Tag Archives: evolution

Death and Evolution: The Varying Degrees of Knowing

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In science, in life, there are facts. “Facts” are ideas that a large percentage of the educated population has accepted for the time-being as pretty damn likely. The evidence for these facts comes either from our own common sense and life experience or from the consensus of the scientific community.

Two Examples: Death and Evolution

Often times these facts are treated casually as obvious things. I’d like to look at two examples:

  1. Each of us is going to die one day.
  2. We evolved with chimpanzees and gorillas from a common ape ancestor who lived about 6 million years ago.

The first fact is an example of something we know from our own common sense observations. The second fact is one we know from the consensus of the scientific community.

These two simple pieces of information (along with several others) happen to be ones that have occupied my mind from when I first realized school isn’t just a place I go to and try to get an “A”, but is a place where I get to learn things about stuff I’m interested in.

The Philosophical and the Pragmatic

My relationship with these facts has evolved. The death question leads to the usual  questions… What is the purpose of it all? Where does the sense of morality come from? The existentialist bunch (from Dostoevsky to Nietzsche to Sartre to Kafka) addressed this over and over and over in their work, in various forms, as if through sheer quantity of words they could somehow get closer to an answer that would satisfy them (and us). And as I read more and more my “knowing” of this fact of death changed.

I think it’s easy to dismiss a teenager’s view of such subjects, but I believe I knew the fact of death most deeply at about age 19. Because of how much focus I dedicated to reading existentialist literature at the time, the overwhelming uncertainty and absurdity of it all was deeply internalized by my mind. The feeling of it was most distinct. That’s when I really “knew” it. I would hit moments of real fear of knowing so little about myself and the world around me. Today, death is less philosophical, and more pragmatic like the knowledge that a car (even if it’s a Toyota) will eventually break down. You repair it, you take care of it, and deal with problems as they arise. Sometimes the more I learn the more I know, and sometimes the more I learn the more tired I grow of caring. The knowledge that can fascinate us can also break us. You have to tread carefully and purposefully with such challenging ideas.

Early Humans vs Modern Humans

The same goes for the second fact of evolution. When I read about early humans struggling to develop simple stone tools, hitting rock against rock to make a sharper rock, I am filled with awe. It challenges the common sense brain I use for getting out of bed in the morning, for making breakfast, for going to work, having goals, making money, spending money, talking to friends, etc. The view of the “life force” over millennia puts the daily life of modern humans into an absurd light.  Perhaps “awe” is not the right word. I oscillate between fascination at the glimpse of the mysterious around us and fear of the immense uncertainty of it.

Varying Degrees of Knowing

Most of us “know” the basic facts of reality today. But for most of us the relationship with these facts varies and constantly changes in depth, perspective, and how it effects the way we approach the activities of life.

Scientific Literacy Has a Lot to Do With Economic Growth

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This blog post is inspired by a statement of Florida Republican Senator (and a rising star for the 2016 presidential race) Marco Rubio in a GQ Interview:

GQ: How old do you think the Earth is?

Marco Rubio: “I’m not a scientist, man. I can tell you what recorded history says, I can tell you what the Bible says, but I think that’s a dispute amongst theologians and I think it has nothing to do with the gross domestic product or economic growth of the United States. I think the age of the universe has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow. I’m not a scientist. I don’t think I’m qualified to answer a question like that. At the end of the day, I think there are multiple theories out there on how the universe was created and I think this is a country where people should have the opportunity to teach them all. I think parents should be able to teach their kids what their faith says, what science says. Whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras, I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to answer that. It’s one of the great mysteries.”

The plot to the left is the per-capita GDP (in 2006 dollars) worldwide throughout the 20th century. See how it increases? Why is that?

My belief, and that of most introductory economics textbooks, is that technological innovation (aka scientific research) is at the core of it all, leading to increased productivity, and on through the self-fulling prophecy of the endogenous growth theory. And I believe that scientific literacy has a lot to do with GDP, because it’s our politicians that decide how to allocate funding, and scientists need funding.

This is why I’m particularly sensitive when the question of federal research funding comes up among politicians. Obama set the goal of doubling basic science research funding by 2016, but he has unfortunately not lived up to the promise and is doing a worse job than his predecessor in this regard. Part of the problem is that the question of funding science always seems to get tied up with a select few topics, namely: evolution, climate change, embryonic stem cells, and abortion. Am I missing any?

The scientific community becomes outraged at some of the absurd statements made by creationists on these topics. The result of that outrage is often the perception that there is a war over science. There is a sense that a strong plurality of Americans are scientifically illiterate based on polls like this: 46% believed the Earth is less than 10,000 years old. However, I have long held the hope that these 46% are ignorant on just those select few topics about which the Evangelical Christian community deeply care about. But outside of those issues, everyone is in consensus on the structure of a DNA double helix, the physics of a transistor, and Einstein’s special theory of relativity. At least I hope so.

From my experience, everyone (left and right) has a deep respect for science in general. The people that rail against “science” actually agree with 99.9% of the current state-of-the-art knowledge in fields from biology to chemistry to physics to mathematics, and have “beef” with a very select few topics of climate change, evolution, etc. It’s important to remember that, and remind people of that. Because the last thing anyone wants is to decrease our nation’s investment in basic scientific research. It’s the fuel for the long-term economic growth of our nation.

So, Senator Rubio, your ignorance about the age of the universe has a lot to do with the GDP of our nation. Because you have a lot of power to influence the following plot:

Theory Evolution is Not Obvious

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Main point: Learn first. Make up your mind later.

I personally think that the theory of evolution is one of the most beautiful and world-changing ideas ever discovered and formulated by man. But I don’t agree with a commonly stated claim that it is an “obvious fact”. It’s beautiful, powerful, exceptionally well-supported by evidence, but it is not obvious. We do not observe evolution in every day life, because evolution operates on a time scale that is orders of magnitude larger than the time scale of our day-to-day existence.

If you don’t understand the basic mechanisms of evolutionary biology that make it all possible, then frankly, it’s much more natural to think of it as some mysterious miracle of the universe or orchestrated by some intelligent designer (e.g. God).

It’s sad that “science” is viewed with suspicion by many people in the United States. Too often, ignorance and poor education is not viewed as something to be ashamed of, but a kind of staple of the cowboy character… “I like beer, and I don’t like math”. That’s truly unfortunate. Put evolution, global warming, and whatever other politicized field of science aside. If you are bad at math… if you don’t know the basics of the scientific method… pick up a book, let yourself be amazed by the world out there.

Science isn’t something for “elitist” professors at “liberal” universities. It’s simply a method of answering the universal question of “how the heck does this work?” and “why the heck does this happen?” If you allow yourself that little bit of curiosity, and follow it up with some reading, I think the beauty of the universe will open up to you, with or without God.

Back to the main point… evolution is only beautiful if you learn a little bit about it. It is not obvious. It requires study. I find that most people that deny the theory of evolution, don’t know much at all about it. Wikipedia, my friends, is a good place to start.

Morality by Consensus

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I’ve been listening to a lot of lectures and debates recently on questions of religion. It’s quite remarkable that scholars representing the theist worldview are willing to engage in debate on scientific grounds. In other words, they argue for the existence and goodness of a supernatural being based on “evidence”, or at least their conception of what makes convincing evidence. To me, this is a losing battle, as religion and rationality just don’t mix. The fundamental concept of religion is faith, and by definition, faith is an irrational acceptance of beliefs as fact.

For that reason, I don’t find these debates very interesting, outside the fact that they inspire me to think about (at times unanswerable) questions of existence, meaning, morality, etc.

And that’s what I wanted to say in this note, as highlighted in the below video of a debate about the role of religion in fine-tuning our moral compass. The question is whether there is such a thing as objective morality, and how it comes about (creationism vs evolution). How do we know (and feel) that it’s wrong to kill? How do we account for the fact that in some cultures it is considered just to abuse women and in other cultures such abuse is fundamentally immoral?

Like many scientists, I don’t believe in the possibility objective morality: a set of absolute rules about what is good and what is evil. I’m referring to a relatively well-defined set of moral laws of the kind that most major religions provide in their holy texts. I believe our conception of what is good comes from social norms, from a kind of a democracy of ideas. We evolve slowly, together, generally in the direction of greater respect for individual rights, freedoms, etc.

37% of College Graduates Don’t Believe in Evolution

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A gallop poll released on December 17 confirms my long held belief that the fundamentalist religious groups are still going strong in the United States. Here is a key statistics:

  • 40% of American don’t believe in evolution. Meaning, they believe that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so”.

As you would expect, there is a correlation between your level of education and whether you “believe” in evolution. However, what’s remarkable to me is that 37% of people that graduate college don’t believe in evolution and 22% of postgraduates don’t believe in it. Is it fair to assume that those are not scientists and engineers, but are students of humanities or subjects less related to evolution and the thinking process characteristic of the scientific method?