to science and Kansas
"Creationists mine ignorance and uncertainty, not as a spur to honest research but in order to exploit and abuse Darwin's challenge. "Bet you can't tell me how the elbow joint of the lesser spotted weasel frog evolved by slow gradual degrees?" If the scientist fails to give an immediate and comprehensive answer, a default conclusion is drawn: "Right then, the alternative theory, 'intelligent design', wins by default." Notice, first, the biased logic: if theory A fails in some particular, theory B must be right! We are encouraged to leap to the default conclusion without even looking to see whether the default theory fails in the very same particular. ID is granted (quite wrongly as I have shown elsewhere) a charmed immunity to the rigorous demands made of evolution.Richard Dawkins/Creation Watch (CSICOP)
Notice, second, how the creationist ploy undermines the scientist's natural - indeed necessary - rejoicing in uncertainty. Today's scientist in America dare not say:
"Hm, interesting point. I wonder how the weasel frog's ancestors did evolve their elbow joint. I'm not a specialist in weasel frogs, I'll have to go to the University Library and take a look. Might make an interesting project for a graduate student."
No, the moment a scientist said something like that - and long before the student began the project - the default conclusion would become a headline in a creationist pamphlet: "Weasel frog could only have been designed by God."
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You'd think biologists at least would wonder about that. Dawkins goes to the how of it - "Creationists mine ignorance...in order to exploit and abuse Darwin's challenge." - but not ever to the why of it. Which under the circumstances seems like it would be far more important.
Some of this has to be a locked mindset implanted in school.
"It's the wrong answer" being all you need to know about the statement or position; and in that context clinging to the wrong answer is a kind of arrogance that can only lead to failure. Unless it's a wrong answer that's part of the curriculum.
That's only true in the controlled ecosystem of academia, though. It's somewhat true in the semi-controlled ecosystem of the modern economy. But out in the long-term jungle of evolution, with its million year-long semesters, the only wrong answer is the one that doesn't work.
Pretending to be a poisonous insect, if it works, is having the right answer. Accidently looking like a poisonous insect when you aren't one, and not getting eaten because of that, is the right answer.
Yes, the sailor's knowledge, of wind and weather, knots and sails - all that is vital, essential, and even for the shipwrecked it can come in handy, but it means almost nothing in the desert or the jungle.
It's a specific circumstance that makes it valuable; yes there's crossover, but the genesis of tidepools starts with chance and fortuitous position, and there's an element of the tidepool to all this, to where we are.
Forces outside our reckoning are at play, unpredictable shifts and change that won't respond to our knowledge and mechanical applications. And there's where the explanation for the obstinate clinging to wrong answers is, I believe.
These guys know, below the conscious threshold maybe, but they see it more clearly than Dawkins does, that their survival depends on resisting the evolutionary pressure, the genetic competition for place, that is "over there" - not specifically at any one locus, but behind and around and all through the loose crowd Dawkins in this essay represents. No room for ignorance and superstition in the brave new world, okay, but also no room for lots of other things there as well. Not all of those things are identifiable, but it stands to reason that the particulars would be clearer to those who feel most threatened by them.
These are genetic paths, wide open now, but at some point they'll close down all other possibilities - that's how it works. There won't be room for "creationists" and "Darwinists" on the same boat. It's a struggle for survival, and logic has only a tangential relationship to survival. It's an aid not a guarantee; the fossil record is packed with well-engineered well-adapted successes that flourished for millions of years, then vanished overnight.
Being wrong about where you are, about the nature of it, about how you got there, about the possibilities it contains, being wrong about everything about where you are, but being there at the right time and in the right way, evolutionarily speaking, is a greater asset for the survival of your genes than having a clear sense of where you should be, but not being there.
That's the contest. That's what's driving the argument. It's closer to Cain and Abel than it is Galileo and Pope Paul V.
The institutionalized dogma of religion is held up to the withering glare of scientific analysis and shown to be fairly silly. Though you could go back a few hundred years and find laughable ideas saturating the mainstream of what passed for scientific thought; and you could go back thousands of years and find the introduction of the infinite into the cultural mind of people whose daily lives presented them with at least as many temptations toward the selfish and mean as these times do. Recognition of the infinite and the plausibility of a greater consciousness than our own are unnecessary to the functioning of machines, but they're going to make all the difference imaginable at some crucial moment up ahead, when the idea of that possibility will mean an openness to its reality, but only if the idea's there.
That's the labor of religion. To get that idea across and keep it there. The trope of beleaguered science struggling against the dark of the unknown as well as the dark of ignorance and superstition is only accurate as a description of science's difficulties; the difficulties of being human are greater and more complex than that - resisting being turned into a hive of insects, resisting being enslaved by more powerful inhuman creatures, resisting becoming inhuman, maintaining the dynamic flow of what we were and are, bringing to fruition something that was in us as seed from the beginning.
Science helps, religion helps, there's nothing inherently wrong with either one. At the healthiest cultural moments in our shared past they were one thing, together.
This contest isn't about science and religion, it isn't about ideas, it's about specific sets of genes and forms of being human competing with each other for position, and posterity.
