Commentary

Is it better to form beliefs based on evidence or based on consensus?

1 Comment

Stuart Schneiderman linked to this Wall Street Journal by Matt Ridley.

Take a look at this:

Last week a friend chided me for not agreeing with the scientific consensus that climate change is likely to be dangerous. I responded that, according to polls, the “consensus” about climate change only extends to the propositions that it has been happening and is partly man-made, both of which I readily agree with. Forecasts show huge uncertainty.

Besides, science does not respect consensus. There was once widespread agreement about phlogiston (a nonexistent element said to be a crucial part of combustion), eugenics, the impossibility of continental drift, the idea that genes were made of protein (not DNA) and stomach ulcers were caused by stress, and so forth—all of which proved false. Science, Richard Feyman once said, is “the belief in the ignorance of experts.”

My friend objected that I seemed to follow the herd on matters like the reality of evolution and the safety of genetically modified crops, so why not on climate change? Ah, said I, but I don’t. I agree with the majority view on evolution, not because it is a majority view but because I have looked at evidence. It’s the data that convince me, not the existence of a consensus.

My friend said that I could not possibly have had time to check all the evidence for and against evolution, so I must be taking others’ words for it. No, I said, I take on trust others’ word that their facts are correct, but I judge their interpretations myself, with no thought as to how popular they are. (Much as I admire Charles Darwin, I get fidgety when his fans start implying he is infallible. If I want infallibility, I will join the Catholic Church.)

And that is where the problem lies with climate change. A decade ago, I was persuaded by two pieces of data to drop my skepticism and accept that dangerous climate change was likely. The first, based on the Vostok ice core, was a graph showing carbon dioxide and temperature varying in lock step over the last half million years. The second, the famous “hockey stick” graph, showed recent temperatures shooting up faster and higher than at any time in the past millennium.

Within a few years, however, I discovered that the first of these graphs told the opposite story from what I had inferred. In the ice cores, it is now clear that temperature drives changes in the level of carbon dioxide, not vice versa.

As for the “hockey stick” graph, it was effectively critiqued by Steven McIntyre, a Canadian businessman with a mathematical interest in climatology. He showed that the graph depended heavily on unreliable data, especially samples of tree rings from bristlecone pine trees, the growth patterns of which were often not responding to temperature at all. It also depended on a type of statistical filter that overweighted any samples showing sharp rises in the 20th century.

I followed the story after that and was not persuaded by those defending the various hockey-stick graphs. They brought in a lake-sediment sample from Finland, which had to be turned upside down to show a temperature spike in the 20th century; they added a sample of larch trees from Siberia that turned out to be affected by one tree that had grown faster in recent decades, perhaps because its neighbor had died. Just last week, the Siberian larch data were finally corrected by the University of East Anglia to remove all signs of hockey-stick upticks, quietly conceding that Mr. McIntyre was right about that, too.

So, yes, it is the evidence that persuades me whether a theory is right or wrong, and no, I could not care less what the “consensus” says.

I think that one of the most troubling things about college students today is that they are so much under the influence of their professors that they regularly just parrot whatever their professors say in order to pass their classes. They can’t afford to ask questions and disagree – they’ve already paid their money, and their job is to agree with the professors in order to pass. This is especially true with secular leftist professors who are often woefully incapable of respecting views other than their own. The ivory tower is not the best place for having one’s views tested by reality, as Thomas Sowell has argued. This is especially true outside of the fields of engineering, math, science and technology. So, young people tend to come out of university parroting the view of their professors, who often don’t know how the real world works at all. The right thing to do to fix this problem is for universities to promote a diversity of views. But that’s not likely to happen in universities that are dominated by progressives. Non-progressive views are not just wrong, but evil. Rather than be viewed as evil by professors and peers for the crime of thinking critically, most students prefer to stick with the consensus views, whether they are defensible or not.

Podcasts

The Talk Origins speciation FAQ and the problem of citation-bluffing

1 Comment

The thing to be explained by Darwinism (in addition to the origin of life) is how can you get new, different body plans and organ types by the mechanisms of mutation and selection. Everyone admits that you can get cases where animal A mutates in a small way so that it can no longer breed with animal B. That is speciation of a sort, because the animals can no longer breed. But the real question is whether we can generate species with different body plans using these naturalistic Darwinian mechanisms of mutation and selection.

Here are two podcasts featuring Casey Luskin that discuss how much morphological change has really been observed according to research.

Here is the MP3 file from part one. (14 minutes)

Details:

On this episode of ID The Future, Casey Luskin discusses Talk Origins, a resource often used by supporters of Darwinian evolution to refute arguments made by proponents of intelligent design. After taking a closer look, Luskin found FAQs on Talk Origins guilty of citation bluffing, overstated claims, and other misleading tactics. In particular, the Talk Origins FAQ on speciation claims to provide evidence of “observed instances” of new species. On further review, this turns out to be far from the case. Tune in to Luskin as he explains why.

Here is the MP3 file from part two. (21 minutes)

Details:

On this episode of ID The Future, Casey Luskin continues his discussion about Talk Origins, a resource often used by supporters of Darwinian evolution to refute arguments made by proponents of intelligent design. After taking a closer look, Luskin found FAQs onTalk Origins guilty of citation bluffing, overstated claims, and other misleading tactics. In particular, the Talk Origins FAQ on speciation claims to provide evidence of “observed instances” of new species. On further review, this turns out to be far from the case. Tune in to Luskin as he explains why in this conclusion to a two-part series.

Basically, he takes a look at the details of cases of “speciation” claimed in the Talk Origins FAQ, and finds that the changes are minor changes, and not changes in morphology. This is not the change that we are looking for to support the hypothesis of macro-evolution. In order to become Darwinists, we need to observe change driven by mutations that leads to changes in body plans. And the mutations have to be heritable.

Highly recommended. You’ve got to love the directness of Casey Luskin explaining what needs to be proved and what has been proved. By the way, here is a more detailed written assessment of speciation claims of the Darwinists.

News

If we pay women to have children before marrying, will they do it more?

4 Comments

Dina tweeted another article from the UK Daily Mail about the problem of paying women to have children before marriage.

Excerpt:

Talking about her future, a young woman neighbour told me: ‘Everyone is going to be a single mother in the  end — you just have to find the  right donor.’

Her view was shared by many of those who lived in the various council estates where I grew up. Single parenthood was the normal method of rearing children.

While my own father left our home when I was young, my mother, who has lived in Britain since emigrating from Jamaica with my grandparents, has been devoted to her children.

Although my father was a good dad and maintained contact, lots of my friends were not so fortunate. Few had any involvement with their fathers.

In many of these homes, the State was almost invariably the main breadwinner, with the families in receipt of welfare cheques.

With the State providing unceasing financial support, there was little thought given to the costs and responsibilities of having children.

[…]The welfare state was meant to be a symbol of civilised society, giving support to the genuinely poor and vulnerable. Today, though, it too often acts as a gigantic engine of social breakdown. Costing more than £220 billion a year, it simply incentivises personal irresponsibility and family collapse.

Far from rescuing people from disadvantage, it traps many claimants and their children in the destructive cycle of welfare dependency, where values such as ambition and commitment are lost. It should come as no surprise that in the parts of the country where welfare dependency and joblessness are most prevalent, fatherhood is the exception rather than the rule.

A report published last month by the independent think-tank, the Centre for Social Justice, showed that the number of lone-parent families is increasing by 20,000 every year, with the total expected to reach  two million by 2015. Incredibly, in some areas of the country, such as Riverside in Liverpool or Ladywood in Birmingham, more than 70 per cent of households with dependent children are headed by lone parents.

Children who grow up in these places rarely come across a male role model.

Today, around half of British births take place outside wedlock, while just over a quarter of all families are headed by lone parents.

Despite a wealth of evidence that absent fathers put children at a disadvantage, I find it deeply depressing that the political class is terrified of taking any action to shore up family life.

Leftist political parties in the UK put in place a system in which women were encouraged to have children out of wedlock because they would receive taxpayer money – money taken from high-earning married men – in order to have children before getting married.

There’s actually a reason why the government pays women to have children before marriage. It’s because of an ideology called radical feminism. Radical feminism supports single motherhood by choice, because radical feminists are opposed to traditional marriage. In a traditional marriage, the man typically works to provide money to support the family, and he derives from that provider role the authority to lead the family on moral and spiritual issues. Women typically focus more on raising and educating the children and supporting the husband/father by doing home-related tasks. These traditional rules are suited to men and women respectively, but they are opposed by feminists because they are “unequal” – just because they are different. And that’s why radical feminists want to undermine marriage. What better way to undermine marriage than by paying women to replace the male role in marriage with government?

Now how should we fix this? Is the solution to tell men to “man up”? No. That is a slogan, not a solution – it does not address the root cause of the problem of fatherlessness. One positive change is to remove the welfare that makes it easier for women to have children out of wedlock without needing to choose a man who is proven to be able to perform the provider role. Today, we have a massive problem where women are not even looking to men to provide for them. Traditional male roles are out. Bad boys are in. Many women grow up fatherless and have no idea what a man actually does in a marriage. When selecting men for relationships, their most important criteria is physical appearance – not providing, protecting, moral leading or spiritual leading.

I’ve even noticed a trend lately where women are even claiming that good-looking terrorists like Tsarnaev and murderers like Hernandez are innocent of the crimes they actually committed, just because these men are “too good looking to be guilty”. This is a whole other level of wrong, but it’s not surprising with women who have been taught that men have no special roles that they are supposed to be performing. The faster we cut off the money for women who prefer bad-boys to provider-men, the better off children will be.