The Good, The Bad, The Spin

Michael Shermer likes to tread dangerous waters. His latest dip into challenging the received turbulance of our times is an evolutionary explanation for the state of Modern Capitalism. Politicos, religionists and the lay masses, if they actually take a gander through Shermer’s The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics, will likely recoil in disagreement. “You mean to say democratic life is not God-ordained?” they may gasp.

Shermer, chief evolutionist and resident skeptic at Skeptic Magazine, has long maintained the root of human behavior lies not only in our biology but in how our surroundings influence our actions. In this latest iteration, Shermer traces human evolution to explain why we are the way we are today. “If our species is about a hundred thousand years old, then 90 percent of our history has been spent in (a) state of relative economic simplicity,” he writes.

It’s true. The 1997 anthropological manifesto Limited Wants, Unlimited Means: A Reader On Hunter-Gatherer Economics And The Environmentdescribes in various essays how our hunter-gatherer ancestry got along in sustainable bands and tribes. Shermer, similar to these others before him, then extrapolates the “relative state of economic simplicity” into what we are today: consumer traders. (more…)

The world of scientific research holds a principle of conservatism that hasn’t yet entered the public consciousness–and likely never will. It is the idea that if something isn’t yet explainable by rigorous and established controls and procedures, researchers are cautious to draw broad conclusions about that phenomenon.

The reason for this is simple: In order to best understand phenomena, researchers are careful about offering conclusive statements because the process of research demands a constant challenging and updating of information, new and old. What makes science, science is the constant refining of knowledge.

Problems arise because the human tendency is to take familiar features of one’s situation and to reduce those features into a seemingly plausible and easily accepted conclusion. An example: The world works in mysterious ways and many ideas exist about how and why the world turns as it does. Commonly, an invisible force–an intelligent designer, a god—is deemed to be responsible.

Such a deduction goes against fundamental scientific principles. Evolutionary explanations are readily available and are accepted by scientists in spite of the fact that more than 80 percent of Americans believe in God. (more…)

Do liberals and conservatives spindoctor science, or are renegade journalists high on anthropomorphism? Franz de Waal, who’s a scientist, a primatologist to be exact, weighs in on the primate revisionism that occurs in this month’s issue of The New Yorker. De Waal explains:

“The main message of (Ian) Parker’s piece could of course have been that fieldwork is no picnic, but instead he went for profound revelation: bonobos are not nearly as nice and sexual as they have been made out to be. Given that the bonobo’s reputation has been a thorn in the side of homophobes as well as Hobbesians, the right-wing media jumped with delight. The bonobo ‘myth’ could finally be put to rest. Parker’s piece was gleefully picked up by The Wall Street Journal and Dinesh D’Souza (yes, the same one who blamed 9/11 on the left), who accused ‘liberals’ of having fashioned the bonobo into their mascot. D’Souza urged them to stick with the donkey.”

At the end of the day, this issue is essentially about the common discomfort–on both sides of the political spectrum–with comparing humans to primates. It’s the worst kind of human exceptionalism because it ignores one simple point: We are primates. One kind of many.

Of course, it’s not just journalists who have trouble with science. So do scientists. (more…)