Consider how frequently self-appointed skeptics and atheists assert the unreliability of other people's beliefs about their own thoughts, saying that anyone who believes anything about their own, personal experience is unreliable if not that the person is delusional. That is something that is commonly done when it is something the "skeptic" doesn't like. But the same "skeptical" atheist will then assert as truth what ethologists and evo-psy scribblers say about what is going on in the minds of animals and ancient human ancestors who can't even tell us what they believe about their experience.
In my recent arguments with Jeffrey Shallit, a computer sci-guy- mathematician at the University of Waterloo, one of the problems seems to be that he, like most of the educated class of the English Speaking Peoples, has a misconception of the state of the art of the science of evolution. Among mathematicians and scientists that misconception is, really, inexcusable. It's extremely simple to demonstrate that the science rests on an extremely small fraction of the relevant information which a theoretically complete science of evolution would require.
We've all been brought up to have many articles of faith about some of the most complex of science and in no area is this more true than the study of evolution. I've come to believe that's true because evolutionary science has become so polluted with ideological and political extras that it is prone to producing faith positions founded in ideological struggle in place of science. And I'm only talking about those of us who accept the fact that evolution is a fact.
Perhaps Shallit, as many a scientist who doesn't specialize in evolution, and many who do, has a much inflated conception of how much is known today about what is, beyond a doubt, the largest and most complex phenomenon, only partly susceptible to scientific methods, that science proposes to study. I say partly because in the 3.5+ billion years long, trillions of organisms vast "thing" that comprises evolution, the vast majority of the physical subject matter is lost through rot, consumption, erosion, and being unfound, crushed, in the vastness of geological change.
And those are just the theoretically observable physical aspects of evolution. Evolution is also an historical science, dealing with the lives of organisms, singly, in groups and in the entire biosphere, which are among the most relevant of events that impinge and have impinged on all aspects of change in species over time. Any events that had an effect on evolution during those trillions of lives that are unrecorded are lost to science, forever.
A brief consideration of the dimensions of time and numbers in evolution as compared to the history of human evolutionary study reveals just how little of that is available for science. The attempts to reconstruct those lost events are so fraught with susceptibility to misconception, misunderstanding and, most often of all, professional and ideological interest and wishful thinking, that the products derived from that should be called "lore" not science. And that is probably charitable, in many cases. Much of what is passed off as science is intentional ideological promotion instead of reporting on the observation of physical evidence.
It is undeniable that the fraction of what is reliably known about evolution constitutes an extremely small part of one percent of the defined phenomena science proposes that the science of evolution covers. And it's quite possible that list of included phenomena, today, is far from complete. My expectation of any phenomenon known in that puny amount of detail is that people making general statements about it are more likely to guess wrong than right about the entire thing. It doesn't much matter how you feel about the consequences of that level of ignorance or how extremely inconvenient the consequences of it, what you don't know really does matter. I'd have thought that, considering the truly infinite field of mathematics, that a mathematician might have gotten his mind around a problem like that.
And that's about what is vulnerable to study by scientific methods. The entirely relevant issues of thoughts and related behaviors of sentient beings, perhaps, especially of the more intelligent of those, are entirely hidden and ideas about them are frequently wrong. Which is what the "skeptical" debunkery mentioned in the first paragraph is based on, only, clearly, not when it suits them to pretend otherwise. In nothing is that more true than in human "study" of the minds and motives of animals. Even those close to us in the tree of life are, honestly, incomprehensible.
For animals, today, as much unlike us as ants, bees and wasps, generally living in colonies consisting of sterile, non-breeding, siblings all belonging to different biologically determined castes in service to a breeding sister who is the mother of them all, including the smaller number of males, the idea that their thoughts and minds are comprehensible to human beings is bizarre. Even to human beings, who grow up to make their way to teach at Harvard or Oxford. There is no reason to believe that even the admitted expert, E.O. Wilson, can comprehend what the mind of an ant is like, what it is like to function from the point of view of an ant. How that isn't relevant to an alleged study of "ant behavior" should be asked before getting on with academic publication.
When you consider the problem of one human being understanding another one, the idea that even the foremost human myrmecologist can do that is justifiably considered superstition and socially and academically enforced pretense. Consider if, as I'd guess is likely, that ants are not the unvaried, barely thinking, beings we imagine out of our ignorance for our convenience. To be getting on with publication.
It is convenient to the allegedly scientific study of behavior to pretend that even people are far simpler than they are. People can, sometimes, honestly testify as to what's going on unseeable, in their minds but, they are frequently mistaken about that. Admit your own experience, how well you can report that is incomplete, at best. And admit that without that report, nothing of anyone's internal experience is available to anyone but them. There is every reason to suspect that, as with the artist of that 35,000 year statue who left no record of what they were thinking I wrote about the other day, what people and ants today are thinking is not susceptible to science. Actually, without any articulation of it, there is no reason to pretend that it is.
And that's not even taking into account how scientific assertions about behavior are based only in the few individuals studied. Of those ants in their jillions around today, an extremely tiny sample are available to be watched by researchers, for a limited amount of time. Ants in even the recent evolutionary past and many others, presumably in species unknown today, thought and acted unrecorded for purposes of scientific observation and can't honesty be said to be available to science. That is true for all but the infinitesimally tiny fraction of animals studied in the history of evolution, including even the direct ancestors of modern humans, which can never be observed with the rigor to honestly constitute science.
Every single thing that can be said about thought is the product of the mind of the person saying it. That is even more so of the person talking about minds other than their own, commenting on what they can't know first hand. That fact determines the quality of what can be said about it. There is nothing to look at and measure and identify to report as something that can honestly aspire to objectivity. Behavioral "scientists" are using their own experience and the lens of their particular professional training to come up with ideas about that behavior and what is behind it. It is inevitably distorted and polluted by that fact. Consider how rare it is for an academic writer on behavior or cognition to come up with observations radically disconfirming their previous assertions. Any explanation of behavior is susceptible to that inevitable distortion. Even more than that, any idea proposed about that is susceptible to being the product of the interested imagination of the ethologist or other "scientist". It might have nothing to do with nature, at all. It might be merely imagination reported as reliable information. There is no process of logical verification, such as that possible in mathematics, that can verify the reality of anything said about behavior. Unlike the physical bodies and even observable behaviors that can be described and measured, thoughts today and, even more so the lost past, cannot honestly be subjected to scientific study.
When Shallit wasn't replacing opposing arguments and evidence with recitations of authorities and derision, he was asserting the scientific correctness of Sociobiology, the briefly popular "science" that E.O.Wilson instituted in the 1970s. In a very short time, in the face of its opponents pointing out its lavish application of assumptions about living species, asserting "behaviors" present in species clear across the vast field of taxonomy and other deficiencies, it was intentionally turned into "Evolutionary" Psychology, in which those assertions were made about the lost past, leaving "scientists" free to make conjectures without the inconvenience of reviewable observation of living beings.
All of this alleged biology replaces observable, measurable, physical evidence with conjecture. The practice of making up stories and calling it science is endemic to psychology and other social sciences, it always has been through out their history. It is not surprising that, whenever it is desired, that kind of story telling is asserted to be biological science. Today it's all the rage among that most tenuously asserted and self-interested of so-called "sciences", economics. Profitably telling rich people fables about their virtues and their money as biology is probably as sure a sign of complete decadence in a branch grafted on to real science as it is possible to find.
Periods of decadence, often related to the self-interest of an entrenched, financially rewarded establishment, happen in academic fields. I think, in the face of the extremely small amount of real information available on which to base the serious study of evolution, the fact of the behavioral and other aspects of that problem honestly being unavailable and the desire to make a name with what are purported to be vastly important discoveries, evolutionary science will be found to be more prone to that than some other areas of science. The real relevance of the behavior of organisms to evolution and the impossibility of honestly studying that with science in order to make general statements about it is a guarantee that "behavior" will be the vehicle leading the truly scientific study of evolution into decadence. If real biologists choose to accept baseless lore as science, there's not much anyone else can do to protect the integrity of the subject. I'm not optimistic that things will improve, there being so much professional prestige built up in opposition to that integrity.
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