The Media and Evolution

by Bobby Maddex

Having just completed Salvo 4 on intelligent design, I have been thinking a lot lately about how evolution is presented to the public by the popular media. Most typically, it comes in the form of off-hand comments in articles or columns on topics that have little or nothing to do with evolution itself. These pieces affirm Darwinism in passing, as though the matter has been fully settled—is as proven as gravity—and only a scientific Neanderthal would disagree.

One particularly egregious example of such tactics can be found in the latest issue of Wired magazine in its cover story, "Why Things Suck." The idea here was to explain why common annoyances (everything from low computer battery life to traffic to teleconferencing) are just that—annoying. For example, the reason why car alarms "suck," at least according to Wired, is because they rely "on vibration or proximity sensors, which means [they're] just as likely to be triggered by a passing truck" as by an actual break-in. You get the idea.

Anyway, one of the magazine's 33 entries (a number that just happens to coincide with the 33 entries on intelligent design in Salvo; have I already mentioned that issue?) is somewhat strangely on "Science"—as in "Why Does Science Suck?" Here's the explanation:

Morality, spirituality, the meaning of life—science doesn't handle those issues well at all. But that's cool. We have art and religion for that stuff. Science also assumes predictable cause and effect in a world that's a chaotic, bubbling stew of randomness. But that's OK, too. Our approximations are usually good enough. No, the real reason science sucks is that it makes us look bad. It makes us bit players in the Big Story of the universe, and it exposes some key limitations of the human brain. Look at it this way: Before science, we humans had dominion over Earth, the center of the universe. Now we're just a bunch of hairless apes on a wet rock orbiting a minor star in a marginal galaxy. Even worse, those same cortexes that invented science can't really embrace it. Science describes the world with numbers (ratio of circumference to diameter: pi) and abstractions (particles! waves! particles!). But our intractable brains evolved on a diet of campfire tales. Fantastical explanations (angry gods hurling lightning bolts) and rare events with dramatic outcomes (saber-toothed tiger attacks) make more of an impact on us than statistical norms. Evolution gave us brains that crave certainty, with irrational fears of crashing in an airplane and a built-in weakness for just-so stories about intelligent design. Meanwhile, the true wonders revealed by the scientific method—species that change into new species over time, continents that float around the planet, a quantum-mechanical world where nothing is for sure—are worse than counterintuitive. To a depressingly large number of us, they're dowright threatening. In other words, thanks to evolution, half of all Americans don't believe in evolution. That's the universe for you: impersonal, uncaring, and ironic.

Where do I even begin?

1. Well, let's start with the fact that this entry is not so much about science sucking as about how people suck for not putting their complete faith in science.

2. Did you notice the author's establishment of the old fact/value split? Right there at the beginning, he (Thomas Hayden) argues that where "morality, spirituality, [and] the meaning of life"—in other words, subjective experience—are the province of religion, objective facts are the province of science. In short, religion is nice and all, but it definitely doesn't represent total truth about all of reality. Sorry, believers.

3. "Now we're just a bunch of hairless apes." Really? Science has proven this? And please show me something besides that old hedge that we share 99% of our genes with monkeys. As Denyse O'Leary wrote in Salvo 1, we also share "perhaps 30 percent of our genes with a banana. So can the banana help us 30 percent toward understanding ourselves?"

4. Note the equation drawn between "campfire tales"—those "angry gods hurling lighning bolts"—with the theory of intelligent design (ID), not to mention the assertion that it is evolution that makes us believe in intelligent design. Hmmm. I thought the irrefutable signs of design in the universe is what makes a growing number of scientists ascribe to ID.

5. The scientific method has proven that species "change into new species over time." Show me just one definitive example of this in the fossil record, please.

6. Is the author trying to say that ID advocates don't believe in plate tectonics ("continents that float around the planet"), or is he just saying that a universal common ancestor is as much of an established fact as plate tectonics? Either way, he's wrong.

7. "To a depressingly large number of us" (emphasis mine): That's right; he's saying that those of us who don't accept evolution uncritically are idiots.

8. "Half of all Americans don't believe in evolution": Actually, only 13% of Americans believe in evolution by blind material causes, so this is just a lie. And perhaps the reason for this has less to do with our feeling threatened by evolution than by articles that make a lot of claims about evolution without backing them up.

9. Finally, is Hayden saying there at the end that critics of evolution are "impersonal, uncaring, and ironic"?

Whatever the case, his entry in the "Why Things Suck" issue of Wired (to which I would have added Wired magazine itself) is clearly an example of defending Darwin ad hominemly (yes, I know this isn't a word; it's just that evolution has given me a penchant for neologisms) and through overstatement, as well as of squeezing evolution into the most unlikely—and ridiculous—of places.

For a much more honest and straightforward discussion of evolution and intelligent design—one replete with FACTS, incidentally—check out Salvo 4. And that marks the last of my shameless plugs.

Comments

[Scott]

I think we should consider that by "ironic" he is referring to the observation that evolution has evolved us to disbelieve in evolution.

[mgarelick]

>8. "Half of all Americans don't believe in evolution": Actually, only 13% of Americans believe in evolution by blind material causes, so this is just a lie.<

OK, so if I promised you a 50% return on your investment, and you got 87%, you would sue me for misrepresentation?

[Tom Rees]

3. "Now we're just a bunch of hairless apes." Really? Science has proven this?

Yes. We are Hominidae ( http://tolweb.org/hominidae/16299 ), or "Great Apes". Check out the skeletal and other similarities (as well as genetic, of course). Now the classification of species is an exercise in expert judgement, but if you apply the same standards as are applied to other species, it's clear that humans are apes. Why ever would you not classify humans as among the Great Apes? The similarities are striking and obvious.