It’s Easy, True, and Useless to Call Glenn Beck Stupid
I’ve mostly kept this blog in the realm of science rather than politics, and I try never to get involved with creationism silliness, but with Glenn Beck ranting about evolution, I’ll make an exception.
Discussing evolution, Beck said, in part: “I don’t think we came from monkeys. I think that’s ridiculous. I haven’t seen a half-monkey, half-person yet.” (You can get the video here, among other places.)
One thing I continue to find interesting is the details of how people get confused about issues related to the theory of evolution by natural selection. It’s all well and good to smugly say that Beck is an ignorant blowhard who knows nothing about the science and wouldn’t care even if he did because of a cynical political agenda, but that – while quite possibly true – obscures a potentially interesting and maybe even (politically?) important question: what’s with this half-monkey thing?
As someone very close to me once said (it was me), “there are many ways to be confused.” It seems like it’s worth going beyond the idea that Beck doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and asking how he managed to get confused in this particular way. I mean, surely, Beck, in principle, understands the relevant distinctions here. I don’t know if Glenn has siblings, but assuming he does, if you asked him if he and his siblings had the same parents, he’d probably say “yes, of course we do, and that question is sufficiently stupid that I’m guessing you watch my show”. He’d probably also agree that he and his brother have the same ancestors so, “yes,” he’d say, he and his sibs are both descended from his parents. But once he got to this point, surely he wouldn’t scratch his head and start puzzling over where the heck the half-Glenn, half-Glenn’s brother creature was. I mean, there it seems obvious he can probably figure out that two individuals can have common ancestors without the requirement that there be some intermediate form who ought to have been there somewhere in the Beck household.
So, assuming he’s really confused, as opposed to just pretending to be confused, what’s the problem here? Why does he think that if A is descended from B, then there has to be, in the present, a form intermediate between the two? And it’s not like Beck is the only one to be confused in this way, or at least in a similar way. People frequently make similar mistakes, and they come in various incarnations: “if we descended from chimps (we didn’t), then why are there still chimps?”
From this, combined with the fact that people don’t worry about the lack of half-brother, half-Glenn cases, it seems that there’s nothing hard to understand about common descent per se. The problem seems to come in when we’re talking about species, and change over time, as opposed to individuals.
Superficially, it seems to me to have something to do with the fact that people are essentialists about species, and seem to have trouble thinking about changes in species over time. (A number of people have done work in this area; Dan Nettle, for instance, has some stuff on this.)
Richard Dawkins, is often quoted for his remark in The Blind Watchmaker: “It is almost as if the human brain were specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism, and to find it hard to believe.” But surely the mind isn’t designed to misunderstand Darwinism per se. It’s designed to do something else, and the misunderstanding emerges as a side-effect, which in turns leads to the sort of drivel we have to endure from Beck and his ilk.
Ok. Rant over.
(Thanks to Justus Myers for directing my attention to this.)
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