
Richard Dawkins' response to “What scientific idea is ready for retirement?" - __Joker
http://edge.org/response-detail/25366
======
btipling
This "essentialism" applies to gender as well. Not just gender but sexual
orientation and even biological sex which some sociologists and
anthropologists distinguish as different from gender. These are not binary,
but actually gradients. We like to classify people as either male or female,
and have that mapped perfectly to the biological sex they were born with, and
likewise mapped to their sexual orientation, but it hides a subtler reality.

This goes with sexual orientation as well. We want to map people into straight
or gay, but that is also a gradient where, like gender, people fall in in
various parts of the gradient.

When I brought this up with a friend, we were talking about the new women.com
yc startup and how they only accepted "women", he responded with that there
are two distinct peaks in this gradient, like if you mapped this as a graph. I
think you can actually blame these peaks not in small part on the immense
social pressure to conform to either being male or female (which bathroom do
you go into?), or even being straight or gay. It doesn't have to be that way,
and there are ways other cultures solved this problem, like some Native
American groups actually had a third gender[1].

I find the concept of "essentialism" interesting and intuitive to think about,
including its flaws, which as Dawkins points out can be quite destructive.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_gender](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_gender)

~~~
jiggy2011
I don't know, if this were the case you would expect more sexual
experimentation than you see. A majority of straight men never have sex with
other men or watch gay porn, just as a majority of gay men have no interest in
sex with a woman. Anything in between we call "bisexual" which is an imprecise
definition.

For this to be true you would need to believe that most straight men have
repressed homosexual desires and most gay men have repressed heterosexual
desires.

~~~
btipling
It would still be a gradient even if the distribution of where people fit into
it isn't even. The way my sociologist professor explained it in school was
that the gradient is for "attraction" and like some appreciate the attractive
qualities of one gender while not actually having any desires attached to that
appreciation.

~~~
jiggy2011
But doesn't that commit the same fallacy of trying to fit your data to a
specific model such as a "gradient" view rather than a binary view, when in
fact it fits neither , both of these views are "essentialist" in that sense.
Besides there's certainly a different between an aesthetic appreciation and a
sexual desire, someone might have an aesthetic appreciation for a car or
mobile phone for example.

~~~
btipling
Sure, you could think of it as one gradient (gender) mapped to another (sexual
orientation). The whole desire of us to classify these things into neat little
labels falls apart though when you look at research and ethnographies of
different cultures that did things differently.

~~~
jiggy2011
But does a gradient really provide a clear picture if ~90% of your data points
stick to one side or the other? To me this seems to be just as clumsy as a gay
straight/gay/bi classification system. Either way risks warping your thinking
as described in the article.

~~~
btipling
We are talking about people. So I think this kind of research and distinction
makes for a powerful reminder of why tolerance for diversity is so important.
Were those young people who do not happen to fit so nicely into these
categories encouraged to be themselves rather than conform with 90% of the
other data points, maybe they could live happier, stress free lives.

~~~
jiggy2011
Perhaps, but when you have large populations that can be mapped to discrete
points then it does make sense to label and observe these.

------
lkozma
"The world is divided into those who get this truth and those who wail,..."

Is Dawkins making a joke here, or is he falling into the same fallacy he is
deriding in the article. Clearly the world is not "divided" into these two
camps, there is a continuum in between and the same person can also hold one
view at a time, a different one later, etc.

~~~
callum85
Ha good point :) I don't think it's a joke, I think he is falling into the
same fallacy himself. To be fair, the article acknowledges it's a difficult
trap: "We seem ill-equipped to deal mentally with a continuous spectrum of
intermediates. We are still infected with the plague of Plato’s essentialism."
He would probably agree, if someone pointed it out to him, that his phrasing
here was an example of exactly what he's talking about. I think it is just a
fault of phrasing though; it doesn't really undermine the sentiment of the
article. It almost vindicates it!

~~~
smsm42
>>> We seem ill-equipped to deal mentally with a continuous spectrum of
intermediates. We are still infected with the plague of Plato’s essentialism.

This is contradictory. If we have some kind of mental handicap that not allows
us to perceive spectra properly, it's wrong to blame Plato for this. If,
however, Plato is the one who steered the whole civilization wrong, that means
we are capable of doing better - we just don't do it right now. Of course, it
could be that it's both but Plato and mental handicap together wouldn't allow
us to realize it :) Recursion is recursive.

~~~
lutusp
> If we have some kind of mental handicap that not allows us to perceive
> spectra properly, it's wrong to blame Plato for this.

I think Dawkins is simply using Plato's idea as an intellectual roadsign, not
assigning moral responsibility. If I refer to Karl Popper when discussing
falsifiability, I might simply be providing a convenient reference to the
idea, not holding Popper responsible for the idea (which he isn't).

~~~
smsm42
I think since he discusses the essentialism as an idea that needs to be
dropped, he goes further than that - he seems to blame Plato (at least among
others) for "infecting" us (taken broadly) with the essentialism. After all,
the idea of essentialism has to come from somewhere, somebody had to invent
it. To me, Dawkins assigns the fault for it to Plato. He does it in the very
first sentence - "Essentialism—what I’ve called "the tyranny of the
discontinuous mind"—stems from Plato".

~~~
lutusp
Again, describing the origin of an idea isn't the same as assigning
responsibility. Your use of words like "blame", "infecting" and "fault", and
the associated tone, simply have no parallel in the article.

Also, correlation is not causation. Many of these classic ideas, found in the
writings of Plato, Aristotle and others, were as much responses to the
prevailing ideas of the time as they were a source or inspiration for those
ideas. Our modern perspective is distorted by the fact that we may have only
one writer's record of the ideas of a time, which may mislead us into thinking
that particular writer originated the idea instead of reporting it.

~~~
smsm42
"Infecting" is a direct quote from "We are still infected with the plague of
Plato’s essentialism." and Dawkins uses the same word at least twice more.

>>> Our modern perspective is distorted by the fact that we may have only one
writer's record of the ideas of a time, which may mislead us into thinking
that particular writer originated the idea instead of reporting it.

This very well may be true, but since we and Dawkins share this perspective,
and Dawkins offers no other suggestion and no other name but Plato and does
not consider the possibility that this perspective might be wrong in any way,
I think the conclusion that he operates on the assumption that this
perspective - attributing essentialism to Plato - is correct would not be
illogical, at least when we consider this particular article.

------
belovedeagle
Frankly, Dawkins didn't answer the question, which was about a /scientific/
idea "ready for retirement". But Dawkins is so blinded by his ridiculous,
anti-intellectual scientism that not only did he find himself unable to
discredit just one single scientific idea (which, by their sheer quantity and
variety, /must/ contain among their number some failure), but he can't even
distinguish the boundary between science and philosophical positions which
haven't been popular (in their entirety) in millenia. As such, while Dawkins
would have provided a convincing (to me) opponent for Plato, in this context,
his essay is pure poppycock.

~~~
alexandros
It's a bit of an impossible ask though. If a "scientific idea" is one which is
supported by the balance of the evidence at this time, then no current
scientific idea is ready for retirement. Scientific ideas don't "have to"
contain some "failure". If they do, we don't know about it yet. When we do, we
retire it proactively. Unless you zero in on one idea where the balance of
evidence has very very recently shifted against it, you have to look a bit
further than the "current theories/hypotheses" space, into the philosophical
ideas, which is what Dawkins is doing.

What would you suggest as a scientific idea ready for retirement?

~~~
pella
"2014 : WHAT SCIENTIFIC IDEA IS READY FOR RETIREMENT?"

* "Evidence-Based Medicine"

* "Large Randomized Controlled Trials"

* "Things Are Either True Or False"

* "Psychogenic Illness"

* "Replication As a Safety Net"

* "Reproducibility"

* "Falsifiability"

* "The Power of Statistics"

* "Certainty. Absolute Truth. Exactitude."

* "The Rational Individual"

* "IQ"

* "Mind Versus Matter"

* "Infinity"

* "Statistical Significance"

* "Artificial Intelligence"

* "Theories of Anything"

* "Computer Science"

* "Simplicity"

* "Scientific Morality"

( details : [http://edge.org/responses/what-scientific-idea-is-ready-
for-...](http://edge.org/responses/what-scientific-idea-is-ready-for-
retirement) )

~~~
appstateguy
It seems to me that Dawkins' response was an attempt to address the "root" of
many of these problem. Essentialism is necessary for people to understand by
creating idealistic meaning, but in doing so you also lose knowledge by
creating an abstraction.

Having said that, I'm not sure how you could "retire" this concept since we,
as humans, rely on abstractions for everything (language, math, morals, etc).
I feel his point is just that scientists should keep this in mind, as a check
against the ego which is what leads to dogmatic thinking.

Edit: Thinking more about it I think that Dawkins' answer was a good one, but
it seems like he in a way misunderstands its meaning. He uses it to showcase
how it can be used to 'mislead' people into disbelieving things like
evolution, but he doesn't seem to recognize that if you were to completely
remove the concept of essentialism you would essentially have to accept that
science can never describe everything and at some point one just has to accept
things as they are without meaning. This implies, then, that science is just
one 'perspective' for giving meaning to something that is essentially
meaningless. This to me would also mean that science and religion are not
opposing forces but simply different ways at looking at the same thing.

------
analog31
Looking through the entire list of essays, I was struck by how few I was
willing to acknowledge as "scientific" ideas. Many seemed like straw men, and
the entire list might give a false impression that scientists are blinded by
bad ideas.

------
IvyMike
> Yet so entrenched is our essentialist mind-set, American official forms
> require everyone to tick one race/ethnicity box or another: no room for
> intermediates.

On both the 2000 and 2010 census forms, I put "Other" and filled in "human".

~~~
jaimebuelta
I always find this need to totally categorise "race" as an absolute as
something very curious about the American culture...

~~~
DanBC
English diversity forms can have complex listings of categories. Here's the
English census, which might be mildly interesting to US readers because it has
no mention of any American races:

Well, I'd like to copy paste an URL here. I go to Google and type "English
census form" into the box. First non-advert hit is the one I want. Right
click, copy link address, switch tab, paste. Look at this fucking blob:

    
    
        http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CDsQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2F
        www.ons.gov.uk%2Fons%2Fguide-method%2Fcensus%2F2011%2Fthe-2011-census%2F2011-census-questionnaire
        -content%2F2011-census-questionnaire-for-england.pdf&ei=4aQDVO-SE6ek0QXs4oHwAQ&usg=
        AFQjCNGAEFRjZVqTLVgB0m9zxbbIcrcoBg&sig2=lPEfOAzhMhA0EO3GG9T19w
    

(I added linebreaks to prevent breaking the HN page.)

[http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&...](http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CDsQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ons.gov.uk%2Fons%2Fguide-
method%2Fcensus%2F2011%2Fthe-2011-census%2F2011-census-questionnaire-
content%2F2011-census-questionnaire-for-england.pdf&ei=4aQDVO-
SE6ek0QXs4oHwAQ&usg=AFQjCNGAEFRjZVqTLVgB0m9zxbbIcrcoBg&sig2=lPEfOAzhMhA0EO3GG9T19w)

NO GOOGLE. NO PERSON WANTS THAT FUCKING URL. EVERYBODY WANTS THIS URL:

[http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/guide-
method/census/2011/the-2011-...](http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/guide-
method/census/2011/the-2011-census/2011-census-questionnaire-
content/2011-census-questionnaire-for-england.pdf)

(Section 16 - Copy from a multi column PDF is painful. Sorry. Trying to select
text from that made me want to smash up my computer.)

~~~
quesera
Google has been serving those wanked URLs in search results for years, but
only to logged-in users. Even if you turn off all search history settings.

They apparently use the data to measure the strength of their ranked results.
But that doesn't explain the logged-in vs _not_ disparity.

~~~
qu4z-2
My favourite bit is the bait-n-switch where they show the correct url, then
change it under you as soon as you click. That seems very underhanded to me.

------
smsm42
I don't see anything about science in this essay. Philosophically, it may be a
valid critique of essentialism, in the meaning that primitive conclusions
Dawkins is drawing - as for rabbits or state politics - are indeed looking
invalid. But nobody currently advocates such concepts - i.e. nobody really
builds a scientific theories based on the fact that rabbits literally
represent the "ideal rabbit" and nobody actually thinks all Florida residents
are Democrats or Republicans. We may act as if they are, in order to simplify
certain things, such as deciding who will be the president or which pills to
give to a specific rabbit, but we know they really aren't.

OTOH, if you drop the concept entirely, then you'd need to throw a significant
part of modern science out of the window. Modern science bases on the fact
that there are some laws of nature, which are universal and fixed, and by
doing certain actions and making certain conclusions using certain techniques
we can discover these laws and thus discover how ideal Platonic objects would
behave, and by reasoning about those objects we could derive the useful
conclusions about real world objects. If you reject this method, then you'd
have to make a scientific theory anew for each object, which would be kind of
hard to make practical. Modeling is necessarily idealization, and if you
reject idealization, not much is left of the scientific method. What Dawkins
seems to argue is that one should realize the map is not the territory, but
isn't it obvious to everybody by now?

------
brandonmenc
> But any evolutionist knows there must have existed individuals who were
> exactly intermediate.

Is this not still up for debate, re: macromutation? Can someone more
knowledgeable clear this up?

~~~
tinco
More from reason than from any experience in biology: I don't think
macromutation has any statistical chance of being a significant factor in
branching of species. The chance of a 'macromutation' both occurring and being
successful enough to not only let the spawn survive but even let it thrive as
a branched species is vanishingly slim.

Perhaps complex characteristics might evolve as functions with simple gene
input, like perhaps the shape of an organ or the structure/color of a fur or
even the size of a mammal all expressed by a few genes. This would allow that
the species as a whole could adapt quicker to environmental changes. Then the
gene mutation would be 'micro' but the resulting change could be 'macro'.
Perhaps paedomorphism is like that?

------
runeks
Very interesting article.

> Essentialism rears its ugly head in racial terminology. The majority of
> "African Americans" are of mixed race. Yet so entrenched is our essentialist
> mind-set, American official forms require everyone to tick one
> race/ethnicity box or another: no room for intermediates.

I thought about this as well some time ago. It's odd that the child of a black
and a white parent is black, and not "neither black nor white" or "both black
and white".

------
jqm
Best Quote of the article...

"Essentialism rears its ugly head in racial terminology. The majority of
"African Americans" are of mixed race. Yet so entrenched is our essentialist
mind-set, American official forms require everyone to tick one race/ethnicity
box or another: no room for intermediates."

Yes, this has driven me nuts for years. I had to fill out a form a few days
ago with the "race" check box (optional of course...). I keep scratching my
head and wondering how one exactly determines this and what difference it
makes and most of all... why would somebody put such an unreasonable and
fallacious question on a form?

~~~
MichaelGG
What's wrong with it, besides the very limited answer space? They should let
you check of multiple boxes or fill in rough percentages. That allows finding
things like "people with 15% or more X ancestry tend to do better on Y".

It's not unlike asking "What culture are you?" Providing useful answers may be
difficult, but it's not fundamentally a wrong thing to ask.

------
wsxcde
Dawkins seems to be a good example of the Peter principle at work in a large
social movement. Clearly he's a smart guy and at some point in his career he
did have interesting and original insights to share with the rest of us.

But it seems like the new atheists [1] have elevated (promoted) him into near
demigod status and he's now being socially pressured into producing new and
original insight on a regular basis. Unfortunately for him, he doesn't have an
infinite well of wisdom and insight and so he ends up producing drivel of this
sort.

[1] I am a new atheist and some of blame for what has happened here probably
falls at my feet as well.

~~~
lclarkmichalek
This image comes up pretty commonly on r/badphilosphy when something he says
(or drama surrounding something he says) is discussed:
[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BpXAZGuCMAA21xA.jpg](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BpXAZGuCMAA21xA.jpg)

I wouldn't go quite so far as to absolve him for his opinions due to social
pressure, but there is truth in what you say.

~~~
wsxcde
I'm not absolving him of his opinions by any means. I was just pointing out
that he's been elevated to this status where he can't (won't? is unwilling
to?) do what most other reasonable people would have done if they were asked
this question. He could've just said, "that's a really interesting question
and I don't have an answer" but instead it appears he's compelled to answer
with a lot of verbiage and little actual content.

------
pella
All answer:

[http://edge.org/responses/what-scientific-idea-is-ready-
for-...](http://edge.org/responses/what-scientific-idea-is-ready-for-
retirement)

------
baddox
That's something that has always bugged me about taxonomy in general, or at
least the way it is portrayed both in the media and in the broad amateur
research I have done on the subject.

~~~
TeMPOraL
That's something that actually bugged me about Object Oriented Programming,
especially the way it was taught at the university (with Java and UML
diagrams). Taxonomy is often a useful tool, but the closer you get to hairy
real-world problems, the more likely it is that your hierarchical object
representation will come around to bite you.

------
acex
How can someone like this call himself an intellectual or be called a leading
world's intellectual. I think that an intelligent design is an insult to both,
intelligence and design and I as well think that circle (more than a triangle)
arise from a biochemistry and as a part of the same evolution. Dawkins in the
same piece uses the same argument to claim that the evolution came late in the
development of human mind. Late compared to what? Evolution? Millions of yeas
compared to a few thousands years of a written word or since we invented a
more persistent method to pass the knowledge than story or since a man drew
some of the first inscriptions on a wall of a cave. And this is no allegory.
Let us get rid of the PI formulas then. It does fit the model. Since we can
only approximate it we cannot use it. The world is a better place today than
it was hundreds or thousands of years ago. The idea that it can be better is
the very idea of ideal and abstract types we are never to reach and should
always aspire to. Essentialism, from an evolutionary standpoint, relatively is
no less correct than some other approximation of what a certain species is in
some period. The evolutionary traits are the same for hundreds of thousands of
years for a species. Mutations take place rarely and only on extreme
environmental changes. The nature (or the evolution) is perfect there. Its
every 'design' has a function perfected through many centuries. This is
essential (sic) problem with the certain type of scientists (those of
celebrity type) is that they not count in how short is human experience on
this world. We say Earth is 4.5 billions years old and that we know that and
those people who claimed differently are in wrong as if we as a human race
posses our own memory since primordial soup. In a shallow struggle against
those 6 thousands years we tend to forget that ideas and their shapes were
experience of the world. Colours are not wrong, we experience the colours the
same way as thousands years before. And will experience them in the future in
a broader spectre. Like we always did with everything. The very world we
experience, even when we do it with our best tools is no more than an
approximation of a world more perfect (or less measured and computed).

~~~
Crito
> _Late compared to what?_

I have developed a sort of notion about the inevitability of invention which I
believe can be generalized to the discovery of other concepts or the
development of abstract ideas.

It works basically like this: Nearly all inventions require prerequisite
inventions. For example, the ipod required transistors and batteries (among
many other things) to exist before it could be invented.

Looking back at history, we can compile lists of technologies that would have
been prerequisites for other technologies. We can determine when these
prerequisites were met, and then compare that date to the date of invention.
Is there a small gap between the two, or a large one?

Many inventions have very small gaps between their genesis and the fulfillment
of their prerequisites. Powered heavier-than-air aircraft are a good example;
they were created within years of the creation of a suitably light and
powerful internal combustion engine.

Some inventions have very large gaps between their genesis and the fulfillment
of their technical prerequisites. If you were a "Connecticut Yankee" in King
Arthur's Court, these are the inventions you would [re]invent. Things like the
phonograph. Basic clockwork, wax, needles, and parchment are all that you need
to create a rudimentary phonograph that works well enough to prove the concept
_(to show how simple it is: if you 've got a shitty vinyl record laying
around, you can play it back with a paper cup with a needle stuck through the
bottom)_.

Inventions that came long after their strict prerequisites can be considered
"late". They weren't waiting for technology or better materials, only waiting
for somebody to have the idea. The vast majority of inventions were not
particularly late.

~~~
acex
Someone could argue that if we had not lost the Archimedes Palimpsest we could
be in a better shape scientifically.

