- Popular presentations of evolutionary ideologies are commonly digested and read as science. Take "selfish genes": an interpretation of facts or a useful way of looking at data is mistaken often for a fact in itself or "the truth" about the way genetics works.
- Science, in general popular discourse, being about "truth" - which it most certainly is not.
- Popular use of induction despite its formal invalidity. This will probably be left out, I just thought some Hume would be fun.
- The failure to produce ex ante mathematical models for speciation, or even particularly good ex post calculations. Suppose we had videographic evidence of the past 2 billion years and DNA samples from every organism as well as the abilities to process said information and realize that there were no deviations from statistically-predicted gene frequencies and what-not. What would the science of such a thing be? Predictive mathematical models, considerations of "convergence", all sorts of methods of analyzing fact using math. What would the popular account of evolution, however, be? All sorts of bosh about squeezing God out of all the gaps, "proving" the "truth" of evolution, dozens of conceptual frameworks a la "selfish genes" for interpreting the data. Which of the two do those advocating the teaching of evolution in schools rant more about? Hint: one of the two doesn't exist and would be way beyond the understanding of a high-schooler.
Actually, ID isn't. Some strands of it do make predictions. I think it's silly.
So I'll polish this up and expand for Monday. I hope it will be adequate and I will have to put an acknowledgment to Mr. Tkatchev at the end.
EDIT: more is needed on #1, particularly, the uncritical use of evolutionary theory [science] to build up naturalistic ideology [not science] in popular discourse [which is what eventually makes it into schools, since schools don't teach science].
2 comments:
This might be out of the range of what you are aiming at discussing, but I think there is some useful work to be done on considering the break of modern with pre-modern science. If you still have database access, you should look through the 1940's archives of the journal Social Research for an article by Eric Voegelin on scientism. He discusses the break with the classic model of science and what it meant for Western thought as a whole.
Generally speaking, the break is with the teleological view of nature; in its place is a decisively non-teleological conception. Another way to think of it is the elimination of the Arisotelian model of science. I think there are reasonably questions left floating as to whether or not that model of science has indeed been thwarted rather than simply abandoned. Obviously, a well-educated high schooler knows more about the natural world than Aristotle, but what seems to be important is how that information is modeled and what that means for the theories that are drawn.
Ok, so this may be a digression. If so, apologies galore!
I have to read that now. I was thinking of this exact same stuff a year ago when I was reading Aristotle's biology for my history of science classes. Yes, you're right, I should put in something about teleology after reading Voegelin. Part of the problem with evolutionists, actually, is that while the point of the scientific theory of evolution is that it is not teleological, Aristotelean notions of teleology creep into evolutionism both among experts and populists.
Another part of the break brought about by modernity was the role of experimentation. Previously, results of experiments were seen as artifacts of the apparatus used rather than evidence of some universal pattern no matter how repeatable. There was quite a lot of discussion of this very matter in the Royal Society and I think scientists would do well to reconsider this stance.
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