but actually evolved ‘specifically for the purpose of experiencing religion’… but it would be very hard to prove this second statement, and anyone who makes it should be highly suspect.
Biology isn’t mathematics, so what do you mean by “prove”? I’m getting an “evolution is just a theory” vibe here.
It is not at all hard to prove the first statement in that paragraph—although if you would like to use a word other than prove, I am okay with that. I certainly don’t mean to suggest that evolution is ‘just a theory’, but rather to point out that just because we have an effective law of nature that explains large amounts of the world, we cannot pretend that it will explain everything that we are interested in talking about.
To be clear, I am not saying that something like ‘spirituality’ or ‘humanity’ is somehow apart from the physical laws or observed processes of nature. I am saying that when we talk about the effects of human nature on X, we need to remember that you do indeed need to consider what is the scientific evidence for ‘human nature’, and what is conjecture. Most people do not use ‘human nature’ and related terms in a way that is meaningful, even in science writing.
Most evidence tends to be pretty clear even in the field of anthropology. You can publish a speculative theory, but more often a paper is going to say “we found these bones with these markers here, {type of dating} indicates age of X with a margin of error of Y”; “technology X was found at Y at a depth of Z, this matches/does not match technology A in aspects B and C, but not P, Q, etc.” Ethnologies are a bit more suspect, but you can check who visited when and observed what, and see if the observations are consistent. And as you might imagine, genetic studies tend to be fairly clear cut.
When you make a more general statement about ‘human nature’, you start to move into frequency counts of observed societies, which mean that your sampling frame is very limited, and much more likely to give you exceptions than rules. Much of what you see in informal writing is broadly extrapolated from comparison with animals and broad assumptions both about the environment and about humans (assumed lack of) ability to adapt without genetic change.
As a shorthand, as in most fields, if a claim is made and a peer reviewed paper is not cited, assume that this is not the proper source for this information.
Seems that this is key. The question is what kind of sampling is broad enough to support what kind of assertion. I’m not sure if that can always be neatly determined, so you might have two sets of claims on a continuum between well-supported and totally speculative with a muddy stretch in the middle.
Yes—and if authors gave an indication of what sort of evidence they were looking at, it would not be a fallacy. It is fine to report that ‘5/5 of the X that we looked at are Y’, but the claim that ‘X are Y’ is not so fine. Most educated people (for example, science writers) seem to understand this for most cases, but drop their critical thinking when it comes to humans…
If you have a specific fallacy in mind, name it (or describe it). However, it is not a fallacy to say that one statement is better backed by evidence than another—you need to specify what evidence I am not being clear about, or any logical connections I have missed.
My intended claim was that we should be more aware of the evidence presented. I also do believe that when we are aware of the available evidence, we will come to disregard most of the references we see to the the content and causes of human nature, but this will depend on how you weigh the evidence.
However, if it will make the matter clearer, I can give you an example of evidence-based claims in the field of anthropology.
Here’s one that I hope isn’t too politically charged, but is still interesting: According to the Ethnographic Atlas Codebook derived from George Peter Murdock’s Ethnographic Atlas (1981), which recorded the marital composition of 1231 societies, from 1960-1980, 186 societies were monogamous, 453 had occasional polygyny, 588 had more frequent polygyny, and seven had polyandry.
Claims that could be made based on this include:
Approximately 85% of human cultures accept some form of polygyny.
Most human societies are polygamous.
Humans evolved to be polygamous.
Humans should be polygamous.
Polygamy gives humans a better chance of survival.
Primitive cultures are more likely to be polygamous.
Anthropologists are perverts.
Obviously, some of these claims you would not make unless you had a specific ax you wanted to grind. Some of these claims wouldn’t be supported by the data. Some of these claims would depend on how you, personally, tend to weigh evidence (particularly the normative ones). Even the first claim, the one most supported by the evidence, is questionable if you disagree on the terms (e.g., what constitutes as a distinct culture?). But this is the sort of thing that we (by which I mean pretty much all of us) are used to dealing with in the soft sciences—we know how to navigate these things. Unfortunately, people are much less willing to navigate fuzzy data accurately, and often much less motivated to navigate human data honestly.
Biology isn’t mathematics, so what do you mean by “prove”? I’m getting an “evolution is just a theory” vibe here.
It is not at all hard to prove the first statement in that paragraph—although if you would like to use a word other than prove, I am okay with that. I certainly don’t mean to suggest that evolution is ‘just a theory’, but rather to point out that just because we have an effective law of nature that explains large amounts of the world, we cannot pretend that it will explain everything that we are interested in talking about.
To be clear, I am not saying that something like ‘spirituality’ or ‘humanity’ is somehow apart from the physical laws or observed processes of nature. I am saying that when we talk about the effects of human nature on X, we need to remember that you do indeed need to consider what is the scientific evidence for ‘human nature’, and what is conjecture. Most people do not use ‘human nature’ and related terms in a way that is meaningful, even in science writing.
Do you know of a clean criterion for deciding when you’re dealing with mere conjecture and when you’re dealing with evidence?
Most evidence tends to be pretty clear even in the field of anthropology. You can publish a speculative theory, but more often a paper is going to say “we found these bones with these markers here, {type of dating} indicates age of X with a margin of error of Y”; “technology X was found at Y at a depth of Z, this matches/does not match technology A in aspects B and C, but not P, Q, etc.” Ethnologies are a bit more suspect, but you can check who visited when and observed what, and see if the observations are consistent. And as you might imagine, genetic studies tend to be fairly clear cut.
When you make a more general statement about ‘human nature’, you start to move into frequency counts of observed societies, which mean that your sampling frame is very limited, and much more likely to give you exceptions than rules. Much of what you see in informal writing is broadly extrapolated from comparison with animals and broad assumptions both about the environment and about humans (assumed lack of) ability to adapt without genetic change.
As a shorthand, as in most fields, if a claim is made and a peer reviewed paper is not cited, assume that this is not the proper source for this information.
Seems that this is key. The question is what kind of sampling is broad enough to support what kind of assertion. I’m not sure if that can always be neatly determined, so you might have two sets of claims on a continuum between well-supported and totally speculative with a muddy stretch in the middle.
Yes—and if authors gave an indication of what sort of evidence they were looking at, it would not be a fallacy. It is fine to report that ‘5/5 of the X that we looked at are Y’, but the claim that ‘X are Y’ is not so fine. Most educated people (for example, science writers) seem to understand this for most cases, but drop their critical thinking when it comes to humans…
I never said you did. I said you were committing the same fallacy as the people who do.
If you have a specific fallacy in mind, name it (or describe it). However, it is not a fallacy to say that one statement is better backed by evidence than another—you need to specify what evidence I am not being clear about, or any logical connections I have missed.
“The evidence isn’t 100% conclusive, therefore we should adopt a position of complete ignorance.”
I read the post as suggesting that we adopt a position of marginally increased skepticism relative to what prevails in common discussion.
My intended claim was that we should be more aware of the evidence presented. I also do believe that when we are aware of the available evidence, we will come to disregard most of the references we see to the the content and causes of human nature, but this will depend on how you weigh the evidence.
However, if it will make the matter clearer, I can give you an example of evidence-based claims in the field of anthropology.
Here’s one that I hope isn’t too politically charged, but is still interesting: According to the Ethnographic Atlas Codebook derived from George Peter Murdock’s Ethnographic Atlas (1981), which recorded the marital composition of 1231 societies, from 1960-1980, 186 societies were monogamous, 453 had occasional polygyny, 588 had more frequent polygyny, and seven had polyandry.
Claims that could be made based on this include:
Approximately 85% of human cultures accept some form of polygyny.
Most human societies are polygamous.
Humans evolved to be polygamous.
Humans should be polygamous.
Polygamy gives humans a better chance of survival.
Primitive cultures are more likely to be polygamous.
Anthropologists are perverts.
Obviously, some of these claims you would not make unless you had a specific ax you wanted to grind. Some of these claims wouldn’t be supported by the data. Some of these claims would depend on how you, personally, tend to weigh evidence (particularly the normative ones). Even the first claim, the one most supported by the evidence, is questionable if you disagree on the terms (e.g., what constitutes as a distinct culture?). But this is the sort of thing that we (by which I mean pretty much all of us) are used to dealing with in the soft sciences—we know how to navigate these things. Unfortunately, people are much less willing to navigate fuzzy data accurately, and often much less motivated to navigate human data honestly.