I think we were just coming at it from different angles. You were looking at it as “what larger abstract principle of the creationists does the whole evolution thing offend” and I was coming at it from “how are both sides more alike than they realize.”

I think there is also in some of these types of discussions a little fuzziness in definitions of the different groups. When you say “evolutionist,” you probably envision a rather bright group of thoughtful professor types. When I say “evolutionist,” I want to imagine that, but I tend to think, “Snotty guy on Usenet who calls himself a libertarian, thinks poor people are genetically inferior, and sleeps with a copy of Atlas Shrugged under his pillow.” Unfortunately, I think the latter are more often the ones that your curious creationist looking for more information is likely to run into.

What you said wasn’t wrong per se, just … maybe only correct along one axis, with an equally important axis left unconsidered. These guys are trying to deliberately prod the religious types to get a scream out of them, absolutely. But they’re also just as unscientific and just as wrong.

In my own defense, I’ve written a number of impassioned and thorough trashings of these sorts of projects. But I also realize that there are more thorough, interesting evolutionary psychology projects out there. But maybe it’s a sign that the laws of fitness in the very unnatural selection process which is science journalism tend not to favour accuracy or evidentiary strength.

In this case, Janis is completely right. My luke-warm comment was dead wrong. Note to self: don’t be nice to idiots in arguments as you might wind up saying something patently wrong in the effort to avoid pointing out they’re idiots. The same once happened to me in an interview with an obdurate journalist, and I hadn’t sufficiently learned the lesson…

Saying that the problem is that they pick deliberately provoking examples is like saying, “Well yes, rape is perfectly natural and hence okay, but don’t say it out loud or else women will get frothy.” It makes it seem like you’re arguing in favor of deliberately hiding the truth because some thin-skinned types won’t like it. What I’m saying is that the deliberately provoking things they are saying aren’t even correct or in most cases vaguely indicated. We have no idea where rape came from, really. The problem with the “what race is stupidest” argument isn’t that it’s provocative. It’s that it’s incorrect.

And that leads me back to my main issue: most people who claim to be “scientific” aren’t any smarter or thinking any more clearly than your typical bible-thumper. There is absolutely no more good science in “God made dinosaur fossils to test our faith” than there is in “evolution forces chicks to dig middle-aged bald guys.” They are both provocative, both guaranteed to start arguments, and both dead wrong.

It’s the latter that’s the problem, the “dead wrong” part, not the controversial part. The fact that they love flogging deliberately inflammatory things in creationists’ faces merely makes them assholes. The fact that most of what they say they

1) don’t actually understand,
2) haven’t thought through, and
3) is in direct contradiction to the real world

makes them just as incorrect as the god squad, which is much, much worse.

‘Non-intended outcomes’ – I am still mulling over whether the only intentional activities in the universe are those of humans. But I am inclined to think – not.

Thanks for your replies!

You know, I knew that tree chart was out of date, but you’re right, I didn’t realize just HOW far out of date. Unfortunately, when it comes to graphics, I’m a bit of a bottom-feeder, finding most of them out there in the interwebs. I actually searched and searched for a good one that wasn’t too complicated to stick in this post, and I thought that this was the best I could find. Obviously, ‘best’ isn’t necessarily equal to ‘good’ in this case. Thanks for the King (2004) citation and the correction on the relation of fungi and animals to plants — I did overstate the closeness of relations among multicellular organisms, but I would stand by the original point, which is the bias towards focusing our attention on the multicellular in both popular perception and even in scientific research.

Janis captures the sense I wanted to get across in the piece, that some of the proponents of evolutionary thought in the popular sphere actually do the cause of persuading religious Creationists a bit of a disservice by picking illustrative cases (rape, materialism, etc.) that seem specifically chosen to provoke, irritate and enrage those who like to talk about humanity having a ‘purpose’ whether divine or otherwise. That is, if we really want to persuade believers in purposeful creation, we should probably not choose these incredibly controversial — and in many cases tendentious — arguments as our front line approach. Peter Stromberg (who writes a column over at Discover Magazine on anthropology and psychology) has taken me to task for not appreciating more interesting and recent thinking in evolutionary psychology, and he’s right — I don’t do that enough — but so often the PUBLIC face of evolutionary thinking tends toward the more outrageous (‘Neuron found that makes us believe in God.’ ‘Rape gene discovered — it’s just human nature!’ ‘Girls programmed by evolution to like ponies!’).

So thanks to all of you for the comments. And to Jonathan, mate, I think you’re hung up on exactly the issue I’m describing: the use of ‘purposeful’ language to describe an unpurposed process. I don’t buy the ‘selfish gene’ argument very much at all, and there are plenty of animals that do NOT successfully reproduce (me, for example). So to say that the ‘purpose’ of life is to survive and proliferate endows the process through which life survives and proliferates too much initial direction. Just because it happens, doesn’t mean that there is anything or anyone intending it.

Please don’t think my denial of ‘purpose’ is an ‘Enlightenment backlash.’ It is my best attempt to square the clearest understanding of evolution I can come to, as yet, with the meanings and implications of English, an imperfect language. My rejection of ‘purpose’ is not an emotional one, but a very carefully considered grappling with the phenomenon we are seeking to describe, the meaning of the term, and the unintentional connotations that creep in along with the explicit denotations. In simple English: it ain’t like ‘purpose,’ so I don’t want to call it ‘purpose.’ I’m sure that there is some philosopher out there who has redefined ‘purpose’ in such a way to include non-intended outcomes, but that’s not the way most of us use the word, so I’m going to try to hold the line on this one.

This is probably why concepts like evolution are so hard for so many people to grasp, and why as a biological phenomenon evolution is not intuitively obvious. But we think in terms of purpose because that’s how humans operate, and in terms of design because we design, and we have conferred these human traits upon our dieties.