|
|
|
ways of thought
Thursday, August 26 1999
This morning as I was preparing to leave for work, I had National Public Radio's Morning Edition on as usual. There was a little piece on there about the recent Kansas Board of Education decision to remove Evolution from the official high school biology curriculum in that state. Evidently the effect of this decision, far from bolstering the "scientific creationist movement" and freeing the hapless children of Kansas from the tyranny of Godless science, has instead been to showcase how entrenched, pervasive and generally loony the religious right really is in this country. And so much for drumming up genuine human faces for this latest instance of the triumph of American Creationism; not even Pat Buchanan wants to be associated with the Kansas School Board decision.
The NPR piece brought up an extremely important point; this whole issue is centered around how various different groups in America receive and accept knowledge of our world. Firstly, there is the top-down approach, where we come up with a notion and then believe it no matter what the evidence says. Then there is the evidence-first approach, where the notion follows the evidence and can be replace or refined if evidence proves not to mesh.
The first approach is the way most of us receive a great deal of the knowledge that is important to us: our language, our morality, basic arithmetic, and other things we use to understand the world. And it works fine that way, as long as these axioms basically jive with reality and, more importantly, we all agree on them. But it doesn't really prepare us to flexibly understand the world. Inter-relationships between things are de-emphasized in this model. Everything is a distinct object, cut off from all other things by the thick arbitrary line of category, rank, and moral certainty. Creationism is particularly preposterous in this regard. "Creation Scientists" would have us believe that God made blood cells and sperm a certain way for cows and a certain other way for mice without thinking it important to explain why, or bothering to emphasize the similarities. It's all lost in the unknowable quirkiness of a Creator's mind, forever locked off from explanation. It's the perfect paradigm for dull, non-inquisitive minds.
The second model is that of the scientific method, where the emphasis is on finding simple underlying rules to explain the complexities of nature. A really good example of the triumph of the scientific method is the rise of the Copernican heliocentric model of the universe from Ptolemy's geocentric model. The geocentric model started out admirably enough, explaining the readily apparent rise and fall of the sun. Surely the sun must be going around the Earth once each day! But then, as people tried to track the planets using this common-sense model, the complexities of a geocentric universe became something of a barrier to further scientific development. The subsequent model of the heliocentric universe prevailed ultimately because of its simplicity. Of course, it too had its problems, and when Newton explained everything in terms of a simple attractive force between all matter, the explanations for many natural observations were simultaneously unified and simplified.
Evolution by survival of the fittest is just another such simple explanation for the complexities of our world. Its brilliance is rooted in a simple fact that all people, even Bible thumpers, accept as common sense: that things that aren't well adapted to their environment generally do less well than their well-adapted neighbors. Similarly, a church made of stone will generally last longer than one made of dried cow manure.
The sad thing about the stealth Bible thumpers who managed to get on the Kansas Board of Education is that their upbringing and culture has rooted them forever in that first model of education, where every bit of knowledge is handed out as unchallengeable facts. It's no surprise that they view Evolution as a threat; within their anti-inquisitive paradigm they can only imagine it being forced into students' minds as an arbitrary godless dogma. The end result of their administrative prowess is an anemic education system where students aren't encouraged to ask questions and explore their world. They're not being taught to be the sort of people who can, for example, learn a programming language just by experimenting creatively with short snippets of code (the way I learned Javascript, ASP & SQL and became the sort of educated professional our country is so desperately recruiting from places like India with the help of industry-supported high-tech green card provisions.)
In the evening I was all by myself and watched Starship Troopers on a videotape I got as some sort of workplace perk. The movie started out with the mediocre acting, glaring colours and sexually-suggestive plot of an early episode of Baywatch. I was not impressed. It was campy without even knowing it. But there was something about the post-modern integration of futuristic propaganda and visions of the high-bandwidth World Wide Web that caught my attention and held it long enough to get to the special effects. Scientifically it was complete crap, but I definitely appreciated the fact that the bugs were substantially harder to kill than the storm troopers of Star Wars. But I'm still left wondering why the solution to a insect infestation on a distant planet would be to send infantry to fight them World War II style, essentially hand-to-hand. Why not just spray nerve gas from hovering spacecrafts?
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?990826 feedback
previous | next |
