Spy magazine had a wonderful column by Ellis Weiner called “How to Be a Grown-up”. (In one column, Weiner pointed out that homeless, applied to beggars, should be houseless.) Gordy Slack, a Bay Area science writer, has written the first book that might be called How to be a Grown-up About Evolution. It is an account of the Dover, PA trial in which parents sued the school board for requiring that intelligent design be mentioned in biology class. The actual title is The Battle Over the Meaning of Everything. (I’ve known Gordy for years and he wrote about me for The Scientist.)
Not surprisingly, Gordy sympathizes with the parents (the anti-creationists). But he tries to understand the other side rather than demonize it, which is what is grown-up about his book. One reason for this attitude is that his father is on the other side. His father, at one point a professor of psychology at Harvard, became at age 51 a born-again Christian and a creationist. In 1998, his father took Gordy to meet Philip Johnson, the Berkeley law professor who is the father of intelligent design (ID), a big-tent version of creationism. “Give us five or ten years, and you’ll see scientific breakthroughs biologists hadn’t dreamed of before ID,” Johnson told Gordy.
While writing the book, Gordy happened to interview Joan Roughgarden, a Stanford biology professor whose specialty is evolution.
I thought our interview was going well. But when I told her that I was writing a book about ID in order to understand what drove its proponents, her attitude and demeanor swung around 180 degrees. . . .”They want to define me [Roughgarden is a transsexual] as inhuman,” she said.
How dare anyone try to understand the other side! (Roughgarden’s reaction to a psychology talk she didn’t like.) The notion that the solution to intolerance is more intolerance is remarkably popular, which is why The Battle Over the Meaning of Everything really stands out.
I wish more people would read Darwin, himself. He’s such a humble and respectable thinker.
A lot of the emphasis Darwin placed on variation and contingency is lost in debates on evolution today. Such an emphasis by Darwin made him much more open to ideas than most of his scientific followers.
Yeah, I think the we’re-sure-we-know attitude of the pro-evolution side is not conducive to progress. Political or scientific.
How much of evolution is neutral drift (driven by variation) and how much is driven by selection? I’ve never heard a good answer to that.
Practice what you preach: try to understand where Roughgarden is coming from. Her exact words (as quoted here) are:
“They want to define me as inhuman”
From the context I would guess that she is implying that these are fighting words. Given that the legal status of transsexuals *has* left them subject to malign neglect, coercion, and simple violence, she has a prima facie case that these people are a threat to her wellbeing in very concrete ways. They are attacking HER.
You, by contrast, are engaged in an intellectual contest from a position of personal safety. They are attacking views you hold. It’s a lot easier to consider sympathy as a tactic in the sort of struggle you’re engaged in than in the one she’s engaged in.
I agree, it is easier for me to consider what you call “sympathy” and what I call “an attempt to understand”. Perhaps that’s why I am making such an argument. Still, I don’t think it means I am wrong.