Just So Stories and an Unpleasant Thought

[lpetrich]

Rudyard Kipling's  Just So Stories are some origin stories that were inspired by the numerous origin or etiological stories that people have invented. In "How the Leopard Got His Spots", it was because someone painted them on some leopard long ago. That is rather obviously Lamarckian inheritance, inheritance of acquired characteristics, and the rest of that book's stories also feature it.

It's been hard to find a good collection of such stories, so I'll give what I can find.

In Greek mythology, one finds that the Ethiopians got their dark skins from someone driving the Sun chariot too close to them, burning their skins. According to Etiological myths, there is a story from somewhere that rhinoceroses have no hair become some rhinoceros caught fire and went into some water to extinguish it. That burned off all the animal's hair and rhinos have been hairless ever since.

In the second Genesis creation story, God orders a certain mischievous snake to crawl on its belly, and that is why snakes do that. I've found a much more recent story that Manx cats are tailless because some ancestor's tail got caught in the door to Noah's Ark.

All Lamarckian, and the Bible even has some Lamarckian genetic engineering in Genesis 30.

Though named after biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, this form of inheritance is an age-old bit of folklore. So one may reasonably conclude that it is common sense.


Now my unpleasant thought.
Lewontin vs. Sagan
What do you think about The Demon-Haunted World?
Geneticist Richard Lewontin celebrates some creationists as the Southern proletariat rebelling against the Northern bourgeoisie, slams the results of modern science as grossly contrary to common sense, and states that some rural-Texas woman "sensibly" refused to believe that we got any TV broadcasts from the Moon because she can't get anything from Dallas.

According to that argument, one ought to believe in Lamarckian inheritance rather than in Mendelian inheritance, and if one does so, then RL's career is totally destroyed.

 

[Jokodo]

Rudyard Kipling's  Just So Stories are some origin stories that were inspired by the numerous origin or etiological stories that people have invented. In "How the Leopard Got His Spots", it was because someone painted them on some leopard long ago. That is rather obviously Lamarckian inheritance, inheritance of acquired characteristics, and the rest of that book's stories also feature it.

It's been hard to find a good collection of such stories, so I'll give what I can find.

In Greek mythology, one finds that the Ethiopians got their dark skins from someone driving the Sun chariot too close to them, burning their skins. According to Etiological myths, there is a story from somewhere that rhinoceroses have no hair become some rhinoceros caught fire and went into some water to extinguish it. That burned off all the animal's hair and rhinos have been hairless ever since.

In the second Genesis creation story, God orders a certain mischievous snake to crawl on its belly, and that is why snakes do that. I've found a much more recent story that Manx cats are tailless because some ancestor's tail got caught in the door to Noah's Ark.

All Lamarckian, and the Bible even has some Lamarckian genetic engineering in Genesis 30.

Though named after biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, this form of inheritance is an age-old bit of folklore. So one may reasonably conclude that it is common sense.


Now my unpleasant thought.
Lewontin vs. Sagan
What do you think about The Demon-Haunted World?
Geneticist Richard Lewontin celebrates some creationists as the Southern proletariat rebelling against the Northern bourgeoisie, slams the results of modern science as grossly contrary to common sense, and states that some rural-Texas woman "sensibly" refused to believe that we got any TV broadcasts from the Moon because she can't get anything from Dallas.

According to that argument, one ought to believe in Lamarckian inheritance rather than in Mendelian inheritance, and if one does so, then RL's career is totally destroyed.

I think that's a misinterpretation of Lewontin to say that he celebrates creationists in any form. What he's trying to argue is that there are sociological reasons other than people's ignorance for why they find creationism attractive, and that yelling at them that they're ignorant isn't going to help and may well make things worse.

Nor does he seem to be saying that scientific results need to adhere to common sense -- rather, that in a context where science is widely perceived as a tool by the elites and a majority of scientists don't do enough to counter that perception, doubting science and resorting to common sense is exactly what you'd expect people to do.

Closer to what seems to be the gist of your post: Far from being blind what that might imply for his own discipline, Lewontin has actually written an article discussing the sociological reasons for why Lysenkoism became as influential as it did in the Soviet Union, all without hesitating a moment to call it a scientific aberration. You can read the abstract here, or a review by John Maynard Smith here.

 

[lpetrich]

I think that's a misinterpretation of Lewontin to say that he celebrates creationists in any form. What he's trying to argue is that there are sociological reasons other than people's ignorance for why they find creationism attractive, and that yelling at them that they're ignorant isn't going to help and may well make things worse.

He didn't present it in that way. He made it seem like it was legitimate for the Southern proletariat to rebel against the Northern bourgeoisie in this fashion.

Nor does he seem to be saying that scientific results need to adhere to common sense -- rather, that in a context where science is widely perceived as a tool by the elites and a majority of scientists don't do enough to counter that perception, doubting science and resorting to common sense is exactly what you'd expect people to do.

He didn't present it in that way either. He made it seem like those objections are legitimate.

Closer to what seems to be the gist of your post: Far from being blind what that might imply for his own discipline, Lewontin has actually written an article discussing the sociological reasons for why Lysenkoism became as influential as it did in the Soviet Union, all without hesitating a moment to call it a scientific aberration. You can read the abstract here, or a review by John Maynard Smith here.

From what I see of it, that's very good. But he did not take that approach in his review of Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World.

From John Maynard Smith's review,

It was, they argue, a misuse of Marxism to apply it in support of Lysenko: ‘Dialectical materialism is not, and has never been, a programmatic method for solving particular physical problems.’ Instead, they suggest that the philosophy provides a ‘set of warning signs’ against theories that are too narrow, mechanical or abstract.

Now I don’t think this will quite do. To see why, one must first understand why at that time Marxists saw Mendelian genetics as undialectical. The orthodox view was that genes influence development, but are themselves unaltered in the process, and hence that the ‘Lamarckian’ process of the inheritance of acquired characters is an impossibility. Hence the gene is a metaphysical and undialectical entity.

He recalled having done some experiments that he hoped would induce some Lamarckian inheritance. He failed.

 

[bilby]

People DO feel that common sense is superior to science, where those two things are in conflict. It's a very hard habit to break, and it probably requires personal experience of counterintuitive scientific results that are immediately important to the individual - which for most people, means a school curriculum where correctly interpreting experiments with counterintuitive outcomes is essential for obtaining good grades, plus a society in which obtaining good grades is highly valued.

We don't put most students into such an environment - those who do inhabit it are generally derided by the remainder as 'nerds', 'geeks' etc. - and the rest pass into adulthood with their common sense intact. Adults are very resilient in defence of their beliefs, and will defend 'common sense' in the face of overwhelming evidence that it is false (typically by simply refusing to accept the evidence presented). There are very few 'life and death' choices for the average adult in the developed world where common sense and reality are in conflict, and where a failure to follow reality will result in obvious, immediate, and dire consequences.

You can tell people that giraffes don't have long necks because their ancestors had to stretch to reach the high branches; You can present the evidence that shows this to be overwhelmingly clear; And they won't believe you, because to believe otherwise isn't going to cost them a cent or an ounce of sweat; While to agree with you would require the painful and difficult exercise of changing their minds. The combination of ignorance and apathy is unbeatable - people can learn, but they cannot be persuaded of the need to learn. At least, I have yet to come across a way to persuade them of this.

As Stan laurel said, "You can take a horse to water, but a pencil must be lead".

Changing one's mind is very hard - even for those who are used to doing it, it is not easy. For people who haven't changed their minds about any of the fundamentals of how reality works since they were first told them as children (by their poorly informed parents and priests), are simply not equipped to do it. Any more than a person who has never done a stroke of exercise is able to lift his own body weight at the gym. For most people, the only mental exercise they have ever taken is occasionally jumping to conclusions.

You can empathize with these poor simpletons who are unable to grasp the basics of reality; But there's basically nothing you can do to help them. The best you can hope for is to educate their children, before those children get set in their ways. But of course, most parents don't want children who are smarter than them. So expect LOTS of opposition.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

Genesis 30
³⁶And he set three days' journey betwixt himself and Jacob: and Jacob fed the rest of Laban's flocks. ³⁷And Jacob took him rods of green poplar, and of the hazel and chesnut tree; and pilled white strakes in them, and made the white appear which was in the rods. ³⁸And he set the rods which he had pilled before the flocks in the gutters in the watering troughs when the flocks came to drink, that they should conceive when they came to drink. ³⁹And the flocks conceived before the rods, and brought forth cattle ringstraked, speckled, and spotted. ⁴⁰And Jacob did separate the lambs, and set the faces of the flocks toward the ringstraked, and all the brown in the flock of Laban; and he put his own flocks by themselves, and put them not unto Laban's cattle. ⁴¹And it came to pass, whensoever the stronger cattle did conceive, that Jacob laid the rods before the eyes of the cattle in the gutters, that they might conceive among the rods. ⁴²But when the cattle were feeble, he put them not in: so the feebler were Laban's, and the stronger Jacob's

 

[Bronzeage]

...

Though named after biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, this form of inheritance is an age-old bit of folklore. So one may reasonably conclude that it is common sense.


Now my unpleasant thought.
Lewontin vs. Sagan
What do you think about The Demon-Haunted World?
Geneticist Richard Lewontin celebrates some creationists as the Southern proletariat rebelling against the Northern bourgeoisie, slams the results of modern science as grossly contrary to common sense, and states that some rural-Texas woman "sensibly" refused to believe that we got any TV broadcasts from the Moon because she can't get anything from Dallas.

According to that argument, one ought to believe in Lamarckian inheritance rather than in Mendelian inheritance, and if one does so, then RL's career is totally destroyed.

When a common sense explanation is wrong, the culprit is always a lack of information. The rural Texas woman doesn't know how TV broadcasts get to her house in the first place, whether sent from Dallas or the moon. All she knows is that distance is a factor in picture quality.

When a person is right about something, it's actually a case of limited choices. It's seldom we are faced with a problem that has more than one good solution. This leads to a double sided paradox. The first is that while a smart person has few choices, the dumb person has an infinite number of bad choices.

The second paradox is the problem of guessing, when all the necessary information is not known. A person with limited knowledge may face a problem, and if they know three possible solutions, they have a one in three chance of guessing the correct one, provided the answer is one of the three they know. An expert may face the same dilemma and immediately think of twenty seven possible causes.

 

[Underseer]

Common sense is an appeal to popularity fallacy.

 

[fromderinside]

I did not commit fallacy.

 

[Swammerdami]

I'm glad nobody's doing it here, but I'm mildly annoyed by caricatures that Darwin was the smart guy, and Lamarck just a superstitious oaf. In fact Lamarck was a pioneer of evolutionary theory and, while he didn't discover Mendelian genetics, neither did Darwin. With an incorrect mathematical model of genetic change, Darwin eventually had misgivings(*) about his own theory and appealed to partial Lamarckianism for partial solution! (* - In addition to over-short estimates of Earth's age, a problem was that favorable mutations would be diluted and therefore fail to gain foothold if all children receive half a genotype. Instead, as Mendel discovered, half the children receive all the genotype.)

By the way: Is it a fun fact that Origin of Species uses the word evolve (or any of its forms like evolving, evolution, evolved) only once? And that single occurrence of "evolved" is the very last word in the very last sentence of the book!

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.