Rationally speaking, is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry and science education. For more information, please visit us at NYC Skeptic's Doug. Welcome to, rationally speaking, the podcast, where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense, I am your host master YouTube, and with me, as always, is my co-host, Julia Gillard. Julia, what are we going to talk about today?

Today, we're going to start out by talking about a recent recently published book that made a big splash called What Darwin Got Wrong by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Patel. Camerini And we're going to we're going to talk about the thesis of that book and where it goes wrong.

And then we're going to talk about that thesis in the context of a couple of other cases of smart people who deny the overwhelmingly accepted science, scientific consensus on an issue.

And those cases are Bill Maher denying the effectiveness of vaccines and Penn and Teller denying the reality of global warming. Right.

So what would what the commonality among those three cases? I think it's interesting because as you said, those are instances where there is a scientific consensus. Now, of course, before our our listeners started flooding us with complaining emails, we're not arguing that any of those three the theory of evolution, the human made human caused climate change and the way in which vaccines work.

We don't claim that science has absolute and definitive knowledge about those things because science doesn't have absolute and definitive knowledge pretty much about anything.

But we're claiming that those are three scientific notions that are as well established, that about which there is as much of a consensus within the community of scientific experts as for anything else.

Right. Well, so I guess the relevant question is for these people, why are they willing to accept other scientific theories unquestioningly with with about the same level of theories that have about the same level of support as these theories, but they're not willing to accept these theories. All right.

So let's start with further immediately. Pomerania, as you said, they published this book, What Darwin Got Wrong, which actually reviewed full disclosure in Nature magazine, and I blasted it.

So I'm going to be pretty soon on a on a debate with father on the infertile gay Internet show, among other things.

And so I definitely have an opinion about this.

And of course, my background is in evolutionary biology. So I get a little nervous about anybody writing a book about what Darwin got wrong. But if if the book is written by William Damski or Michael Behe or Duane Gish, so the class, the standard intelligent design proponents or creationists, I'm not to bother.

You know, that's what they do.

On the other hand, pivotally Pomerania is a well-established cognitive scientist with an academic career, a perfectly respectable academic career. Jodie father is arguably one of the most influential philosophers of mind of the latter part of the 20th century and early part of the 21st.

So these are actually not only smart people, because smart is kind of you could you could argue that Bill Damaske is smart in some sense, for instance. But these aren't just smart people. These are people who are serious academics, who have made a career out of doing serious research or scholarship on in their own disciplines. So why is it that all of a sudden they turn around and they come up with some notions that I think are fairly bizarre?

So can you elaborate on these bizarre notions? What was the thesis of the book?

Right. So the book is actually divided into two parts. One pretty clearly, in my opinion. One was written by pithily and the other one was written by foder. So the first part, the one that was written by pivotally, is a list of new or recent things that have been discovered in biology that for some reason the authors think cause a problem for for evolutionary theory.

So these things involve include things like we know a lot more about development and the fact that it is constrained, constrained to a large extent. In other words, the natural selection can only work within certain constraints that are imposed by development as well as by the genetic make up of an organism. There also are saying that all of these recent knowledge about the way gene networks work and all this knowledge has come out of genomics again increases our awareness of how much constraint there is on the evolution of living organisms.

Now, none of that sound like a rebuttal of the fact that evolution occurs, though. Exactly. Not only that, but none of that is unknown to evolutionary biologists, scientists, mainstream content.

That is controversial, right? That's right. It's not controversial.

It's pretty mainstream science. And nobody thinks that this somehow poses a problem for the theory of natural selection.

It is true that there are constraints, but as Stephen Jay Gould beautifully argued several years ago, constraints are both of this nature.

Genetic and environmental constraints are both limitations, but also opportunities, you know, natural selection and. Sometimes, demonstrably, you can demonstrate that this both by experiment and by mathematical simulations, natural selection can actually get accelerated by genetic constraints.

It can they can drive selection in a particular way, in a particular direction and facilitate the evolution of a certain structure while at the same time they hinder or preclude the evolution of other structures. So the typical example from the book is the question of why don't we have pigs with wings?

Now, that sounds like a fairly silly question, but it is a serious question, meaning that, you know, why is it a lot of vertebrates did not develop wings and the ones it did only developed in within certain phylogenetic groups and Ilina certain in a certain way? Wouldn't there be a selective advantage, argue for their involvement in pigs having wings and be able to fly for, for instance, away from predators?

And the answer, of course, there is, yes, maybe there is that maybe there would be an advantage.

But the fact of the matter is that pigs cannot fly for a variety of reasons, one of which has to do with the developmental biology of being a pig.

You know, if you want to develop wings, you have to do it out of some structure that exists.

For instance, birds, of course, typically, you know that there are forelimbs into into wings. Well, pigs can't do that the way they're structured.

You know, the way the animal is built is just not going to be feasible.

And you cannot attach an additional pair of limbs just just like that to a pig and make it fly.

Right. So it sounds like all this boils down to is that where you end up on the evolutionary landscape? Just depends on your starting point. I mean, that's right. There are some peaks on the landscape of different types of traits.

You could have, I mean, figurative peaks where you'd be really well off, but you never get to those peaks because you start out somewhere else and you get another local maximum.

And that's right.

And in fact, evolution biologists are perfectly aware of this, which is why in evolutionary theory, natural selection, contrary to the common law, is not considered an optimizing process. It's considered a satisfying process right now, a process that finds a local peak of adaptation. And if it's good enough, it's good enough.

And there is no drive somehow to the best possible solution. And of course, all the solutions and not just confined are constrained by the history of the organism and by the particular developmental molecular biology of the animals. Again, there is nothing controversial about it. And it's not clear to me why Pomeranian for to think that somehow this is a blow to Darwinism.

OK, so there must have been more to the book than that was sort of contribution. Right.

There is a second half to it, which is the more philosophical contribution to the book and their further makes this argument.

He says that because natural selection cannot discriminate between traits that are actually advantageous to an organism and and and traits that just happen to be correlated with a trait that is advantageous. Therefore, natural selection as a concept is fundamentally incoherent, and one cannot possibly devise a general theory of natural selection. What it sounds like he's making an argument about how well we can know for sure which traits were actually selected for.

I mean, if trades occur together, like every time you see.

Black feathers in this animal, you also see, I don't know the spots or something, right? You can't be sure. Was it the feathers or was it the blackness that helped them blend in? Was it the spots that I don't know, like every time there's this color linearity, it makes it harder for us as scientists to decide which one was actually advantageous to the animal. But that's not how I mean, that's a statement about our knowledge of the process, not about the process itself.

It's an epistemic statement. And besides, there are a lot of cases where we actually can make the distinction right. You know, Elliot Sober was a philosopher of biology who also recently has debated foder and has made this brought up this classic example of the heart. So the heart does at least a couple of things.

It pumps blood and it makes noise. OK, now those two are completely co-occurrence, right? You can't separate the two, but it seems to me and to end to sober that it would be really ridiculous to argue that natural selection has favored the ability of the heart to make noise and that pumping blood is just incidental to what happens. It clearly is the other way around. Now, why do I say that clearly is the other way around? Because we don't only know about the evolutionary biology of the heart.

We also know about the developmental biology and the function of biology of the heart. So you can you can make a discrimination sometimes, not always, but between traits that are selected for and straight traits are just happened to be going along with the right based on functional considerations.

I mean, we know how to some extent the whole organisms work, but it gets worse than that because father actually wants to claim he's very clear in the in the book. He wants to claim that there is more news, not just epistemic, but fundamental. It's a it's a question of fundamental logic of the theory.

He says that because of that impossibility in principle to discriminate between, you know, selection for and selection of, as it's known in philosophy, your biology.

Right.

The selection for is the the heart pumping blood and selection of is the sound that makes the sound is selected. But but as a hitchhiker. OK. Right. Right. So that's a distinction.

And so far it claims that because you cannot make that distinction as a matter of principle, that is you have to do to see every case in its own particular details and you have to know the genetics, the developmental biology and the ecology. So you cannot make a general theory out of it.

Another way to look at it is this photo claims that the Theodosius actually is not a scientific theory because it's not based on laws.

As in like physical as in physical laws, gravitation, you know, due to gravity or the second principle thermodynamics or something like that, in other words, because you cannot generalize to to a law like art version of the theory, then it's essentially just one thing happens and the other thing happens.

Then it sounds like he's he's going to have to throw up pretty much all areas of empirical inquiry other than physics. I mean, I have this problem of trying to tease out cause and effect and confounding factors and variables you might be missing.

And you write it pretty much sounds like Foda thinks that any science that has an historical component, it's not really a science. It's just one thing after another happens. And when we don't have any rhyme or reason for it, there's no general theory that it's possible to be derived.

And, you know, all philosophers and I know I think that this is bunk. It's just not a good way to reason. There's very good reasons that, you know, it's hard to get into in the next few minutes because we want to talk about the other two things. But there are very good reasons on philosophical grounds to think that actually, yes, you can do a science of of of historical events to some extent, especially in cases like in evolutionary biology, where you can also do experiments and bring in issues of functionality and so on.

So most people do think that Florida is sorely mistaken on this one.

So we should talk about why they think this, since it seems to be so incoherent, at least you know, it's a good question.

I think I really believe that at the end, or at least my answer to it at the end, when we briefly talked about the other two cases, because I think there are commonalities, there are differences, but there are commonalities. They're interesting.

They seem really different to me. But go ahead.

Tell me what you think to comment on. Well, the second case we wanted to talk about briefly, as it turns out, is Penn and Teller famous Episode 13 of Season One of Bullshit, which is a great show, by the way. I love Penn and Teller. I use excerpts of that show in my critical thinking classes. So this is not a general attack on that. I just like by the way, I should I should add, I actually admire a lot of father's work in philosophy of mine, but that doesn't mean that he always gets it right, of course.

So very often in that show criticized the whole notion of human made or human caused climate climate change. And it seems to me, which we said earlier, it's in fact the consensus of the relevant the pertinent scientific community, meaning the community of climatologists. The way they did that was interesting.

I mean, they they didn't feature a single climatologist in the whole show, then a weatherman, right?

Yeah.

They had a government, which is not exactly the same thing, but they had they feature some hippies, environmentalists, which was pretty funny, actually, because they got the some of these environmentalists to sign famously or infamously, I suppose, a petition to ban nitrogen monoxide. Oh, that again, of course, is water.

Right. So that was actually the funny part about that show that did show that environmentalist themselves in this done the not necessary that strong and critical thinking sometimes. Right.

But that said, so those are the people that are featured that day.

And Bjorn Lomborg, who is an economist, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, as well as one or two figures from the Cato Institute, which is a libertarian think tank that has been historically against vociferously, vociferously against climate change.

And by the way, I don't think it was I don't remember that it was disclosed in the show. Penn Jillette of Penn and Teller is a fellow at the Cato Institute, which is right there. An interesting observation. It seems like there is a little bit of a conflict of interest there. So there was no scientist, there was no actual expert.

There was nobody actually knew anything about climate climate change featured on the show. And the notion of climate change was treated by Penn and Teller at the same level as magnetic therapy and homoeopathy and things like that. This is an absurd notion that no intelligent person will believe that strikes me as bizarre.

Right.

So the fact that they didn't actually bring I mean, if you were actually interested in finding out the truth about a phenomenon, the obvious steps would seem to be to bring on an expert in that phenomenon.

So the fact that they didn't probably, I would say, points to one of the reasons that smart people end up not accepting scientific consensus on things, that they insulate themselves for whatever reason, they they don't want the conclusion to be true. And so they're they're pretty good at insulating themselves from evidence that would contradict what they believe to be true. So, I mean, there's, you know, plenty of ideological reasons you could posit for Penn and Teller.

But I think I think you're right, although that doesn't that cannot be the whole story.

Because, you know, again, let's make the comparison between these people, Penn and Teller, on the one hand, or foder and Pomerania on the one hand and in the usual suspects who who also attack or criticize or denied that kind of science. Right. In the case of further information, we made the comparison with. Intelligent design proponent and creationism, by the way, we should say that Pomeranian further definitely distanced themselves from from creationism of any kind.

Well, they're both avowed is atheists. That's right. They're both haters. So so what is what is surprising in the first case that we discussed is that these are not creationism, intelligent design proponents. These are, you know, atheists and scholars and so on. The case of Penn and Teller. Again, this is a similar situation that now this is not Jim Inhofe, the senator from Oklahoma, who has been going around saying the global climate warming, global warming is a worldwide conspiracy of crazy scientists bent on destroying the American way.

Right. This is not that crazy, that kind of crazy talk. You can dismiss immediately. These are actually smart people who normally are very thoughtful about about their show. And they put it together very well. And then all of a sudden they just seem to take a bizarre turn.

Which brings us to the third case that we wanted to discuss. It's a similar situation.

Bill Maher has famously said, well, all over the place, he's gotten a lot of publicity. And and so he makes the case that vaccines. Well, I don't know if he totally denies the effectiveness of vaccines, but he's certainly suspicious of them and he doesn't think it's a good idea to get vaccines. He's mocked people for getting the flu vaccine.

And that is kind of idiots that that might have been the exact wording.

I fall into that category because I take regular flu vaccine, I guess, right? Yes.

And so this seems to be I don't know if he's gone so far as to deny the theory of germs, but but it seems to be OK.

Right.

And this seems to stem, at least in part, from just a sort of paranoia about about the government. He said in an interview that you shouldn't trust the government, you shouldn't let the trust the government with your health.

And so I don't know if he's sort of lumping science together with the government as one big sort of scary authority, like monolithic authority figure, or whether he thinks there's some sort of conspiracy that, like the pharmaceuticals, have lobbied the government to promote vaccines or I don't know exactly why he thinks this is happening.

And he's also, generally speaking, skeptical of what he calls Western medicine. Right. Right. And and, you know, Big Pharma, as you pointed out, now, there is plenty good reason to be skeptical Big Pharma, and they certainly a good reason not to trust the government no matter what they do that as a general way of talking or thinking that's not necessarily bad, but to entirely dismiss an entire, you know, large chunks of scientific knowledge.

Bill Meyer is somebody who has built a reputation for sharp thinking about all sorts of social and political issues. Now, you may agree or disagree with this particular political positions, but he's certainly not stupid. And he seems to be thoughtful about, you know, what he says on his show and how he says it.

And yet all of a sudden it turns around and just makes these bizarre claims about people who vaccinated themselves, being idiots and so on and so forth. So this is our third case.

Well, as one of our commenters made a point that I, I agree with and was going to make myself that I think was Yanase was his name said, you know, Smart is not it's not like a single distinct thing.

You know, there's different ways to be smart. And just because you are verbally clever and and politically savvy and rhetorically skilled like Bill Maher does not mean that you have a good head for science and and are good at interpreting evidence.

That's correct. But but what strikes me and the reason why we're doing this show is that there is a profound distinction, I think, between the Bill Myers on the one hand and Jenny McCartney on the on the other, or between Penn and Teller on the one hand and Jim Inhofe and the other, or between Father and Obama on the one hand and, you know, doing and younger creationists on the other. And and so here I think we need to get to what we think why this is happening.

So I have a little a little theory, but it's actually at least a four point year. I don't think this is an easy answer. And of course, I fully admit that this is my own speculation based on on my reading of these people.

But I think there's your point there. You're about to tell us applies to all the three cases. I think it does to to to some to some extent, as you pointed out, there are significant differences between among the three the three cases, of course, and among the people that are involved. But there are some culinarians.

Yeah. So, I mean, there are four things going on here. First of all, notice that in all three cases, these are not experts in the relevant field of inquiry.

Right. But they do like to pontificate. Right.

And just like the pope, who is now an expert about anything but still likes to pontificate literally in his case, because that's what the term comes from. I think this is just people that enjoy doing that kind of beautification, regardless of the fact that they actually don't have any expertise that justifies that sort of attitude. So that's the first reason.

The second reason is these are smart, smart people who know that they are smart and thoroughly enjoy that aspect of their personality.

Nothing wrong with that. Not a lot of us do that. The. I'm sure you and I fall into the same category, but my point is going to be, what was that? Speak for yourself. Yeah, that's right. Well, you know, OK, I'll speak for myself.

But I think that that to some extent, what I'm trying to suggest is that all these four points that I'm that I'm mentioning, these are actually typical of a lot of smart people and a lot of scientists, philosophers and and exponents of the skeptic movement have these four categories, myself included, these four traits, myself included. But I'm going to make the argument that to a small degree, these are good. And then to a large degree, when they go beyond certain boundaries, they become detrimental.

So the third point the third characteristic is that that these are all cases, it seems to me, where ideological bias becomes blinding. We all have ideological biases. I mean, nobody can honestly claim not to have biases of any sort about politics or policy or philosophy and so on.

But in these cases, you know, Bill Maher's crusade against Western science, Penn and Teller, you know, strong sense of libertarianism and for their own ongoing long career of trying to put science in its place and and espousing espousing anti reductionist views of the world. I think they all fit this pattern.

And the fourth one last one is these are people who seek controversial positions, I think to some extent, for the sake of controversy.

I mean, they really like this idea.

And again, to some extent, a lot of people in this movement and skepticism and do that, myself included this a particular pleasure in being the rabble rouser and being the guy that kicks up the dust in front of the big guys or the accepted knowledge. Right. To some extent that probably that's why we all in the skeptic movement to begin with. But if you do that too much, if you enjoy that too much, I think that that buzz is this kind of peril.

Yeah, I think that's a great moral in which to close this section of the rationally speaking and move on to our rationally speaking PEX.

Welcome back. Every episode, Julia and I pick a couple of our favorite books, movies, website or whatever tickles our irrational fancy. Let's start as usual with Julia Spik.

Thanks, Massimo. My pick is a book called The Miracle Detective by a journalist named Randall Sullivan. I think he he's written for a number of magazines, including Rolling Stone.

So I don't know if it would fall into the category of a favorite book, movie or website, but I think it's interesting and and worth hearing about.

So I found out about it because there's going to be a TV show called Miracle Detectives on Oprah's new network, the One Network. And and it's based on this book.

And it's going to co-star this guy, Randall Sullivan, which I found out about because the casting director has called me to find out if I would be interested in auditioning for the role of the skeptic failed to Randall Sullivan.

Did I tell you that long story? No, I'm not I'm not going to do it right now.

So anyway, so this book, Sullivan is a believer.

Well, he's, I guess, a lapsed Catholic when the book begins, then the book charts his progression as he goes to a number of places. But mainly most of the book takes place in this Bosnian town called Matagorda, which is famous for having these claims.

Five children, I think, who claimed to that the Virgin Mary appears to them every day around the same time and speaks to them and gives the messages and makes predictions. And so Sullivan goes to Bosnia and he spends a lot of time there and investigate that.

And the narrative that he makes that he tells at least, is that he he was skeptical and then he's convinced of the reality of these apparitions by talking. He spent some time with the children themselves and and investigates. And it's interesting. I mean, I don't know if you really were skeptical.

It does make a nice narrative that he was a skeptic and then and then was just swayed by the overwhelming force of the evidence into believing.

True. That just means that he wasn't skeptical enough.

Right. I mean, so what I think is interesting about this book and I read it closely because, you know, I was interested after I got this call, is that it?

It it shows all of the ways that you can sort of be blinded by to the evidence.

I think.

So there's a whole if you ever read Joe Nicole, for example, and The Skeptical Inquirer, who talks a lot about investigating miracles and claims of the paranormal. There's a number of common things that you find in in people who who are quite credulous, who believe in these things.

And one of them, for example, is a testimony that the the child or the peasant who claims to have experienced this paranormal or miraculous event is just too, too earnest and too too simple to ever dissemble, to lie, and that they have no motive for lying.

And so this is usually taken. People people, you know, take this as evidence that the miracle must therefore be real.

And so Randall Sullivan does this is one of the things that makes them believe it's true because he has this deep personal connection with the child that he talks to and and he just knows that she couldn't possibly be lying. She's very earnest and sweet demeanor.

And then the fact that somebody doesn't lie doesn't mean that they actually are telling the truth. That was something that is empirically accurate. Sure, sure.

There's plenty of other explanations. It's not a, you know, either this or that. Right. And then and then.

So just to close up this book is also fun because you can play detective yourself and examine the evidence that he presents and figure out what you know could be wrong with it.

So, for example, one thing that he thinks is strong evidence in favor of the reality of the apparition is that all five children, as they're there experiencing the apparition whom only they can see their eyes follow the same pattern, like it looks like they're all looking at the same thing as the the Virgin Mary supposedly rises up into the sky, which he thinks is, you know, well, how could they all be looking at this, you know, in the same how could they all know exactly where to look if there weren't actually something real there that they were all watching?

But this is so this is this happens and I guess the 90s or something. And the children have been doing this for years. So it's really not all that surprising that they've gotten the timing down and the coordination down.

So, you know, if you're a skeptic, that's how you would interpret it. Like, of course, they're coordinated.

They've been doing this for years. But if you're a believer, you see that as evidence so recommended to to read skeptically.

Well, my pick is a philosophy of science blog, and it's called It's Only a theory. The address. It is only a theory dot blogspot, dot com. And it's interesting because it's aimed at a somewhat technical audience. I mean, you have to have a little bit of background in philosophy of science to or in science, at least to actually follow some of the arguments. But it's it's an interesting exercise. There's 52 others and the list keeps growing and.

Some of these are among the best names in philosophy of science, generally speaking, and what they do with the blog is about is anybody.

And in this group that has an idea and is working on a paper or preparing a paper for a conference or something like that, you actually can jot down these ideas, you know, sort of a sketch form, put it on the blog and then request feedback and comments from from the readers, which means that the blog is a great way to keep up with what's going on in philosophy. So if you want to know what the best some of the best for, you know, they're not all represented, obviously, but some of the best people in philosophy of science are actually thinking or doing at the moment.

And this is this is a one stop shop for it.

And, you know, to give you a couple of examples, recent entries include a commentary on mathematical models and philosophical progress, where there is a discussion about whether mathematical modeling can actually help, either answering or at least sharpening certain kinds of philosophical questions, you know, like the trolley dilemma, kinds of questions or questions that deal with optimization, issues of moral behavior and that kind of thing.

Another one is about the methodology of positive economics.

There's been a lot of discussion after the recent economic collapse worldwide that, you know, economies just don't seem to get it right. And and, you know, so what is what's going on with economics? And there's some interesting discussion there about the nature of economics. And, you know, is it a mathematical series of mathematical formalisms that is completely touch from reality or does it have actually something to do? Is it a really a science that has empirical content, that sort of thing?

So I really recommend the blog. It's again, it's called the it's only a theory. And you can find that a link to our website.

Very cool. I suppose. Now I have to check that out before I want to denigrate philosophy to you again. Might be a good stop. You probably probably required.

OK, that wraps up another episode of rationally speaking. Join us next time for more explorations on the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

The rationally speaking podcast is presented by New York City skeptics for program notes, links, and to get involved in an online conversation about this and other episodes, please visit rationally speaking podcast Dog. This podcast is produced by Benny Pollack and recorded in the heart of Greenwich Village, New York. Our theme, Truth by Todd Rundgren, is used by permission. Thank you for listening.