karl Popper when discussing falsifiability, I might simply be providing a convenient reference to the idea, not holding Popper responsible for the idea (which he isn't).

acex 12y ago

How can someone like this call himself an intellectual or be called a leading world's intellectual. I think that an intelligent design is an insult to both, intelligence and design and I as well think that circle (more than a triangle) arise from a biochemistry and as a part of the same evolution. Dawkins in the same piece uses the same argument to claim that the evolution came late in the development of human mind. Late compared to what? Evolution? Millions of yeas compared to a few thousands years of a written word or since we invented a more persistent method to pass the knowledge than story or since a man drew some of the first inscriptions on a wall of a cave. And this is no allegory. Let us get rid of the PI formulas then. It does fit the model. Since we can only approximate it we cannot use it. The world is a better place today than it was hundreds or thousands of years ago. The idea that it can be better is the very idea of ideal and abstract types we are never to reach and should always aspire to. Essentialism, from an evolutionary standpoint, relatively is no less correct than some other approximation of what a certain species is in some period. The evolutionary traits are the same for hundreds of thousands of years for a species. Mutations take place rarely and only on extreme environmental changes. The nature (or the evolution) is perfect there. Its every 'design' has a function perfected through many centuries. This is essential (sic) problem with the certain type of scientists (those of celebrity type) is that they not count in how short is human experience on this world. We say Earth is 4.5 billions years old and that we know that and those people who claimed differently are in wrong as if we as a human race posses our own memory since primordial soup. In a shallow struggle against those 6 thousands years we tend to forget that ideas and their shapes were experience of the world. Colours are not wrong, we experience the colours the same way as thousands years before. And will experience them in the future in a broader spectre. Like we always did with everything. The very world we experience, even when we do it with our best tools is no more than an approximation of a world more perfect (or less measured and computed).

msellout 12y ago
I think you're using a different definition of "essentialism" than Dawkins is. Dawkins was not arguing against improvement, but against the idea of clear boundaries between concepts.
- 12y ago

analog31 12y ago

Looking through the entire list of essays, I was struck by how few I was willing to acknowledge as "scientific" ideas. Many seemed like straw men, and the entire list might give a false impression that scientists are blinded by bad ideas.

wsxcde 12y ago

Dawkins seems to be a good example of the Peter principle at work in a large social movement. Clearly he's a smart guy and at some point in his career he did have interesting and original insights to share with the rest of us. But it seems like the new atheists [1] have elevated (promoted) him into near demigod status and he's now being socially pressured into producing new and original insight on a regular basis. Unfortunately for him, he doesn't have an infinite well of wisdom and insight and so he ends up producing drivel of this sort. [1] I am a new atheist and some of blame for what has happened here probably falls at my feet as well.

lclarkmichalek 12y ago
This image comes up pretty commonly on r/badphilosphy when something he says (or drama surrounding something he says) is discussed: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BpXAZGuCMAA21xA.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BpXAZGuCMAA21xA.jpg I wouldn't go quite so far as to absolve him for his opinions due to social pressure, but there is truth in what you say.
- wsxcde 12y ago
  I'm not absolving him of his opinions by any means. I was just pointing out that he's been elevated to this status where he can't (won't? is unwilling to?) do what most other reasonable people would have done if they were asked this question. He could've just said, "that's a really interesting question and I don't have an answer" but instead it appears he's compelled to answer with a lot of verbiage and little actual content.

pella 12y ago

All answer: http://edge.org/responses/what-scientific-idea-is-ready-for-retirement http://edge.org/responses/what-scientific-idea-is-ready-for-...

smsm42 12y ago

I don't see anything about science in this essay. Philosophically, it may be a valid critique of essentialism, in the meaning that primitive conclusions Dawkins is drawing - as for rabbits or state politics - are indeed looking invalid. But nobody currently advocates such concepts - i.e. nobody really builds a scientific theories based on the fact that rabbits literally represent the "ideal rabbit" and nobody actually thinks all Florida residents are Democrats or Republicans. We may act as if they are, in order to simplify certain things, such as deciding who will be the president or which pills to give to a specific rabbit, but we know they really aren't. OTOH, if you drop the concept entirely, then you'd need to throw a significant part of modern science out of the window. Modern science bases on the fact that there are some laws of nature, which are universal and fixed, and by doing certain actions and making certain conclusions using certain techniques we can discover these laws and thus discover how ideal Platonic objects would behave, and by reasoning about those objects we could derive the useful conclusions about real world objects. If you reject this method, then you'd have to make a scientific theory anew for each object, which would be kind of hard to make practical. Modeling is necessarily idealization, and if you reject idealization, not much is left of the scientific method. What Dawkins seems to argue is that one should realize the map is not the territory, but isn't it obvious to everybody by now?

jqm 12y ago

Best Quote of the article... "Essentialism rears its ugly head in racial terminology. The majority of "African Americans" are of mixed race. Yet so entrenched is our essentialist mind-set, American official forms require everyone to tick one race/ethnicity box or another: no room for intermediates." Yes, this has driven me nuts for years. I had to fill out a form a few days ago with the "race" check box (optional of course...). I keep scratching my head and wondering how one exactly determines this and what difference it makes and most of all... why would somebody put such an unreasonable and fallacious question on a form?

MichaelGG 12y ago
What's wrong with it, besides the very limited answer space? They should let you check of multiple boxes or fill in rough percentages. That allows finding things like "people with 15% or more X ancestry tend to do better on Y". It's not unlike asking "What culture are you?" Providing useful answers may be difficult, but it's not fundamentally a wrong thing to ask.

runeks 12y ago

Very interesting article. > Essentialism rears its ugly head in racial terminology. The majority of "African Americans" are of mixed race. Yet so entrenched is our essentialist mind-set, American official forms require everyone to tick one race/ethnicity box or another: no room for intermediates. I thought about this as well some time ago. It's odd that the child of a black and a white parent is black, and not "neither black nor white" or "both black and white".