Rationally Speaking

If you are even a teensy little bit into reason and rationality, then you are likely to wince every time you open a newspaper, surf the web or watch television. The wince of the week definitely came from an interview that ABC’s George Stephanopoulos conducted with G.O.P. House opposition leader John Boehner.

Today I was forwarded by several people a really bad and confused op-ed piece by New York Times columnist David Brooks. It is entitled “The End of Philosophy,” which naturally raised my baloney detector level to yellow alert.

The other day I posted on my FaceBook profile that I better hurry up to finish my presentation on epigenetic inheritance. One of my friends commented: “I have no idea what that means, but good luck to you!” Ironically, that is, in part, the point of my presentation: understanding what it all means. Let me explain.

Sometimes you open Nature magazine and are surprised by the latest discovery in quantum mechanics or molecular biology. Browsing through the March 5, 2009 issue I was stunned by an article penned by sociologist Harry Collins, entitled “We cannot live by scepticism alone” (The Brits call it “scepticism,” not “skepticism.”).

I have been downloading a cartload of books on my new Kindle lately, since I really enjoy the idea of walking into the subway carrying a rather inconspicuous, very light, yet incredibly large library with me. One of these books is Samir Okasha’s Philosophy of Science: A Very Short Introduction, which I’m reading because I intend to review and promote it.

Nature -- presumably through the mechanism of Darwinian selection -- has endowed us with a balanced system of pains and pleasures that correspond respectively to the sort of things we should avoid or seek in order to further our survival and reproduction. It is not surprising that the brain produces a sensation of pain when we bleed: if it didn't we may run the risk of bleeding to death without noticing (or noticing too late). Similarly, it is hardly surprising that our brain releases pleasure chemicals (literally, neural drugs) to reward us when we do something useful, like finding and eating a sugar or fat-ladened substance.

Below is a detailed response to my latest post, which Ken graciously sent me for publication here. After that, you will find a few additional notes from yours truly.Dear Massimo,Thanks, of course, for the very kind comments about my presentation at Brown. At your invitation, I’m writing a few comments to clarify and correct what I think are some mistaken impressions and also to point out a few areas of genuine disagreement. You wrote:

I am traveling back from Brown University (on Amtrak's Acela Express train, ah, the civilization of the Northeast!), where I participated in a panel discussion on evolution and religion together with Ed Larson (Pepperdine University, author of the Pulitzer winning Summer for the Gods on the Scopes trial), art historian Mary Bergstein (Rhode Island School for Design), and Brown's own

Academia is notoriously resistant to change, which to some extent is a good thing. It was therefore no surprise that when Wikipedia became a phenomenon most academics scoffed at it as a passing fad, fatally flawed by its very core idea: anybody, and I mean anybody, can become a Wiki author and post new entries or edit existing ones. Surely, this will inevitably lead to chaos and complete unreliability, the critics said.

I guess it was only a matter of time before my colleague Jerry Coyne at the University of Chicago lost his patience while reading one of several pieces that appeared in the press about the current and future status of evolutionary theory.

Time to put New York Times’ columnist Stanley Fish in his place, again. Fish is a rather interesting kind of animal: an academic through and through (he is, after all a professor of law at Florida International University and dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and before that has taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins and Duke University), who nevertheless relishes harsh criticism of academia.

This is the year of Darwin (yes, yes, it’s also the year of astronomy, I know), and especially this week -- around the date of Chuck’s birth -- we are seeing a spike of events, radio and tv pieces, and printed articles. (Expect a second peak in November, for the anniversary of the publication of Origin of Species.)