Texas governor and presidential candidate Rick Perry is ambivalent about the "theory" of evolution. He says it's just one theory that's out there, on equal footing with creationism. He's proud of the fact that, in Texas, children are taught both, so they can choose for themselves.
There's a serious problem with this approach to education, however. It has to do with humans' very limited ability to weigh probabilities rationally. Calculating likelihoods and odds is tough cognitive work, and we only do it when we must. Years of research on human thinking has shown this. In place of the difficult mental work, the human brain substitutes a powerful urge for simplicity and purpose, called the "design heuristic." It's an inner theory of the world, likely rooted in our ancient mind, which is hard to shake.
Here's just a bit of the voluminous evidence, which I examined in my book, "On Second Thought." Work with children has shown that even very young ones have a natural inclination to see the world as purposeful and see things like stars, trees and rain primarily in terms of their function instead of their natural causes. Laboratory tests have shown this again and again: when psychologists ask children why mountains exist, most say they exist so animals have a place to climb. In kids' "theory" of the natural world, trees don't just happen to provide shade; making shade is their primary purpose. And so forth. In fact, unless there is really good evidence to convince kids otherwise, they want to see everything as having a precise function in the grand scheme of things.
But is this childish yearning for purpose and design simply a sign of cognitive immaturity, a primitive habit of mind that we grow out of as we age and as our brains sprout new neuronal connections? Psychologists are very interested in how both kids and grown-ups explain the world, because our theories about stars, eyes and lakes are closely tied to our understanding of creation and creator -- our personal cosmology.
Tania Lombrozo, of the University of California, Berkeley, suspected that the strong childhood preference for purposeful design might actually be a lifelong default position, one that is eclipsed, but doesn't actually disappear, as we gain experience and learn nature's laws -- gravity and plate tectonics and natural selection, for example -- that constrain our explanations of things. And she figured out a way to test this provocative idea.
Lombrozo decided to study patients with Alzheimer's disease. She figured that dementia would weaken the entrenched causal beliefs of adulthood, and that with their beliefs so compromised, adults would show their true cognitive colors. To test this idea in the laboratory, she gave Alzheimer's patients the same cognitive tests that are used with children, basically consisting of a series of questions with two possible answers. For example, she might ask, "Why is there rain? Is it because water condenses in clouds and forms droplets, or does rain exist so we will have water for drinking?" Other questions she used: "What is the sun for? How about trees?"
Well, guess what. Alzheimer's patients think the primary purpose of rain is to provide drinking water, that trees exist to provide shade and that the sun is up in the sky for the sole purpose of keeping us warm. Mentally healthy adults, by contrast, while they know the sun warms us, also know the sun does not exist for that reason. It's an important distinction. The Alzheimer's patients' thinking mirrors the rudimentary thinking of children and suggests the urge for design and functionality is never really outgrown. There is a fundamental human urge to comprehend the world as purposeful.
There is an intriguing twist, however. Lombrozo did a second study with the same people, asking whether the order in the universe was caused by God or by some process like evolution or plate tectonics. In other words, do design and purpose require a designer? And the answer appears to be no. Even though the patients tended to see the world as designed and purposeful, they were no more likely to presume that a supernatural designer is behind the natural order of things. So, our lifelong impulse is to see the world as ordered and purposeful; some of us add the God part on, but it's not necessary to explain the brain's urge for order.
Yet a lot of people -- and many societies -- do add the God part on, as a way to explain this basic cognitive urge. For example, psychologists have found that in cultures where formal education is limited, people often prefer purposeful explanations of things, presumably because they remain scientifically naive. Lombrozo believes the same fundamental impulse explains the appeal of "intelligent design" creationism, the worldview that rejects evolutionary theory in favor of a design explanation of life's complexity. Though scientifically indefensible, this view is understandable as a persistence of the basic human impulse to infer order.
Michael Sigman: Read Our Lips: No New Texans
Michael Zimmerman, Ph.D.: Michele Bachmann's Stance on Evolution Demolished by High School Student
Michael Zimmerman, Ph.D.: Creationism in Connecticut? Pushing Pseudoscience in the Name of Religion
ooooo, I like it here, look at all the wide open spaces!
yours is a materialistic approach to define purpose and meaning to our lives. blame it on the brain and past conditioning.
it amazes me how much the evangels and materialists have in common. one finds no real meaning and purpose to our lives as we are just robots of selfish genes and the other has made a papa god in their image.
the ladder to greater awareness might go by both routes. or not.
If so, how can anything not be material? If you believe in a God, for example, you presumably sense his presence in some way.
It is not a done deal though, in its present form. While any new evidence must conform to what has already been learned, there are some monkey-wrenches in the gears of the theory.
The most significant of these is the time problem. No one knows what time is, and most importantly, it is variable.
Organisms have been known to affect their own DNA based on changing circumstances, turning on some genes and de-activating others. There is the placebo effect, which is a self healing mechanism, as yet unexplained which may be related to this.
These things may yet change the existing theory in ways in which we do not yet understand.
This is certainly an interesting question, but I'm not sure how it directly affects the theory of evolution. General Relativity models time and space using geometry, showing them to be, in a sense, interchangeable and showing causality (the idea that one event causes another) to be dependent on the movements of the observers. Thermodynamics seems to suggest that time is a statistical property of the large scale behaviour of systems of particles. The small scale behaviour of individual particles is time symmetrical. On an individual particle basis the asymmetry of time, like temperature, is meaningless.
All interesting, but not directly relevant to a theory about biochemistry at a specific period of time on a specific planet, surely?
The second problem is that there are many successful experiments in precognition and retro-causality.
In other words, if time doesn't really exist, we might be creating our future and our past at the same time. That, of course, would have an effect on biology.
Just because we haven't found fossil evidence of such doesn't change the fact that we KNOW we evolved from other animals.
We most assuredly did not just POP appear on the planet!
So why does Rick Perry preach his religion? Mostly because of politics. My question is: would Rick Perry and the other Creationists apppreciate anyone else preaching their religion, particularly if it was not Christianity as they believe it to be?
My guess is no.
So these Creationsits are theocratic rulers, wishing to impose their ways on everyone and they rarely if ever are compassionate to the beliefs of others, contrary to the Constitution.
Go back to backward Texas Ricky. Where they teach Creationism and let kids decide what they want to believe in the sciences. Wow those folks are scary and odd. How do we keep them in Texas? Maybe we oucld petition them to cecede?
A narrative is what we are designed for. It is not dangerous in the simple natural world. The child's world is still that, a simple, at least somewhat, more natural world. The modern adult world is very artificial, very abstract and theoretical. (Think 401-K)
I like this article very much but it is about far more than creationism. Let's us say for argument that creationism is correct. It still leaves all the other narrative fallacies that people believe intact (the stock market is still capitalism). An example is that our political parties are open to the public. They (we) (I) would like that to be true, it makes a nice story. But our political parties are only open to large amounts of cash.
While Creationism cannot be settled as easily as other logical fallacies driven by narrative, the general problem of cave people living in a modern world remains. Little children are not wrong to think rain is water to drink but that is not why it happens, or is it?