Tag Archive for theory

Matt Foss | September 3, 2011
2 comments

Why some people don’t accept evolution: a layperson’s perspective

I’ll come right out and say that I am not especially well-educated in science.  I studied the liberal arts in college and never took a course beyond Intro to Biology.  I do think that I gained a fundamental literacy of the science through my minimal classroom study (and copious independent reading as a child), to the point that I can understand what science journalists and bloggers are talking about even without being able to make sense of the raw data myself.

Image credit: Ethan Hein

I do understand, at the most basic level, how evolution works and why it works, even if I can’t wrap my head around the intricate processes that drive it.  I’d be out of my league attempting to teach it to someone or to debate a creationist on it (a position in which we atheists too often find ourselves, as if we’re all PhD biologists in the minds of creationists).

Even as a layperson (especially as a layperson?) I feel that scientific literacy is a vital part of being an informed citizen.  I’m troubled by the widening knowledge gap I see between scientists and everybody else, and particularly by the anti-intellectual sentiment that is rising alongside populism.

Denial in favor of design

To many atheists (and even theists who are skeptics about most everything but gods), it may seem shocking and frustrating that so many people in the United States dismiss evolution as wild conjecture.

When we see the notion of “intelligent design” being taught alongside actual science in biology class as if the two had equal weight, our first reaction may leave a palm-shaped depression in our foreheads (or a forehead-shaped indentation in our desks).

Sure, there are a number of people so hopelessly dedicated to ancient origin stories that they don’t want evolution to be true. It would turn their entire world upside down were they to accept that they are part of a 3 billion year old solar-powered chemical reaction rather than a unique, purposeful creation apart from nature.  It would mean to them that they are no better than their animal kin and take away all incentive for civilized behavior in their minds.

The threat of such a crisis of conscience has been used as an argument against evolution since Darwin first proposed it.  It was used by the prosecution in the infamous John Scopes trial, and even today is rehashed and regurgitated by creationist groups like Answers in Genesis.

I’m not so sure that there’s a way around this roadblock. How does one persuade a person to step over a ledge if said person is utterly convinced that they’ll tread onto a slippery slope?

Framing it like a religion instead of science

There are others still who are taken in by deceitful rhetoric like “evolution is just a theory”, people who don’t believe the science because they don’t understand it.

I suspect that a major reason why people don’t “get” evolution is that they try to understand the theory as something that it’s not: an infallible history that’s conveniently spelled out for them.  Unfortunately, science doesn’t offer the romance or clarity of religious mythology, no matter how badly our human minds want it to (not to say it can’t be exciting in its own right if you embrace your inner nerd, but most don’t).

The narrative of Darwin on his epic odyssey through the harsh environment of the Galapagos, suddenly experiencing a “eureka!” moment as the idea of natural selection dawns on him, is false.  It is nevertheless taught that way to schoolchildren to make the subject more fun (the same goes for the myth of Newton and the falling apple revealing to him the concept of gravity).

On the Origin of Species was a breakthrough 150 years ago, but it isn’t a sacred text.  A century and a half of new discoveries have rendered it obsolete, and the biologists of the 2160s will likely say the same about our most cutting-edge scientific literature today.

Unfortunately, people don’t seem to want an amendable explanation that says “We can’t know for sure, but this is what most probably happened based on what we’ve found so far.”  It doesn’t satisfy that desire for certainty that nags at all of us.  It leaves room for doubt, and makes many people uncomfortable.  No, people want an ironclad explanation that says “We know that this is what happened, for these irrefutable reasons.”

Science can’t offer that.  It’s driven by uncertainty – that’s what leads to new discoveries and new questions to be answered.  Until the American public learns to accept that, how can we expect them to accept evolution?

Category: Science | Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
guest writer | August 25, 2011
3 comments

The problem faced by Conspiracy Theory

As there are different types of philosophies so too are there different types of Conspiracy Theory. These range from simple one off events such as the assassination of JFK and 911 to historically entrenched conspiracy theories that encompass esoteric ideals with real world implications. The latter tend to be associated with secret societies or Meta intergalactic conspiracy theories involving alien control.

Today the biggest problem facing Conspiracies Theory is its lack of articulation and analysis of systematic processes. However, simply dismissing conspiracy theories as being illogical, wildly imaginative or staggeringly absurd will no longer work as an analytical benchmark. In terms of pure logic and reasoning some conspiracy theories are more plausible than others. For instance take the assassination of JFK. It is plausible that a network of men other than Lee Harvey Oswald had him assassinated. This is more plausible than the premise that the world’s political and financial systems were deigned to be as they are in order to serve the purpose of a smoke screen designed by a secret society in the ancient world that envisioned world domination – whatever that is.

Apart from the art of linguistics, Conspiracy Theory fails to address the phenomena it seeks to explicate in a concise or sophisticated manner. As a further hindrance to the cause, the semantics encompassing Conspiracy Theory have reached bursting point – a concept ablaze with theoretical amalgamation producing ideological saturation. As a consequence both the descriptive and conceptual terms of Conspiracy Theory have become meaningless. Take the conspiracy theory of JFK as a single point conspiracy. By this I mean a preplanned arrangement between two or more individuals at a single point in time. These individuals would have conspired collectively to corrupt the political process when disposing of Kennedy.

It is precisely here where the misdiagnosis of conspiracy theories emerge, they must therefore reframe their theoretical ideas of the process they seek to analyze. Single point conspiracy theories can be equally analyzed as single point corruption, both occurring at designated points in time within social, economic and political systems. Immediately this sense of analyses and the semantic use of single points of corruption bring credence to the attempted argument. Political Scientists and Sociologists study corruption, particularly at discrete points in time regarding illegal operations and processes in a system. However not too many study Conspiracy Theory as a serious framework for consideration or as a viable ontological alternative. Predominantly when studied in a serious format, it is the the work of psychologists attempting to discredit conspiracy theories by merely labeling them under the banner of erratic belief systems.

In order to provide analytical and insightful robustness to a theory, conspiracy theorists must first stipulate what phenomena they are trying to explain and what type of conspiracy they are advocating. If proponents of conspiracy theories want to build a persuasive argument they must first elucidate what they mean by a type of conspiracy in a particular context. To explain something like JFK they must illustrate how single point conspiracy theories are equivocal to single points of corruption – one off events in political systems and not the byproduct of an overarching conspiracy with a superior teleological goal enacted by the New World Order. This is because pre planned Meta conspiracy theories of secret world rule in which every observable phenomenon is linked to a larger Meta Conspiracy Theory is rendered inept by Social Chaos Theory because no room is allocated for randomness and error.

By positioning the argument in the Social Science domain of single point conspiracy or corruption lends itself to readily defensible claims. Systematic corruption and single point conspiracies are rife in the world and this is why rules and regulations are formulated to prevent the abuse of power. What cannot be logically argued is the convergence and transition from the micro to the macro that results in Meta Conspiracy Theory. For example that corruption in small parts of a social system is somehow related to a pre planned conspiracy on a larger scale such as the global financial crisis, 911 and the Iraq war. For this reason when seeking to explicate a corrupt occurrence; the conceptual and contextual use of Conspiracy and Conspiracy Theory is of the most importance when analyzing social and political phenomena.

__________

Tony Sobrado is a Social Scientist and Research Analyst based in London. He writes for www.atthegrapevine.com and is a member of Project Reason and JREF.  He is currently working on Who rules the world? An analysis of Conspiracy Theory which addresses the phenomena of Conspiracy Theory from the perspective of the social sciences. He holds a BSc in Political Science from The London School of Economics and a Masters degree in Social and Political Theory.

You can find him on twitter @TonySobrado.

Category: News, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Astrid Lydia Johannsen | August 24, 2011
3 comments

Outer Space to Inner Space

Carl Sagan rocked my Cosmos

When I was a child, my fascination was with things celestial. I wanted to be an astronaut so that I could be closer to the stars. It was as though the heavens called to me, so I studied all I could about the planets (there were nine at the time) and the stars in the galaxy. I read about Andromeda, the Magellanic Clouds, comets, asteroids, meteorites, nebulae, and so many other things. I watched Cosmos as a kid, and though I was too young to really wrap my brain around the humanist message Carl Sagan spoke of in his series, those shows resonated with me nonetheless.

It was in high school that I was finally able to study the one subject that fascinated me almost as much as astronomy: physics. Physics, along with my love of history, introduced me to names like Ptolemy, Brahe, Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, and the history of science. It was the history of science, spawned by my love of the stars, that ultimate led me to the study of religion.

I was curious, why was someone like Galileo condemned to house arrest for the harmless act of reporting what he had discovered by pointing his telescope skyward? Science was always a marvel to me, and it blew my young mind that there could be people throughout history who would condemn scientists for teaching things that were held as contrary to popular understanding. Read that as “contradicting the Law of God”.

Galileo Galilei

Religion had always fascinated me as well, though I had no idea how much my curiosity about religion would influence me in later years. By the end of high school, my academic interest in outer space made a complete turn toward a fascination with inner space and the realm of the mind. More specifically, I wanted to understand why people believe the things they believe in. Why do people have religion?

These questions were always in the back of my mind as I spent a little over a decade trying on a handful of different religions, Judaism, Buddhism, even Wicca, in an attempt to try and understand them, and those who practice them, a little better. At university, I finally had the opportunity to study religion in a context which suited my skeptical mind a lot better: not behind a pew in a church, but behind a desk in a university. And in the final term of my final year before graduating, I took a course that would make me realize that choosing to study religion in an academic setting was probably the best decision I could have made regarding my academic career, and my life in general. I took a course on theory of religion, and it opened my eyes to the kinds of prospective answers I had been asking about religion for most of my life. What defined religion? Was it purely a sociological phenomenon? Did religious belief evolve with the rest of the mind? So many more questions to explore, far beyond my original childhood curiosity.

I think it’s interesting that my childhood fascination with the stars led me toward religious scholarship. I still read about astronomy, cosmology, and physics, and I am a strong proponent of the sciences and the pursuit of knowledge about how our universe works. I even contemplated majoring in physics prior to going to university, but my interest in history and ancient cultures won me over and I wound up majoring in religious studies. And I don’t regret it one bit!

Side note:
Recently I posted a video at WeAreAtheism.com concerning my interest in religion and how that shaped my eventual coming out as an atheist. Give it a gander if you are so inclined, and I encourage other atheist folk to consider posting their own video or essay as well.

Category: Focus on Religion, History, Religion, Science | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Ellen Lundgren | August 19, 2011
One comment

Top 10 Most Famous Scientific Theories (That Turned out to be Wrong)

I saw this cool article on scientific theories that turned out to be wrong, and it was fascinating. So below I made a list of what I love about this article.
  1. I love lists.
  2. I love debunking bad science.
  3. I love bad science that makes good stories.
This article gave me an idea for a sci-fi alternate reality piece of fiction I might write. But I’m not telling you which one gave me the idea because then you might steal it! *stink eye*
Category: Link, Science | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Astrid Lydia Johannsen | July 27, 2011
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The Academic Pursuit of Religion

Max Müller

In the late 19th century, an English academic of German ancestry by the name of Friedrich Max Müller proposed the study of religion from a scientific perspective. Prior to this time, religious scholarship was the exclusive domain of theologians who analyzed religious texts, making copious commentary on scriptures, that they might prove their faith to be the correct one. The idea that one could study religion as one studies astronomy or geology seemed unlikely to a great many people, including many in academic circles.

The impetus for Müller’s science of religion came a century earlier with the emergence of the Deists and the idea of a natural religion. According to the Deists, the divine existed and could be found in the natural world. To them, there was no need for the dogma of religion. Revealed scriptures were unnecessary. God was not an entity but rather a force of nature. The whole world was sacred, and prayer involved studying the world in great detail. With Deism, scholarship and faith did not have to be at odds with one another. Scientific analysis of religion was possible, and Müller as well as others would work toward a theory of religion which could be understood from an analytical, scientific perspective.

It would be the disciplines of history, archaeology, and anthropology which would seed the scientific study of religion in the latter years of the 19th century. After 1859, the buzzword on the lips of many in academia was ‘evolution’. Darwin’s theory of natural selection was being co-opted and corrupted by sociologists who twisted it to fit social dynamics, and put 19th century mechanized Britain at the top of the social evolutionary ladder. This was the thinking that fueled 19th and early 20th century anthropologists and early religious scholars. The claim was that society evolved just as living things did, and people moved through stages of civilization which led from tribal societies to agrarian societies to mechanized societies in a linear progression. The budding science of religion would offer a similar linear theory.

E. B. Tylor

Edward Burnett Tylor was a well-traveled English autodidact who came up with an early theory of religion based on his experiences with varying tribal societies of Central and South America. He proposed the theory of animism, the idea that all things were infused with the divine. Trees, rocks, the ocean, weather, all things were inherently spiritual, and Tylor claimed it was this ever-present spirituality which was worshipped by early tribal societies. Tylor also proposed the idea of “survivals”, that is, curious behaviors which persist into modern times that at one point in the past were aspects of spiritual practices. A blessing after someone sneezes would be an example of a survival. According to Tylor, survivals offer contemporary evidence for ancient animistic practices, thus connecting the ancient with the modern.

James George Frazer was a contemporary of Tylor, and also a disciple of Tylor’s theories. It would be Frazer who would take the scientific study of religion via anthropology to its next level in his seminal work “The Golden Bough”. Using anecdotes from the Greco-Roman myths he had studied earlier in his life, Frazer penned an extensive academic tome discussing his theory of religion. A terse blog post is wholly inadequate to summarize “The Golden Bough” given its voluminous nature. But what can be taken from it in this instance is this: Myths, magic, and the divine are attempts by earlier societies to explain the world in which they live. And as the tools for studying the world become more refined, so too do the myths. Animism matures into polytheism. Polytheism matures into monotheism. Eventually theism gives way to science as the pre-eminent tool for studying the natural world. It is Frazer’s theory of the social evolution of religious thought.

Though it may seem like an appealing idea, that ultimately religious thought will be superceded by scientific inquiry, it relies on the erroneous theory of social evolution. I don’t believe that religious thought, animism, polytheism, monotheism, is a linear progression. A stage of monotheism is not required to step into atheism. There were many atheists in polytheistic societies. The Deists demonstrated that scientific inquiry did not have to suffer while retaining a belief in a supernatural force. Tylor and Frazer’s theories are outdated today, having been a clear product of their time, but nevertheless they provided a firm academic starting point for further analysis into what defines a religion. I encourage folks who are interested in studying religion from a scientific perspective to look into “The Golden Bough” and early theories of religion.

Category: Focus on Religion, History, Religion, Science | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
Shawn Witham | July 24, 2011
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All Hail Our Savior, Algorithms!!

Being a computational scientist, I am fascinated by the subject of computational theory. The success of algorithmic explanations of nature is an extremely in depth, complex topic, but interesting none the less. The implications of the world around us being able to be explained through computational methods are desparately in need of more recognition, not only from current and in-training scientists, but also from anyone who searches the internet.

What is an algorithm? Computational algorithms, in all honesty, rule the world. Whether you follow stock markets, obey traffic signals, or use cell phones, you’re in the hands of algorithms. On the most general terms, a computational algorithm is any piece of computer code that follows steps to achieve a goal; whether its a straight forward mathematical problem, or a complex, learning-based, predictive piece of a code, algorithms are in play. For a good comparison of the diversity of algorithmic development, use a calculator for some simple math…now head over to Wolfram Alpha, and be prepared to be amazed.

An image of broccoli, which follows the Fibonacci pattern

Algorithms are the work horse behind all natural sciences. Whether its simulating the dynamics of billions of stars within galaxies, or predicting gene patterns within strands of DNA, computers are our savior. For example, the image to the right is a vegetable that follows the Fibonacci Sequence. Visually representing the overall structure is very straight foward when you have a computer and programming knowledge at hand (I’ll leave the chaotic occurrences for later). Also, as mentioned earlier, galaxy simulation is a huge topic within computational astrophysics (go here for a cool video made with OpenGL). Of particular importance to my professional life, is computer code that can learn. Evolutionary programming is such an in-depth, interesting programming topic, that it fills entire textbooks. However, for a general look, a common practice with biophysics and biochemistry is something called “sequence alignment” and probably has had an indirect influence on your life. Within these fields, scientists are dealing with massive amounts of experimental data, and with the help of algorithms, we are able to learn from these data and make educated predictions about things that aren’t experimentally known. This predictive usage of computational methods is, in my opinion, the most powerful aspect to algorithmic development.

The most successful and widely used examples of algorithms are that of internet search engines and shopping companies. Google, Amazon.com, Netflix, and many others, all use extremely complex algorithms just for you to be able to get results that pertain to things that you care about. When I’m bored and laying around thinking, I wonder sometimes if the internet, through all its different pieces and parts, hasn’t developed a conscience for itself (which both neuroscience and philosophical research is currently being done on). Entire departments of mathematicians, computer scientists, and electrical engineers are devoted to the development of fast, accurate, and novel methods for reading peoples minds when searching the internet.

I’d like to finish by going back to Wolfram Alpha and point you to this video of Stephen Wolfram at the 2010 TED Conference (definitely worth watching when you have time). A computational theory of everything, along with his concepts of algorithmic development that is accessible to non-computer programmers will be the next leap in computer usage, like the interent was back in the 80s/90s. By developing a computer that can do work from human language, solving complex mathematical problems and manipulating massive amounts of data will become as common as writing a school essay. To steal a quote from physicist Lawrence Krauss (modified a little…), “Forget Jesus, algorithms suffer so you can live.”

Category: Science, Science Sunday | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,