Suspension of Disbelief: The Failure of Skepticism in the face of Science Another Response

If you are going to insist on asserting "behaviors being evolved", on them being "an adaptation" or, most abbreviated and often most clueless of all "it's in the DNA"  then you are claiming that whatever "it" it is you're talking about resulted in someone who had "it" having more children than someone who didn't have "it".   That production of a larger percentage of offspring in a population is the basis of natural selection.

If you don't actually SEE A BEHAVIOR and you don't KNOW HOW MANY CHILDREN THEY HAD WHO DID THE BEHAVIOR and how many of THEIR CHILDREN DID IT you don't have any actual knowledge to back up your contention that "it" was 1. a positive adaptation, 2. inherited as a positive adaptation.

Any assertion to that effect made, even by the ex-Oxford based Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science on Fresh Air, is nothing more than a story purported to be science, based on self-serving speculations of the most obvious kind.   THEY ARE BASED ON NOTHING EXCEPT THE DESIRES OF SAID SCIENTIST THAT THEY BE TRUE.   They may seem plausible but that is only through their skill as a story teller, it isn't based on any actual observation from nature, any actual counting of offspring or any real connection made between the unseen "behavior" and the uncounted "offspring" not least of all because ALL OF THE INDIVIDUALS IN THE STORY AND THEIR "BEHAVIORS" ARE ENTIRELY MADE UP.  

One of the convenient features of story telling is that you can come up with stories that hold together in the imagination  and even simulate some reality about even the most unrealistic animals found nowhere in nature and even fictional environments and even universes that seem plausible merely on the basis of internal consistency.  That isn't any unknown aberration of diseased thinking, it is the near universal reality taken advantage of by even realistic playwrights and novelists.  And it isn't something our modern, sciency, cynical age has surpassed.    I can promise you, if you go to  The Wizarding World of Harry Potter ™ that the flying and the magic are not real.   I can't guarantee you that the organisms and their behaviors in any evo-psy creation fable are any more real and neither can the most well credentialed scientist who makes those up.

In the case of Daniel Dennett, his  witheven more baseless speculations, are even more apt to the comparison I just made, yet he has parleyed such stuff into him being Co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies, the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and a University Professor at Tufts University.  And, more importantly, a frequent guest on the chat shows.*

That is a pattern which has been a feature of natural selection from the beginning of it, stories invented out of nothing which were then successfully passed off as science, proving in some cases, such as eugenics, that it is an extremely dangerous practice which, at the very least, should never be accepted as any more than what it is.

The stories told about Carrie Buck's feeble mindedness and that of her daughter were entirely false, carried merely by the authority of the eugenicists telling it through court cases up and to the Supreme Court where supposedly the keenest of minds trained in the truth testing skills of the law bought it.  Those stories were sold to that august body largely through the repute of Darwinism among the educated class who, clearly, didn't really understand it.   Cleary, the social prejudices of those justices, all of them in the upper class, all of them with university educations, in the case of the famous author of the infamous decision stripping Carrie Buck of her rights, saturated in Darwinism, were all predisposed to suspend their critical faculties and to never actually look at the woman and her child as they were in reality.  And that was a relatively mild form of the violence that resulted from the tales told by scientists using natural selection as the vehicle for their creative story telling.   The success of evolutionary psychology proves we have not progressed in the sophistication of our understanding of it.

The danger of that is best proven by an example I first realized when I read this paragraph from Marilynne Robinson's review of The God Delusion.

The God Delusion has human history and civilization as its subjects, inevitably, considering the pervasiveness of religion. Dawkins dwells particularly on Christianity, since he is most familiar with it, and because its influence is and has been very great. On the one hand, he professes a lingering fondness for the Church of England and regrets that familiarity with the Bible, a great Literature, is in decline. On the other hand, he finds the Old Testament barbarous and abhorrent and the New Testament mawkish and fairly abhorrent as well. His treatment of these texts depends to a striking degree on a “remarkable paper” by John Hartung, an associate professor of anesthesiology and an anthropologist. The paper, titled “Love Thy Neighbor: The Evolution of In- Group Morality,” originally published in 1995, is available on the Web. Dawkins and his wife are thanked in the acknowledgments. Curious readers can form their own impression of its character. A sympathetic review by Hartung of Kevin MacDonald’s A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy, with Diaspora Peoples is also of interest. These are murky waters, the kind toward which Darwinism has often tended to migrate.

I had never heard of John Hartung before but I was certainly familiar with the name, Kevin MacDonald, due to him being the sole witness called by the Holocaust denier, Hitler apologist and crypto-Nazi, David Irving in the lawsuit Irving brought against Deborah Lipstadt.   MacDonald's professional expertise in evolutionary psychology was based on a series of books treating Jews as a subject under the methodology and accepted practices of evolutionary psychology.  Though his books are clearly antisemitism as science, called that by a large number of reviewers outside of evo-psy, promoting some of the same negative stereotypes that earlier anti-Semites used to promote pogroms and, yes, the genocide attempt by Irving's hero, his professional stature within evolutionary psychology didn't suffer one bit, until the trial.

He was made a full professor at  Department of Psychology at California State University, Long Beach the year before his testimony for David Irving, Secretary-Archivist of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, editor of professional journals, the full scale of positions and honors, even as he was publishing and after he had published the books which made David Irving believe he would be both a friendly witness and useful for his attempt to deny Irving's Holocaust denial and promoting neo-Nazism, the writings that presumably make MacDonald popular with neo-Nazis now.   You can read his professional resume and see for yourself how well that science policed itself.

Since MacDonald made it impossible for his colleagues to overlook the nature of his science - I admit to believing it's  more due to the desire to avoid bad publicity - some further honors may have been withheld.  Though I have read that several of those journals and groups who still publish him and with which he is associated push white supremacy.   I have to ask how those sophisticated readers of him, most of them certainly his academic colleagues and other university educated readers of such books and papers, failed to notice.

And John Hartung's paper mentioned above, such as it is, is still also available, online.  As are a number of others with it, listed under the authority gleaned from the Darwinian phrase, "Struggles for existence" , clearly full of scienceoids (to coin a term that desperately needs coining) in the genera of anti-monotheist, anti-religious invective, passed off by Dawkins as reliable science.

Marilynne Robinson continued, in her review:

Dawkins says,[after Hartung] “I need to call attention to one particularly unpalatable aspect of its [the Bible's] ethical teaching. Christians seldom realize that much of the moral consideration for others which is apparently promoted by both the Old and New Testaments was originally intended to apply only to a narrowly defined in-group. ‘Love thy neighbor’ didn’t mean what we now think it means. It meant only ‘Love another Jew.” As for the New Testament interpretation of the text, “Hartung puts it more bluntly than I dare: ‘Jesus would have turned over in his grave if he had known that Paul would be taking his plan to the pigs.” Pigs being, of course, gentiles.

There are two major objections to be made to this reading. First, the verse quoted here, Leviticus 19:18, does indeed begin, “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people,” language that allows a narrow interpretation of the commandment. But Leviticus 19:33–34 says “When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. . . . You shall love the alien as yourself.” In light of these verses, it is wrong by Dawkins’s own standards to argue that the ethos of the law does not imply moral consideration for others. (It would be interesting to see the response to a proposal to display this Mosaic law in our courthouses.) Second, Jesus provided a gloss on 19:18, the famous Parable of the Good Samaritan. With specific reference to this verse, a lawyer asks Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”Jesus tells a story that moves the lawyer to answer that the merciful Samaritan–a non-Jew– embodies the word “neighbor.” That the question would be posed to Jesus, or by Luke, is evidence that the meaning of the law was not obvious or settled in antiquity. In general, Dawkins’s air of genteel familiarity with Scripture, though becoming in one aware as he is of its contributions to the arts, dissipates under the slightest scrutiny.

The intellectual practices of people who believe they embody the very reliability of science, and who are presented in the media and by academia as such, are quite frequently susceptible to dissipating under the slightest scrutiny**.  I've found that in nothing is that made clearer than looking at the speculative assertions of evolutionary psychology and, through my scrutiny of them and associated lore and mythology of neo-atheim, the Darwinists.   For all of these reasons, for their association with some of the darkest periods and practices of the past century and a half, I have come to the conclusion that, instead of a beacon of the Enlightenment which anti-religious commentators made out of the scientific successes of religious people such as Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and others in the exact, observational sciences, they are a recursion to the earlier tradition based on plausible narrative.  But, with the added arrogance that they have the gold standard guarantee of science to back up their creation myths.

*  Despite Joseph Weizenbaum thanking him in the credits of his book, Computer Power and Human Reason, as a "young" philosopher, Dennett didn't learn a thing from Weizenbaum's book.   In talking about what scientists do as they practice science, Weizenbaum said:

He [the scientist] is rather like a theatergoer, who, in order to participate in and understand what is happening on the stage, must for a time pretend to himself that he is witnessing real events.  The scientist must believe his working hypothesis, together with its vast underlying structure of theories and assumptions, even if only for the sake of the argument.  Often the "argument" extends over his entire lifetime.  Gradually he becomes what he at first merely pretended to be:  a true believer.

That is as accurate a description of what this whole thing rests on as could be imagined.

** It's only fair that I point out that David Irving was, before scholars such as Lipstadt exposed him and the libel trial he brought to try to silence his critics, presented as a fine and important historian of the Nazi period.  It is discouraging to read some of the endorsements those writings got from other renowned historians who, obviously, either didn't know German sufficiently well to have the authority they were granted or who just didn't read Irving very carefully.