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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Most societies I am aware of still have males and females. There are various exceptions - e.g. various groups that perceived to be "outside" of the binary structure - but these would be still defined groups and there still would be labels. Could you give examples - more than one - of cultures that really perceived gender as a gradient?
For sexuality it is more complex since not all cultures have western fixation on sexuality and thus the question of who rubs which part of their body on which part of whose other body may not be as prominent as in our culture. I.e. they may have a concept of "gay" but it would be as big part of one's identity as "coffee drinker" or "likes to wear jeans" is in ours.
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.
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.
Or your sociologist professor is wrong, and the majority of the human population only orients to one sexual attraction or the other in binary, which makes a lot more sense from an evolutionary point of view.
I wonder from where do we have so much evidence about what happened before "hundred institutions" existed. Cultural institutions predate writing and probably predate oral history, in fact many animals have some kind of social institutions. So if there was an "ideal man", uncorrupted by "institutions" (Dawkins would, I suppose, dislike that idea very much), certainly we have very little evidence about how that man could behave. But I think such man never existed - social institutions are part of what humans are, and always have been. That could be different - as many other aspects of humanity are varied and diverse - but they always exist.
I'm not in the mood for googling, so forgive my lack of sources, but by institutions I mean the catholic church, islam and others. We have plenty of documentation showing homosexuality to be common in ancient Rome and Egypt, and it is said that a word describing homosexual acts didn't even exist until the 19th century.
"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.
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!
>>> 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.
> 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).
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".
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.
"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.
We are mentally equipped partially by our culture and our education. I don't know that Dawkins is committed to the notion that it is nature more than nurture that equips us poorly, though I admit I've only given the article a cursory skim.
I think it's just a rhetorical device that, had Dawkins thought a bit longer, he would have avoided in that specific context. Or it's meant ironically as others have suggested.
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.
Feel free to substitute "scientific idea" with "idea within the scientific community".
Challenges to any strictly "scientific idea" as you are thinking of them are not going to come in this form of article. They will come in the form of scholarly papers and studies published in major journals. They won't be prompted by these sort of fluff questions for celebrity scientists, they will naturally arise through research.
Dawkin's answer was not off; your expectations for what this question was asking and how it could be answered were off.
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?
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.
The scientific community works within paradigms which adequately explain their experiments. There may be some weird results, but as long as they remain few, new scientists will remain convinced of the paradigm's merits. The areas of weird results are the most interesting, and attract attention and further exploration.
When the weird results multiply after further investigation, ad hoc modifications to the theories of the paradigm might be necessary. This might work for a while, satisfying the scientists' need to explain their results.
However, ad hoc changes may push the paradigm to its limits. Crisis occurs within the scientific community. Scientists may start to abandon core tenets of the paradigm in search for new theories which are better at explaining all the weird results. The paradigm might be so ingrained into the world-view of its scientists that only young scientists who are yet to be indoctrinated might be able to see past it.
The famous examples are of relativity, quantum physics, and heliocentrism. Ptolemaic geocentrism, particularly, had a lot of ad hoc modifications to explain the loopy movement of planets.
If someone understands Kuhn and philosophy of science better than me, please correct me. I know that Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend have different views on "scientific progress", but Thomas Kuhn is the only one I have read on this topic.
> Scientific ideas don't "have to" contain some "failure".
That may be true, but all of them are subject to falsification by new evidence, and none of them move beyond challenge -- none of them become true in a final sense -- only false.
Perhaps he could answer the question, what is the most recently retired scientific idea? I imagine it's likely most readers are unaware that that idea (whatever it is) has been retired.
I can think of a few, starting with a very recently retired idea:
1. All biological life depends on sunlight. Falsified first by bacterial colonies that thrive near deep-sea volcanic vents.
2. Light requires an ether for its transmission. Falsified by the classic Michelson-Morley experiment.
3. The universe is static in overall size, "... which required Professor Einstein to add a cosmological constant to his intellectual masterpiece to make it agree with observation." Falsified soon after by observations that led to the Big Bang theory.
4. Phlogiston, the idea that burning matter relied on a hypothetical essence responsible for the combustion.
5. Universal and constant space and time, an idea favored by Isaac Newton, falsified by relativity.
6. Inheritance of acquired traits, falsified by modern genetics (but to some extent argued with by the new field of epigenetics).
Agreed. This is a great example of a "straw man attack". He sets up an intellectually shallow definition of a philosophical ideal and then somehow manages to connect it to Florida politics...Brilliant!
He deals so fluently in generalities that he starts sounding like a new-age prophet predicting the next earthquake that will blight humanity.
> 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
This is nonsense. Dawkins' topic wasn't scientific ideas ready for retirement, so it's not surprising that the issue didn't come up. Also, those who understand science realize there are no accepted ideas, ideas beyond challenge, ideas that have become truths. Scientific theories can never be proven true, only false -- this is one of the most basic scientific principles. I'm sure Dawkins fully understands this, but it happens it wasn't the topic of this article.
Dawkins is a proponent (probably the loudest, save possibly for NDT) of scientism. Scientism is inherently anti-intellectual (thus setting it apart from "science", which is, of course, not at all anti-intellectual). It's ridiculous that someone would blind themselves as thoroughly as Dawkins does with this position.
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.
> 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".
I'm actually kind of being a dick when I answer "human". In theory, the data is used to answer questions about "how racist/inequitable is America these days", and given some of the uglier bits of our history, this is an important question to answer.
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:
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.
The U.S. has a history of disenfranchised minorities. Surveys and censuses provide data (when given by participants...) that can be used to e.g. correlate median household income to racial demographics.
Then, people who want to make the U.S. more egalitarian have data to work with.
Ideally, the census would sample DNA and use that for aggregate statistics. (Pretending we could somehow do this while keeping privacy.) It'd be useful knowledge to know how certain clusters of genetic traits relate to socioeconomic ones.
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?
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?
> 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".
"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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
I think you're using a different definition of "essentialism" than Dawkins is. Dawkins was not arguing against improvement, but against the idea of clear boundaries between concepts.
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