When it comes to accepting evolution, gut feelings trump facts

[Tank]

When it comes to accepting evolution, gut feelings trump facts

Definitly worth reading the whole article. The extract just covers the main results.

..."What we found is that intuitive cognition has a significant impact on what people end up accepting, no matter how much they know," said Haury. The results show that even students with greater knowledge of evolutionary facts weren't likelier to accept the theory, unless they also had a strong "gut" feeling about those facts.

When trying to explain the patterns of whether people believe in evolution or not, "the results show that if we consider both feeling and knowledge level, we can explain much more than with knowledge level alone," said Minsu Ha, lead author on the paper and a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Teaching and Learning.

In particular, the research shows that it may not be accurate to portray religion and science education as competing factors in determining beliefs about evolution. For the subjects of this study, belonging to a religion had almost no additional impact on beliefs about evolution, beyond subjects' feelings of certainty.

These results also provide a useful way of looking at the perceived conflict between religion and science when it comes to teaching evolution, according to Haury. "Intuitive cognition not only opens a new door to approach the issue," he said, "it also gives us a way of addressing that issue without directly questioning religious views."...

This research goes a little way to explaining how people can appear to hold apparently differing views on what appear to be contradictory ideas.

[yodachoda]

Yeah, I mean I'm a biology student and I pretty much believe in evolution.  But when I look at the complexity of a human being, it's still incredibly difficult to believe you don't need a mind or intelligence to turn a bacteria into a human being.  Sometimes I question whether 3.8 billion years, as long as that is, is enough for natural selection to mold a bacteria into a human.  Sometimes I question whether a giraffe's spots, which have such an incredibly powerful appearance of design, could actually have been produced without a mind behind it.  Life has a pretty powerful illusion of design.

But then I look at the facts supporting evolution, and some of the bad designs in nature, and accept evolution stronger.  Perhaps the strongest thing that has helped me accept evolution is looking at the difference between a wolf and a chiwawa.  There is absolutely zero doubt that evolution by artificial selection has molded a wolf into a chiwawa in just less than 10,000 years.  SUch a huge difference in such a short amount of time suddenly makes it much more plausible that nature (which can "see" more of the organism that human dog breeders) can mold, say, a monkey into a human or a fish into an amphibian. 

Evolution is VERY counterintuitive, because it's so tempting to apply the "watch found in the desert" logic to humans and creatures.  For the watch, a mind designed it.  For a human, a mindless process with no foresight created it.  Both objects are extremely complex and have a strong appearance of design.  Only difference is one was designed while the other wasn't. 

[Sandra Craft]

Evolution is VERY counterintuitive, because it's so tempting to apply the "watch found in the desert" logic to humans and creatures.  For the watch, a mind designed it.  For a human, a mindless process with no foresight created it.  Both objects are extremely complex and have a strong appearance of design.  Only difference is one was designed while the other wasn't. 

Except that most watches seem well designed while the human body is pretty slap dash and has a lot of flaws  -- as if any intelligent designer were a committee that was just winging it.  Or it were coming together by accident over a long period of time.

[yodachoda]

Evolution is VERY counterintuitive, because it's so tempting to apply the "watch found in the desert" logic to humans and creatures.  For the watch, a mind designed it.  For a human, a mindless process with no foresight created it.  Both objects are extremely complex and have a strong appearance of design.  Only difference is one was designed while the other wasn't. 

Except that most watches seem well designed while the human body is pretty slap dash and has a lot of flaws  -- as if any intelligent designer were a committee that was just winging it.  Or it were coming together by accident over a long period of time.

I disagree.  The human body, while it has flaws, is very complex and does alot of jobs pretty good.  For example, it has billions of neurons in the brain that all connect in a way that makes it possible for simple physics and chemistry to allow for emotion, intellect, reasoning, memory, abstract thought, ect. 

[Sandra Craft]

Evolution is VERY counterintuitive, because it's so tempting to apply the "watch found in the desert" logic to humans and creatures.  For the watch, a mind designed it.  For a human, a mindless process with no foresight created it.  Both objects are extremely complex and have a strong appearance of design.  Only difference is one was designed while the other wasn't. 

Except that most watches seem well designed while the human body is pretty slap dash and has a lot of flaws  -- as if any intelligent designer were a committee that was just winging it.  Or it were coming together by accident over a long period of time.

I disagree.  The human body, while it has flaws, is very complex and does alot of jobs pretty good.  For example, it has billions of neurons in the brain that all connect in a way that makes it possible for simple physics and chemistry to allow for emotion, intellect, reasoning, memory, abstract thought, ect. 

But not good enough to suggest an intelligent designer that really knew what it was doing -- that's the point.

[xSilverPhinx]

I think there's a strong 'appearence of intelligence', but not actual conscious planning intelligence and it's important to make the distinction. Selective reactions to dynamic changes in selective pressures are not random.

But yeah, take into account that we're extremely complex and even the amount of time involved to take a single celled organism and turn it into us, and quite frankely, it can be a lot for our minds to digest. That's why many creationists accept microevolution but deny macro. It's the same thing, but the latter is what happens when you have microevolution going on for a very long time.

It's easy to see why it can be so counter-intuitive and the mental path of least resistence (easier to believe) would be that evolution couldn't possibly be true.

Add that to the fact that people are natural pattern recognisers, seek order and try to form structured belief systems and models or reality to navigate through. Funniliy enough I thought that the more someone knew, or the better their model of reality or belief structure about a certain topic is, the more likely they're bound to accept certain ideas based on their own merits, but the link Tank posted says otherwise. ???

I don't know if it's the case, but these brain conflicts are kind of interesting. I don't know if it has anything to do with the example of one of a spilt-brain patients brain in which one hemisphere accepted the idea of god and the other did not.

Split brain with one half atheist and one half theist

Something equivalent going on here?

[pytheas]

But when I look at the complexity of a human being, it's still incredibly difficult to believe you don't need a mind or intelligence to turn a bacteria into a human being.

Read the dialogue of a dying man with a priest by Marquis de Sade. Does the spark that lights up the gunpowder into a powerful flash need inteligence? incidence

Sometimes I question whether 3.8 billion years, as long as that is, is enough for natural selection to mold a bacteria into a human.  

I question our capacity to actually fully understand and Know what 3.8 billion years Mean.

Sometimes I question whether a giraffe's spots, which have such an incredibly powerful appearance of design, could actually have been produced without a mind behind it.  Life has a pretty powerful illusion of design.

giraffes eat Acacia leaves exclusively. acacia leaves of african origin-as giraffes eat- contain DMT, dimethyltryptamine a poison that makes us hallucinate happily, drawing the exact identical patterns as we see them arising from the void!
Also spiders on LSD-a similar molecule-  weave similar irregular patched pentagons instead of the concentric hexagons
makes one wonder eh?

Our need for explanation, fuelled by core insecurity and fear of death PRODUCES designs and patterns where there are none, and assumes an Agent to assume responsibility because that is very, very comforting
Julius Caezar said repeatedly: Men will readily believe if you tell them what they want
Albert Camus hinted at the paradox of the human condition, frail and mortal but with the "eternal" outlook of logic introspection

I alternate my illusions in order to see what, if anything remains. To date a serene black void is the backgound  

But then I look at the facts supporting evolution, and some of the bad designs in nature, and accept evolution stronger.

Bad designs?  sorry I don't get you. In a way existence is the proof of success. if it's there for us to judge it...

Evolution is VERY counterintuitive...

I dig biology and disagree, evolution is charming and quite easygoing with our understanding

For counterintuitive subjects have a go at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_nonlocality

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat

biology is for sobering up

join the quantum party and chew some acacia, meet the designer of Your making

[Tank]

I think evolution is counter-intuitive. Intuition about life, as we experience it, is that things don't change. Sun come up, Sun goes down, but the cycle repeats. Winter comes, winter goes, but the cycle repeats. Dogs produce more dogs. Cows produce more cows. People produce more people. That's what humans see in their lives. That things will continue to be as they are is the intuitive way thing are.

However explaining evolution isn't too difficult with the right props and a couple of hours. Evolution by natural selection is not a difficult concept to grasp. But to deduce Evolution by intuition is not easy. That's why it took so long to figure it out and then 40 years of work by Darwin to gather enough evidence to support his ideas.

[Velma]

Hmmm, then I must be one of those strange people who let fact trump gut feelings.  On my journey from believer to atheist, creationism was one of the things I threw by the wayside.  As I read books by such folks as Richard Dawkins and Stephen J. Gould, the arguments for creationism were exploded one by one.  Eventually, there came a point where I had to accept that evolution is a valid theory no matter how it made me feel.  Doing otherwise would have meant lying to myself.

[Twentythree]

I don't think that evolution is counterintuitive. since the dawn of consciousness human beings have understood descendant traits and the concept of bloodlines. If two tall people have a baby it is likely the baby will be tall. If the daughter of a warrior and another warrior have a son chances are the son will be a good warrior. So all you have to do is imagine lineage going all the way back to abiogenesis. Biology is bar none the simplest discipline from a logical standpoint to comprehend and evolution is very intuitive and ideas of evolution or progressive change and improvement through descendants has existed since the beginning of mankind.

Darwin: On the Origin of Species
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/origin.html
Alfred Russel Wallace: "On the Tendency of Varieties to depart indefinitely from the Original Type."

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/12/wallace/quammen-text


Anaximander of Miletus (c.610–546 BC): "The Earth, which had coalesced out of the apeiron, had been covered in water at one stage, with plants and animals arising from mud. Humans were not present at the earliest stages; they arose from fish."

this site is chock full of ancient references to evolutionary and natural selection ideas.

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/ancient.html

For a full historical perspective

http://www.iep.utm.edu/evolutio/

In many cases religion fueled and muddled the ideas until it was eventually solidified in the 19th century but nonetheless the idea of natural selection and the development of traits through successive generations is far from "counterintuitive".

[Ali]

Honestly, the first time I heard the theory of natural selection, I thought it was the most common sense and intuitive explanation I had ever heard and was amazed it took humans so long to come to it.  I'm probably one of those for who gut feelings trump facts, it's just that my gut feelings strongly embrace evolution.   

[Tank]

I think this discussion is going to get bogged down in the meaning of 'intuitive'. But if evolution were 'intuitive' why isn't it mentioned in any holy books? Holy books are simplistic, in other words intuitive. They codify the zeitgeist prevailing at the time they were written. If evolution were intuitive nobody would have had a problem with Origin of Species. Once the impact of natural selection is understood evolution becomes the consequence. But this is a taught/learned concept, that isn't intuition as I would understand it. Intuition is something that one knows instinctively and is not taught. If understanding evolution is intuitive why was there ever a point where it was not understood?

I agree that inheritance has been obvious ever since people have had children. And while evolution is fuelled by inheritance it is not evolution. No ape ever gave birth to a human. There is a continuum where each child is but a step from our ancestors to us. As we only ever see maybe 4 or 5 generations we can't witness evolution as such.

Thanks for the links, I think I got most of them here Evolution Resources  

[Twentythree]

Tank...never have I seen such a robust collection of linkages and materials for educations...you have truly amassed a respectable collection. It will take a while but I fully plan on investigating this thread to its fullest. Thanks for putting in the time.

[pytheas]

Intuition about life, as we experience it, is that things don't change. That's what humans see in their lives.

TA PANTA REI, everything changes, everything flows
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraclitus

humans figured this reality out (2500 years ago) without even the analytical / scientific resources we have today

An intuitive explanation as to how one (and eveyone) can witness everything flowing is that there is a still standpoint to regard everything else changing. That is consiousness, the observer, the higher self
more on this from "stillness speaks" by Eckhart Tolle

intuition is abour emotional conclusions. Thought may be used in aid but with caution to its validity by external correspondence.
if you are a logic person, so will your intuition precipitate in reasonable fields

[pytheas]

But if evolution were 'intuitive' why isn't it mentioned in any holy books? Holy books are simplistic, in other words intuitive. They codify the zeitgeist prevailing at the time they were written.

I beg to disagree your honor,
As simplistic as the so-called holy books as they seem, they are neither simple nor intuitive. Full of doudle and triple meanings allegories and in need of "interpretation" they were composed by leagues of very clever men over several generations that grasped the idea of crowd control twinned with personal psychology of the masses. They did not codify any prevailing zeitgeist, instead they inforced their version of the New zeitgeist, the One zeitgeist approved by church. To do that they had to use ambiguous code.

If evolution were intuitive nobody would have had a problem with Origin of Species. Once the impact of natural selection is understood evolution becomes the consequence.

exactly, in that respect following the understanding comes an emotional trajectory that accepts evolution that is the birth of acquired intuition

But this is a taught/learned concept, that isn't intuition as I would understand it. Intuition is something that one knows instinctively and is not taught. If understanding evolution is intuitive why was there ever a point where it was not understood?

I propose for clarification
-understanding and reasoning is one part

-acquired intuition  is feelings and expectations based on previous exposure/experience
that is "intuition" for character evaluation( the vibes) complex social conditions, abstract concepts, higher conclusion

-base intuition which does not involve learning in its origin equates with body reflexes
a very limited and unconscious array of reactions to noxious to pleasurable stimuli

But as we know that a baby will look at a flame and reach out to touch it, see the edge of the bed and kneel over and fall, I doubt there is ever such a thing as base intuition which does not involve learning in its origin