From the Tail: Betting on Uncertainty

I think I know where you stand on the ongoing federal court case in Pennsylvania, where parents have sued to block the teaching of intelligent design in their schools. Your position notwithstanding, only 13% of the respondents to a November 2004 Gallup poll believed that God has no part to play in the evolution or creation of human beings. Fully 45% said they believe that God created humans in their present form less than 10,000 years ago!

What's going on here? Many (perhaps even a majority) of these respondents were taught evolution in school. Did they choose to disregard it merely because it contradicted their religion? They do seem to accept a whole host of other things during the course of their education which may contradict it as well. For example, there appears to be far less skepticism about the assertion that humans occupy a vanishingly small fraction of the universe. I'll throw out three other explanations that are often advanced, but which I believe to be inadequate as well:

1. Natural selection is not a good enough explanation for the facts: Clearly, it is.
2. Natural selection has not been properly explained to the general public: Sure there are common misconceptions, but proponents have had enough school time, air time and book sales mindshare to make their points many times over.
3. Religious zealots have successfully mounted a campaign based on lies, that has distorted the true meaning of natural selection: This has conspiracy theory overtones.  There are too many people who do not believe in natural selection -- have they all been brainwashed?

My explanation is simply this: Human beings have a strong visceral reaction to disbelieve any theory which injects uncertainty or chance into their world view. They will cling to some other "explanation" of the facts which does not depend on chance until provided with absolutely incontrovertible proof to the contrary.

Part of the problem is that we all deal with uncertainty in our daily lives, but it is, at best an uncomfortable co-existence. Think of all the stress we go through because of uncertainty. Or how it destabilizes us and makes us miserable (what fraction of the time are you worrying about things that are certain?). In addition to hating it, we confuse uncertainty with ignorance (which is just a special case), and believe that eliminating uncertainty is merely a matter of knowing more. Given this view, most people have no room for chance in the basic laws of nature. My hunch is that that is what many proponents of Intelligent Design dislike about natural selection. Actually, it's more than a hunch. The Discovery Institute, a think tank whose mission is to make "a positive vision of the future practical", (but which appears to devote a bulk of its resources to promoting intelligent design) has gotten 400 scientists to sign up to the following "Scientific Dissent from Darwinism":   

We are skeptical of the claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.

In this world of sophisticated polling and sound bites, I think that the folks at the Discovery Institute have gotten their message down pat. To be sure, natural selection is not a theory of mere chance. But without uncertainty it cannot proceed. In other words, Natural Selection is a theory that is not of chance, but one that requires it.  The advocates of Intelligent Design are objecting to the "purposeless" nature of natural selection and replacing it with the will of a creator. It doesn't really help matters for Darwinians to claim that chance plays a marginal role, and that the appeal to chance is a proxy for some other insidious agenda. Chance is the true bone of contention. In fact, as Jacques Monod put it over thirty years ago:

Even today a good many distinguished minds seem unable to accept or even to understand that from a source of noise, natural selection could quite unaided have drawn all music of the biosphere. Indeed, natural selection operates upon the products of chance and knows no other nourishment; but it operates in a domain of very demanding conditions, from which chance is banned. It is not to chance but to these conditions that evolution owes its generally progressive course.

The inability of otherwise reasonable people to accept a fundamental role for randomness is not restricted to religious people -- scientists are hardly immune to it. We know that even Einstein had issues with God and dice in the context of Quantum Mechanics. Earlier, in 1857, when Ludwig Boltzmann explained the Second Law of Thermodynamics by introducing, for the first time, probability in a fundamental law, he was met with extreme skepticism and hostility. He had broken with the classical Newtonian imperative of determinism, and so could not be right. After much heartache over answering his many critics, Boltzmann (who had been struggling with other problems as well) hanged himself while on holiday.

Of course one reason we hate to deal with uncertainty is that we are so ill equipped to do so. Even when the facts are clearly laid out, the cleverest people (probabalists included) make mistakes. I can't resist providing the following example:

William is a short, shy man. He has a passion for poetry and lives strolling through art museums. As a child he was often bullied by his classmates. Do you suppose that Williams is (a) a farmer, (b) a classics scholar?

Everyone I ask this question chooses (b). But that isn't right. There are vastly more farmers than classics scholars, and even if a small fraction of farmers match William's characteristics, that number is likely to be larger than the entire set of classics scholars. (Did you just get burned by your meager probabilistic reasoning faculties?) The psychologists Kahneman and Tversky pioneered the field of behavioral economics, which establishes among other things that our heuristics for reasoning about uncertainty are quite bad. You can probably think of many patently dumb things that people have done with their money and with their lives when a simple evaluation of the uncertainties would have resulted in better outcomes.

So back to getting people to accept uncertainty as an inherent part of the world. As you can probably tell, I am not holding my breath. On evolution, the timescales are too long to be able to provide the incontrovertible proof to change most people's minds. Maybe a better approach is to reason by analogy. There is an absolutely staggering amount of purposeless evolution unfolding at breakneck speed before our very eyes. I am talking about the Web, the very medium through which you are reading this. In only about ten years a significant portion of the world's knowledge has become available, is almost instantaneously accessible, and it's free. Consider these figures from a recent article by Kevin Kelly. The thing we call the Web has

• more than 600 billion web pages available, which are accessible by about 1 billion people.
• 50 million simultaneous auctions going on on Ebay,  adding up to  1.5 billion a year.
• 2 billion searches a month being done on  Google alone.

Think back to what you were doing ten years ago. Did you ever really think that any of this would happen? The scale at which the internet operates was envisioned by none of the engineers and computer scientists who collaboratively attempted to design the basic substrate of protocols upon which it runs. In truth, the innovations and designs of the web come from the collective energies of its users, and not according to an intelligent design or a blueprint. Here the purposeless of evolution is much easier to see. One day in the future some theory will reveal as a simple consequence, why all of a sudden in the years 2004-05, there sprung up 50 million blogs, with a new one coming on line every 2 seconds. This theory of evolution will be framed by a Law and this law will have at its core an indelible, irreducible kernel of chance. And chances are, most people will have a hard time believing it.

Comments

[Abbas Raza]

Absolutely brilliant, Abhay! From the noise (and sound and fury) of the Intelligent Design debates, you have managed to draw a coherent and beautifully presented, short and lucid explanation of our unease with uncertainty in general, and some people's unease with natural selection in particular. (Sorry, Jacques.)

Why is it, I wonder, that evolution focused on inductive reasoning (the recognition of repeating patterns) to predict events in the world (for survival), even erring on the side of hyper-development of this sense in us to the point that we insist in seeing patterns in even completely random events, rather than using a more Bayesian, probability based approach? Is this just a contingent fact of evolutionary history? Can we imagine creatures that would be naturally at ease (instinctively) with evaluating probabilities correctly? I don't see why not, but as you point out, we are not those creatures.

For the rest of you, I should point out that when Abhay mentions that "The scale at which the internet operates was envisioned by none of the engineers and computer scientists who collaboratively attempted to design the basic substrate of protocols upon which it runs," he is speaking with authority. His own contributions to the infrastructure of the net border on legendary, and it certainly wouldn't be what it is without his pioneering work.

Thanks, Abhay, and we want MORE!

[morgan]

Sir, you've cut through the poppycock with an extremely impressive logical knife. Amazing and a pleasure to read.
Another nifty example to remind people that their brains aren't well adapted to taking probability and randomness seriously is gambling. I myself have sat on way too many busted straights and flushes to think that my own mind can be fully convinced of what I otherwise know to be the case. A city grows and grows in Nevada based on our inability to intuitively grasp the workings of chance.
Anyway, thanks for writing this. A pleasure to have you on board.

[Asad]

Whoa, that was persuasive. Your writing is so clear!

If there is a selection pressure that favors credulity in these matters, and thus that we are genetically programmed to disfavor explanations involving chance, it seems to kick in around questions that really matter to us, around things that are stressful. I say this because many people can tolerate uncertainty in trivial matters, but not on "big" questions. What do you think?

[JonJ]

An excellent argument, to which I would add only a couple of things. One is that it does not explain something I still have not found an adequate explanation for: the fact that the deniers of evolution seem to be overwhelmingly concentrated in the United States, though the factors you mention are common to all human beings.

The other is that one has to be careful of Monod's reference to the "generally progressive course" of evolution. Even biologists can eveidently now and then slip into the error of seeing progress in evolution -- unless this is a careless translation.

[Jed]

Great post, Abhay, and a particularly graceful analogy to net development. I'll be using it (without citation, mind you) on a regular basis.

But I think you give people far too much credit. It's not the concepts of probability or determinism that challenge us (would that it were so!). The problem is that we're supposed to have cogent beliefs and opinions at all. Your average American--and, no doubt, your average everywhereelsean--may or may not believe an infinite number of things on any given day, at any given minute, depending on the last meal they ate, the insipid sitcom they just consumed, or the quality of the experience of the last time they scratched their ass. Ask them a question in a certain way and with certain words, and make a face when you do it, and they'll align themselves with whatever you, me and the Discovery Institute can cook up in our bathtub.

[Juke Moran]

Most of the creationist 45% were not raised in academia, not intellectually - neither at home nor in college - but most all of them were raised by television. Most of them spent more time in front of televisons than they did in school or in learning conversations with any adult.
Not that television specifically told them that Biblical creation stories were factual, but that it did not say they weren't factual and it did not give them an accessible version of evolution as fact.
Scientists have no stature against the weight of television's authority, unless they themselves are on it.
It's past time to acknowledge the profound shaping force televison has been, how much of the current situation - from the present Administration's corrupt hypocrisies to unchecked global warming and the simplistic "debate" about evolution - is the direct result of the stark poverty of real information and the subtle coercive manipulation television has delivered to the great majority of us.
Going on three generations of Americans have been raised by TV. And it is an awful thing they've become because of it.

[John Landon]

It is futile to start analyzing the minds of those who 'reject evolution' by pegging that one to one with natural selection. From the time of the first reviewers of Darwin many DID accept evolution, but threw up their hands at the oversimplification of natural selection.
A natural intuition about how things work makes people skeptical evolution works that way.
So the popular view seems to reflect that inevitable doubt, then confusing the question with the fact of evolution itself.
One reason for the confusion is that Darwinists themselves often promote the idea that people are rejecting evolution, if they reject the mechanism.
Darwinists are strange people, they think their opponents stupid, when in fact it is they who are confused, and I mean really confused.

For a falsification of the idea of random evolution with respect to visible world history, check out my
http://www.history-and-evolution.com/

History and Evolution

Check out my blog too, Darwiniana, for a longer version of this post (sometime today)

[cwes]

Having read the other comments, I will weigh in just slightly.
While I agree with the idea that people in the world, Americans included, have an inate inability to determine the best course for themselves because they don't see all the possibilities, nor do they weigh the ones they do see but instead reach for the possibility with the greatest reward, I don't believe that scientists in general have any more objectivism than any other person. Yes, many scientists put on blinders themselves against things that don't fall directly into their own line of reasoning, or things that they don't believe can be explained empirically. They place themselves above anyone who disagrees with them and refuse to see the possibilities that others see.
While we all hate uncertainty, I would say that scientists hate it more so than anyone else, thus they strive to remove it. The two theories, evolution and creationism for most people have an equal amount of uncertainty, though you are right, they believe that they are more in control of the one than the other.
The reason more people choose creationism is because the reward as they've been taught is much greater. They believe that if they do certain things that they can control their future with - for most religious people - nothing more than faith to base that on (thus the uncertainty.)
You argue that this ability to somewhat control your actions and therefore control your future removes uncertainty. I would agree only for people who are true Bible scholars and truly know what it holds, which honestly I would say not even the clergy of Christendom (or even the pope) has a firm grasp on.
How unfortunate for them that while they believe in creationism, which I too believe in, they will not reap the rewards they believe they are in line for because they fail to truly understand what it is they believe in.

[Kagehi]

John Landon is an example is part of the problem. To cover his points:

1. The Fallacy of Random Evolution. Sorry, but there is no such fallacy. Evolution is not random at all and none of the supposed dogmatic scientists believe it is. John seems to have missed the point that true random evolution would **require** supernatural intervention, since it would result in things existing that defy necessity and physics, like finding a 50 foot lizard that only lives in deep underground caves, but randomly started growing wings. Survival is dependent on what helps you to survive, what detracts from that is deleted, this is hardly random, even if the mutations that give rise to those things over time 'are'. The confusion seems to be the belief that random mutation = random changes. This is no more true than having your lotto ticket suddenly aquire extra numbers, based on the ones drawn. The rules governing it have a fixed probability, precisely because even though the numbers drawn are random, the rules of the game limit how many possibilities would work. Some clown just yesterday asked why if nitrogen in the most available gas in the atmosphere, why most species use oxygen. Sounds reasonable, but nitrogen in the atmosphere is a highly stable chemical, so takes significant amounts of energy to divide into a useful form, concentrate it as high as you want and it will 'never' burn, unless you add.... "oxygen". Free oxygen is a catalyst and you can burn damn near anything including metals with it, with a high enough concentration. So, when do species develop the ability to use nitrogen? When they exist in places where oxygen is extremely rare and acids or high levels of heat, like thermal vents, provide the energy needed to use it. Yep, can't imagine how 'random' events could produce a world full of oxygen breathers. Seems so 'impossible' when something else is available... Wrong!!

2. A New Model of History. Huh?? What new model? This is a straw man. People dealing with ID like concepts have been arguing this since 'before' Darwin, when they where trying to find evidence for it. Darwin upset their boat by providing something that actually did have evidence for it and conpletely contradicted them. ID now is doing the same thing. Arguing that some 'other' version of reality is superior, but with no evidence of it. They want scientists to give up all the evidence they do have and look for evidence of something they think exists, but which they can't even provide a credible way to detect. Saying something 'looks' designed, therefor 'must' be, is not science. Behe has tried that, every time he has scientists have been able to show how his argument is based on a lack of understanding of the mechanisms he argues about, **not** lack of explainations for the how the mechanism evolved. This is just pure nonsense, until and unless real evidence appears. Given the number of supposed scientists involved, one would assume if evidence existed, one of them could provide it. Instead all we see is people arguing that, "Someone else needs to look for it, because we say its there!" Sorry, that isn't how science works. Edison didn't imagine the light bulb, insist it had to work, then argue that every other scientist on the planet 'find' the evidence that he was right. What is the supposed ID scientists' excuses?

3. The Enigma of the Axial Age. Further gibberish. First off, much of the supposed parallel development between Europe and China is nonsense. The two developed seperately and half the stuff in China they came up with more than a thousand years 'before' the west. Heck, they had a fleet of ships, which no one is quite sure how far they explored, close to 200+ years before Europe ever built anything larger than a fishing fleet. But the conservatives in their empire are much like the conservatives today. They saw 'foreign ideas' as dangerous, so the moment the emporer died, they tried to erase all evidence the fleet ever existed. They failed, but it still took until this century to find the records that where not destroyed. The Maya had things like an accurate calender (and who knows what else, since Europeans destroyed all their records the first thing the met), long before Europe stopped believing that Apollo rode a firy charriot across the sky in the day time. What little supposed parallel development existed in the Europe<->Asian regions had more to do with the fact that trade routes and information passed back and forth even 'before' Marco Polo travelled the entire distance between them. This is just pure nonsense and shows a incomprehension of real history, not a need to look at some imaginary new one.

4. Kant's Challenge. What can I say.. Lets take entirely made up human concepts that contradict observable and repeatable causes and effects, and claim we are missing something... Yep, your missing something all right, your missing the fact that until the last 100 years or so no one bothered to try to figure out cause and effect in human endevours. Kant makes the mistake of doing what scientists refuse to. He starts with the premise that it is 'obvious' that human concepts don't follow natural laws, then makes up circular arguments for why this must be true, without either testing the premise or proving a way to test it. A scientific approach would be to say, "I assume this is true, but what if it isn't? If it isn't, what would I expect to see? How would I determine if natural cause and effect are involved?" and so on. Thankfully real scientists have done exactly that in numerous experiments. If anything, their results show 'consciosness' to be an illusion, not some magic thing that sits outside our heads and defies the laws of physics. But heh, feel free to ignore evidence in favor of belief if it makes you more comfortable, you have plenty of company...

5. The Darwin Debate. Sorry, but no. Its the most persistenly misunderstood science, the one most threatening to a minority of Biblical literalists that insist the world works based on 'their' beliefs, and not on those of hundreds of other religions. Its the most attacked, since the intentional misunderstanding promoted by those that feel threatened by it makes it look like it contradicts 'all' religion, not just those of extremists. It doesn't. A recent poll showed that, in some parts of the US, 1 in 5 people still think the sun revolved around the earth... And I don't think even you are dumb enough to argue that evidence doesn't exist for that being dead wrong. Evolution is accepted by most Jews, many Christians, virtually everyone else in all other religions, save Islam. Why? Because Islam refuses to allow 'any' contradictions to its world view, most Christians see only other Christians as 'authority', so are more likely to listen to fundimentalist nuts than scientists. Ironic then that the Jews, who where the first source of all Xian religions, accept what the modern Pharisee don't... Point being, *most attacked* is not the same as *most debated*, any more than claiming that the US is truely a cess pit of murder, rape and imperialism, just because people that commit rape, murder and conquest on a daily basis in other parts of the world say we are.

Its also hardly dogmatic, like most claim. People that claim that have **never** been to a science seminar in their lives and have now @[email protected]$%$ clue how much contention and how many theories and modifications are suggested to 'fix' the supposed gaps the ID people and every other clown out to misclassify it *claim* we ignore.

[Azra Raza]

Dear Mr. Parekh,
As someone who has been a student of Evolutionary Biology for all my conscious life, I was delighted to read your thoughtful essay. Your diagnosis about why so many intelligent people actually want to believe in the elusive Design hypothesis rather than evolution is right on the mark: we are scared of uncertainty and chance. In a way, your hypothesis is further strengthened by my own experience. I deal with a similar type of visceral reaction, (albeit a far more serious and tragic one than the philosophic one under discussion here) when cancer is diagnosed in my patients. In the vast majority of cases, we cannot assign any causative factors (genetic predisposition, environmental damage etc) to the malignancy, yet patients will invariably try to draw associations with infections, injuries, imagined exposure to toxins, their diet or life-style and so on. It is extremely difficult to accept that our lives can be hostages to randomness. In fact, my conclusion has been that there is more to fear than fear itself; it is this randomness. And that is what is so hard for most humans to accept, as you wisely point out, even more so when faced with their own mortality.
I also wanted to add the following to your statistics:
Every second year, the Gallup pollsters survey religion in the United States, and report that 93 percent of us believe in God, while 89 percent are certain that God loves him or her on a personal basis.

And this is what the great Harold Bloom wrote last week in The Guardian about Mr. Bush:

“A grumpy old Democrat, I observe to my friends that our emperor is himself the best argument for Intelligent Design, the current theocratic substitute for what used to be called Creationism. Sigmund Freud might be chagrined to discover that he is forgotten, while the Satan of America is now Charles Darwin. President Bush, who says that Jesus is his “favorite philosopher,” recently decreed in regard to Intelligent Design and Evolution: “both sides ought to be properly taught.”

I look forward to more thought-provoking and intelligent pieces written by you for 3qd. It was a pleasure to read your article. Thanks again.

Azra Raza, M.D.

[cwes]

1.true random evolution would **require** supernatural intervention, since it would result in things existing that defy necessity and physics, like finding a 50 foot lizard that only lives in deep underground caves, but randomly started growing wings. Survival is dependent on what helps you to survive, what detracts from that is deleted, this is hardly random, even if the mutations that give rise to those things over time 'are'.

Well, I don't understand all of your gibberish (I think several people need to take writing classes) I will say this. Randomness is always weighted by probability. No one ever said that evolution was completely random. From my understanding of the theory, evolution of life came about by necessity. An organism begins moving or is somehow flung into a region where it's abilities aren't sufficient to live for very long, just long enough for offspring to be produced. These offspring too would die shortly after reproduction, but eventually their abilities to survive longer periods of time come about through their evolution. In this case oxygen breathing life would exist because nitrogen breathing life did not overcome the weight of the added energy needed to use nitrogen in the same ways, where oxygen breathing life had a much easier time of it. But what created the oxygen in the first place my friend?

2.Edison didn't imagine the light bulb, insist it had to work, then argue that every other scientist on the planet 'find' the evidence that he was right.

I'd be happy to help you learn the truth from the Bible, but you would just scoff and say it's impossible. Therefore, I resign myself to saying, fine you go and read for yourself and teach yourself, but I know it to be true from my own studies.

4. (your number 4, as I have no comment on #3) A scientific approach would be to say, "I assume this is true, but what if it isn't? If it isn't, what would I expect to see? How would I determine if natural cause and effect are involved?" and so on.

I thought the scientific approach was to say "I believe this to be true, so I'm going to test and revise and test some more until I am absolutely sure." Otherwise, I have a belief that I'm constantly trying to disprove. The other thing we've learned is that sometimes while answers seem to be right because they describe some portion of the spectrum of data, that if they don't describe all the data, that we have to keep working at it. As far as I know, evolution has never succeeded, and I know that a bit of faith is required in ID.

5. Ironic then that the Jews, who where the first source of all Xian religions, accept what the modern Pharisee don't...

Actually the Jews weren't the source of Christian religions. A single Hebrew man was, and he ended the Mosaic Law with his death brought about by the Jews. In fact, it was the pharisees themselves who had him murdered, for the exact reason that their human philosophy didn't match up with what he was teaching, (and what he taught harmonized completely with all their original biblical texts that they were modifying.)
After his death, many Jews started subscribing to reincarnation too, does that mean that it was more believable than resurrection (which had happened within 100 years of their very day)?

Of course the same thing later happened in the churchs of Christendom, when they started changing the foundations of the christians to include human philosophies and pagan religious teachings that were directly in violation of Biblical standards.

I don't argue that with the information you have been presented by your religious backgrounds that you would subscribe to science as a religion instead of some 5,000 year old text. I'm just trying to get you to look into the basis of the true religion more than just the topical experience you seem to have.

[Abbas Raza]

Dear cwes,

I would have expected better manners from a Christian. I don't appreciate the tone of your comment about my sister's appreciation of Abhay's essay, and I will do you the favor of removing your offensive comment. Please be respectful in your comments; more people will be willing to hear you out and think about what you are saying that way.

[cwes]

I do thank you for removing the comment, as it was made without thought, as we sometimes speak before thinking about the consequences. However, to reword it, I believe I've seen a few glorious praises from Dr. Raza on this site, and they rarely make any new points other than to praise someone for their eloquence, that could be sent in a pm.

[roman]

If evolutionists are the superior race & creationists are the cavemen just answer one thing.... How do you explain "In the beginning was nothing & then it exploded''?. Hold on let me put my mom on speaker phone!