Mainstream science is overrated. Most of the reason it feels so effective and all-explaining is a cognitive illusion. Most people overestimate how solvent scientific consensus actually is.
I saw Joe Rogan’s recent interview of Mel Gibson.
Gibson said that he was a creationist and didn’t believe in evolution. Joe pushed back a bit, saying that mainstream science had found remnants of putatively proto-humans.
Here is a snippet of Mel’s response and the back and forth:
Mel: Yeah maybe they were monkeys I don’t know, you know.
Joe: There was, they’re similar to us just not where we are, they’re on the road to becoming what it means to be a human being.
Mel: Yeah I don’t know, I don’t know.
Joe: What do you think those are?
Mel: I don’t know they could be animals or they could be like look at today I mean you can get some mosquito can bite you and your kid can be born with a malformed skull or something it’s like uh you know they have those you know…
Joe: Yeah… but this is like a like a genetic thing like they’ve done they’ve mapped the genome of these creatures they’re different yeah.
Mel: Well I don’t know how to explain those, Joe, I don’t know.
Don’t worry Mel, I know how to explain that fact: The fact is false!
We don’t have any early hominid DNA and we nearly certainly never will. We have DNA samples of recent human “sub-sub-species” like Neanderthals and Denisovans, but those are so recent that they only went “extinct” after Aboriginal Australians physically and genetically departed from the rest of mankind.
We certainly do not have the various hypothesized species of Homo with their genomes all neatly fitted into some kind of system that clearly shows their relation and descent one from another and that they are distinct from both us and great apes.
Even if we did have their genomes, genomes are often so messy as to not be able to even show what Joe is supposing. We have the genomes of many people of many different races, and although we can look at haplogroups to determine descent (which are more or less directly inherented without change from a parent), most anything else has too much statistical noise.
Evidence that can’t be there.
Now Joe Rogan isn’t quite lying—he is saying what he assumes is true. He’s heard of supposedly early supposedly hominin fossils, how they are related, how they must have geneticly diverged, and how evolution should affect the geno- and phenotypes, so he assumes that the finding of bones of something like “Lucy” and the publishing of a theory of such a creature’s life and date must come as well with its genome and the theoretical cornucopia of corroborating data.
After all, it’s hard to visit a friend’s house without leaving DNA behind. Certainly having “Lucy’s” bones means we have her genome sequenced. Can’t they just dig into her marrow? If scientists can find out who you’re related to by your DNA, or find a criminal based on DNA, certainly they should be able to show the relative descent of creatures on earth!
The reality is that not only that genomics is much more complicated than that, but also that DNA just doesn’t last that long. Supposed early hominids (or any creature) have no DNA remaining whatsoever, let alone a full genome (which I suppose I should say is not the same thing).
So why do we think Lucy is what we think it is? Well, we have a theory of species and their origins and its apparent traits fit in a well-wanted place.
Just Imagine the Science
My point here is not narrowly about evolution or creationism.
The point is that when we are brought up in a wider mindset of science, when we hear about a theory of how the world works, and see that there are trained authorities that say what kind of evidence we should expect, we naturally fill in the gaps and assume that work has been done to complete satisfaction.
Joe Rogan here is doing what we all do. He knows that the ideas of common ancestry, genetics, evolution and others will predict very specific things about the world. He also knows that theoretically we should have tools to find this information.
Obviously scientists are laboring to fill out precisely this predicted evidence—that’s what their careers are—but the human brain automatically fills in what could amount to thousands of years of scientific gruntwork without question.
Misimagining the Fossil Record
To the point above, the paleontologist David Raup has gone into some criticism of a narrowly Darwinian interpretation of the fossil record. This quote has been parroted by creationists quite a bit, because although Raup certainly was no creationist, it dispells a lot of the learned assumptions about what kind of evidence we actually find…
Evolution, but especially that motivated by Darwinian natural selection expects to find a fossil record that shows a slow transition from certain creatures into more fit creatures. This just isn’t what we see in the fossil record:
“Instead of finding the gradual unfolding of life, what geologists of Darwin’s time, and geologists of the present day actually find is a highly uneven or jerky record; that is, species appear in the sequence very suddenly, show little or no change during their existence in the record, then abruptly go out of the record. And it is not always clear, in fact it’s rarely clear, that the descendants were actually better adapted than their predecessors. In other words, biological improvement is hard to find.”
Raup, of course, is not endorsing creationism, and he certainly believes in the common ancestry of humans and animals, but he’s saying that a person looking at the entirety of the fossil record really sees species pop into and out of that record, whose relationship of descent with prior or posterior species is dubious.
When I was young and learning about evolution, I naturally assumed that scientists could dig into the fossil record and find incremental evolution, in which generation by generation, we could see early mammals become more and more humanlike with every passing century. This would be overwhelming evidence of Darwinian evolution… but it has nothing to do with what we actually find.
Raup goes further:
“We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn’t changed much. The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky and, ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin’s time. By this I mean that some of the classic cases of darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information—what appeared to be a nice simple progression when relatively few data were available now appears to be much more complex and much less gradualistic.”
There is a reason for the emergence of ideas such as punctuated equilibrium, wherein all species speciated from one origin, but their actual speciation is not something of Darwinian gradualism, but of relatively rapid reoganization of the entire being to new, rapid environmental changes. There is an even more radical theory, saltationism or the “hopeful monster” theory, wherein this evolution happens in massive mutations sometimes in a single generation….
There are a lot of different ways to interpret the fossil record as we see it, but had we known the fossil record as we know now, Darwinian natural selection would not be the best, or even a passable explanation of the data we see.
Nonetheless, natural selection is the public representative and stereotype of mainstream science. The ideology became so pervasive and ingrained in the culture that we speak and think with metaphors of natural selection as if it truly is some operant principle well evidenced through eons of time.
Point
Now I am not making a creationist point with this information, but one of public perception.
We are not actually shown scientific evidence—actual scientific evidence for anything (we can’t be)—because the reality is quite messy. “Evidence” doesn’t exist as if there are single ontological proofs or disproofs of theoretical frameworks. Anyone who for a moment pretends that “science” is so simple as to pretend that some Popperian “falsification” means anything only displays how far their experience or awareness is from how institutionalized science actually works. To truly delve into a field and to understand with sweat and rigor the painful complexities of it is something that cannot be adequately summed up in one or two archetypical examples to be fed to the masses, although those examples can indeed define how the masses understand the world.
Instead, in our “scientific education” we are told the underlying ideology or geist of the mainstream scientific current, for example, Darwinism, and we are shown piecemeal evidence which is by no means representative of reality, to shore up faith in that ideology. Once we know the logic of that ideology, we fill in the blanks of what the hypothetical evidence should say. This creates an illusion in our own mind of scientific uniformity and that illusion is the perfect weapon to dispell any of the many disproofs one will encounter if he acquires a more gritty and real relationship to the data as it actually exists.
There are a lot of times where R*dditors, “skeptics” or “science communicators” will have highly inflated views of how well mainstream scientific theory, or at least the public court history of it, correspond to actual facts on the ground. This is the case even when the theoretical framework of a fiend could be losely described as “true.” Even more so in the many, many cases where the consensus, for one reason or another or a million has in any way diverged from reality.