NOTE TO READER: IF YOU ARE INTERESTED PLEASE DO READ THE COMMENTS BELOW. THEY DO MAKE SOME EXCELLENT POINTS.
Representations of Evolutionary Theory in Turkish Newspapers, a paper for which I am a co-author, will be presented in ECREA conference in Barcelona. Meanwhile, one of the co-authors, Murat Gülsaçan, brought to my attention the following paper by Setälä and Väliverronen, entitled Public acceptance of evolution and the rise of evolutionary discourse. This paper, though a little bit convoluted with jargon, seems to ask a very similar question with our paper, yet through a completely different epistemological glass.
We would argue that evolutionary theory is grounded in the rational thought. We would further argue that rational thought has a legitimate logical basis to make better predictions than other epistemologies. Setälä and Väliverronen, if I did not completely misunderstand what they were trying to communicate in their abstract, would argue that evolution is yet another kind of "rationalist discourse." It is very surprising, and somehow unnerving, to see this distinction within academia.
‘Yaz’ olmalı idi ilk söylenen, ‘oku’ değil. Biz tanrısı değil miyiz bilincimizin? Bizim beynimiz değil mi her suçu unutan? Biz değil miyiz ki her düşünceyi çarpıtan? Yazmalıyız ki sözümüz kök salsın, yazmalıyız ki değişen anlamların geri dönebileceği, yeniden başlayabileceği bir evi olsun. Yazmalıyız ki, suçlarımız ve suçluluklarımız ve hatalarımız yüzümüze çarpılabilsin. Bu değil midir hayatımızın anlamı?
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I am puzzled by this abstract...what on earth does evolutionary psychology have to do with anything here? It just pops up out of the blue -- I guess one would have to see the full paper to know.
ReplyDeleteAnd, forgive my ignorance, what is implied by "rationalist discourse"? There is obviously a difference between evolutionary psychology and the theory of evolution...
That is exactly my opinion. But I do not want to say that out loud before the conference... :)
ReplyDeleteI assume the authors are Finnish. At first they seem to be pissed that their beloved country was ranked uncharacteristically low in its acceptance of hip secularist things such as basic Darwinism. Then, they get even pissier as they complain that the 2006 Science article sparked a subversive attack on the otherwise characteristically science saaviness of Finns - making them look embarassingly ignorant to their E.U. counterparts. But, they follow with a funny complaint: embarassed Finns, in order to feel better about themselves, used the article as an excuse to attack any remnants of folkish attitude (religious, and anti-science) in Finland - as if the latter was responsible for the international shame qua "we're not as evolution-hip as we ought to be." The Evo-Psych deal is supposed to show the "real" reason behind the Finnish anti-folkishness: E.P. is the hippest, edgiest fashion right now in the land of Darwin (the UK, one of the top scorers in the Science article), and as it is both evolutionary and implies that folkish attitudes are ignorant and backward (a proposition that does not actually follow from EP), active proselytization of EP in Finland kills Siamese twins with one stone - (1) it should help promote Darwinian literacy at the same time that (2) it should help vanquish those folkish vestiges of a backward society that militate against the said literacy.
ReplyDelete....And this is interesting why?
I don't think they are making a serious judgement on whether or not evolutionary theory should be considered just another genre of discourse (qua folk theory) vs. a serious knowledge producing enterprise driven by a non-folk epistemic embedding (i.e. scientific epistemology. The authors are communications people and discourse is just their conventional unit for partition the world (their favored ontological unit) into things so that they can publish and make careers. I would bank that their understanding of evolutionary science (maybe even science in general) is actually poorer than what they think.
On the other hand, I do think that the popularization of evolutionary psychology at this point in time might as well be treated as somewhat folkish and "just rationalist-discursive." (Though I strongly assume that this is not the route the present authors will take in this paper) Viz., evolutionary psychology in general (not just the particular brand that is currently being meme-ified), scientific and all, is still in diapers as a serious knowledge producer. Popularizers like S. Pinker and others (not Dawkins, for once), tend to underplay a great deal of gappy theoretical presuppositions and empirical holes behind the theory (partly because of the legitimately ignorant anti-evolutionism amongst audiences), in favor of emphasizing the really cool, wickedly counter-folkish implications of evolutionary psychology (that happen to follow from currently "gappy" premises and data). In brief, its current popularization is "folky" in the sense that it relies much more on the rhetoric, authority, and hipness of its proponents rather than on an abundance of theoretical and scientific rigor. None of this, of course, is to say that EP is unscientific (it just tends to get overblown) or that it does not have good potential (just not in its current guise).