Thought experiment is not science
Today’s cover story in Salon is an interview with biologist Lewis Wolpert, who argues that the propensity for religious belief is wired into our biology and is an evolutionary product of natural selection.
Wolpert is an atheist. He theorizes that the ability of early humans to understand causality—pounding this nut with this rock will break it open—enabled tool-making, which was an evolutionarily successful strategy. And thus the establishment of this causal worldview necessitated an explanation for everything:
Salon: So once you have an understanding of cause and effect, then ignorance is no longer tolerable? You want to explain everything.
Wolpert: Exactly. You know, we cannot tolerate not knowing the causes of things that affect our lives.
There’s a fairly logical flow of reason to this theory, and I’m all for thought experiments. But is this science? Perhaps Wolpert doesn’t claim any particular authority for this argument. But wait, right there in the title of his new book, Wolpert hauls in the “evolutionary explanation” juggernaut: Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: the Evolutionary Origins of Belief. The problem here is that Wolpert’s ideas may be reasoned, but they are not evidenced. Science is an evidence-based discipline. The fact that Wolpert is an eminent (developmental) biologist may only exacerbate the problem, since so much authority is accorded to scientists. You know, because their discipline is so evidentiary.
Well, despite his training and esteemed contributions to science, perhaps Wolpert has relaxed his criteria for discerning facts. But what’s this about lack of evidence for qi, the energy manipulated by acupuncturists?
Salon: Maybe the scientific instruments that we have at our disposal just can’t detect anything about qi.
Wolpert: Sorry. When they invented qi, how in the hell did they know what an energy field was? They hardly had a concept of energy. I mean, if you go back and look at their evidence, I’m afraid it was a nice set of ideas, but I’m terribly sorry, evidence matters. And that’s what causal beliefs are really about. If we believe that something has a particular cause, we should be looking for the evidence.
So evidence does matter. But so, apparently, does hubris:
Wolpert: My argument is that causal understanding gave rise to toolmaking; that was the evolutionary advantage. It’s toolmaking that’s really driven human evolution. This is not widely accepted, I’m afraid, but there’s no question about it. It’s tools that really made us human. They may even have given rise to language.
No question about it? There must be a great deal of evidence for there to be no question about it… But if there were a great deal of evidence, it would be rather well-accepted, wouldn’t it? Let me be clear: intellectual discourse makes me happy. Let’s talk about the evolution of the psyche. But let’s not imply that it’s science. Evolution is such a fun explanation to invoke, but flinging around adaptive arguments willy-nilly just gets everyone into a lather and makes actual science that much more difficult to integrate into the popular consciousness.
May 15th, 2007 at 3:24 pm
Seriously. This dude is an utter buffoon. And he seems to take pride in simply not engaging with other thinkers on the subject.
May 15th, 2007 at 3:25 pm
Obviously it’s a hypothesis, but what right do you have to call it pseudoscience. That’s ridiculous. This guy has a developed a reasonable explanation for the origins of belief, a logical hypothesis. He claims, in his own opinion, that he “believes” this to be true. There is the magic word. Stop being pretentious.
May 16th, 2007 at 1:08 pm
So, is it the fact that he calls himself a scientist - and his conclusions scientific - your only concern? If he called it a religious belief, would that be acceptable? After all, then it does not have to be proven; leap of faith and all that? Can any of his conclusions be proven?
May 16th, 2007 at 1:38 pm
Hi Mom,
Yes, my concern is only that he implies that his conclusions are scientific. (Haven’t read the book, so maybe he is much more careful in his argument there.)
In this case, I would say that the words “know” or “understand” denote fact-based evidence, but the word “believe” denotes faith, or conviction despite a lack of fact-based evidence. I’ve got no problem with a scientist with “beliefs,” but it’s important not to call a conviction of faith a scientific fact. My overall criticism is that Wolpert probably doesn’t consider his perspective in the belief category at all (notwithstanding “blah’s” post). He claims to argue from “evidence,” but I don’t think anyone could ever accumulate the right kind of evidence to prove things one way or another.
In short, whether tool use encouraged a cause-and-effect sort of worldview in early humans and led to a biologically-based propensity for religion is simply an untestable hypothesis. Fascinating? Yes! An academic topic? Why not. But testable by means of rigorous science? Nope.
Thanks for the comment!
September 20th, 2007 at 3:52 pm
[…] it’s so full of flimsy logic. Of course it’s just the latest article among many (e.g. 1,2,3) that have inappropriately invoked adaptive explanations for complex human […]