To PZ Myers, On the Occasion of Some Frustrating Numbers

To PZ Myers

My guidance about these survey numbers on creationism and evolution, besides reminding you that surveys of this kind are complicated by the fact that some respondents try to give the answer that they think they're supposed to give, rather than the thing they actually believe (and complicated further still by the fact that many people believe in contradictory things and feel no need to resolve the contradiction), is this:

Ask yourself this: why do so many people seem to believe what the survey shows they believe? Don't tell yourself the answer. Ask it as a scientist ought to. Come up with some hypotheses and think about their implications.

For the moment, your hypothesis seems to be, "They are all much dumber than me and other people who believe in evolution." You note how that gets you in dutch vis-a-vis Kerry voters--if they're dumber on one thing, (47% belief in some flavor of creationism), how can you regard their choices on other matters as legitimate? The purity of your position here leaves you with only 13% of your countrymen as people whose intellects seem to be functioning within your acceptable parameters. That's an argument you can in fact make, but then just be willing to take on board the necessary correlates: it means any political or social system that depends on mass participation is from your perspective grossly flawed. It also means, almost of necessity, that you're endorsing an associated hypothesis that intelligence is natural or intrinsic, and high intelligence not well distributed among human populations regardless of what is done to encourage it. Hello, Bell Curve. As a hypothesis, it strikes me as a tough one to prove, but sit down and think of a few things that would let you do so that go beyond "belief in evolution".

There are alternatives. Consider those as well. You could argue that evolution has not been taught sufficiently well in American schools, or that the American government has been insufficiently enthusiastic in its support for evolution over the past five decades. Hard to test. You could argue that evolution gets insufficient coverage in the public sphere, or has been communicated ineffectively and infrequently by scientists and specialists. Also hard to argue: in both cases, what's the comparative metric that you're imagining at which evolution would be sufficiently supported or communicated suffciently well? For at least three decades, evolutionary theory went largely unmolested in the public schools and for longer than that, some of the very best and most articulate representatives of the scientific community have dedicated most of their lives to explaining it within the public sphere.

You could suggest that there is something intrinsic about evolution that makes it hard to understand, and the comparative simplicity of creationism makes it unfortunately appealing. Not for reasons of intellectual inability, but just because people like "clean theories" for aesthetic reasons. However, both creationism and intelligent design in their present and past manifestations are sometimes strikingly arcane and difficult to understand. Bishop Usher's chronology wasn't exactly clean and simple. High-level evolutionary theory is more complex than people think, sure, but the basic idea of adaptation and natural selection is well understood by many, even those who favor creationism. Moreover, knowledge of some of the key evidence for evolution, particularly fossil evidence, is actually strikingly well distributed among the population.

So what's left? One tentative hypothesis that requires thinking in rich and subtle ways about the history of the United States over the last century is this I'd offer is this: evolution and creation science have become over many decades symbolic compressions of much wider, more complex and more difficult to articulate social and cultural cleavages. They're containers for a wide variety of resentments, conflicts, fears and misrecognitions. In this reading, you have to learn to look below the surface of the ocean for the rest of the iceberg.

My suggestion is that when you do so, you tend to find some things that have much more validity to them than poor education or weak intellects. For example, you might find that what some people mean by "religion" is complicatedly tied in with what they mean by "culture": that to express a faith in religion is also for them to be an authentic inhabitant of the place and time they find themselves in. You can see that negatively, as enforced or institutionalized conformity, or positively, as people making choices about the authenticities that define their daily existence.

You might find that for some people, "religion" is an invaluable tool that helps them answer the questions that other thought-systems either cannot answer or for principled reasons will not answer. Many people in my field of African Studies have to find ways to understand what it means when someone visits both an indigenous healer and a biomedical doctor. A colleague of mine once interviewed a practicioner who was expert in both fields. As a doctor, he prescribed medicines, explained to patients how the illness was working in their bodies, and what the medicine would do for them. As a healer, he tried to help them to understand the meaning of their illness and to answer the question, “Why me? Why now?” At some primal level, answering that question, “Because you happened to be in a room with someone who had tuberculosis” or “Because you’re genetically predisposed to this illness”, however true, is insufficient, emotionally and philosophically.

You might find, too, that part of the iceberg below the surface is the social relation between scientists and non-scientists, a relationship that aligns with a broad range of other economic, regional, and cultural relations, many of which have been on the mind of many people in the last month in the election aftermath. You don’t have to be either Marxist or the reddest of the red-staters to think that some of the tensions in those relations connect to both real and imagined grievances which have nothing to do with evolution, but which find an expression within them. Resisting what scientists say is right may be a displaced resistance to the general authority of experts, bureaucrats, and the like, and a displaced resentment of the fact that the skills of scientists have a value and a transportability in a globalizing world that the skills of manufacturing workers or Wal-Mart clerks do not.

Finally, as part of this composite working hypothesis, some skepticism about the applied claims and demands of scientists, particularly as they manifest in demands for particular orthodoxies in education and other social institutions, is a pretty rational (indeed, scientific) reaction to the real history of American public science in the past fifty years. From the perspective of a wider public, scientists have historically put their expert authority behind things like studies of posture which led to a generations Ivy League undergraduates being photographed naked in gymnasiums as well as respectably careful and orthodox ideas like evolutionary theory. Before we rush to say, “But the posture stuff was quackery”, we have to remember how many truly bad ideas were broadly endorsed by people who claimed the expert authority of science and were authenticated by academic institutions. Including the posture research. One of my favorite examples of this is the entire generation of sober, careful, absolutely orthodox computer scientists who thought that creating artificial intelligence would be a snap, and who often sought to prepare the American public for the consequences of a world with widely available human-equivalent AIs. That they turned out to be drastically wrong is well known to scientists today—but I’m not sure that we fully realize the cumulative hidden costs of entering into the public sphere with poorly realized or falsely overconfident science. There’s some hysteria starting to build up within public health circles now about the health consequences of acrylamide in French fries and other fried food, for example. I can’t help but sympathize with the person quoted in a recent news story who said (while munching his fry), “I could care less”. Because with public health, and a lot of other public science, there is a great deal of crying wolf by ambitious experts looking to build a careerist portfolio that secures access to grants and allows them to claim to be working for the general good.

You might say that it’s up to the public to distinguish between junk science and good science, but even the scientists can’t do that sometimes, because the legitimacy of science even within academic and scientific institutions is shaped by sociology and hierarchy as well as intellect. I have some sympathy for a public that may feel the easiest thing to do is scorn science while also enjoying its applied benefits.

It may be worth thinking about how to help a weary public make meaningful distinctions between different kinds of science. However, I also think that scientists may need to do something that sits very poorly with academic culture at the moment, and with all professionals of any kind, and that is very, very aggressively self-police access by their fellows to the public domain, to make the barriers to accessing policy and public institutions extraordinarily high. You’d better not just have a few scraps of data about acrylamide before you start blowing your bugle: you’d better have a rock-solid demonstration of a link between its rising consumption and cancer or some other disease, a link which isn’t just demonstrable but where there is an effect size that actually matters.

Withdraw recognition of the experts-for-hire who appear at every trial and find a way to appropriately authenticate scientists in this role. Restrict the flow of public money to science and the reverse flow of scientists into the making of policy. Restrain scientists from easy or casual advocacy of public initiatives and applications of their work. You can’t stop scientists from saying what they want, but academic institutions provide a certification that is supposed to separate out people who use junk science as the authority for junk policy and those who exhibit much more judicious care.

I think this is a smaller piece of the creation-science puzzle than the larger social terrain that forms the bulk of the iceberg’s underwater surface. It’s worth some consideration, however: how much is a wider public disaffected from the authority of science because scientific authority, even from very respectable sources, has been misused or presented itself as far more certain about the truth than it is entitled to? If evolution has a hard time being understood for its irreducible truthfulness, and if mischievious or ill-intentioned proponents of “intelligent design” are able to make headway, it may have something to do with a history of misconduct in public science.

None of this means you have to stop being frustrated or annoyed. Certainly don't stop calling out the malicious promoters of creation science and intelligent design for what they are. I wouldn't want that, any more than I intend to stop calling Bush voters out for the consequences of their choices or intend to stop criticizing the Bush Administration for any number of misdeeds. But the survey data shows there's something more here than a few no-goodniks, much as the election results demonstrate that there's something more profound in the air than Karl Rove's shenangians.