Conflicting Interests

I have always taken science very seriously. As a child I much preferred museums, zoos, and video games to sports or "socializing." My family was loosely Christian so it was very easy for me to discard religion at a young age. While I drifted a bit deciding what to call myself, I eventually settled upon the title of atheist (and given our reaction to the Brang article, that name probably brought some comfort to me). While I insist that I have no religion, my girlfriend reminds me that atheism is my religion. She may have a point; I'm unsure if I've discarded spiritualism and filled the void with science (my reason for being an atheist), or if I am partaking in science spiritually. While I have her to thank for making me realize spiritualism has validity in many peoples' lives and is something I am going to have to deal with on occasion, I am still fascinated and frustrated by the fact that many people appear to ignore scientific findings, or suspend their belief in science while partaking in religion. (Stephen Jay Gould calls it non-overlapping magisteria, I call it 1984's "doublethink"). While I still see this as an issue today, I can recall a time when I seemed to be having this problem with myself.

In my senior year of high school I began taking my first psychology classes. One class I took particular issue with was a class on social psychology: the way groups and people make individuals behave (looking back this is very similar to our discussion of sociobiology, minus the genetics). While many of the things we were taught seemed like common sense, many things seemed odd to me. Many of the studies conducted on topics like anger and aggression, for example, seemed like they had biased findings meant to support some agenda. Some things I disagreed with because I didn't think they matched the way I thought and felt. It took me awhile, but I think I can finally understand what I learned by relating it to Lewontin's writing on sociobiology. I first had to realize that social psychology/ sociobiology will make generalizations, but they had to be interpreted as data would be for any natural population. A bell curve would be appropriate (if we knew how to adjust for emotions and behavior on a numbered scale), and so deviation from the average findings should be expected. Because of the way emotions function, it is difficult for us to truly test them in a scientific environment. We can see that chemicals activate when a person is angry, or a gene is present in unstable individuals, and until we can better decide how to interpret emotion these are the things we will test. Of course, as Lewontin points out, there will be bad science, biased and funded by a cause that is looking for someone to find results that have already been determined, but this is no reason to distrust science. It merely requires critical analysis; always check new studies to see if they are elaborate enough, are replicable, if they actually test what they say they do, and if they make conclusions that are reasonable based on the data collected. Never trust findings that hide their data, as far as I'm concerned, and when shown evidence that supports a claim, don't ignore it.

For these reasons, I have drawn a conclusion that is closer to Pinker's than Lewontin's. I dislike the "bad science" that we frequently see funded, but I think the concept that behaviour is influenced by both biology and "culture" is undeniable. I think Lewontin's handling of the situation ignores scientific evidence in favor of a noble answer; noble, yet incorrect.