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Politics and Evolution
Feb. 12th, 2015 01:04 pmI've written previously on Facebook about my problems with evolution skepticism. In response to a piece of news about the governor of my state refusing to answer a question about whether he believes in evolution (http://www.nationaljournal.com/twenty-sixteen/walker-weasels-on-evolution-20150212), I'm going to share that writing with you here. I find myself getting more annoyed these days at anti-science, anti-intellectual discourse. That's part of the problem, not part of the solution. And it really is an attack, directly or indirectly, on my chosen career path at this point.
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First, as an anthropologist (or at least as someone whose undergraduate degree will be in anthropology), and as someone who knows working anthropologists, the suggestion that evolution is wrong, or not scientifically supported, invalidates a significant portion of our discipline. It suggests that a great deal of what we know about pre-modern humans (which in this context means not modernity as in technology, but modernity as in pre homo sapiens sapiens) is wrong. Not only that, but it suggests that anthropologists are either too dumb to realize that their evidence is not as strong as they think it is, or that they are all engaged in a great cover up. Both of those possibilites are upsetting to a lot of anthropologists.
Second, and again as someone who is working toward being a social scientist and who knows working social scientists, I feel like skepticism about evolution casts doubt on the nature of scientific inquiry itself. The process of scientific investigation is, at its core, the same, whether we're talking about physics, biology, chemistry, or what-have-you. The same kind of experimentation and refutation happens with all new theories within scientific disciplines. This is what makes them scientific. To suggest that this has somehow failed in evolution suggests either that the process of scientific advancement is fundamentally flawed, or that the biologists who have worked out the theory of evolution have engaged in defective work. Defective work that no one else has ever managed to show serious problems with.
It is true, of course, that sometimes rejection of major theories is slow and mired in politics. Politics has slowed advancement of the sciences for centuries, keeping ideas from the heliocentric solar system to ethnic equality (anthropologists have a lot of blame in that area!), to quantum physics. Yet, in the end, sooner or later, those bad ideas are proven wrong.
It's possible that some other explanation in keeping with our understanding of the physical laws of the universe will be found that replaces evolution, just as the same could happen with gravity. An example of an alternate theory for gravity I rather like is that what's really happening is that every individual thing in the universe is expanding at a constant rate, a process which keeps things smushed into each other. It's cute. If you finagle it enough, maybe it even accounts for most of the phenomena we associate with gravity. It also doesn't fit Occam's Razor. Just like epicycles, and epi-epi-cycles in the orbits of a geocentric solar system, you can make it work, but you really have to stretch your brain.
It's also possible, of course, that a creator formed the universe anywhere from a few thousand years ago to yesterday afternoon, just as we see it now. If that's the case, then it really doesn't matter. It doesn't change the fact that science continues to provide the best way we have of understanding why the physical world *as it is now* behaves the way it does.
The scientific method of inquiry has provided us with satellites, remote surgery, lasers, computers, and so much more. If we question the validity of the process that created the concept of evolution, why not question the validity of the processes behind the internal combustion engine or powered flight? It's all based on the same idea; that we can observe our surroundings, come up with explanations for them, attack those explanations in every conceivable way as part of a knock-down drag-out fight to disprove them, and finally take the ones the survived and use them to make fruitful predictions about reality.
That, in my humble opinion, is the way it is.
---
First, as an anthropologist (or at least as someone whose undergraduate degree will be in anthropology), and as someone who knows working anthropologists, the suggestion that evolution is wrong, or not scientifically supported, invalidates a significant portion of our discipline. It suggests that a great deal of what we know about pre-modern humans (which in this context means not modernity as in technology, but modernity as in pre homo sapiens sapiens) is wrong. Not only that, but it suggests that anthropologists are either too dumb to realize that their evidence is not as strong as they think it is, or that they are all engaged in a great cover up. Both of those possibilites are upsetting to a lot of anthropologists.
Second, and again as someone who is working toward being a social scientist and who knows working social scientists, I feel like skepticism about evolution casts doubt on the nature of scientific inquiry itself. The process of scientific investigation is, at its core, the same, whether we're talking about physics, biology, chemistry, or what-have-you. The same kind of experimentation and refutation happens with all new theories within scientific disciplines. This is what makes them scientific. To suggest that this has somehow failed in evolution suggests either that the process of scientific advancement is fundamentally flawed, or that the biologists who have worked out the theory of evolution have engaged in defective work. Defective work that no one else has ever managed to show serious problems with.
It is true, of course, that sometimes rejection of major theories is slow and mired in politics. Politics has slowed advancement of the sciences for centuries, keeping ideas from the heliocentric solar system to ethnic equality (anthropologists have a lot of blame in that area!), to quantum physics. Yet, in the end, sooner or later, those bad ideas are proven wrong.
It's possible that some other explanation in keeping with our understanding of the physical laws of the universe will be found that replaces evolution, just as the same could happen with gravity. An example of an alternate theory for gravity I rather like is that what's really happening is that every individual thing in the universe is expanding at a constant rate, a process which keeps things smushed into each other. It's cute. If you finagle it enough, maybe it even accounts for most of the phenomena we associate with gravity. It also doesn't fit Occam's Razor. Just like epicycles, and epi-epi-cycles in the orbits of a geocentric solar system, you can make it work, but you really have to stretch your brain.
It's also possible, of course, that a creator formed the universe anywhere from a few thousand years ago to yesterday afternoon, just as we see it now. If that's the case, then it really doesn't matter. It doesn't change the fact that science continues to provide the best way we have of understanding why the physical world *as it is now* behaves the way it does.
The scientific method of inquiry has provided us with satellites, remote surgery, lasers, computers, and so much more. If we question the validity of the process that created the concept of evolution, why not question the validity of the processes behind the internal combustion engine or powered flight? It's all based on the same idea; that we can observe our surroundings, come up with explanations for them, attack those explanations in every conceivable way as part of a knock-down drag-out fight to disprove them, and finally take the ones the survived and use them to make fruitful predictions about reality.
That, in my humble opinion, is the way it is.
