You End Up Believing What You Want to Believe

Psychology Today

Art Markman Ph.D.Ulterior Motives

You End Up Believing What You Want to Believe

You bias your interpretation of evidence toward what you desire.

Posted Jul 01, 2011

Just yesterday, one of my colleagues posted a link to a paper from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition published in 2010 that analyzed data from a number of studies involving almost 350,000 people.  The analysis suggests there is no significant relationship between heart disease and eating saturated fats.  He seemed excited about this result, presumably because it supported his desire to eat fatty foods. 

It is always nice to discover that something you hoped were true really is true.  But, can your desire for an answer affect the way you evaluate the evidence?

This question was explored in a clever study by Anthony Bastardi, Eric Uhlmann, and Lee Ross published in the June, 2011 issue of Psychological Science.  They examined how people evaluated new evidence when what they believed to be true conflicted with what they wanted to be true.

n this study, participants were people who expected to have children in the near future.  All of them believed that caring for young children at home was better for the child than sending them to an outside daycare.  Of these participants, half were people who expected they would send their child to daycare some day, while the other half were people who expected they would keep their child at home.

The experiment was conducted in a different session from when the participants expressed their beliefs about daycare and home care, and so it was not obvious to participants that this study was intended to be related to their existing beliefs or plans for the future. 

In the experiment, everyone read one study that supported the conclusion that home care really is better than daycare.  The other study supported the conclusion that daycare is better than home-care.  The methods of the two studies were different.  People were asked to evaluate the studies for whether the methods were valid and whether the studies were convincing. 

Not surprisingly, the people who believed that home care is better and planned to care for their children at home believed that studies demonstrating that home care is best were more convincing than those demonstrating that daycare is best. 

Those who planned to care for their children using daycare showed the opposite pattern.  Even though they originally believed that home care is best, they found the study demonstrating daycare to be best to be more convincing than the study demonstrating home care to be best.

In many real-world situations, there is conflicting evidence from different studies.  So, it is important to make judgments about which evidence is strongest.  But, these results suggest that people are biased to interpret the evidence in ways that are consistent with their desires. That means that people may ultimately come to believe that the weight of evidence supports the position that they already wanted to believe was true.  And they will believe this without recognizing that their own desires influenced the evaluation of the evidence.

The Existence of Trans People Validates Diversity and Nothing More

No, The Existence of Trans People Doesn’t Validate Gender Essentialism

March 9, 2015 by Kaylee Jakubowski

By now, it should be no secret that allyship with trans people is a core component to intersectional feminist thought.

Yet there is still one question I consistently hear from well-intentioned friends and colleagues: “Don’t trans people validate the idea that men and women must exist within certain societal roles? Doesn’t it perpetuate gender essentialism?”

This question – conjoined with the constant assault of doubt and skepticism aimed at the entire existence of trans identities – has likely haunted a fair share of politically conscious trans activists themselves at one point or another over the course of their transition.

To answer this question, we’ll need to start by defining gender essentialism:

Gender essentialism is the idea that men and women have inherent, unique, and natural attributes that qualify them as their separate genders.

These differences are often biological or sexual, and they are almost exclusively viewed as polar opposites: Men are strong, women are weak; men are dominant, women are submissive; men have penises, women have vulvas; men have a high sex drive, women constantly need convincing; and so on and so forth.

Gross, right?

Moreover, gender essentialism fuses gender and sex to one another intrinsically. To someone promoting gender essentialism, gender and sex are identical. Naturally growing a masculine-read body, but being a woman (i.e. a trans woman) is a sheer impossibility.

This is the reason why some see transitioning as a submission to essentialist thought: Trans women and trans men are making their bodies more feminine or masculine, accordingly, and thus promoting this fusion of gender and sex. Right?

Not exactly. This assertion isn’t as cut-and-dry as it might seem.

In fact, it is absolutely possible to take a stance against gender essentialism and still continue to transition – or to support your Queer kin who are doing so.

Transition Itself Is Non-Essentialist

As I mentioned above, two core parts of gender essentialist thought are the biological and sexual assumptions that go along with a person’s definition of what it means to be a man or a woman (and being neither of these, of course, is right out of the question).

A common narrative that trans people express is that they aim to become their “true selves.”

However, striving to become one’s true self is not the same thing as the popular misconception that trans men or trans women are working to “become the opposite sex.”

The differences between these two are subtle, but important.

The first description implies that they are already men, women, or non-binary and are searching for ways to better express their reality.

The latter implies that their identity is completely invalid until they alter their bodies. Right from the get-go, we’re subjected to a cissexist perspective on trans realities.

Of course we’re going to believe that transitioning is inherently essentialist when the argument starts this way – because it has been inaccurately presented to us as inherently essentialist.

The journey to become one’s “true self” frequently passes through many places. A common one involves the person freeing themselves from the gender expression expected of people with their body and adopting one that feels more natural.

Another involves altering their body so that they can feel more comfortable in it, which allows them to reclaim it for themselves in the way that they see best fit.To answer this question, we’ll need to start by defining gender essentialism:

Gender essentialism is the idea that men and women have inherent, unique, and natural attributes that qualify them as their separate genders.

These differences are often biological or sexual, and they are almost exclusively viewed as polar opposites: Men are strong, women are weak; men are dominant, women are submissive; men have penises, women have vulvas; men have a high sex drive, women constantly need convincing; and so on and so forth.

Gross, right?

Moreover, gender essentialism fuses gender and sex to one another intrinsically. To someone promoting gender essentialism, gender and sex are identical. Naturally growing a masculine-read body, but being a woman (i.e. a trans woman) is a sheer impossibility.

This is the reason why some see transitioning as a submission to essentialist thought: Trans women and trans men are making their bodies more feminine or masculine, accordingly, and thus promoting this fusion of gender and sex. Right?

Not exactly. This assertion isn’t as cut-and-dry as it might seem.

In fact, it is absolutely possible to take a stance against gender essentialism and still continue to transition – or to support your Queer kin who are doing so.

Both of these self-affirmations break apart the idea that the person is permanently and biologically tied to their gender, while still affirming their right to be autonomous over their own body and to alter it to their content.

Transitioning is non-essentialist by its nature because it actively defies the idea that bodies need to or should operate in accordance with how they “naturally” operate.

It denies the presumption that our bodies have a biological predestination and queers (as opposed to maintains) the social constructs surrounding gender and our bodies.

Trans People Are Diverse

Another major reason why the “transition-as-essentialist” argument falls flat is because not every trans person is identical or wants the same things.

A full body transition is not desired by every trans person.

There are even major trans activists who promote the radical idea that trans women can actually love the body they’re in and don’t need to feel coerced to change themselves.

Conversations between trans people about their bodies, the gendering of them, and the significance and political meaning of physical transition have been happening in Western culture for as long as two trans people have been talking to one another. In fact, trans people have been defying the gendered expectations of their bodies for at least as long.

Furthermore, the argument that transitioning is inherently essentialist undermines the diversity that exists even within people who are transitioning.

Butch trans women exist.

Femme trans men exist.

Transitioning agender and non-binary people exist.

These expressions and identities, in and of themselves, subvert gender essentialist expectations by queering the binary constructs of gender, gender roles, and expectations.

A person’s decision to change their body – or advocating for increased autonomy so that they can – does not necessitate advocacy for a gender essentialist world.

Just the opposite, it adds options and opportunity for people to exist in non-essentialist ways. It opens doors for people to express their genders and reclaim their bodies where they would otherwise feel trapped.

Most importantly, it shows off the gender binary and the norm of arbitrarily gendering children for what these systems really are: broken as all hell.

Well, Okay, Maybe It’s a Little Essentialist

I’ve spent the last two sections demonizing gender essentialism and showing how it is not the sole purpose for transitioning, and I stand by those arguments.

Gender essentialism – in the way I defined it above and the way that it’s understood throughout our society – is a totally garbage concept that is largely to blame for much of the gender-based oppression within our culture.

This is obvious just by looking at how our own identities differ from the social norms that exist around us. We alone dictate that gender essentialism simply can’t be natural law.

Biologist and Queer-feminist activist Julia Serano talks about her own apprehensions toward gender essentialism in regards to her own identity in her book Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive.

She compares the nature-vs-nurture dichotomy first by showing the flaws in gender being recognized as only genetic:

“[I]f being genetically male automatically led to a male identity, masculine gender expression, and exclusive attraction to women, [then] how did I become a bisexual femme-tomboy transsexual woman?”

Simply put, if gender essentialism were the rule, genderqueer identities just wouldn’t exist.

The ills that gender essentialism has brought women and non-binary folx has led many of these people to embrace gender artifactualism, the understanding of gender as strictly a social construction.

After all, gender norms differ from culture to culture, and they certainly don’t accurately describe every person within our own culture, so they can’t be natural or inherent to us as humans.

But Serano addresses an inconsistency with the idea that gender is exclusively a social phenomenon as well.

She describes scenarios in which male children were reassigned as female (after their“ambiguous” genitals or botched circumcisions led doctors to mandate it for them) grew up to be men or have “male-typical” traits, despite them being raised and socialized as girls.

She also touches on how this gender artifactualism doesn’t coincide with her own gender reality, using a similar argument as above:

“[If] socialization artificially brainwashes all of us into becoming heterosexual masculine men and feminine women, then how do you explain the existence of fabulous bisexual femme-tomboy transsexual women such as myself?”

Out of this conundrum, Serano concludes that there is only one explanation: Gender is neither essentialist nor artifactualist, but is both essentialist and artifactualist, each to some degree depending on the individual person. She refers to this concept as the holistic model of gender.

So while neither our biology nor our socialization exclusively dictate who we will be and how we will identify, there is evidence that both of these influences simultaneously and convolutedly guide us toward one direction or another. (This outcome should be unsurprising in a field of study that works to deny binaries and dichotomies).

From there, finding the comfort zone between self-affirmation and political idealism is up to the individual – as not every trans person is an activist, after all.

***

Gender essentialism is a tricky topic.

On one hand, it’s been used to legitimize both sexism and trans-antagonism; on the other, evidence suggests that it might not be entirely unfounded for every person.

Finding the middle ground between our bodies and our cultural influences has always been a paramount idea in feminism – and the politics of transitioning are no different.

Not to mention that advocating for and supporting transgender rights by acknowledging the diversity that exists within trans people is inherently non-essentialist, the only result that could come from progress is that more doors and opportunities will be opened for people to explore their genders and create a society that respects the full array of human experience.

Kaylee Jakubowski is a Contributing Writer for Everyday Feminism. She is a trans, Queer feminist with specific interests in ecofeminism, anti-imperialism, Queerness, and statistical approaches to social justice work. Xe is pursuing a B.S. in Statistics with a minor in Women’s & Gender Studies. Feel free to Like her Facebook Page, follow her on Tumblr, or see what she’s up to musically. Read her other articles here.

Scientists Are Beginning to Figure Out Why Conservatives Are…Conservative

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Scientists Are Beginning to Figure Out Why Conservatives Are…Conservative

Ten years ago, it was wildly controversial to talk about psychological differences between liberals and conservatives. Today, it's becoming hard not to.

—By Chris Mooney

| Tue Jul. 15, 2014 5:00 AM EDT

Scientists are using eye-tracking devices to detect automatic response differences between liberals and conservatives.University of Nebraska-Lincoln

You could be forgiven for not having browsed yet through the latest issue of the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences. If you care about politics, though, you'll find a punchline therein that is pretty extraordinary.

Click here to read more from Mooney on the science of why people don't believe in science.

Behavioral and Brain Sciences employs a rather unique practice called "Open Peer Commentary": An article of major significance is published, a large number of fellow scholars comment on it, and then the original author responds to all of them. The approach has many virtues, one of which being that it lets you see where a community of scholars and thinkers stand with respect to a controversial or provocative scientific idea. And in the latest issue of the journal, this process reveals the following conclusion: A large body of political scientists and political psychologists now concur that liberals and conservatives disagree about politics in part because they are different people at the level of personality, psychology, and even traits like physiology and genetics.

That's a big deal. It challenges everything that we thought we knew about politics—upending the idea that we get our beliefs solely from our upbringing, from our friends and families, from our personal economic interests, and calling into question the notion that in politics, we can really change (most of us, anyway).

It is a "virtually inescapable conclusion" that the "cognitive-motivational styles of leftists and rightists are quite different."

The occasion of this revelation is a paper by John Hibbing of the University of Nebraska and his colleagues, arguing that political conservatives have a "negativity bias," meaning that they are physiologically more attuned to negative (threatening, disgusting) stimuli in their environments. (The paper can be read for free here.) In the process, Hibbing et al. marshal a large body of evidence, including their own experiments using eye trackers and other devices to measure the involuntary responses of political partisans to different types of images. One finding? That conservatives respond much more rapidly to threatening and aversive stimuli (for instance, images of "a very large spider on the face of a frightened person, a dazed individual with a bloody face, and an open wound with maggots in it," as one of their papers put it).

In other words, the conservative ideology, and especially one of its major facets—centered on a strong military, tough law enforcement, resistance to immigration, widespread availability of guns—would seem well tailored for an underlying, threat-oriented biology.

The authors go on to speculate that this ultimately reflects an evolutionary imperative. "One possibility," they write, "is that a strong negativity bias was extremely useful in the Pleistocene," when it would have been super-helpful in preventing you from getting killed. (The Pleistocene epoch lasted from roughly 2.5 million years ago until 12,000 years ago.) We had John Hibbing on the Inquiring Minds podcast earlier this year, and he discussed these ideas in depth; you can listen here:

Hibbing and his colleagues make an intriguing argument in their latest paper, but what's truly fascinating is what happened next. Twenty-six different scholars or groups of scholars then got an opportunity to tee off on the paper, firing off a variety of responses. But as Hibbing and colleagues note in their final reply, out of those responses, "22 or 23 accept the general idea" of a conservative negativity bias, and simply add commentary to aid in the process of "modifying it, expanding on it, specifying where it does and does not work," and so on. Only about three scholars or groups of scholars seem to reject the idea entirely.

That's pretty extraordinary, when you think about it. After all, one of the teams of commenters includes New York University social psychologist John Jost, who drew considerable political ire in 2003 when he and his colleagues published a synthesis of existing psychological studies on ideology, suggesting that conservatives are characterized by traits such as a need for certainty and an intolerance of ambiguity. Now, writing in Behavioral and Brain Sciences in response to Hibbing roughly a decade later, Jost and fellow scholars note that

There is by now evidence from a variety of laboratories around the world using a variety of methodological techniques leading to the virtually inescapable conclusion that the cognitive-motivational styles of leftists and rightists are quite different. This research consistently finds that conservatism is positively associated with heightened epistemic concerns for order, structure, closure, certainty, consistency, simplicity, and familiarity, as well as existential concerns such as perceptions of danger, sensitivity to threat, and death anxiety. [Italics added]

Back in 2003, Jost and his team were blasted by Ann Coulter, George Will, and National Review for saying this; congressional Republicans began probing into their research grants; and they got lots of hate mail. But what's clear is that today, they've more or less triumphed. They won a field of converts to their view and sparked a wave of new research, including the work of Hibbing and his team.

"One possibility," note the authors, "is that a strong negativity bias was extremely useful in the Pleistocene," when it would have been super-helpful in preventing you from getting killed.

Granted, there are still many issues yet to be worked out in the science of ideology. Most of the commentaries on the new Hibbing paper are focused on important but not-paradigm-shifting side issues, such as the question of how conservatives can have a higher negativity bias, and yet not have neurotic personalities. (Actually, if anything, the research suggests that liberals may be the more neurotic bunch.) Indeed, conservatives tend to have a high degree of happiness and life satisfaction. But Hibbing and colleagues find no contradiction here. Instead, they paraphrase two other scholarly commentators (Matt Motyl of the University of Virginia and Ravi Iyer of the University of Southern California), who note that "successfully monitoring and attending negative features of the environment, as conservatives tend to do, may be just the sort of tractable task…that is more likely to lead to a fulfilling and happy life than is a constant search for new experience after new experience."

All of this matters, of course, because we still operate in politics and in media as if minds can be changed by the best honed arguments, the most compelling facts. And yet if our political opponents are simply perceiving the world differently, that idea starts to crumble. Out of the rubble just might arise a better way of acting in politics that leads to less dysfunction and less gridlock…thanks to science.

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CHRIS MOONEY

Chris Mooney is the author of four books, including the New York Times bestselling The Republican War on Science. He was a science journalist and podcaster for Mother Jones and host of Climate Desk Live from 2012 to 2014. He is now a staff writer at The Washington Post.

WHAT WAS DARWIN'S ALGORITHM?

To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.

CONVERSATION : LIFE

Part Four WHAT WAS DARWIN'S ALGORITHM?

John Brockman [5.1.96]

The synthetic path to investigating the world is the logical space occupied by the physicist Murray Gell-Mann, the biologist Stuart Kauffman, the computer scientist Christopher G. Langton, and the physicist J. Doyne Farmer, and their colleagues in and around Los Alamos and the Santa Fe Institute.

The Santa Fe Institute was founded in 1984 by a group that included Gell-Mann, then at the California Institute of Technology, and the Los Alamos chemist George Cowan. Some say it came into being as a haven for bored physicists. Indeed, the end of the reductionist program in physics may well be an epistemological demise, in which the ultimate question is neither asked nor answered but instead the terms of the inquiry are transformed. This is what is happening in Santa Fe.

Murray Gell-Mann, widely acknowledged as one of the greatest particle physicists of the century (another being his late Caltech colleague, Richard Feynman), received a Nobel Prize for work in the 1950s and 1960s leading up to his proposal of the quark model. At a late stage in his career, he has turned to the study of complex adaptive systems.

The synthetic path to investigating the world is the logical space occupied by the physicist Murray Gell-Mann, the biologist Stuart Kauffman, the computer scientist Christopher G. Langton, and the physicist J. Doyne Farmer, and their colleagues in and around Los Alamos and the Santa Fe Institute.

The Santa Fe Institute was founded in 1984 by a group that included Gell-Mann, then at the California Institute of Technology, and the Los Alamos chemist George Cowan. Some say it came into being as a haven for bored physicists. Indeed, the end of the reductionist program in physics may well be an epistemological demise, in which the ultimate question is neither asked nor answered but instead the terms of the inquiry are transformed. This is what is happening in Santa Fe.

Murray Gell-Mann, widely acknowledged as one of the greatest particle physicists of the century (another being his late Caltech colleague, Richard Feynman), received a Nobel Prize for work in the 1950s and 1960s leading up to his proposal of the quark model. At a late stage in his career, he has turned to the study of complex adaptive systems.

Gell-Mann's model of the world is based on information; he connects the reductionist, fundamental laws of physics — the simple rules — with the complexity that emerges from those rules and with what he terms "frozen accidents" — that is, historical happenstance. He has given a name to this activity: "plectics," which is the study of simplicity and complexity as it is manifested not just in nature but in such phenomena as language and economics. At the institute, he provides encouragement, experience, prestige, and his vast reservoir of scientific knowledge to a younger group of colleagues, who are mostly involved in developing computational models based on simple rules that allow the emergence of complex behavior.

Stuart Kauffman is a theoretical biologist who studies the origin of life and the origins of molecular organization. Twenty- five years ago, he developed the Kauffman models, which are random networks exhibiting a kind of self-organization that he terms "order for free." Kauffman is not easy. His models are rigorous, mathematical, and, to many of his colleagues, somewhat difficult to understand. A key to his worldview is the notion that convergent rather than divergent flow plays the deciding role in the evolution of life. With his colleague Christopher G. Langton, he believes that the complex systems best able to adapt are those poised on the border between chaos and disorder.

Kauffman asks a question that goes beyond those asked by other evolutionary theorists: if selection is operating all the time, how do we build a theory that combines self-organization (order for free) and selection? The answer lies in a "new" biology, somewhat similar to that proposed by Brian Goodwin, in which natural selection is married to structuralism.

Christopher G. Langton has spent years studying evolution through the prism of computer programs. His work has focused on abstracting evolution from that upon which it acts. He has created "nature" in the computer, and his work has given rise to a new discipline called AL, or artificial life. This is the study of "virtual ecosystems," in which populations of simplified "animals" interact, reproduce, and evolve. Langton takes a bottom-up approach to the study of life, intelligence, and consciousness which resonates with the work of Marvin Minsky, Roger Schank, and Daniel C. Dennett. By vitalizing abstraction, Langton hopes to illuminate things about life that are not apparent in looking at life itself.

J. Doyne Farmer is one of the pioneers of what has come to be called chaos theory — the theory that explains why much of nature appears random even though it follows deterministic physical laws. It also shows how some random-seeming systems may have underlying order which makes them more predictable. He has explored the practical consequences of this, showing how the game of roulette can be beaten using physics; he has also started a company to beat the market by finding patterns in financial data.

Farmer was an Oppenheimer Fellow at the Center for Nonlinear Studies at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and later started the complex systems group, which came to include some of the rising stars in the field, such as Chris Langton, Walter Fontana, and Steen Rasmussen. In addition to his work on chaos, he has made important theoretical contributions to other problems in complex systems, including machine learning, a model for the immune system, and the origin of life.

---

Back to Contents

Excerpted from The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution by John Brockman (Simon & Schuster, 1995) . Copyright © 1995 by John Brockman. All rights reserved.

Evolution as an algorithm (Part One)

Evolution as an algorithm

While Monod characterised evolution in terms of its most basic features, Daniel Dennett has championed a conception of evolution at the next higher level of abstraction. He proposes that Darwin’s theory of natural selectionshould be thought of as an algorithm.

Some features of the world can be satisfactorily described in terms of laws and equations. Newton’s inverse-square law of gravitation is a perfect example. Others require statistical descriptions. But a faithful abstraction of natural selection needs to capture its cumulative and temporal character. Algorithms do this in ways that differential equations cannot.

Unlike typical discoveries in the sciences, an algorithm once uncovered, is no longer up for debate. The closest analogue is with mathematical theorems. Once Pythagoras had developed his theorem relating the lengths of the sides of right triangles, it could not be undeveloped. There is much to be gained from thinking of natural selection in algorithmic terms, and it is as unlikely to be refuted as Pythagoras’ theorem. This is one more reason why Dennett refers to natural selection as ‘Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.’

It is once we start thinking of life in algorithmic terms, that the power of Darwin’s theory becomes shockingly clear. It is a matter of common experience that offspring inherit traits from their parents, and that no two descendants are completely alike. Darwin recognised that whichever offspring had been born with variations that were somehow more profitable than its peers - however slight these variations may be - they would pass on these advantageous traits to more offspring than their less advantaged contemporaries. The advantageous traits would then spread and become commonplace within the population. This kind of system lends itself to algorithmic modelling. Imagine two variables representing the fitness of ‘normal’ members of a species (variable a), and a mutant, b. The mutation is very minor, perhaps corresponding to a slight strengthening of teeth, giving b a 1% fitness advantage in cases where that strength is helpful. We are in the abstract world of mathematics and algorithms, so if b > a on average it is inevitable that b will continue to increase and the number of b organisms will come to significantly outnumber the a organisms. The only question is how many generation it will take. The new fitness value for the overall population will have become normalized at 101% compared to where we started. The stage is now set for the eventual emergence of another beneficial mutation that will see the whole species renormalized to a still higher value of fitness. Of course, neutral mutations and deleterious mutations will occur as well, but at the simplistic level of description provided here, these have essentially no net effect because beneficial mutations are inherited more often - by definition, and therefore inevitably overwhelm the non-beneficial mutations.

Importantly, at this level of description there is no difference between so-called ‘micro’ and ‘macro evolution.’ While common sense allows that descendents with stronger teeth may come to outnumber those with weak teeth (micro-evolution), when viewed in abstract algorithmic terms, the same mechanism accounts for any adaptation whatsoever, including macro-evolutionary changes. Darwin was quite correct to observe “I can see no limit to this power” and conclude that it could serve to drive the origin of species.

However loudly Darwin’s critics protest, this level of explanation of adaptation is powerful and irrefutable. Dennett is correct to claim natural selection is about as likely to be refuted as is a return to a pre-Copernican geocentric view of the cosmos. Once understood, the idea is so obvious as to be self-evident.

Unfortunately, its immense explanatory power and irrefutable nature is also its Achilles’ heel. Expressed in the abstract terms laid out so far it can explain any and every adaptation; we have not specified the interval between generations, so by default the value of b reaches infinity almost immediately, as does the population of b organisms. In order to serve as an explanation for adaptations in terrestrial biology, the algorithm of natural selection needs to be properly ‘parameterised.’ The same holds true for Newton’s ‘f = ma.’ This formula tells us nothing useful about an actual event in the world until parameters of force, mass or acceleration are known.

In evolution, specifying parameters is no easy task. Real-world populations compete for multiple resources, and lives are lived out in specific but changing environments. One of the key parameters is the net effect of natural selection. Since it is not the only force acting on populations, depending on the parameters that are plugged into the algorithm, it is possible that other factors could overwhelm it temporarily, or even in the long run. However, if on average, it has the slightest net effect, natural selection will serve as a possible explanation for any adaptation (in fact, every adaptation) that is logically possible in any given environment.

The present situation is one where the mechanism and theoretical power of natural selection is not in doubt, but its place within an account of the actual terrestrial biological history is dependent upon it being correctly parameterised and placed within a larger model of the 3.8 billion year history of life on Earth.

Carl Sagan on Humility, Science as a Tool of Democracy, and the Value of Uncertainty

“Science is a way to call the bluff of those who only pretend to knowledge… It can tell us when we’re being lied to. It provides a mid-course correction to our mistakes.”

BY MARIA POPOVA

“Without science, democracy is impossible,” Bertrand Russell wrote in his foundational 1926 treatise on education and the good life. Three generations later,Carl Sagan (November 9, 1934–December 20, 1996) — another one of our civilization’s most inspired minds and greatest champions of reason — picked up where Russell left off to make an elegant case for the humanizing power of science, its vitality to democracy, and how applying the scientific way of thinking to everyday life refines our intellectual and moral integrity.

In his 1995 masterwork The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (public library) — the source of his indispensable Baloney Detection Kit — Sagan writes:

Avoidable human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our ignorance about ourselves… Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us — then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls.

The true power of science, Sagan suggests, lies not in feeding into our culture’s addiction to simplistic and ready-made answers but in its methodical dedication to asking what Hannah Arendt called the “unanswerable questions” that make us human, then devising tools for testing their proposed answers:

There is much that science doesn’t understand, many mysteries still to be resolved. In a Universe tens of billions of light-years across and some ten or fifteen billion years old, this may be the case forever.

[…]

Science is far from a perfect instrument of knowledge. It’s just the best we have. In this respect, as in many others, it’s like democracy. Science by itself cannot advocate courses of human action, but it can certainly illuminate the possible consequences of alternative courses of action.

The scientific way of thinking is at once imaginative and disciplined. This is central to its success. Science invites us to let the facts in, even when they don’t conform to our preconceptions. It counsels us to carry alternative hypotheses in our heads and see which best fit the facts. It urges on us a delicate balance between no-holds-barred openness to new ideas, however heretical, and the most rigorous skeptical scrutiny of everything — new ideas and established wisdom. This kind of thinking is also an essential tool for a democracy in an age of change.

Art by Olivier Tallec from Louis I, King of the Sheep

The scientific way of thinking, Sagan asserts, counters our perilous compulsion for certainty with systematic assurance that uncertainty is the only arrow of progress and error the only catalyst of growth:

Humans may crave absolute certainty; they may aspire to it; they may pretend, as partisans of certain religions do, to have attained it. But the history of science — by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible to humans — teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us.

We will always be mired in error. The most each generation can hope for is to reduce the error bars a little, and to add to the body of data to which error bars apply. The error bar is a pervasive, visible self-assessment of the reliability of our knowledge.

In this continual self-assessment, Sagan argues, lies the singular potency of science as a tool for advancing society:

The reason science works so well is partly that built-in error-correcting machinery. There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be probed, no sacred truths. That openness to new ideas, combined with the most rigorous, skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, sifts the wheat from the chaff. It makes no difference how smart, august, or beloved you are. You must prove your case in the face of determined, expert criticism. Diversity and debate are valued. Opinions are encouraged to contend — substantively and in depth.

[…]

Science is part and parcel humility. Scientists do not seek to impose their needs and wants on Nature, but instead humbly interrogate Nature and take seriously what they find. We are aware that revered scientists have been wrong. We understand human imperfection. We insist on independent and — to the extent possible — quantitative verification of proposed tenets of belief. We are constantly prodding, challenging, seeking contradictions or small, persistent residual errors, proposing alternative explanations, encouraging heresy. We give our highest rewards to those who convincingly disprove established beliefs.

Embracing this ethos is an exercise in willingly refining our intellectual and ideological imperfections. Sagan captures this with elegant simplicity:

Valid criticism does you a favor.

He returns to the greatest promise of science as fertilizer for intellectual and spiritual growth, a democratic tool of social change, and a framework for civilizational advancement:

Science is a way to call the bluff of those who only pretend to knowledge. It is a bulwark against mysticism, against superstition, against religion misapplied to where it has no business being. If we’re true to its values, it can tell us when we’re being lied to. It provides a mid-course correction to our mistakes.

[…]

Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion and bamboozle requires vigilance, dedication, and courage. But if we don’t practice these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly serious problems that face us.

Complement the enduringly elevating The Demon-Haunted World with Sagan onscience and spirituality, the vital balance between skepticism and openness, hisreading list, and this wonderful animated adaptation of his famous Pale Blue Dotmonologue, then revisit cosmologist Lisa Randall on the crucial difference in how art, religion, and science explain the universe and Neil deGrasse Tyson’s touching remembrance of Sagan.