Lewontin vs. Sagan

[lpetrich]

Biologist Richard C. Lewontin, a colleague of the late Stephen Jay Gould, once wrote Billions and Billions of Demons, a review of the late Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World. It contains what seems like a postmodernist defense of creationism.

He started out with mentioning a debate with some creationists that he and Carl Sagan had had back in 1964;

Sagan and I drew different conclusions from our experience. For me the confrontation between creationism and the science of evolution was an example of historical, regional, and class differences in culture that could only be understood in the context of American social history. For Carl it was a struggle between ignorance and knowledge, although it is not clear to me what he made of the unimpeachable scientific credentials of our opponent, except perhaps to see him as an example of the Devil quoting scripture.

He continued with some sort of argument that creationism is somehow a revolt of the Southern proletariat against the Northern bourgeoisie, to use Marxist terminology. There could well be some of that, but their "solution" is a VERY bad one, to worship some old book that is just plain wrong on some important issues. It may make them feel virtuous, but at what price?

Looking back at that, one can think of a similar sort of defense of Lysenkoism, theories of Ivan Michurin and Trofim Lysenko, theories which the Soviet Government turned into officially-supported dogma for a while. Lysenkoism states that genes do not exist and that genetics is Mendelist Weismannist Morganist metaphysical idealism. If Lewontin can defend creationism, surely he can defend a theory that states that his professional career is based on a bourgeois delusion if not a bourgeois fraud.

He complained about Sagan's book that

Most of the chapters of The Demon-Haunted World are taken up with exhortations to the reader to cease whoring after false gods and to accept the scientific method as the unique pathway to a correct understanding of the natural world. To Sagan, as to all but a few other scientists, it is self-evident that the practices of science provide the surest method of putting us in contact with physical reality, and that, in contrast, the demon-haunted world rests on a set of beliefs and behaviors that fail every reasonable test. So why do so many people believe in demons?

He rightly notes that Sagan did not have a good answer to that, but he did not have a better one. I personally suspect that cognitive style may be an important factor. Some people find it much easier to grasp technical knowledge than others do, like someone who jokingly called herself a "math atheist".

In any case, if one goes on a quest for reliable knowledge, one is likely to reinvent scientific method again. Where does Lewontin expect such a quest to end up at?

First, we are told that science "delivers the goods." It certainly has, sometimes, but it has often failed when we need it most. Scientists and their professional institutions, partly intoxicated with examples of past successes, partly in order to assure public financial support, make grandiose promises that cannot be kept.

Cannot be kept? That's a rather extreme accusation. He noted the lack of significant progress in cancer therapy, and the lack of therapies from the efforts to sequence the human genome (the article was written in 1997). However, there have been successes as well as failures, like genetic engineering.

Second, it is repeatedly said that science is intolerant of theories without data and assertions without adequate evidence. But no serious stu-dent of epistemology any longer takes the naive view of science as a process of Baconian induction from theoretically unorganized observations. There can be no observations without an immense apparatus of preexisting theory. Before sense experiences become "observations" we need a theoretical question, and what counts as a relevant observation depends upon a theoretical frame into which it is to be placed. Repeatable observations that do not fit into an existing frame have a way of disappearing from view, and the experiments that produced them are not revisited.

He then went on to cite some alleged claim of ignoring some awkward counterevidence to mainstream genetics ("dauer modifications" of nematodes being inherited), and he went on to claim that many popularizers make allegedly unsubstantiated claims like scientific medicine lengthening lifespans. Except that it has. Premodern infant mortality was much higher than it is today in the more advanced countries, and even the lifespans of those who made it into adulthood have increased.

He claimed that improved sanitation did more than improved medical treatments, but what does he think was the theoretical justification for improving sanitation? But vaccination, a modern medical treatment, has eradicated two diseases so far -- smallpox and rinderpest -- and it has come close with some other diseases, like polio. We have been seeing a resurgence of diseases like measles and whooping cough because of some parents' unwillingness to vaccinate their children against those diseases.

Third, it is said that there is no place for an argument from authority in science. The community of science is constantly self-critical, as evidenced by the experience of university colloquia "in which the speaker has hardly gotten 30 seconds into the talk before there are devastating questions and comments from the audience." If Sagan really wants to hear serious disputation about the nature of the universe, he should leave the academic precincts in Ithaca and spend a few minutes in an Orthodox study house in Brooklyn.

I'm baffled at that statement. Seriously. What does he mean by that?

He then complains that we are dependent on the authority of those outside our professional specialties, and turns to

With great perception, Sagan sees that there is an impediment to the popular credibility of scientific claims about the world, an impediment that is almost invisible to most scientists. Many of the most fundamental claims of science are against common sense and seem absurd on their face. Do physicists really expect me to accept without serious qualms that the pungent cheese that I had for lunch is really made up of tiny, tasteless, odorless, colorless packets of energy with nothing but empty space between them?

The Fallacy of Composition. It's like asking if one can live inside a pile of boards and nails and drywall and shingles and glass sheets and the like, because a house is nothing but those.

The cheese's smell is due to various molecules evaporating from it, and these molecules stick inside of smell receptors inside our noses. These receptors then relay that something is sticking to them.

Astronomers tell us without apparent embarrassment that they can see stellar events that occurred millions of years ago, whereas we all know that we see things as they happen.

He ought to watch some lightning some time, and notice that its sound arrives noticeably later than its light.

When, at the time of the moon landing, a woman in rural Texas was interviewed about the event, she very sensibly refused to believe that the television pictures she had seen had come all the way from the moon, on the grounds that with her antenna she couldn't even get Dallas.

That's because NASA can use communications satellites, thus getting around that sort of barrier.

What seems absurd depends on one's prejudice. Carl Sagan accepts, as I do, the duality of light, which is at the same time wave and particle, but he thinks that the consubstantiality of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost puts the mystery of the Holy Trinity "in deep trouble." Two's company, but three's a crowd.

I am reminded of the early theologian Lactantius (around 300 CE) and what he stated about antipodes in Divine Institutes, Book III (Of the False Wisdom of Philosophers), Chapter 24. Of the Antipodes, the Heaven, and the Stars:

How is it with those who imagine that there are antipodes opposite to our footsteps? Do they say anything to the purpose? Or is there any one so senseless as to believe that there are men whose footsteps are higher than their heads? or that the things which with us are in a recumbent position, with them hang in an inverted direction? that the crops and trees grow downwards? that the rains, and snow, and hail fall upwards to the earth? And does any one wonder that hanging gardens are mentioned among the seven wonders of the world, when philosophers make hanging fields, and seas, and cities, and mountains?

In fact, that would have been an excellent example for Lewontin to use.

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.

He then goes on to explain that this commitment, which is more properly a commitment to methodological naturalism, is a way of avoiding hypotheses like miracles that can explain anything. However, a hypothesis that can explain anything really explains nothing, and is about as meaningful as the the hypothesis of Bertrand Russell's interplanetary teapot.

But does Lewontin feel as bad about rejecting supernatural and paranormal beliefs that he may not like? Beliefs like ghosts, ESP, UFO's as extraterrestrial spacecraft, astrology, various altmed therapies, ...

 

[ApostateAbe]

Lewontin attributed creationism to class struggles (WTF?), Sagan attributed it ignorance, but the best explanation seems to be memeplexes that have evolved for thousands of years by Darwinian selection to maximize reproduction of those memeplexes (evangelism). Sagan attributed it to ignorance, but his own ignorance seemed to be his downfall, and Lewontin seems to have been a victim of the phenomenon, one victim of billions and billions. The "Orthodox study house in Brooklyn" would be a Jewish school, where Lewontin believes that critical thinking and philosophical inquiry into the nature of knowledge and existence would be deeper than within Sagan's university in Ithaca. I don't have much confidence in a Jewish philosophy student's ability to comprehend the universe better than an astrophysicist, but there may some truth in this. Science is the best hope for fighting delusion, but the communities of scientists are likewise prone to political/moral ideology, wishful thinking, authoritarianism and groupthink. I observe one scientific field drastically at odds with another scientific field on a given politically-loaded issue, or a community of scientists in one nation drastically at odds with the community of scientists in another nation, and such things are reminders that Sagan's ideal of science as a candle in the dark is an ideal, not so much to do with the actual reality of science as we like to think.

 

[ronburgundy]

It doesn't seem Lewontin is defending creationist theory but rather trying to explain the appeal of the theory for reasons beyond simple ignorance. I think Lewontin is correct on that score. There is a kind of politics and class warefare tied anti-intellectualism and anti-science. The Scopes trial was more of a battle between the booming post-industrial urban modernism versus struggling rural traditionalism as it was merely between the theories of evolution and creationism.

That said, Lewontin's post-modern efforts to create false equivalences between science and religion in terms of epistemology and authority seem like the kind off dishonest, cowardly separate-but-equal apologetics that Gould spewed in the form of his "non-overlapping magisteria".


and