Honey, The View Shrank My Brain

"What you just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points. And may God have mercy on your soul."
- Billy Madison

The View always hurts my ears, but this segment hurt my brain. In case you couldn't make it through the whole two minutes, it consists of inane jabbering and of the hosts flinging around the non-word "Darwinism", as if evolution were an exotic opinion or a cult and not the foundation of biology. (For why the term "Darwinism" is wrong see Olivia Judson's excellent piece in the Times For why it's stupid, re-watch the video.)

Everything in science is open to challenge -- yes, that's critical -- but evolution is not "just a theory," as its opponents are so fond of proclaiming. It's a paradigm -- as accepted among serious scientists as the "theory" of gravity. As our professor told us in college: Nothing in biology makes sense without evolution. Its ideas guide us when we think about and practice science. In the century and a half since Darwin published On the Origin of Species, his ideas too have evolved -- into a way of thinking about the natural world that we can thank for a large share of the discoveries and breakthroughs, medicines and vaccines of the last 150 years.

But to hear Sherri and Elisabeth quack on and on about "Darwinism", you'd think it was just the latest fad -- like skinny jeans or the Atkins diet - something to be amused by but skeptical of -- something that might be nice and all but just isn't for everyone.

The biggest failing of our ratings-driven media is that it treats everything as a matter of opinion -- equating emotional arguments with fact-based ones. In truth, Sherri and Elisabeth's religious beliefs are neither here nor there. Some things are matters of opinion or belief, but other things are demonstrable, testable -- provable.

We have a name for those things and for the process of finding them.

It's science.

Comments

[momoluvsu]

Loved this article, and thanks for the link to the Times. The scary issue is when the Sherris and Elisabeths of the world control what is taught in public schools. I bet both of them would accept all the classes the kid would need to take if he or she wanted to be a doctor. They are both full of it. I don't expect to see ANY of them in a think tank.

[Zanti]

Things that are provable are science? Okay.

"The biggest failing of our ratings-driven media is that it treats everything as a matter of opinion -- equating emotional arguments with fact-based ones."

Actually, the biggest failing of our ratings-driven media is its willingness to blatantly cater to what the audience wants to see, hear, and read. We have, for instance, the totally staged encounter in question (Elisabeth Hasselbeck is an intelligent woman who happens to be lovely and blond, and so she plays the stooge). And we have the latest Pew poll that purports to show that suspected-terrorist torture is primarily supported by church-goers (a lie easily debunked by looking at Pew's own figures!). Oh, and we have a show called "American Idol," which only works if 1) our concept of entertainment is utterly debased and 2) we're actually willing to believe that the judges have no idea what to expect prior to witnessing a given act.

The "View" encounter comes off as something rigged to produce precisely the kind of response you gave (and which we're reading in the threads). What's the probability that something which appears utterly rigged isn't, given the importance of ratings? We need to be smarter than the folks yanking our chains.

[TheDeRanger]

Our knowledge about everything in the real world is, always, at best an approximation that tries to model what we experience and find. When we get models that consistently explain what we've seen and that are directly useful in predicting what we will see, we start to devise tests to evaluate them. Evolution has been tested and tested and tested... for many years, and while continually refined the core ideas are as close to proven as anything in science.

The View is set up to provide entertainment. Anyone thinking Sherri and Elisabeth are speaking with any intellectual authority is missing the point - they don't know anything in the world of science, and they don't want to know. Sherri provides the "sweet" but grotesquely stupid role, Elisabeth is the snide cheerleader who doesn't want to worry her "pretty little head" about actual facts and how they go together.

Of course, they're not really as stupid as they pretend. The stupid people are the ones who watch them and think they are saying things for reasons other than getting paid. Beats working for them.

[kcgeezer]

Elizabeth and Sherri represent and pander to the ignorant portion of The View's demographic. To them science is a concept that is beyond their understanding.

[BobLablah]

"testable - provable".

By that definition global warming is still just a theory. So I guess you're right.

[Zanti]

Climate change is not a theory--hard scientific evidence exists for same. And predictions can be made based on that evidence. The Earth does leave a track record of the events that occur on it--otherwise, we'd have no knowledge of our planet's history (or any means of predicting its future).