Biomythology: The Skeptic's Guide to Charles Darwin and the Science of Persuasion

by David Cook

Overview

"

Is the life unexamined by the fMRI not worth living? Can biology replace the humanities in capturing what it means to be human? Biomythology levels the playing field of skepticism, doing for Darwin and science what Richard Dawkins has attempted for God and religion. This irreverent romp reasons:

- ""Once upon a time there were nine planets--scientific truth rests on the faith that future discoveries will not turn today's facts into tomorrow's fairytales.""
- ""Science is the art of arranging observations to fit theory. When applied to alter minds rather than matter, the evidence can be as convincing as a serial killer's smile on your first date.""
- ""With prenatal testing building better bell curves by controlling the gateway to our brave new world, eugenics is thriving.""

Biomythology will teach the skeptic to recognize over twenty rhetorical devices of scientific persuasion that can be borrowed to change our worldviews rather than the world we view.

"

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781524601836
Publisher:	AuthorHouse
Publication date:	04/28/2016
Pages:	422
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

Read an Excerpt

Biomythology

The Skeptic's Guide to Charles Darwin and the Science of Persuasion

---

By David Cook

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2016 David Cook
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5246-0183-6

---

CHAPTER 1

Skepticism without a Doubt

The most perfect philosophy of the natural kind only staves off our ignorance a little longer.

— David Hume (1711-1776)

Like big government, big science grows stronger every day, passing laws to constrain every facet of nature. No fact, no observation, is above the law. As a result, the prisons of intellectual history are overflowing with scientific facts gone bad. Waves of light break into quantum sand. Time and space genuflect to viewpoint. Pluto lost the vote.

If our elementary school science texts already contain errors, where exactly do we draw the line between theory and myth? Will today's facts withstand the ravages of discovery and consensus to outperform those former facts that now sound like fairy tales, such as "Once upon a time, there were nine planets"? If you find your skepticism is increasing, read on.

All Things Are Possible to Doubt

Skepticism is doubt. Doubt can be dangerous. Ask anyone in sales. Whether your product is faith, rationality, or genocide, skepticism kindles hesitation, ignites freedom of thought, and dampers the impulse to buy. The rallying cry of those who are intent on slaughtering or demeaning their fellows is seldom "I'm just not certain!" It is small wonder that skepticism has gotten a bad name.

Make no mistake: skepticism is not cynicism. The skeptic has doubts about the folly of human passions; the cynic has no such doubts. What's more, while cynics lack faith, true skeptics are not ashamed to admit that — ultimately knowing nothing — they must act on faith in something: love, logic, explanations voted most likely to succeed, beauty, dreams, inspiration, justification, habit, reason, observation, consensus, pragmatism, the human spirit, the Holy Spirit, the sanctity of human life, etc.

Faith makes the skeptic's world go round. The skeptic suspects it is vanity to confuse a web of belief with a network of knowledge. Most importantly, without having to fret about knowledge, skepticism can be fun! In this book, we are going to have our fun and poke it too — at those borrowing the name and tools of natural science to sell ideas to our culture rather than to increase our control over nature.

Divided Skepticism

We may divide skeptics into two camps: turf skeptics and real skeptics. While the mutual doubt between Republicans and Democrats epitomizes turf skepticism, real skeptics doubt politics and politicians. While real skeptics doubt knowledge in general, turf skeptics can be counted on to doubt the knowledge of their competitors.

Real skeptics believe that knowledge requires certainty. They claim you cannot really know if the sun is shining unless you are certain that the sun is shining. How certain? Real skeptics claim that certainty is absolute. It is like the plague: either you have it or you don't. If you are less certain of something than the nose on your face, you are not certain about it at all. Real skeptics not only think outside the box, but some doubt the box exists outside the stories of men and women. For real skeptics, certain knowledge hangs on the thread of certain faith in the death of inconvenient future discoveries.

Real skeptics are rare. Turf skeptics abound. Orthopedic surgeons are skeptical about chiropractors; Protestants, about Catholics; atheists, about theists. All qualify as turf skeptics. Wherever there is turf, a turf skeptic is never far away.

Take professional skeptic Michael Shermer, who writes the "Skeptic" column for Scientific American. He is dismayed to cite a 2009 Harris Poll of adult Americans revealing that 82 percent believed in God and only 45 percent believed in Darwin's Theory of Evolution. Shermer may be the king of skeptics, but he's hardly as skeptical as skeptical can be. He is a scientific skeptic, a turf skeptic defining skepticism as "the application of the scientific method to test all claims." He is obviously no skeptic about the superiority of the scientific method despite there being no prospective, placebo-controlled studies to prove the method's superiority over the humanities in discovering what it means to be human. Shermer's brand of skepticism requires us to reach for our pocket calculators each time we hear the words "I love you!" How else can we know if the claim is statistically significant? Such is the peril of abandoning our doubts to the provincial whims of scientific turf skepticism.

Leveling the Playing Field of Skepticism

The golden age of skepticism has passed as surely as the Wild West. Consider Scottish philosopher David Hume, quoted above. Now there was a real skeptic, a radical skeptic, and not some namby-pamby modern-day skeptic short on doubt that the scientific method can do more than temporarily blind us to our ignorance. Hume might have joined us in asking how we can rationally believe that Mother Nature is flipping a two-headed coin–heads yesterday, heads today, heads tomorrow. How can we be rationally certain that our run of luck is not about to end? Real skeptics like Hume caution that we predict the future from the habits of the past at our rational peril. Forget probability. Long shots happen. No matter what the odds, a horse can't win by a nose when the nose is still shy of the finish line; the truth of the horse race is in the photo finish, which transcends both the race and the odds.

What was the probability that two skyscrapers towering over New York for more than ten thousand days would no longer be standing at the end of September 11? Despite the rightful shock and sorrow still attached to this tragedy, Hume might have agreed with the analogy that scientific evidence and certain reason are about as rock solid as a World Trade Center: waiting to succumb to the terror of future discovery.

Hume left us with plenty of room for doubt about the providence of both the natural and supernatural. Today, Hume's brand of skepticism is vanishing. Stories of the supernatural monopolize our doubt, leaving little left for stories of the natural. As a result, skepticism is losing its balance. Doubt threatens to topple into the abyss of certainty. In life, balance is everything. Novelist and scientist C.P. Snow (1905-1980), in his famous 1959 public Cambridge lecture "The Two Cultures," bemoaned the lack of balance in British culture. Supposed intellectuals, Snow noted, could quote Shakespeare but not the most basic laws of physics. The skeptic is rightly concerned about the similar growing asymmetry in skepticism. Therefore, to regain equilibrium in our doubt, welcome to Skepticism 102: Biomythology: The Skeptic's Guide to Charles Darwin and the Science of Persuasion.

In Skepticism 101, The God Delusion, renowned Darwinian apologist Richard Dawkins taught the skeptic's perspective on the stories of the supernatural. One-time Charles Simonyi Professor for Public Understanding at Oxford University, Dawkins is a rhetorical genius when it comes to selling science to the public. Similarly, when it comes to the light of skepticism, Dawkins is the brightest wavelength on the spectrum. Delusion provided a litany of arguments to popularize skepticism about religion. The polemic was scathing and exhaustive, if not exhausting. We will, therefore, ignore skepticism about the stories of the supernatural and explore, instead, skepticism about stories of the natural. In other words, we will examine skepticism without a doubt — the doubt about transcendence. All other doubts, and doubters, we will happily entertain.

In ages past, skepticism about religion caused ears and hearts — among other organs — to burn. Today, as science and religion vie for our belief, doubts about science cause their own share of heartburn, not to mention conflagrations in the meeting rooms of peer-review and tenure committees. Apologizing in advance for any inadvertent fires, the goal of this book is to level the playing field of the game of skepticism, doing for Darwin and science what Richard Dawkins has already attempted for God and religion.

Along the way, we will mention no intelligent designs except for the designs of those using the name of science to sell something. Similarly, we will not refute Darwinism — only examine Darwinian rhetoric. The words playing upon these pages form an instruction manual for recognizing the many devices of the rhetoric of objectivity concealed within scientific plain prose. We will teach the skeptic to pick scientific explanations apart at their artificial joints and to doubt science whenever it is taken out of the context of its own discipline, whether to replace the humanities or to allow cruelty to have its reasons.

Why Doubt?

All doubts are equally dangerous, but some doubts are more equal than others. It depends on what you are selling: eternity or oblivion. Many protested when Dawkins penned words that could be used to cast doubt on religion. Many will protest as I pen words that may be used to cast doubt on science. The skeptic will learn, however, that it is not the words that are dangerous. People, not guns, kill people. People, not words, tell lies.

Since the time of Aristotle, it has been known that the words of rhetoric can be used for good or ill. In the great philosopher's words about words, "A man can confer the greatest of benefits by a right use of these, and inflict the greatest of injuries by using them wrongly." The skeptic suspects that whether words result in benefit or injury rests with actions, not the words themselves. If people could use the reform of Christianity to turn "Love one another!" into a hundred years of Christians killing Christians over the correct definition of love, then what idea can't be borrowed to justify passion?

The "this idea could be used for evil" argument could be used against most any scientific, theological, or philosophical idea ever imagined, skepticism included. The Golden Rule, in the hands of a masochist with a death wish, can be used to excuse torture and serial killing. The most exquisite Grecian urn ever spun from a potter's wheel can still, if swung with enough momentum, end life. So it is with the most beautiful prose.

As we will see, the universal solvent of rhetorical reason can be used to wash away all actions at odds with passion. Reasons pass; the consequences of actions persist. When it comes to physical cruelty or killing, the skeptic knows enough to doubt whatever words are used to justify, condone or glorify the act. In Shakespeare's tragedy, Othello killed his sea of kisses, Desdemona, not because of lago's villainous words, but because the great general failed to doubt the words rather than the act of killing. Othello would have flunked Skepticism 102.

Badly.

The most radical of skeptics, the solipsists, doubt actions and believe only in their own private stories, their silent words and images. In this book, we will counsel the skeptic to doubt stories, not actions. If you doubt a world beyond your personal stories, please respect the rest of us, even if logic tells you we do not exist. Flush the toilet.

Solipsist or not, the real scientist may safely doubt that the words of this book will encourage people to throw out their Blu-ray discs, electric lights, or antibiotics. The public, like Francis Bacon before them, are more concerned with the fruits than the explanations of science. If Darwinism could predict what natural selection will do next, we'd all accept it as a legitimate discipline of science. But it can't, so we won't.

The skeptic may suspect that Darwinian efforts to export their explanation from a tool of science to a demand for cultural belief may well have sacrificed the credibility of all science. Largely thanks to Darwinism, the skeptic may imagine, scientific consensus has become confused with "The Boy Who Cried Wolf."

Must we alter our faith and lifestyle because of a boy who keeps changing his stories? Don't blame my polemic if the boy is no longer believed. Don't blame me if our ozone is being strangled by the paw prints of a carbon wolf or the methane gas of a flatulent cow. Personally, I would suggest the skeptic look at the stories themselves, not just the questionable history of the storyteller.

Fundamental Incomprehensibilities

Dangers aside, the skeptic will delight to find that nature provides abundant opportunity for the study of doubt. One form of such doubt is called agnosticism, from the Greek gnosis for "knowledge" and the a for "without." The agnostic is thus "without knowledge." In the now famous words of "Darwin's bulldog," the man who coined the term agnosticism, Thomas Huxley (1825-1895), "In the ultimate analysis everything is incomprehensible, and the whole object of science is simply to reduce the fundamental incomprehensibilities to the smallest possible number."

Defining Science

If the purpose of science is, as Huxley suggests, concentrated "fundamental incomprehensibilities," what in fact is science? As the premature death of countless facts has alerted the skeptic to surmise, it takes more imagination to invent a lasting fact than a lasting aphorism. The curved space of non-Euclidean geometry has long since seduced us from the arms of Euclid's "shortest distance between two points," while Socrates' previously cited "All I know is that I know nothing" shows no signs of being a casualty of progress. Indeed, Socrates' wisdom has become the real skeptic's universal rallying cry. Placing aesthetics before rationality, we will therefore skip the facts of science, for a time, and turn to the aphorisms.

To this skeptic, "Science is the art of arranging observations to fit theory." Happily, better wits than mine have assaulted the topic. English author Samuel Butler (1835-1902) proposed that science "is only an expression for our ignorance of our own ignorance." Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman (1918-1988) wrote, "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." Philosopher of science Karl Popper (1902-1994) suggested, "Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification." Best of all, Nobel Laureate Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937) captured science with the eloquence and parsimony previously reserved for a good equation: "All science is either physics or stamp collecting."

Rutherford's contributions to physics were a gift to the world. Building on Rutherford's philanthropy and philately, we arrive at a new dichotomy— real science versus biomythology — and a new set of aphorisms. Real science applies the scientific method to control the physical universe; biomythology borrows the method to control our minds. When it comes to verifying electricity and chemistry, the flick of a plastic light switch is all that is required. The light of biomythology has no switch, only scientific consensus.

The good skeptic will quickly note that, as I use it, the term biomythology is concentrated fallacy, able to poison any well with a single drop. It plays to our emotions; it is a straw-man term discrediting the arguments of all imagined opponents. It is a hasty generalization, using the example of a few scientific proselytizers to discredit the many devoted scientists of consciousness, who have devoted a lifetime in the pursuit of truth. It is a plea for our own illogic, based on the illogic of others. It is a false alternative, forcing readers to choose between reason and faith in defining what makes us human — as if there were anything reasonable or faithful about us. It is an appeal to the majority because "everyone knows" what it means to be human, and just about everyone wishes we wouldn't act that way. It's the opportunity to provide the skeptic with a really good laugh as the changing fashions of the emperor's new clothes fail to cover the warts of the emperor's old theories.

Sure, we could have used less incendiary terms: natural science versus natural philosophy and natural persuasion. But why spare the emotions of those who take pride in having none? Such an attempt would be an insult to any rationalist worthy of the name. Continuing to use the terms biomythology versus real science, the skeptic need only remember which science insists we see the light and which science provides the light so we can see.

History

For some, history is what happened. For many, history is a celebration of the events forming our culture. For the skeptic, history is a story engineered to reconcile the nightmares of yesterday with our dreams for tomorrow. A review of history teaches the skeptic that concocted or reconstructed terms like biomythology are nothing new. Consider an introduction to the father of the Italian renaissance, Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374):

What is the use — I beseech you — of knowing the nature of quadrupeds, fowls, fishes, and serpents and not knowing or even neglecting man's nature, the purpose for which we are born, and whence and whereto we travel?

Petrarch, in addition to elevating humanity to its correct place above biology, invented the term Dark Ages so he could salvage us from the supposed ignorance of medieval scholars. He searched Greek and Roman classics for what distinguishes us from the fowls and fishes to make us human. He launched humanism and the humanities.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from Biomythology by David Cook. Copyright © 2016 David Cook. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction, ix,
1. Skepticism without a Doubt, 1,
2. Exploring Biomythology, 18,
3. Schools, Courts, and Imbeciles, 36,
4. Intelligent Designs, 60,
5. Evolutionary Equivocation, 78,
6. Murder by Ugly Fact, 99,
7. Is Darwinism a Religion?, 116,
8. The Rhetoric of Objectivity, 142,
9. Musical Definitions, 166,
10. Rock of Evidence, 189,
11. Fallacy to a Higher Power, 215,
12. The Road to Truth, 233,
13. Some Falsehoods Are More Equal than Others, 257,
14. The Madness in Shakespeare's Method, 270,
15. Rhetorical Numbers and Apes, 283,
16. Art, Nature, and Reconstruction, 300,
17. The Ghost in the Paradigm, 314,
18. Free Will versus Free Excuse, 329,
19. The Golden Rule of Skepticism, 349,
20. Skeptical Faith, 360,
Bibliography, 375,
Notes, 385,