I need help
My father is — well, he’s not a creationist, but he doesn’t believe in evolution. His argument seems to boil down to this: look how long we’ve been on this planet! And we only got [important stuff] in the last six thousand years or so! It’s absurd!
Happy father’s day: I want to get him a book that might help convince him that he’s wrong. But he found, say, The Language Instinct too technical, so it needs to be really popularised. but convincing, since he is generally unwilling to be convinced. And it needs to answer this argument of his. I know it’s a bad one, but I was never any kind of biologist, so I can’t explain to him well enough why. He thinks I make everything up, anyhow.
This is like a challenge to your ingenuity or something. Please. The shame of this relationship is getting to me; I’m desperate. P.Z. Myers, I’m thinking of you.
June 11th, 2005 at 7:33 pm
You might try darwin’s dangerous idea, by dawkins, who is good in general, although he tends toward the technical. Give it a read yourself first, though.
June 11th, 2005 at 8:06 pm
Here’s what I recommend: At the Water’s Edge, by Carl Zimmer. It’s pitched just right, so a lay reader will have no trouble digesting it, yet the focus throughout is on the evidence — lots and lots of data. And it’s all about fossils and nifty tetrapods and whales.
June 11th, 2005 at 9:28 pm
I dunno, I consider things like molars, a closed circulatory system, and my skeleton to be pretty important - a lot more important than a system of numbers, the transistor, or swiffers, for that matter.
June 11th, 2005 at 9:47 pm
I think what he’s saying is that humans, as we recognise them, have been on this planet much longer than 6000 years, and yet, all the important stuff happened since. If we take “recognisable human” as “looks more or less like us and has a language”, which I will, because I am a linguist, then we have a long time between the development of language and, well, Europe, which is I guess what he’s talking about. (It’s hard to explain really stupid stuff.)
I will look at the two other books, though. Thank you.
June 11th, 2005 at 10:37 pm
If the argument is really about evolutionary biology any of Stephen Jay Gould’s books, but it sounds like you’re really arguing about human accomplishments? Technology? Art? Cro-Magnon cave paintings are fully as good as anything mankind has produced since, and they’re 35,000 years old. Or would reading a book about the cave paintings only push the date back without changing his mind in any significant way? I need clear mission objectives before I can formulate a strategy. :>
June 12th, 2005 at 1:21 am
I think it’s great that you’re thinking of Father’s Day’s gifts and considering what would be meaningful. It’s such a great thing to have a day to reflect on all the reasons why you love a parent, all the stuff you admire about them, all that is right. I’m glad to have it personally, not for my own father since I don’t have one, but to help my kids think of what they appreciate.
I’m glad you blogged this. I’ve very nearly forgotten about it.
June 12th, 2005 at 9:20 am
You see, I am not sure what we’re arguing about; it would be easier, then, since I could argue *against* something.
Michelle, yeah, as much as I complain about him a lot, I do love my father a great deal.
June 12th, 2005 at 9:20 pm
It *is* an interesting question. It’s an open question on when people-people showed up - that is, mentally modern folks. . . I’m not really up to date on the details, but let’s just say 50,000 years ago. That is a long time! It comes down, I think, to why civilizations exist (last 6,000 years, it sounds like he means cities, surplus-producing agriculture, monumental architecture, ~written language, centralized large-scale political administration, rise of science, etc). I’m no expert, but I think one idea (there are a number of them) holds that the end of the last ice age, and accompanying climate changes, had a lot to do with sparking that first round of domestication-settlement-etc. in Eurasia and N. Africa. Whatever the cause (-although you can get complex civilizations without agriculture, in resource-rich environments like the Northwest Coast of America) . .
“Farming originated at different times in different places—as early as about 9,000 years ago in some parts of the world. In some regions, farming arose through indigenous developments, and in others it spread from other areas. Most archaeologists believe that the development of farming in the Neolithic was one of the most important and revolutionary innovations in the history of the human species. It allowed more permanent settlements, much larger and denser populations, the accumulation of surpluses and wealth, the development of more profound status and rank differences within populations, and the rise of specialized crafts.” (MSN Encarta - Stone Age: http://encarta.msn.com/text_761555928___11/Stone_Age.html )
Books: The Water’s Edge is quite good . . . I really like Chance in the House of Fate, by Jennifer Ackerman, which is a meditation on time and chance and the surprisingly deep kinship of all life as revealed by recent advances in genetics . . . Darwin’s Ghost is good (The guy takes the Origins of Species framework and plugs in modern evolutionary theory ) but it can drag a little, and if I remember correctly, it gets into this long discussion of sym- vs. allopatric speciation towards the end that would bore anybody not especially interested to tears, though I may be confusing it with something else . . . What Evolution Is is supposed to be good, but I haven’t read it. . .. Life by Richard Fortey is a “natural history of the first 4 billion years of life on earth,” pretty neat and has evolution as a given . . .
Definitely different than a tie.
June 12th, 2005 at 11:57 pm
WA, I was trying to be discreet in dispensing advice but apparently, I’m not good at that. What I really think is that you should find something to give to your dad that he will really enjoy and that demonstrates your appreciation for him as a person rather than something to prove a point. Guess I was too subtle in my previous comment. Go figure.
June 13th, 2005 at 8:04 am
Oh, no, he’ll like this as a gift. It’s hard to explain. But he will.
June 13th, 2005 at 2:33 pm
Dawkins spends most of his ink arguing against a different set of objections than the one your father raises. Assuming that your father isn’t bothered by the appearance of design, believes that you can get here from there through genetic space, and that there has been sufficient time to do it, Dawkins is probably the wrong choice.
If we were genetically modern 50,000 years ago, why did we take so long to make the jump to civilization? What were we doing for the first 40,000 years? I can think of four kinds of answers to that question.
1. We were working through necessary preliminaries: not sitting motionless in cultural space, but slowly progressing through a series of stages that were prerequisites to agriculture and urbanization.
2. We were reproducing. Population density had to climb to a certain level before the innovations that enable civilization were sufficiently motivated.
3. We were waiting for good weather. This is the appeal to climate history.
4. We were doing nothing special, just waiting for the dice to come up double-six. This is essentially Gould’s argument in Wonderful Life: two-and-a-half billion years of almost unchanging prokaryotic life calls out for exactly the same kind of explanation. Gould might be a good start, but Wonderful Life is heavy going at times.
June 13th, 2005 at 3:34 pm
I’m not sure what he believes, is the problem. Is he ok with design? I don’t know. I think he’d take the semi-creationist microevolution yea macroevolution nay, but then, he’s often surprising. And I can’t recall what he claimed to believe last time we fought about it. Plus, of course, what he says he believes is often not what he does believe. He likes to take strong positions sometimes.
In part his question is a good one, but in part it is based on bad assumptions or knowledge. In any case, I am thinking about the suggested books, and trying to recall what he disagrees with. I’m not sure a basic “arguments for evolution” wouldn’t be about right. As cool as whales are, the book looked a little overspecialised, though I’m still considering. Wish I’d thought of this one earlier.
June 13th, 2005 at 8:01 pm
given ACW’s comments, I’d go for Guns, Germs and Steel, by Jared Diamond…also just a good read, but he talks a lot about civilizations and the role of environment, why societies evolved where/when they did, etc.
June 14th, 2005 at 11:33 am
Funny, as soon as I read your post, I was thinking, Guns, Germs, and Steel, for the same reasons that Elaine mentions.
But… the problem here, again, is that, if he does not already really believe in evolution, what norms of evidence does he accept? I don’t know if this is how it is with your father, but what I’ve seen most often in these cases is that people fall into a kind of “scientific relativism” — everyone’s spouting a theory (combined with some CS feeling that “everyone has a right to their own opinion), so…