SGU Episode 38

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SGU Episode 38
12th April 2006
(brief caption for the episode icon)
SGU 37                      SGU 39
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
R: Rebecca Watson
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
P: Perry DeAngelis
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Show Notes
SGU Forum

Introduction

You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

News Items

Global Warming (15:54)

• Global warming alarmists intimidate dissenting scientists into silence.

Questions and Emails

Evolution, the Promotion of Positive Science News (30:42)

S: Well with that, let's move on to some email questions. We actually received our first voicemail email.

R: Yay!

S: This is from Rich Ludwig from Hillsboro, West Virginia, and he responded to our request for people to send us, to actually record their voice speaking their question. So let's play that now.

Hey guys at the NESS, I enjoy your question every week. I take every chance I can to spread the word about your show. I have two questions that I hope you could give me advice on. The first is about evolution. Where can I find good evolutionary information and reading? I'm a believer in evolution, yet I do not feel I can defend my position as well as I'd like. My limited background in evolution is an International Baccalaureate Biology 3/4 in high school, some time ago. I would like to do more research. Any recommendations as to books or websites would be greatly appreciated to further my knowledge about evolution. My second question is dealing with promoting critical thiking. I notice that skepticism deals mainly with bashing bad science. I was wondering why there isn't more promoting of good science? As I've looked through even your articles, few are about new discoveries such as Lucy or other findings. I'd like to see both on skeptical pages. Why is there not more?

S: Well thank you, Rich for sending in your voicemail. The first question, first you're absolutely right, and this is a good point, that believing in education and having a high school-ish education about evolution really isn't enough to stand toe-to-toe with a well prepared creationist. You have to know really a lot of details about evolutionary theory and you have to know a lot about argument styles of evolution deniers, of creationists and intelligent design proponents.

R: Namely making stuff up as you go along.

S: Right, right. But they're good at it, they're really good at making stuff up.

R: They are, they're very, very good at it.

S: Their logical falacies can often be quite subtle, in fact they're my favourite textbook example of logical falacies because they make every single one that there is, they really do. The sources that I've used that I think are good: on the web I think that talkorigins.org, and of course this link will be on our notes page, is the best overall evolution site on the web, and also deals with creationism and intelligent design, so you'll see lots of resources, not just about evolution, but also about debating creationists.

B: Also, go to our logical fallacy page and read that until you're well versed in these fallacies, and you'll be amazed how often you find them crop up in debates with these guys.

S: Right. And then read creationist websites and just name all the logical fallacies. I also, I cut my teeth, even when I was in high school and college, proselytizers would come to my door to preach whatever their fundamentalist religion was, and I would immediately spark up a conversation with them about creationism. If they didn't want to talk about that, I'd send them packing. But if they wanted, I would talk to them for hours about evolution and creationism, not that I thought that I was going to change my mind, but just to hone my skills, and just to learn what arguments they make.

R: Another good way to do that is to hit up some online forums because you'll find people there debating things like that, and not only do you get to see the arguments that creationists are using, but you have some time to take the information, process it, google it, look into it before responding, you don't have to come up with something on the spot.

S: I looked at my bookshelf just to see what evolution books I have on there, and some of the ones that I have that I think are good. Wonderful Life by Stephen Jay Gould is a great discussion of some evolutionary thinking. The Pattern of Evolution by Niles Eldredge. Of course On The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, it's sometimes good...

P: That's a tough read.

S: It's a tough read but you know what? It's worth going back to the source, get through some of those chapters if you can, it really is worth it, it's amazing to me even now how much of evolutionary theory Darwin got right right at the beginning. He really spent decades working out a lot of the things, and a lot of his solutions to some of the scientific problems of evolution are still the solutions today that we invoke.

P: It's really, really brilliant and when you think about coming from almost nothing, nowhere to conceive of and systematize evolution in his writing, it's amazing.

S: It was an incredible intellectual achievement. Also I have on my shelf Taking Wing by Pat Shipman who I actually studied under at Johns Hopkins, she's an excellent evolutionary biologist. All about the evolution of flight, which is a topic which is frequently a target of creationists, and it is incredible how much we know about that. I also like reading about human evolution, the three books I have on that are The Neanderthals, Lucy's Child and The Hominid Gang, although those are getting kind of dated so there are probably some newer ones out there that would be worth reading, I probably have to update my library myself. So those are some resources I think that...

P: What about Sagan, Steve? Shadows?

S: Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, you know that's an interesting book, it's not really so much about evolution as about human psychology and what we might be able to learn about human psychology by examining our closest relatives, other primates basically. Regarding the second question about promoting good science to balance our bashing of bad science, that definitely is a good point and that is a subject that we have talked about amongst ourselves as well, that we have to make sure that we promote how cool and wonderful real science is and that often the media promotes pseudo-science and bad science because they think it's cool and sensational, but they're really cheating the public because real science is far more interesting and far more bizarre and cool than anything in fiction or science fiction.

R: Like Snipley the furry lobster.

S: Yeah, like Snipley the furry lobster or black holes or anything to do with quantum mechanics or cosmology, it's all really interesting bizarre stuff, it's great. We don't spend too much time just talking about ordinary science because regular scientists do that and there are plenty of other standard science outlets that do that, our niche is skepticism, it is dealing with the fringe, the controversial science, weird science, pseudo-science, so we are going to always emphasize that but we do need to balance it with promoting some good science and I do think that we try to do that on the skeptics' guide, maybe we need to do a little more of that as well. But thanks again Rich for sending in your question.

References