I have a favourite thought experiment I like to try. Stepping outside of my dominant ideology, the one I have been bought up believing, and seeing what the world looks like from out there. It is a slightly scary place.

It is perfectly acceptable these days, indeed positively de rigueur in bohemian circles, not to believe in God nor insist the human race is descended from two nudists and a talking snake. Yet, if I tell people in polite conversation that I don’t believe the Theory of Evolution, I always get that look, the one where they narrow their eyes and look at you slightly sideways, to see if you’re joking or not.

Don’t worry, I’m not thinking of becoming a creationist – they really are mental – but I’ve found that the Theory of Evolution, when examined, is actually much more complicated than it first appears, and requires quite a degree of faith in it’s details. It worries me that the majority of people who believe it unquestioningly, don’t even know exactly what they believe, they just trust the ‘experts’, who have probably worked it all out for them.

It is, after all, only a theory. And just because it is taught in schools doesn’t necessarily mean it is correct. Once we were taught to believe in Phlogiston, Aether, the Steady State theory, the Four Humours and a load of other great sounding theories that unfortunately turned out to be completely bonkers. When I was in school I remember being taught that goldfish had 10-second memories, which would be really cool, if it wasn’t just lies, lies, lies.

It’s called the Aunt Jobiska syndrome, one of Haldene’s three theorems of bad science. The name comes from the Edward Lear poem The Pobble Who Has No Toes, in which Aunt Jobiska insists that “It’s a fact the whole world knows, That Pobbles are happier without their toes!” i.e. just because the whole world believes something it doesn’t mean it makes any sense.

History, as we know, is written by the winners, which is why today we all know Darwin’s theory, but very few of us know Lamarck, Darwin’s main rival of his time. But Darwin’s victory was not because his theory was ever proved (indeed, it is inherently unprovable), but because it was the most popular. And being popular, as we know from the career of Jeremy Clarkson, does not make something right.

Mary Midgley called Darwinism “the creation myth of our age”, as it has now replaced creationism, which was unquestioned belief throughout what we now, perhaps rather hypocritically, call the “Dark Ages’. I’m not saying I have a better theory, or that the Christians, Buddhists, Scientologists, Daniken or Icke are any nearer the mark, but I worry that if we, as a species, just continue to blindly accept whatever is the most easily digestible theory around at the time, we’re never going to make much progress towards actually answering any of the big questions in life.

tags: evolution creationism bad science

This entry was posted on Monday, February 12th, 2007 at 11:58 am and is filed under bad science, evolution, philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.