Apathy Sketchpad

Well this is interesting.

The other day, as you may have read, I removed Scott Adams’ blog from my list of links because he was acting like a moron and arguing against atheism in a rather stupid way, and then trying to justify it by saying it was amusing to watch atheists get angry at this. Today’s entry on his blog is much better. I shall quote a bit here, to save you clicking on links, since I know all internet users hate doing that:

I can’t reconcile the Richard Dawkins theory with my personal theory that I’m always right. Something has to give.

My best guess is that Richard Dawkins and I agree on all the big questions. It just seems like we don’t because my writing often triggers cognitive dissonance in readers who need to think of their world view as infallible.

…

The other possibility is that I’m a moron, since we all agree Dawkins is brilliant.

This has largely come about because Adams generally likes to assume that all current theories are wrong and come up with his own (hence while he doubts evolution he also doubts creationism). This is one reason why I like most of what he writes: it’s a good way to be interesting because you’re very likely to say something new and that promotes good discussion. It’s also what made Newton, Darwin and Wallace, and Einstein such great minds: they did very much the same kind of thing, detatching themselves from assumptions and common theory and thinking ‘afresh’, although they were rather better at it than any cartoonist. Of course, this could also be said for Mark McCutcheon and his laughably insane “final” theory — which interestingly is a theory Adams also posited in chapter 14 of The Dilbert Future. The difference is that Adams was raising it purely as an object for discussion, and so the fact that it really doesn’t work in real life isn’t massively relevant, although it does somewhat diminish his point somewhat. (The competing interpretations of quantum theory would have been a far better example, but they’d have been harder to elucidate, particularly since Adams doesn’t understand quantum theory particularly well.)

The problem with this kind of thinking is when you start to assume that your theory is correct and therefore the other theories are wrong. If you want your theory to be accepted then you have to prove it, and if you want the conventional wisdom to be forgotten then you have to debunk it. This is what McCutcheon abjectly failed to do: he wrote a book and appealed directly to a public who are mostly massively ignorant of the physics he was claiming to debunk. Had he “clearly debunked” relativity in a scientific paper instead of a book and a website then it wouldn’t have got past peer review. Instead he bypassed this and simply assumed that his theory was correct and the others were wrong, purely on the grounds that he couldn’t (or, though he presumably didn’t know this, didn’t) understand the conventional theories and he did understand his own (though again, in fact he didn’t understand it because if he had he’d have spotted the gaping holes in it).

The same mental block is evident in Adams’ recent writings (he even jokingly refers to it in the quote above, which is a little worrying now I think about it) and even more so in his blog’s comments (many of whom seem to genuinely believe Richard Dawkins is the same person as Richard Dawson, to the point where one commenter who implicitly refers to a TV show called “Dawkins’ Creek“). He said in a post some time ago that “evolution looks like a blend of science and bullshit, and have predicted for years that it would be revised in scientific terms in [his] lifetime. It’s a hunch – nothing more.” Now the second sentence of that quote is nothing more or less than a lie, albeit one predicated by ignorance rather than the intention to deceive, and quite an offensive one at that, if you happen to be one of the many scientists whose life’s work is tied up in the theory (and here I switch from the colloquial to the scientific definition of “theory”). As such I shall concentrate on the first sentence, as that appears to be the source of the ignorance that predicated the second.

The problem with this argument is that Adams has, like McCutcheon, failed to understand the theory he is attempting to debunk. I can’t claim to know how well Adams understands evolution, beyond what little I can reliably infer from his writings, but it would seem highly probable (especially since he says he hasn’t read The Selfish Gene) that the theory of evolution as he understands it in fact quite literally is “a blend of science and bullshit”. I know that my understanding of evolution could be quite reasonably described that way before I read Darwin’s Watch. It was the version of evolution I was taught in school, by teachers who thought it more important that I accept than understand the theory, and by teachers who didn’t, I presume, understand the theory any better than I did pre-Darwin’s Watch. As such the version of evolution people are taught is the basics of the science, padded out with bullshit as well-meaning and intelligent teachers answer pupils’ youthfully inquisitive and often very good questions as best they can given that they haven’t mostly read any Dawkins either, resulting in people having a simplistic and distorted view of how the universe operates.

And a major problem is that this version of evolution is quite easy to debunk. There are any number of creationist websites which will quite happily point out the flaws in it, but a better understanding of the theory can easily show that these flaws are not present in the actual theory of evolution as believed by credible scientists working in relevant fields. And just as McCutcheon debunks Special Relativity using the Twin Paradox, conveniently ignoring General Relativity which specifically exists to address exactly that point, people who don’t actually understand evolution claim to have debunked it by citing flaws in the slightly stupid version of evolution they do, and it’s very, very difficult to argue with them, because they are in one sense right: evolution as they understand it doesn’t make sense. Telling them “oh, you just haven’t understood it correctly; you’d believe it if you had” is a very difficult thing to do without seeming very arrogant. In this case, when Adams says that his “best guess is that Richard Dawkins and [himself] agree on all the big questions”, the truth is that he and Dawkins agree that the versions of evolution and of atheism that Adams sets out to debunk is bunk.

(Adams wears his ignorance on his sleeve, which sometimes makes his writing more interesting, because it makes it much less pretentious and as long as he isn’t too aggressively certain of his often-crackpot theories it makes it easier to approach them as interesting hypotheicals rather than, well, crackpot delusions to be pitied. Unfortunately, this pro-ignorance stance means that when he fails to do the proper research before attacking a subject, he does so by conscious decision. I think he should stick to proposing theories, rather than attacking them, if he doesn’t want to have to do the reading first.)

I think, therefore, that it is important that people care careful not to misrepresent evolution, as well as things like relativity — McCutcheon’s problem with it appears to stem from bad teaching: he says “The Twin Paradox Thought Experiment… famously appears in nearly all introductions to Special Relativity ever presented, as evidence for the bizarre truths of this theory, yet it is always retracted when challenged (and usually only when challenged).” And this is broadly true: I’ve heard similar scenarios presented as examples (not evidence) of the seemingly unlikely implications of relativity many, many times. But all this proves is bad teaching: Special Relativity only holds when considering inertial frames (or more accurately, frames in freefall in uniform gravitational fields), because it is a special case of the General Theory of Relativity, which applies everywhere (in theory: in reality it breaks down at a quantum level for reasons we don’t yet understand). There’s absolutely no excuse for using such a scenario to explain Special Relativity, unless you do so with sufficient layers of caveat that people couldn’t go away thinking Special Relativity was true in the general case. While it has been shown that the story usually trotted out in introductions to relativity (get two clocks, send one into orbit going really fast for a while, then land it and compare them and oh, look, the one that went fast is a few seconds behind) is true, it isn’t true simply because of Special Relativity, as the Twin Paradox shows.

Similarly, if you subscribe to a simplistic kind of “Special Evolution”, then you run into all kinds of problems, like irreducible complexity or the question of where the evolving lifeforms came from in the first place. These are valid criticisms of “Special Evolution” but they are addressed very well by the “General Evolution” theory explained in The Selfish Gene. Anyone being taught evolution must at least be made aware that the “general” theory exists and what apparent flaws in the “special” theory it addresses, even if they are only being taught the simplified “special” case.

Anything less is simply lies-to-children: very useful, but also potentially very dangerous if it isn’t made clear that that’s what you’re presenting.