Apr 1, 2014 at 6:56 PM | johanna
"There are numerous historical examples of people believing stuff that (empirically) isn't true."

Absolutely. Very many indeed. Suggesting a behavioural trait for this.

"And really, those who claim that we can deduce contemporary social behaviour from "evolutionary biology" or somesuch, are just making stuff up as they go along."

I make no such claim. On millenial timescales we are talking cultural evolution, not biological. On longer timescales, such as most of the entire existence of homo-sapiens-sapiens (and his religions), culture/gene interaction very likely has an impact regarding pre-disposition to certain behaviours, plus more obvious impacts like the cultural selection of lactose tolerance.

Apr 2, 2014 at 3:12 PM | Andy West

P.S. per this thread and elsewhere, I am claiming that the behaviour of 'rallying around a core belief' as Geronimo so nicely puts it, *is* one we are pre-disposed to via evolution.

Work for once ;-) has intervened... I just want to make one very "simple" statement. What I believe is core to all this.

Human beings are unique in evolution. They were given a brain with a far greater capacity than they actually needed. They were given the intellect without the knowledge.

When you can sense the world around you perfectly (ancient and current humans have no difference) and when you can ask questions of both yourself and others and the universe, then you want answers. However, the shared scientific knowledge at that moment cannot provide them. So you fill in the gaps. That process still goes on.

When someone in a thousand years looks back, they will think we are as scientifically ignorant as we do of the medieval times. And the gaps will be filled with... with?... who knows.

I am talking about pure science here. The gaps? and how they are filled? They are really what we are discussing.

I have a definition for pure science.

Thanks for the thread Jiminy but one thing for sure I don't look back on people being scientifically ignorant a thousand years ago and feel any superiority, merely humility. Go figure how Erosthenes worked out the circumference of the Earth, or how Euclid drew together the mathematics of his day, or how Kepler figured out the trajectory of the planets. It's mind boggling to me, so our ancestors will have available tools we can't conceive of now and will themselves be humbled by Einstein, Maxwell, Pauli, Feynmann and the others (can I add Marie Curie who I admired as a child because she made the big breakthrough for women in science as far as I knew at that time and I was impressed with that) and many others. They are, and were, truly giants.

Ancestors????? Descendants, sorry.

Apr 2, 2014 at 3:36 PM | Richard Drake

And it seems to me you are drifting towards insult. I've read BH regularly for quite some years before commenting here, and know that aside from trolling (espc the notorious DZB), gratuitous shock or foul language or insult etc. all views on CAGW and related topics are welcome. My perspective is no less or no more valid to be here than anyone else's, and like most folks here I'm an amateur with a perspective to offer. I've never been rude to you or to anyone else here, and reciprocation would be appreciated. As for unproven theories, if that was the criteria for considering them waffle, then all the (minority) candidates that eventually make it through to proof would also have to be considered waffle. In truth many theories have offered aspects that help overlapping theories make it, even if they don't themselves. I prefer to regard theories as exciting possibilities, as long of course as they aren't like CAGW pushed down people's throats en mass (I'm happy with certain aspects, like CO2 being a GHG) as 'settled science', at the expense of trillions too, um... somewhat like a religion.

Apr 2, 2014 at 4:04 PM | Jiminy Cricket
"So you fill in the gaps"

I presume you mean creation myths, physical world-view extensions to formal religions (like Christianity's view of the solar-system or how animals came to be, circa centuries back), and ridiculous 'scientific' orthodoxies that having once 'filled in the gap' for a while, can take hold and become immense blockages to finding out what's really happening as time and techniques advance. If so, then I very much agree.

"That process still goes on."

And I agree with this too. We don't appear to have grown out of the habit (my own view being that this is because the habit is deeply embedded).

While agreeing with Geronimo regarding some shining scientific lights of the past, I can well imagine that those looking back in a thousand years could, in amongst their admiration for our own era's many achievements, very likely view the whole CAGW debacle as primitive at best, and possibly worse.

Andy West: "very likely view the whole CAGW debacle as primitive at best, and possibly worse."

On the millennial scale I've no doubt that's correct, however in the short term the political classes will keep it under wraps and while not pretending it didn't happen will largely ignore it. That's what's happened with the Eugenics movement which drew its support from exactly the same social and political classes as the CAGW scare.

As an example I am an avid Radio 4 listener and have been for 40 years or more (even Laurie Taylor's "Thinking Aloud"), I also read the Guardian and the Observer and the Daily and Sunday Telegraph and have done for 40 years or more. In all that time I cannot recollect one programme, or one article that discussed Eugenics, which as a cult philosophy must have been right up there with Nazism in terms of utter disregard for the plight of other human beings.

Here we had a plausible scientific story, that mentally incapacitated/physically handicapped people dilute the human gene pool and a policy of mitigation that tried to ensure they didn't breed, which involved forced castration and womb removal, or incarceration for life, and eventually, of course, when the Nazis cottoned on to it, executions. Yet I can recollect no discussions on Radio, or TV about this crime against mentally incapacitated/physically handicapped people. No one has ever discussed why people like the Webbs, Bertrand Russell, Winston Churchill and the whole cabal of bien pensants could have countenanced such barbarity. To my knowledge at least.

Taking a punt at why, and this is what I would say is pure opinion/guesswork, it's because the same social group of bien pensants, or rather there descendants, who control these serious media outlets, so they're staying schtum. Could be wrong, am willing to be proved wrong, but we treat the holocaust with the respect it deserves and mourn for its victims, and rightly so. Why not eugenics?

Anyway, that's my theory, CAGW will just be airbrushed out of history when the whole business collapses, nobody will be guilty of anything, just like eugenics.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Apr 3, 2014 at 9:21 AM | geronimo

Good point, and a plausible theory.

Apr 3, 2014 at 10:44 AM | Richard Drake
"However, I don't think the end of CAGW will be like this."

One can hope. I saw a documentary on the brutal German occupation of SW Africa not too many years back (can't recall exactly when); the whole thing was a complete surprise to me, had never heard of it before.

Apr 3, 2014 at 11:07 AM | Richard Drake

The system complexity would suggest that over-arching theory at anything like that level of resolution is impossible, but indeed it's a fun thought and I for one wouldn't rule out anything for generations to come. Incredible article from Levin.

"I think in the interests of balance, you should have mentioned that Winston Churchill, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York and Dean Paul Inge, GK Chesterton's bete noire were also enthusiastic supporters of eugenics and attempts to introduce compulsory sterilisation. I think they might just possibly have been right wing."

You are touching on a theory I've been mulling over for a couple of months and have yet to find the words to articulate it (probably because its opinion and not scholarship).

I suppose it really started with the Labour Party and its stance on immigration. The Labour Party is supposed to represent the "working classes" yet uncontrolled immigration in a welfare state hits the working classes harder than anyone else. There is more competition for jobs (and resultant drop in wages), there is more competition for social housing, the immigrants are more likely to live in working class areas and their schools will be full of children whose first language isn't English. What on Earth is the party that purports to support them doing calling for more immigration?

I then pondered a little on the history of the Labour Party and where it is now. I found it in Wikipedia:

"While beginning as a working class movement, it today is largely middle class."

In its beginnings it was working class, but was soon hi-jacked, not by the middle classes, but by the, for want of better word" upper-middle class bien pensants. On the other hand Churchill and the Archbishop of Canterbury were lower aristocratic bien pensants. There's a large overlap between right and left occupied by people with pretty much the same belief systems outside of their politics. They are well educated, comfortably to well off, send their kids to private schools, well read, and want to tell everyone else how to run their lives. They are two sides of the same coin and represent what Farage keeps referring to as the "career politicians" who leave university (Usually Oxbridge, again for both sides) and immediately get themselves on the road to a seat in parliament as their given right. They are the people who supported Eugenics and they're the people now who support lunatic mitigation policies which will cost the people of the UK dear in the long run. Those that don't decide on the parliamentary path go for jobs in the arts, media, and television. Other than politics they are the same class. They are what would have been described in former times the "intelligentsia".

Nobody from the intelligentsia, as far as I can make out, spoke against the Eugenics movement with the exception of Pope Pius XI. And their descendants have simply buried it and don't talk about it. But keep this in the forefront of your mind it was scientists who led the way, Galton himself was the archetypal Cambridge educated, FRS etc. His theory was plausible, and may have been right, but it was picked up enthusiastically by the intelligentsia. Just like Hansen and CAGW.

Richard, yes Mencken was to lots of things, a life spent in permanent opposition, but he made a lot of sense, however I don't put him into the bien pensant group I described above - in fact I'd go further and say his life was about bursting bubbles and if ever there was a bubble it's the group think of the people I described above.

He appears to have been a man of many contradictions but he does describe bien pensants in his writings:

"It was Americans who invented the curious doctrine that there is a body of doctrine in every department of thought that every good citizen is in duty bound to accept and cherish; it was Americans who invented the right-thinker." Baltimore
Evening Sun, July 26, 1920.

I don't know if the Americans invented the right-thinker but Mencken certainly spotted them.

He also appears to have despised democracy and yet noted that people in democracies were happier than those without.

Thanks Richard, I wasn't aware of his article on Eugenics, but not being a scientist doesn't preclude the use of common sense. The notion that congenitally ill people will dilute the gene pool is plausible, however the solution provided was inhuman, you don't have to be a scientist to understand that. Similarly you don't have to be a scientist to understand that switching to renewable technology from fossil fuels isn't going to be cheap, or feasible, in any short time scale.

In Peter Hitchen's Mail Online blog, which the Bish links at top-right of this page (and Richard D has already referenced on another thread), Peter makes a direct comparison of climate-change zealots to bibical prophets and those who believe in 'the Rapture' (a time when 'the saved' will be carried up to Heaven). A little lurid Old Testament stuff in there too. I think such comparisons are becoming more frequent.

Although clearly a prized member of the bien pensant club I don't believe Bernard Levin was himself one of them. His opening remarks in the critique of a new opera that had opened the previous night in Covent Garden have stuck with me since I read them. Unfortunately I can't recollect the name of the opera but his first sentence of the critique was:

"Last night was the worst night in London since the outbreak of the black death."