PZ Myers. 2005 May 14. A historian disgraces himself. <http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/a_historian_disgraces_himself/>. Accessed 2008 Nov 20.
Posted on M00o93H7pQ09L8X1t49cHY01Z5j4TT91fGfr on Saturday, May 14, 2005
A historian disgraces himself
David Hadley sent me a link that was unbelievable. Please, somebody tell me that this weblog, The Social Affairs Unit, is a satire site. I looked all over, and it seems to take itself very, very seriously, and its authors have academic connections. I'm hoping it is merely the most incredibly deadpan English humor, because I've just read an appallingly stupid article on evolution there. It's written by a professor of modern history at the University of Wales-Aberystwyth, one William D. Rubinstein. Despite the credentials, though, the idiocy starts with the title, and it just gets worse and worse.
Look upon this title, and cringe with me: The Theory of Evolution: Just a Theory?
Anyone who has read this site for long knows how I feel about the "just a theory" argument—it's a signifier that whoever utters it is a clueless ignoramus. It requires a total lack of awareness of the scientific meaning of the word "theory" in favor of the irrelevant colloquial meaning. It's a deplorable mistake for a serious scholar to make—but as we'll see, Rubinstein does not seem to be a serious scholar.
Like most people with enquiring minds, I have at least a desultory interest in many fields beyond my own narrow specialty, including the mysteries of science. I am not a scientist, needles[sic] to say, although I think I have as much common sense as the next man and probably more in the way of an independent viewpoint than most.
That's not an auspicious start. That level of self-congratulatory, preening pomposity puts me on edge.
I have thus long been fascinated by the great dogma of the Theory of Evolution, which of course was formulated by Charles Darwin in his seminal work On the Origin of Species in 1859, probably the most important book published during the nineteenth century. The Theory of Evolution in its commonly-voiced form has long struck me as having so many dubious features that it is genuinely surprising that it has not attracted many more challenges than it actually has—although (I gather) a growing number of scientifically-trained commentators are also having their doubts.
The "dogma" of the theory of evolution, formulated by Darwin? This fellow is apparently unaware that there was a major revolution in evolutionary theory in the 20th century, the neo-Darwinian synthesis, or that there is an ongoing shift fueled by molecular biology and development. Equating modern evolution with Darwin is a foolish mistake—rather as if I were to decide history was just that kind of stuff Herodotus wrote—but to go on to parrot the false claim by creationists that growing numbers of legitimate scientists are joining their ranks is remarkably credulous.
Oh, but wait: he's about to start listing all of the problems in evolution. Sit down, swallow anything you might be drinking, and set your coffee cup down.
Nevertheless, there are so many deep implausibilities in the Theory of Evolution as it is commonly understood that it seems to me, as a non-scientist, that something must surely be radically wrong. Let me set out the doubts which I (and many others) have had about Evolution.
• Evolution appears to be plainly impossible. Animals cannot "evolve" into new and different species. If one breeds cats for a thousand generations, they will still be cats, won't they? They simply will not "evolve" into cats which look like kangaroos and are genetically different from felis domesticus. It simply won't happen.
I guess getting a history degree requires no knowledge of logic. Declaring something impossible because it "appears to be plainly impossible" and "it simply won't happen" is, well, inane. Cats are not expected to evolve into kangaroos, but cats and kangaroos did evolve from ratlike ancestors, not over a thousand generations, but over tens of millions of years.
• Moreover, no one expects "evolution" to occur. If your pet cat gave birth to a litter of kittens, one of which had two tails, you wouldn't exclaim, "Aha! Here is the next stage of feline evolution!" One would assume that the two-tailed kitten was a freak of nature. No one would claim that a deviant animal was an example of evolution at work. If you read in a newspaper that a cat gave birth to kittens which looked like racoons, and had a different DNA structure from ordinary cats, you would assume that a hoax or fraud was being perpetrated. No one, anywhere, would conclude that we have just beheld an example of Darwinian evolution in actual fact.
The guy definitely has a thing for cats and bogus expectations. Evolution is not about cats giving birth to raccoons. It is about cats giving birth to cats, which are slightly different from their parents.
He's right in one thing: no one, anywhere, would consider his example to have anything to do with evolution. Including evolutionists. So why is he bringing up this goofy irrelevancy?
• Even more importantly, to the best of my knowledge no one has ever seen an example of genuine evolution, that is, of one species producing an offspring which was clearly of another, different species. Of course, there are hundreds of billions of living beings in the world, and it would be remarkable if anyone spotted a clear-cut evolutionary change. On the other hand, people have been looking for evidence of evolution for nearly 150 years, and scientists would certainly be sensitive to the emergence of any new species, with the evidential value this would have for proving Darwin right.
"To the best of my knowledge" is the important phrase here; he hasn't looked. Here. He could have just used that new-fangled thing called "Google" and typed in the words "observed speciation" and gotten a list back. The lesson of this paragraph is simply that William D. Rubinstein's knowledge is not very good.
• Most claimed examples of evolution at work are highly dubious. Perhaps the most familiar such example, often cited in textbooks, is of the moths in Lancashire whose colouration progressively darkened during the nineteenth century as dark-coloured moths became progressively more likely to blend in with their soot-darkened surroundings, and hence escape the notice of predators, while light-coloured moths were more likely to be seen and eaten. Even if this actually occurred (and there is apparently some doubt), this is, however, not an example of the evolution of a new species, but of certain members of the same species with favourable characteristics having a better survival rate than less favoured members of that species. The species itself has remained unchanged.
"Unchanged", in the mind of William D. Rubinstein, must mean "hasn't turned into a kangaroo or raccoon." The moths certainly have changed. The peppered moth story is not in doubt. His wording "certain members of the same species with favourable characteristics having a better survival rate than less favoured members of that species" certainly sounds like a simple definition of evolution, so what is he arguing about?
• The alleged general evidence for evolution throughout chronological history is often arguable, even logically fallacious. All biology textbooks by definition point to the fact that certain geological strata contain the bones of primitive horses, while the strata above it—assumed to have been deposited more recently—contain the bones of more advanced horses, and conclude that the primitive horses gave rise to the more advanced species. But no evidence is offered that the primitive horses were actually the ancestors of the advanced ones. The linkage is simply assumed. The reasoning here is obviously circular and fallacious—the very issue under discussion is assumed to have occurred, without further direct evidence.
Poor Dr Rubinstein seems to have drifted off the script and mangled a creationist argument. The bogus creationist argument is that fossils are dated from strata, while strata are dated from fossils, and that that is circular (it's also not true). It's also sad that a professional historian has flubbed the historical story. The consistent order of fossils in geological strata was a phenomenon documented well before the proposal of evolution. It showed that there was a succession of forms that were not documented in biblical chronology.
• There are actually no "missing links" in the fossil record, a fact which, I understand, is continuously swept under the rug. According to Darwinian theory, such transitional species should have constantly appeared (and keep appearing), yet remarkably few have ever been observed. There are apparently no known transitional fossils in the whole fossil record of the plant kingdom, although millions of fossil plants have been found [Cited in William R. Corliss, ed., Science Frontiers II: More Anomalies and Curiosities of Nature (2004), p. 154]. What the actual fossil record allows us to infer is apparently that entirely new species appear, as it were, fully-formed.
Oh, the old "no transitional fossils" argument. It's a lie.
And of course all new species are fully formed; they evolve by small changes from generation to generation. Rubinstein is just hung up on his ridiculous notion of cats leaping into kangaroo-hood.
• New organs in living bodies must appear fully-formed at once or they can serve no biological purpose and confer no advantage upon that creature. On the other hand, the complexity of most organs would seem to make this impossible. Charles Darwin himself was well-aware of this, and apparently regarded it as the most important criticism of his theory. The example which is always given is the eye: the retina cannot simply appear at one time, the lens a million years later, and the optic nerve a million years thereafter. The entire eye, including it neural connections with the brain and, through it, with an animal's locomotive system, must all have appeared at precisely the same time. The odds against this happening by sheer random chance are incalculably vast, and yet many creatures on different branches of the animal kingdom have "evolved" eyes which function in similar ways - squids, spiders, and humans, for example.
Dear gog. The "Darwin's Eye" quote-mine. This guy is like a whole parade of creationist cliches. The fully-formed argument is also bogus, as is the claim that organs have to have their full functions straight from the beginning. Take a look at the thyroid, for instance.
• The "fittest" do not survive. Most species extinctions appear to be the result of unpredictable natural catastrophes, like the meteor which allegedly wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Moreover, the survival of any creature, regardless of its "fitness", depends wholly on there being a viable food chain. If the lions in the jungle killed and ate all of the gazelles, the lions would themselves quickly starve to death. For their survival, there must be enough slow gazelles to feed the lions, but also enough fast ones to ensure the continuation of the food chain.
Extinctions by catastrophe are part of the story; they are rare events that can exterminate whole lineages. But most of life goes on without such interruptions; how many of Dr Rubinstein's relatives have been killed by falling meteors?
His "viable food chain" argument is bizarre, and misses the whole point of Darwin's explanation. Lions too slow to catch gazelles die, leaving behind only their faster relatives; at the same time, gazelles too slow to escape lions die, leaving behind their faster relatives. These kinds of arms races are part of evolution, and lead to ever more refined or complex or efficient or just plain different forms…which actually answers his next phony dilemma.
• The incredible complexity of life, and its apparent ever-increasing sophistication over time, strongly implies a guiding force of some kind, and one which can produce a continuous array of new creatures of ever-increasing complexity. Whatever that force may be, it must therefore be capable of producing new species more complex than the previous ones - something which at first glance seems impossible, implying some kind of advanced problem solving force. Where is it situated? How does it go about "solving" the problems confronting it.
Gosh. And in a sieve, where are the little gremlins that sort out the small items that can go through the pores from the big ones that remain behind?
I think if he'd actually read anything by Darwin with any understanding, let alone more recent biologists, he'd realize that the power of evolutionary theory lies precisely in the fact that it answers his last two questions. It isn't "situated" anywhere, and it solves problems by trial and error…selection.
I simply do not know what all of this means, although the best inference which might be drawn is that new species apparently "evolve" suddenly and fully-formed, a concept, known as "saltation", which has been advocated in the past, and which was recently revived, at least in part, in the late Stephen J. Gould's theory of "punctuated equilibrium".
That is simply rank, ignorant nonsense. Punctuated equilibrium has nothing to do with saltation.
The mechanism which brings about these sudden, fundamental changes, however, remains (so far as I know) completely unknown, but must be marked by a high order of creative ability. The drawn-out transitional process suggested by Darwin, however, does not appear to accord with the facts, coolly considered.
However, "these sudden, fundamental changes" are merely a product of Dr Rubinstein's imagination and have no bearing on the biological evidence; his uninformed fantasies have no standing in the evaluation of the theory.
Rubinstein should be deeply embarrassed to have babbled on so about a subject on which he obviously knows nothing, and did not even trouble himself to take so much as a superficial look at what actual biologists say on the subject. After reading the pretentious introduction to his ignorant bilge, though, I suspect he is unfamiliar with the idea of shame.
I took a few courses in modern history when I was an undergraduate over 25 years ago; I think that means I'm more qualified to pontificate on how history should be done than Rubinstein is to drone on about modern biology. Fortunately, I am also aware of the depth of my own ignorance about the field, and have some measure of self-respect…so I'll spare you. I'm not that big a moron.
- Man that's so classic I have to figure he got paid for it.
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Why did I accidentally click the link to the article rather than to this post?
On a totally unrelated note, PZ: I hope you don't mind me asking - how do you pronounce your daughter's name? - I went with congratulating him on his excellent satire. I don't know him, so I may as well give him the benefit of the doubt...
- Skatje rhymes with "gotcha", if that helps.
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PZ, you're supposed to be grading, not posting...
#: Posted by on 05/14 at 12:04 PM -
Hmmm. What would Professor Rubenstein say about the Great Man Theory of History?
It would certainly seem surprising that a Great Man, like Napoleon, would arise fully formed and able, though a mere short, chubby guy, to cause the deaths of millions of muscular peasants with a scrawl of his pen.
Yet there seems to be a controversy about that. Some historians find the Great Man theory implausible.
When Professor Rubenstein has solved that one, maybe he could, in his spare time, correct the mistakes of the biologists.#: Posted by on 05/14 at 12:06 PM - Yeah, Karen, it's all that Hadley's fault. I'm sitting there innocently working away, my e-mail makes that little beep, there's a link, I click it, I'm horrified. How could I go back to reading the intelligent efforts of my students without purging myself of Rubinstein's nonsense first?
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Paul wrote:
Anyone who has read this site for long knows how I feel about the "just a theory"
How do you feel about "just a story?"
http://enigma.charliewagner.com
http://www.charliewagner.com#: Posted by charlie wagner on 05/14 at 12:20 PM -
The SAU is interesting. It hasn't been heard of much for some years, but was founded under Thatcher by a man called Digby Anderson, who wanted to do for liberal social theory what the monetarists had done to Keynesianism.
This project got nowhere, really. Digby was a provincial sociology lecturer who was determined to éthe bourgeois from the Right. He had an extraordinarily disgusting cookery column in the Spectator for many years. But he was also a devout right-wing Christian, who was an ordained Anglican (episcopalian) priest.
The last conversation I had with him, which was about 12 years ago, he was planning to become a Greek Orthodox, in order to escape form women priests.#: Posted by Andrew Brown on 05/14 at 12:30 PM -
My brother was a sport's writer for 20 years while he moved glacially through school to get his degree in History. At the graduation, the top students spent most of their speeches thanking their Lord and Savior instead of the faculty. Both were heavily involved with the “Campus Crusade for Christ”. I guess if you spend all your “time” in 17th Century New Amsterdam or in Feudal Japan you don’t have to learn ANY Biology.
#: Posted by on 05/14 at 12:31 PM
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There are apparently no known transitional fossils in the whole fossil record of the plant kingdom...
That is a patently absurd statement, akin to "there are no known trees in the forest."
You won't find better examples of continuous variation in forms than in the plant kingdom, both fossil and extant. Of course, he's being disingenuous, since there will never be enough "transitional fossils" to satisfy his absurd notions.#: Posted by on 05/14 at 12:41 PM - The transitional fossils argument is an interesting example of how not to do science, because whenever a transitional fossil is found, it turns one gap into two gaps for which transitional fossils have to be found.
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Hey, no picking on historians! Most of us understand the theory of evolution better than this, really! After all, every profession has its bozos -- even biologists have to cop to Michael Behe...
#: Posted by on 05/14 at 01:08 PM
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This would be ironic:
http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/blog/archives/000308.php
except that I don't believe he appreciates the extra difficulty of someone (ie himself) who is not even at amateur status in science attempting to 'be clever enough to outsmart the "experts"'.
History doesn't require much in the way of equipment or additional related subjects (ie further sciences and maths for evolution) to understand and investigate it properly. At most for history you need to understand a human language and culture which is more or less closely related to your own - and some of them even get that much wrong (eg the creationists and their silly misdrawing and misunderstanding of a chinese character to make a fallacious connection to Noah's ark).#: Posted by on 05/14 at 01:27 PM -
Thanks REF
I found this wonderful quote in the first article (in reference to nonspecialists):
"...unlikely to be truly reliable or to be based on anything more than a perusal of obvious secondary sources."
Rubenstein has proved his point. -
"Unchanged", in the mind of William D. Rubinstein, must mean "hasn't turned into a kangaroo or raccoon." The moths certainly have changed.
Dr. Rubinstein was thinking that if evolution is so great then the moths would have evolved kangaroo legs and jumped away to escape their predators. But raccoons would be good, too, I think. (I am using "think" in the sense that describes Dr. Rubinstein's cerebral processes, so it's not really a big deal.)#: Posted by on 05/14 at 01:57 PM -
If I read the "about us" section correctly, the SAU takes pleasure in trying to pee on the legs of liberals. They hope to bring down western civilization that way, I gather.
For all you non-historians out there, I apologize.#: Posted by on 05/14 at 02:01 PM -
I hope you sent this guy the link to your rebuttal... if he is the serious scholar he claims to be, he could use the education. Most history profs that I was familiar with hadn't cracked a biology textbook since grade school, so it doesn't really surprise me that he knows nothing about evolution. Of course, with his professorship and an ego like his, I don't doubt he feels qualified to pontificate on any subject that catches his whim, whether he knows anything about it or not.
#: Posted by on 05/14 at 02:15 PM
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Rubenstein has proved his point.
Yes, it's nice when they put their own foot in their mouth and then shoot it. It saves anyone else the bother. However, they still leave a lot of mess around as a result of their actions for those of us with higher standards of intellectual and moral cleanliness to clear up.
PS Your verification word spends most of its time invisible or missing.#: Posted by on 05/14 at 02:16 PM -
Omg I think my IQ just dropped a few points reading his points. With his intelligence I'm sure he has..somewhere.. I'm surprised he wrote that.. wow.
#: Posted by on 05/14 at 02:33 PM
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If familiarity with the "obvious secondary sources" is the hallmark of a good amateur, Rubinstein has a ways to go.
PS Does my verification word "wash out" when I preview? -
Sorry, Les, that last PS wasn't really aimed at you but at the blog/site owner - PZ.
The verification word not only disappears on preview but also on many page refreshes or new openings of the page. When the word isn't there, the previously displayed word doesn't still work (because I tried that). I actually started trying to post the first time when there weren't any other comments at all! Though part of the delay was because of it not telling me up front about needing an email address (which I would have preferred not to have spammed). The next post of mine had another 3 comments appear before it finally got through. Is the system picking on me or do the rest of you have to put up with that degree of unreliability as well?
</aside>#: Posted by on 05/14 at 03:05 PM -
No, we don't have to cop to Behe: he's a biochemist, not a biologist.
But Davison more than makes up for that.#: Posted by Matt Brauer on 05/14 at 03:06 PM -
...no one expects "evolution"...
I get it--this is a draft of a Monty Python sketch.#: Posted by on 05/14 at 03:22 PM -
I've gotten a couple of complaints about the verification word disappearing now and then. I've sent in a complaint to the ExpressionEngine people, and I hope they fix it soon.
One workaround: register. Registered users don't have to mess around with the verification stuff at all. -
Right, I've posted an url to this page on the requisite blog comments section, lets see what happens next.
#: Posted by on 05/14 at 04:27 PM
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I was forced to submit around 300 words of academic-sounding vitriol as a comment to that board. Since comments are moderated I doubt that they'll be posted, but it was a mind cleansing exercise.
#: Posted by on 05/14 at 05:36 PM
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The verification word is invisible often enough that I've gotten in the habit of looking for it before writing.
But if you write your post, then hit refresh, you get a verification word and you don't lose what you wrote.#: Posted by on 05/14 at 07:40 PM -
is it just me or are the anti-evolution faction copying from each others homework? It seems that I have read the same tired old arguments several times just on this website.
As for the no evidence of evolution, these guys must not have any kids or they would have heard alot, and I mean alot, about antibiotic restistant strains of bactiria. -
On behalf of historians everywhere, I apologize. Every specialty has its share of idiots and he's certainly proved himself that, hasn't he? (Your dig about claiming that modern evolutionary biology is the same as Darwin's original musings from 1859 permitting you to equate modern history with the practices of Herodotcus would, I sadly predict, sail right over his head as he strikes me as the type who wouldn't pick up on the subtle put-down.)
Interestingly enough, he seems to be something of a gadfly around current "hot topics" in public debates, even if not able to weigh in much of academic depth from his own research. He's published articles in the popular magazine, History Today that are far afield from his own expertise and seem to be all about popularity, for example: "THE HUNT FOR JACK THE RIPPER" History Today May 2000 and "Oswald Shoots JFK" October 1999 in which he writes: "That no academic historian has ever examined Kennedy's assassination is a reproach to the historical profession. The training of academic historians in assessing evidence could hardly have been put to better or more important use, and this is one case in which academic historians should have left the ivory tower." - Just to contradict some of the historian-bashing, my uncle is a historian, he defends evolution theory, and he teaches it in an anthropology class, at a Christian college, in Kansas. Some respect, please.
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Brian S has a point. I used to teach High School History from a book that included a sidebar on Gould, describing his great contribution to US society.
#: Posted by on 05/14 at 09:20 PM
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Dr Rubinstein badly disgraced himself and he has only himself to blame. His confidence on his intellectual powers of analysis is so great that he did not feel it necessary to talk to a biologist or read some material before opening his big mouth. Thanks to this imbecility he published on the internet, has no more credibility on anything. He cannot be taken seriously even on modern history, a field he presumably must be better informed than in modern biology. And he seem to have done it gratitiously, since he is no creationist. Please somebody near him prick him with a needle and disinflate him fast. Be careful while the air escapes. And please do not let him near a keyboard connected to the internet for at least a month.
#: Posted by on 05/15 at 12:05 AM
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"I guess getting a history degree requires no knowledge of logic. "
Shouldn't a biologist, or any high-school graduate, know that of one is not a statististically valid sample for any purpose. The man is an idiot. His personal idiocy says nothing about the discipline of History. There are Historians in your audience; I'm one.
Since Rubinstein's entire article is based on sloppily repeating the standard talking points of professional creationists, I'd love to have someone review his dissertation to check on its originality.#: Posted by John McKay on 05/15 at 12:34 AM - Actually, humanities departments at universities tend to be more consistently rational than science departments. All biologists are evolutionists, but some believe in pseudosciences other than creationism, and overall the critical thinking taught in history and literature makes people more skeptical than the plain facts taught in biology, chemistry, and physics.
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The training of academic historians in assessing evidence could hardly have been put to better or more important use ...
That's another ironic quote since he failed to demonstrate any ability to assess (or even find) the evidence in the case of evolution. Or perhaps he didn't regard the subject as being important enough.
I guess getting a history degree requires no knowledge of logic.
Possibly not - and not just as a result of my own opinion. Here's Rubinstein himself again (via google because I have a problem viewing various document types):
http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:SVviwTL1Ge0J:www.ehs.org.uk/othercontent/StandingConferenceReport2000.doc
History as a discipline has many problems:
He then repeats the illiteracy problem and suggests students are better at visual skills. No mention is made of the need for logic. Yet it seems unlikely that more pupils with good critical thinking skills are turning up in history than are turning up in science - where the lack of that particular skill does get noticed.
* There is no longer a common core of the subject.
* It is losing its role as the central and archetypal arts degree.
* Many students have problems with grammar.
* Many students are unable to write well.
* Students know very little history other than that of the 20th century.#: Posted by on 05/15 at 02:28 AM -
Alon: "humanities departments at universities tend to be more consistently rational than science departments."
Do you happen to have any statistics for that? (since it contradicts my impression of who is complaining about what in their intake, including Rubinstein)
At the moment I think I'd be googling blind for the sort of place in which critical thinking had been officially assessed and contrasted across subject intakes (and graduates or professionals). I suppose maths SATs might include some element of logic (not having taken them in the UK) but probably not enough to make a very good indicator.#: Posted by on 05/15 at 02:36 AM -
I'll try and dig up a link, SEF. The statistic I'm using is based on a survey Massimo Pigliucci did of students at the university he taught at at the time, the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, to see whether they believed in God. He hypothesized that science majors would be the most inclined to atheism, but found out that on the contrary, they were the least inclined to atheism with humanities students being the most inclined.
The mathematics SAT has no element of logic. The verbal SAT has some in critical reading, but used to have more, when it had analogies. -
Hmm... it's rather dodgy to equate atheism with critical thinking. It is possible to be an atheist merely through ignorance (despite oppressive missionary zeal in most places) but also through dogmatic upbringing rather than genuine understanding. Meanwhile, it is possible for someone religious to be capable of critical thinking but have carelessly or carefully failed to apply it to their religion or underlying faith. I know such people (sometimes in person and sometimes by their writings).
It is well known here (at least I think it is in academia but can't really speak for the general knowledge of people whose culture is reality/soap TV and sport) that theologians are at high risk of losing their faith (or specific religion) because they are actually examining the details of it and the evidence for it. I would put theologians in the classics/arts/humanities bin with historians as opposed to the sciences bin but that doesn't mean other arts subjects make the same sort of examination any more than science subjects do.
Anyhow, that Pigliucci survey would seem to contradict some modern ones. Scientists (usually including technicians and engineers in the US stats I've seen) show a greater proportion of atheists than the general public. Which means the arts students/graduates must be showing fewer atheists or else the entirety of the graduate population is sufficiently atheistic to allow for arts to have an even greater proportion of atheists than sciences! Which means higher education is either very important or merely the expected destination of people who are already more fit to think. The UK government is trying to lower standards to allow everyone to pretend to have an education. I don't believe they've ever shown that the pretence has a better effect than the actuality (rather like placebo effect versus real drugs).#: Posted by on 05/15 at 03:53 AM -
The UK government is trying to lower standards to allow everyone to pretend to have an education.
I hope Prof. WDR is not the new UK norm.#: Posted by on 05/15 at 05:51 AM -
Well I tried searching for statistics, polls or surveys on critical thinking anyway. Most of the sites were adverts for or details of courses and most of those focused on the money and power in leadership that they could get you (a typical and rather disgusting spin designed to appeal to the sort of people I dislike).
I did find one site about testing critical thinking but unfortunately in its results it doesn't address the specific question we were asking here but instead lumps the critical thinking in with reading, writing and maths in a combined score versus general subject area. Even so, the results are interesting (and I'm going to assume for now that the test fairly measures what it claims to measure). These are the links I took (while attempting to find any data rather than woffle!):
http://www.cord.edu/dept/assessment/ahbmajoractivities.html
to
http://www.ets.org/hea/acpro/index.html
to
http://www.ets.org/hea/acpro/proficiency.html
and
http://www.ets.org/hea/acpro/compare.html
to
http://www.ets.org/hea/acpro/pdfs/tested_all.pdf
* In the proficiency classifications table of that PDF, only 4% of all students (ie not even the general public) in all institutions are rated as proficient at critical thinking. That figures (from my own experience). It was the same in the other couple of PDFs I checked (specialist and liberal).
* In the subject breakdown of humanities vs social sciences vs natural sciences but combined skills score, a strange inversion occurred between 119 and 120 (116/7 in specialist pdf). Below that level, the trend was for fewer natural scientists dropping below each score with social scientists being worse than humanities students. Above that level, the humanities started to do better than natural sciences but with social sciences still generally worse than both.
This matches with my own experience that to do real science it is necessary not to be completely rubbish. However, since much of good science career work is a matter of being diligent with the processes rather than always spotting new things and most good science output relies on team-work and peer review (which then renders those sources more trustworthy), it isn't necessary to be absolutely the best in order to contribute usefully. In contrast, social science has always seemed to me to have the greatest proportion of fakers, getting by with deliberate obfuscation rather than insightfulness (as brilliantly highlighted by Sokal).#: Posted by on 05/15 at 06:01 AM -
jaimito: "I hope Prof. WDR is not the new UK norm."
I think he's a little older than that - but he's certainly not helping!#: Posted by on 05/15 at 06:06 AM -
I think you misunderstood the PDF or I did. I read the context-based scores to refer to critical thinking scores in each category rather than overall critical thinking scores for students in different majors.
About social science, weren't the disciplines Sokal implicated in the humanities? The hardest social science, psychology, is relatively bullshit-free. Sociology, too, uses scientific methods, or at least mainstream sociology does. The mainstream department Sokal identifies as the most postmodernist is not sociology but English, which I presume includes both English language and English literature. -
Alon: "I think you misunderstood the PDF or I did."
I'm voting that you misunderstood it.
The table at which I'm looking breaks the overall score into 4 sub-scores - only one of which is critical thinking. Then the last 3 columns contrast the subject areas but don't do anything to indicate this is using any particular sub-score (eg critical thinking) rather than the overall score - which is what I therefore take it to mean. If critical thinking were itself meant to be the overall score then it shouldn't have been listed as a sub-score.
Alon: "weren't the disciplines Sokal implicated in the humanities?"
Possibly. I'd need to see how Sokal is grouping them compared with how these test people are grouping them (as compared again with how I'd group them - which is probably by dumping more into the fakers bucket!). I didn't see that precise a subject breakdown on the site. I admit that I merely picked Sokal's name quickly as the most recognisable from a set of such debunkings I'd included in a blog entry, without going back to look for his own list of worst fakers.#: Posted by on 05/15 at 07:04 AM -
Critical thinking is just one subscore out of four. If you want good evidence for that, go to page 10 of the PDF and look at the row corresponding to a score of 118. The numbers in that row in the columns critical thinking, humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences are 83, 65, 76, and 60 respectively. If the context-based subscores were critical thinking scores broken down by student major, then the critical thinking score would be a weighted average of the three subscores. However, if it were then it'd be lower than the highest of all three subscores, whereas in fact it is higher. A cursory look at the skill subscores and context-based subscores shows that their weighted averages could easily be the same, which would be the case if they were simply two different ways to break down the various tests or test questions given to the students.
Sokal doesn't say outright that the problem lies in the humanities or social sciences, if I'm not mistaken. Instead, he implicates the Department of English and the Modern Language Association, which always go in the humanities. In reality, none of the mainstream departments of the academia has a substantial faker population; even if Sokal's right and the Department of English is filled with post-modernists, the subjects this department investigates are so varied and disparate that in many there's no opportunity to produce post-modernist scholarship. -
I have no idea whether scientists are more or less likely to be gullible idiots than academics in the humanities, but I do know that undergraduates majoring in a subject and department faculty are two very different populations; and I also have doubts that atheism and critical thinking are reliable proxies for one another, since I've known atheists who believed all manner of crazy things.
I did once come up with an addendum to Clarke's Laws, stating than when a distinguished but elderly scientist in one field claims that the entire community in a different field is making a mistake that a young student could correct, he or she (usually he) is almost certainly wrong. It seems to happen a lot among professors emeritus who get a public reputation for being mavericks.#: Posted by Matt McIrvin on 05/15 at 07:59 AM -
this guy has a PhD from Hopkins!
Just goes to show you that being educated and being stupid are unfortunately not mutually exclusive.
PS. your verification thingy is screwed up PZ.#: Posted by on 05/15 at 08:02 AM -
Though this is drifting somewhat off PZ's Rubinstein topic, I did notice something else in the PDF - in the proficiency classifications. They've put critical thinking directly above the reading levels as if it were merely an extension of that rather than a separate category (or again an overall one as you seem to imply, Alon). If they've missed the elements of critical thinking in experimental design and numerical analysis (including the invention of new analysis techniques), then they've already biased their survey towards the humanities via the literary and away from science, even if that was inadvertently done through their own ignorance of what is important.
. . .
These were the Sokal links I was using in the blog (from several copies found via google):
http://www.sablesys.com/sokal.html
http://www.sablesys.com/kimball.html
In the review, I was taking things like "social text" and "cultural studies" as a cue it would be in the social science bucket rather than humanities when forced to choose between 3 buckets rather than the usual 2 of arts vs sciences (though I was only doing it from memory rather than re-checking at the time). However, you might bucket things differently and, since that review is not Sokal's own commentary, so might he.
</aside> - unless PZ thinks the digression is worthwhile.
Of possibly more interest is how Rubinstein's own critical thinking skills would match up, eg what sources he chose to trust and how many he compared when arriving at his opinion in a subject area far beyond his own grasp. Another type of study I was coming across on the internet was the appalling laziness or gullibility of students when looking things up on the internet, eg seldom checking more than one site for verification and not being as good at assessing reliable ones as they thought they were (one example being believing Microsoft's claims on its own site).
http://www.wellesley.edu/CS/pmetaxas/CriticalThinking.pdf
In his article, Rubinstein refers to Darwin's book as a bookshop link rather than making a link to one of the online copies. Whereas I would take the use of an online reference there as a better indicator that someone had read the source and wanted others to be able to verify easily anything they said about it. As others have already noted, his arguments are traditional creationist misunderstandings rather than being original or meritworthy - though he doesn't cite sources for them. For the plant kingdom transitionals he has to have missed an awful lot about pollen evolution and its use in dating ancient things as well as in modern forensics ... and pretty much the last 150 years in most scientific areas.
I guess that makes him a true historian though. If you recall from the conference document I linked, he's rather against the student emphasis on the 20th century and early modern history. That would rule him out from having met anything much of current scientific note and in very much the same boat as the ignorant creationists.#: Posted by on 05/15 at 08:28 AM -
I was so slow at posting (with all the cross-checking), I was several comments down from where I started!
Alon: "Critical thinking is just one subscore out of four."
So you do agree with me after all. In which case I don't know what your original quibble was supposed to be.#: Posted by on 05/15 at 08:33 AM -
I have nothing to say that hasn't been said, except that your verification thingie worked for me.
I also submitted a comment to that site, but it hasn't shown up (yet), so their warning about their willingness to edit or reject for any reason seems to be apt.#: Posted by on 05/15 at 09:22 AM - I submitted a comment to the site as well. It hasn't shown up. Now it's possible that the "staff" only works Mondays through Fridays, but I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for my comment to show up. I even sent a Trackback, but it hasn't shown up yet either.
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Now I don't know any history - me being an ignorant simple minded biochemist and all. But I have this theory that the Normans never really existed and the battle of Hastings never took place. After all, even mainstream historians admit that it occured a long time ago and no currently living person was present. So how can we possibly ever be sure - answer me that Professor Rubinstein!
#: Posted by on 05/15 at 10:35 AM
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Sent them an email myself. Long one. Damn, I get excitable sometimes. It's posted here.
#: Posted by Tyson Burghardt on 05/15 at 10:56 AM
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In my unposted comment, I made the point that transitional fossils are available by the museum-load. There's a handy unit of measure.
#: Posted by on 05/15 at 11:36 AM
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Alon: "Critical thinking is just one subscore out of four."
So you do agree with me after all. In which case I don't know what your original quibble was supposed to be.
My quibble is that the three context-based subscores have nothing to do with assessing the critical thinking skills of students in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences.
In the review, I was taking things like "social text" and "cultural studies" as a cue it would be in the social science bucket rather than humanities when forced to choose between 3 buckets rather than the usual 2 of arts vs sciences (though I was only doing it from memory rather than re-checking at the time). However, you might bucket things differently and, since that review is not Sokal's own commentary, so might he.
This is Sokal's site about the entire issue. In Transgressing the Boundaries: An Afterword, Sokal approvingly quotes two paragraphs, of which one implicates the departments of sociology, literature, and history, and the other does those of literature and anthropology. In A Plea for Reason, Evidence and Logic, Sokal implicates literary criticism (which isn't a mainstream department) and sociology (which is). In What the Social Text Affair Does and Does Not Prove, Sokal bashes English.
Therefore, I must retract my earlier statement that the worst culprits are in the humanities; it seems that humanities professors and social scientists are equally likely to produce post-modernist garbage. -
Alon: "... have nothing to do with assessing the critical thinking skills ..."
I disagree with the "nothing". Critical thinking is clearly included in the overall measure but unfortunately the score is polluted with the other skills when they do the subject breakdown - and I pointed this out right from the start (post #41 here). I couldn't find a pure measure in the searches I ran but thought that was already a lot closer to the point than measuring atheism would be since it did at least include critical thinking among the basic literacy and numeracy skills (which also contribute to research ability of course).
"worst culprits"
The problem is that such poor standards are permitted within any academic discipline without their own peers outing them. That's the major advantage of peer review in science - there's usually someone (NB qualified rather than clueless) sniffing around for mistakes and willing to point them out. Having more clueless people around (whether creationists or historians or anyone else) or those who don't even bother to check for validity or aren't willing speak out against nonsense and dishonesty is no help at all - as Sokal demonstrated with his hoax ... and as the sycophantic followers of creationists laughably and unknowingly continue to demonstrate from the other side of the intellectual divide.*
* Do I have to point out that this is an arbitrary/movable division of convenience depending on current issue under observation ... much like the artificial division between species in a lineage imposed by humans observing the numerous ongoing transitional points at moments in time.#: Posted by on 05/15 at 12:36 PM -
Tyson, your response was pretty good.
I think the author of the article summed it all up pretty well, when he said:
I simply do not know what all of this means
#: Posted by on 05/15 at 01:31 PM -
Your man, the historian, is obviously a nitwit. But he buzzes to a small audience. To really read something maddening, check out the Washington Post's interview with Phillip Johnson -- it is a classic oscullation of the Republican bottom, since they rule in the Post's home town, and evidence of journalistic malpractice on a much bigger scale. Here's the link:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/14/AR2005051401222_pf.html
Myself, I especially like the fact they sent a reporter who obviously knows nothing about science. I guess on the theory that ignorance is fairness. -
Like others here, as a professionally-trained PhD candidate in history I have to say: this Rubinstein guy is a chrome-plated lackwit. Of course, I am being trained in environmental history with a minor in history of science (in a certain state known, incidentally, for its Niobrara chalk...) so I suspect I am in a considerably better position to understand evolutionary theory than he is. But then I'm likely also a considerably better standard historian than him, as well. Environmental history is (among other things) the study of the influence of "nonhuman nature" on human history, everything from climate to geography to epidemic disease. Please know that many of us in this humanities-based profession take science seriously and do our best to understand it fully, that we don't buy into current-fashion Postmodernist babble, and that a number of us know exactly what a "theory" is.
#: Posted by on 05/15 at 11:03 PM
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I see that my comment and many others have now been posted after that article. I guess they have to be pre-approved by editors who only work M-F, 9-5.
#: Posted by on 05/16 at 07:45 AM
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When I first read the Social Affairs Unit article, I thought it must be what we used to call, in the old pre-web usenet days, a troll. That is - if there is anyone who doesn't know - a post made deliberately provocative in order to elict some response, the more over the top the better.
It did take me several readings before I was sure enough about it to decide to send it here, and still I keep looking for clues, not wanting to believe he is serious.#: Posted by David Hadley on 05/16 at 07:49 AM -
Rather OT, but thanks to Andrew for the bit about Digby Anderson. When I first spotted the name, I thought, 'that couldn't possibly be the Anderson with the cookery column in the Speccie, could it?', but lo and behold it is! Would never have pegged him as a CoE minister -- always imagined him more like the hunter from Jumanji. A rough lot beneath the sherry-sipping veneer, those Anglican clergy. I remember England briefly atwitter, during a visit many years ago, at an elderly vicar who'd beaten his wife to death with a radio. The man's name, Leslie Rampage, was priceless.
Digby's was a great column, fully as disgusting as Andrew suggests, with a heavy emphasis on the entrails of game. The Speccie certainly ain't what it used to be.#: Posted by Mrs Tilton on 05/16 at 07:57 AM -
Egad, this man is a historian? What a disgrace to the guild. Well, here's another historian and Pharyngula fan reddened with embarrassment. In extenuation, I can only repeat what someone said above, that every field has its bozos...
I can't remember the context anymore, but years ago back in a grad school seminar Gertrude Himmelfarb's annoying book about Darwin somehow came up, and one of the students remarked in passing, not meaning much by it, that "some people question evolution." The professor, a very distinguished scholar of the Renaissance and Reformation, immediately interjected in a loud voice: "Who?! Crackpot fundamentalist preachers??!!" He immediately followed this, to everyone's astonishment and delight, with a hilarious impression of the vilage idiot, flicking his lower lip with his finger and saying "blub blub blub." You kind of had to be there, but it was one of the funniest moments of my educational life.#: Posted by on 05/16 at 11:43 AM -
Take a look at the comments to Rubistein's article itself.
His intended audience didn't think much of it either.#: Posted by on 05/16 at 04:45 PM -
I thought most of those were people from here (and from PT).
#: Posted by on 05/16 at 05:57 PM
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Re: the Kimball article,
http://www.sablesys.com/kimball.html
I'd have to say that somebody who mentions Stanley Fish in tandem with deconstruction knows about as much about either as your man Rubinstein knows about biology. And anything from the WSJ editorial page talking about developments in the humanities after WWII is probably suspect as well.
Social Text fully deserved the egg they got on their face (for not knowing or caring about standards in their own field as much as for even accepting a Physics article for publication, let alone not running it past a couple physicists first), but there are plenty of examples of less idiotic attitudes towards science in the humanities. Michel Foucault, for example, while talking about sexology as ideology in his History of Sexuality, compared the development of knowledge in that field unfavorably with the trajectory of chemistry and physics as actual sciences.
The standard comeback to the "everything is discourse" people when I was an English grad student was to point out the ridiculous anthropocentrism of that idea--we're just not that important in the universe. The "all socially constructed" people seem personally egocentric as well, determined to assert that only they understand the way the universe works, even to the point of denying the reality of anything outside humankind that could act on us regardless of our beliefs. But Medieval beliefs about health being regulated by the equilibrium of the four humors, for instance, were notoriously ineffective in fighting disease (not that that stops people from paying for much the same thing via Chinese medicine these days), and I doubt that disbelieving in rain will make it sunny, though here in Portland I'm going to keep trying.
Bill#: Posted by on 05/16 at 11:36 PM -
Praise from Foucault is very faint praise indeed, especially when he's writing about sexuality, where he was a total fraud.
Got anybody else?#: Posted by on 05/17 at 10:09 PM -
I'm not sure how he was a total fraud about sexuality, where he was writing mainly about problems with studies of sexuality. Unless you think that 19th century beliefs about human sexual practices were scientifically valid?
#: Posted by on 05/18 at 12:30 AM
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Because he made up a theory of 'true sex' based on one 19th century case of a depressed hermaphrodite.
Even I, a redneck from the peckerwoods without a single degree from the Sorbonne, easily came up with three examples of hermaphrodites in the same era who lived happily, in one case, married, and did not suffer from any weird sanctions about 'true sex.'
He was probably a fraud about everything, but sex is the one I can prove.#: Posted by on 05/19 at 10:12 PM -
I don't know about that one--I haven't read everything the guy wrote. But 'true sex' doesn't sound very Foucaultian, or whatever the adjective would be. Or was he saying that other folks screwed around with the intersex person and tried to push him or her towards some identity he or she wasn't into?
#: Posted by on 05/20 at 12:49 AM
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Professor Rubinstein has responded to his critics (see the May 20 comments). As expected, it's a nonresponse.
My response to his nonresponse is here. -
Dude, you're right of course, the guy's a moron. But listen, you can't do the "[sic]" thing right out of the gate when quoting him and then ignore your own typos.
"That level of self-congratulatory, preening pomposity pomposity puts me on edge."
"Equating modern evolution with Darwin is foolish mistake"
That was as far as I got.#: Posted by on 06/04 at 09:42 AM - If I were criticizing him for a few typos, you'd be right.
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My, my, my. It's like a group of teenagers confronted with the latest fad, tripping over themselves to show they "get it". Most of this "rebuttal" takes the form of personal insults, and the rest is a bunch of links to non-explanations and irrelevant snippets. The age of secular zealots is upon us!
#: Posted by on 06/04 at 12:59 PM
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Secular zealots: forcing school children to state their atheism in front of the class, demanding science classes teach science and asking "what part of 'no' in 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion' don't you understand, morons?".
#: Posted by Tom Morris on 06/04 at 03:27 PM
- Jake: Please explain why the links that are used to refute Professor Rubinstein are "irrelevant." They are not irrelevant (indeed, they completely eviscerate every point Professor Rubinstein claimst to make), but I'd be interested in why you think they are.
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BoingBoing's just linked to this entry. Prepare for onslaught... Cap'n we dunnat have enough bandwidth... We'll be Boinged to death! (Kottke and Cory Doctorow... that's some good bandwidth. I'm thinking that IDtheFuture doesn't get that...)
#: Posted by Tom Morris on 06/05 at 07:27 AM
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Heh heh. If that' sthe case, then allow me to repost the link to my own little evisceration of Rubinstein's IDiocy...
I know, I know, I'm a link whore, but I can't help myself... -
Can't be bothered to read all the responses but one fundamental tenet that the writer does not understand when it comes to modern evolution theory is that gradual changes are not believed to have happened. Instead sudden mutations occured in evolutionary history and it was this sudden "creation" of new types of organisms that generated the changes that persisted due to their better adaption to the existing environment.
If the writer is going to report authoritatively on a subject he/she should make sure that they understand what it is they are trying to defend.#: Posted by on 06/05 at 08:22 AM - No, that isn't the case. Changes that are rapid on a geological scale occur, but generation by generation, the changes are usually relatively small.
- Indeed. That's what makes Rubinstein's later "challenge" for an "evolutionist" to show him an example of speciation that occurs by 2015 (way down in the comments section of the article) so utterly laughable.
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One confusing sentence from your posting:
And of course all new species are fully formed; they evolve by small changes from generation to generation.
I understand what you mean, but I think it's worth elaborating. If, for instance, the historian in question reads your page, this sentence will probably come off to him as self-contradictory.#: Posted by on 06/05 at 09:04 AM -
Reports from Aberystwyth: apparently the guy is American not British, and is renowned, among other things, for his lack of a sense of humour, so we can assume that the article is not written 'tongue in cheek'.
#: Posted by on 06/05 at 12:28 PM
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<blokcquote>Animals cannot "evolve" into new and different species. If one breeds cats for a thousand generations, they will still be cats, won't they?</blockquote>
Where does this guy think Felis domesticus came from, anyway? Original creation? "And God saw that man and woman were without feline companionship, and were lonesome, and so God caused them to fall into a great sleep, and took from them an ear, and from it crafted housecats. And they were good, though somewhat aloof."
True, speciation occured through artificial selection -- maybe even "intelligent design", depending on your view of humanity (can the species that produced "Who want's to Marry My Dad?" truly be considered "intelligent"?), but just as clearly, these animals could and did "evolve" into new and different species. -
I hate to burst your bubble, but the peppered moth story was proven wrong, just like the embriotic propaganda. [which is still taught in some states to this day.]
http://www.trueorigin.org/pepmoth1.asp
And even if it were true, that is a sign of variation within a kind, not evolution, which claims to create an entirely new kind of animal.
The word "species" doesn't even have a clear definition.
From my studies, thus far, evolution seems to be implausible and quite a silly non-empirical philosophy, with hidden agenda.
Where do you think morality came from?#: Posted by on 06/05 at 06:58 PM -
No, the peppered moth story is still valid.
"Embriotic propaganda"? Are you for real? Making up words is not a good persuasive strategy. -
Perhaps we should ask Prof. Rubinstein for a new work - "The Nature of Clothes Pegs". Not only would it be less important, it may even be believable. Although I doubt it!
#: Posted by on 06/05 at 07:33 PM
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that link that you used for evidences for evolution seems hardly any proof at all...
first of all, the theory of evolution claims that animals evolved from entirely different species into what they are today. However, what the "evidence" you use to refute the historian only shows that animals can adapt and change to their environments. This is entirely different. Whereas one requires slight adjustments in DNA, the other requires impossible evolutions. To say that a salamandar can "evolve" different sub-species is much different than to say that the human body is the result of billions of years of natural selection of balls of goop. This claim of micro-evolution as evidence is preposterous.#: Posted by on 06/05 at 10:04 PM -
don: what would that hidden agenda be? anyway, for evidence of evolution, just look at what selective breeding on the scale of tens of years does to dog breeds (coming from wolves in the distant past). what do you think would happen after millenia of breeding, etc. so, you believe that everything just came fully formed from... where? deus ex machina? and what exactly is "embryotic propaganda"? anyway, just because a concept is inconceivable to you does not make it false. remember galileo being put under arrest for his hypothesis that the solar system was heliocentric.
i would guess you are really a creationist with a belief in an omniscient, omnipotent superior being. all this pseudo-scientific jargon surrounding "intelligent design" is purely that. one of the fundamental tenets of science is ockham's razor: given a choice between two explanations, one of which calls upon fewer empirically unverified assumptions, that one is to be preferred. why indroduce a supreme being who initiated all known and unknown biology, when it is most reasonable, based on the physical evidence that natural selection over geologic timescales could easily have produced the variety we see. heck, if you want to bring creationism into this, why were there N number of human races created in the first place? and, no, for science, the answer "because" is not enough. it presents no testable hypothesis.
reductio ad absurdum: i believe that the world is only 5 seconds old. in fact, the whole universe consists only of me. there is a supreme being, who in its infinite wisdom, created only one instance of "life", namely me, and who is continually generating sensory data and memories for me, which give me the impression of there being a greater universe. (the matrix, anyone?) you don't exist. the welsh prof doesn't exist. p.z. myers does not exist. there are no species because there are no other living things in the universe. this is merely an entertainment created purely for me. now, please disprove my statements. why the hell should i believe you and your exocentric propaganda? all of you are utterly nuts. still, it does keep me entertained.#: Posted by on 06/05 at 10:33 PM -
Funny, Dave, but I feel I can disprove you. I think you dont exist, you are figment of my imagination, a phantom idea implanted in my awareness for my entertainment. Regarding Jeremy Chen, he was dreamed up by you, not me, so I bear no responsability for anything he appears to be saying. If the situation looks familiar, it is because Jorge Luis Borges wrote it in The Aleph. Now, if the dilemma of two dreamers dreaming each other is difficult to solve, having three dreamers (Jeremy, you and me) is yet more complicated. I hope no one else appears to make our dream world even more impossible. Borges has another story, The Creator, that may throw some light on this issue.
#: Posted by