Childhood Origins of Resistance to Evolution
This is an old, unpolished file I dragged up from my folder filled with notes and clutter. Come back daily till the 12th of February for the Darwin Day advent posts and links!
In a 2002-2003 study about a third of American adults indicated that evolution is “absolutely false” (Miller et al. 2006). Disturbing as these results might be, the origin of this misconception concerning life’s humble origins lies not solely with, as one might expect, religious fundamentalism or plain ignorance.
In a review article in the renowned journal Science (access required), Dr. Paul Bloom and Dr. Deena Skolnick Weisberg, of the Department of Psychology at Yale, argue that a resistance to science finds its origins in childhood (Bloom and Weisberg 2007). Children already possess an innate — and incorrect — sense of the functioning of the physical world. According to many children, everything in the world has a purpose. Flowers have pretty colors because we enjoy the colors so much. Or, clouds are made for rain, and the purpose of a cat is to chase a mouse. How are these views different than the view that man was uniquely created and that a woman was created as his partner?
Evolution goes in against our innate sense of how the world operates. It teaches us that we are not uniquely selected beings, and that we do not have a specific purpose in life. We are just part of the entire chain of life, past, present and future. There are so many other innate propensities to unscientific thinking we overcome when we grow up: what makes evolution so different? A child finds it hard to imagine that the world is spherical, but any sane adult can comfortably grasp this idea. But so many of us are told that our innate feelings concerning the world are correct, and that evolution’s counterintuitive concept is indeed wrong. School Boards fight over the inclusion of evolution and creationism, and many more School Boards just leave both out of the science classroom altogether in an attempt not to step on zealously long toes. Churches preach against science and many individuals accept the religious world view based on the holy trinity of misguided intuition, ignorance, and authority. But why does evolution feel innately incorrect to begin with?
Not everyone fully understands the workings of evolution; not even every evolutionary biologist grasps every single intricate concept to the fullest. We know evolution took place, takes place, and will continue to take place, but minute details of natural and sexual selection are still uncovered every single day. That we do not know how a part of the total sum exactly works is no argument against the whole. We do not argue that combustion engines are impossible because we are (currently) unable to explain exactly what happens in such an engine on the scale of quantum physics.
Evolutionary science also seems more abstract than, to use the previous example, the workings of a combustion engine. We don’t have to know how an engine works to know that it indeed does work: our daily commute to school or work is proof enough. We do not experience evolution directly. Millions, even billions of years of evolution, and we and all other species on this planet are a temporary results of this process. But we live for only a century, if we are lucky enough. Our lifetime is only a fraction compared to evolutionary time and we also don’t feel the effects evolution has on us directly. Evolutionary change will reveal itself in the offspring of the offspring of the offspring of the offspring — repeated many times — of our offspring. If there even is some pressure to change to begin with.
That we lack the personal experience for evolution does not mean there is no compelling evidence for evolution. There is literally and figuratively tons of scientific evidence, from diverse fields such as paleontology, biology, sociology, psychology… basically any field of research involving the study of living things, past and present. As Richard Dawkins eloquently wrote in his persuasively written book The Selfish Gene: “[t]oday the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun.”
Still, it is not hard to imagine that someone who is evolutionary illiterate will not be easily conveyed by what a scientist in a scruffy labcoat, using big words such as ‘horizontal gene transfer’, ‘genetic drift’, and ‘punctuated equilibrium’, has to say about it. We might just be preprogrammed to not understand evolution.
References
Bloom, P. and Weisberg, D.S. 2007. Childhood origins of adult resistance to science. Science 316(5827), pp. 996-7.
Miller, J.D., Scott, E.C. and Okamoto, S. 2006. Public Acceptance of Evolution. Science 313(5788), pp. 765-6. Erratum in: Science (2006) 313(5794), p. 1739.