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…)

A couple of years ago I received a phone call of a reporter. She wanted to know the effects of human-ingested substances–pharmaceuticals, caffeine–on the environment and other humans after being deposited in sewage. Before referring her to the resident environmental scientist experts, I did some research.

Five minutes and a few Google search terms later I found a readily available report (from an expert, non-news-media source) on the subject that essentially said the amounts of such substances are so minuscule that there is no ill effect.

My short amount of research, and the reporter’s excellent sense of judgment, effectively killed the story.

But it’s a story that won’t die that easily. And the cost is being shared by everyone as a result of the Associated Press’ latest iteration last week, which stirred the pot and generated fear among readers by suggesting not enough is being done about potentially toxic public waters. Water agencies are going out to test local water supplies as a result of this story in an attempt to calm public fears and address the issue.

The AP story is so full of qualifiers–the word “may” appears over and over–the the story’s unintended reaction, maybe, is to engender fear. JunkScience.com has this to say: (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…)