Wrestling with ideas

Integrating knowledge, rejecting nonsense.

Larry Costales, Unsplash.

The latest essay in the Worshipping the Future series is up on Helen Dale’s Substack. It considers the notion of the sovereign chooser and how it has undermined the distinction between child and adult and feeds into the tendency to treat constraint as oppression. It has provoked some typically thoughtful “connecting-the-dots” comments by Arnold Kling.

The Worshipping the Future essays represent a mixture of ideas I have been considering for years with more recent thoughts and tentative conclusions. Sovereign chooser is a more recent characterisation of a tendency in current thinking.

I also aim to keep the essays to around 2500 words in length. If they get too much beyond that, I look to split such an essay into two essays. Which is what happened in this case. With the central argument about Economics not (yet) being a science being moved into the next essay. The latter is part of a critique (and reworking) of Economics that I have been developing for quite some time.

The essay after that explores why, in the absence of binding reality tests, bullshit (statements made for persuasive effect without regard for their truth value) wins. Hence, not only are entire disciplines built on creating mountains of bullshit out or molehills of truth, we now have industries doing the same: most obviously diversity-inclusion-equity “training”.

As hopefully has been clear, I read widely across scholarly disciplines. What I am seeking to do is to develop ways of analysing social patterns that integrate insights from across disciplines. With the evolutionary lens providing the key framework.

One of the deep problems of academe is precisely that failure to integrate. In particular, to not integrate into other disciplines the insights of evolutionary biology, and the anthropogenic sciences generally.

This is not merely a matter of the social sciences mostly not actually being sciences. It is a more general failing. A failing whose effects are perhaps most egregious in Medicine.

Most medical degrees provide little or no information on human nutrition: particularly not on the evolution of human nutrition. It is hard to do nutrition science well, which means it is easy to do it badly and even easier to do it to an agenda.

Nevertheless, we now know a great deal about the evolution of human nutrition. We also know a great deal about the basic cellular mechanics of human nutrition. The failure to integrate this into the education of doctors, dentists and nurses has reached the level of appalling failure.

The way we currently train doctors is analogous to training mechanics and saying to them “yes, there is this stuff called petrol, it goes in here, swishes around and waste comes out here: that’s enough on that, let’s move on to the rest of the car”.

In Australia, indigenous health has been a longstanding scandal. Yet, why indigenous health is so comparatively poor is easy to understand if you apply the evolutionary lens and take nutrition (and metabolism) seriously.

We know that the transition from foraging to farming was a metabolic disaster, greatly adversely affecting human health. Farming took off because it both shrank human niches (it takes less resources, including training and attention, to raise a farming child than a foraging child) and it increased the number of such niches. They were definitely not healthier niches, however.

High infant mortality and hundreds of generations meant farming populations did adapt to the problems with farming nutrition. Even so, that adaptation is sufficiently recent in evolutionary terms (10,000 years or less: a mere 500 or less generations) that it wears off as we age.

Australian Aborigines have been going through the transition from foraging to farming diets, with predictably bad metabolic  consequences.

But wait, there’s more. The transition to an industrialised, processed food diet is also a metabolic disaster, generating surging obesity, cancer, cardio-vascular disease, dementia, etc. rates.

If you are a population that is, in evolutionary terms, going through both the farming and industrialised processed food transitions simultaneously, then you will suffer from a double metabolic disaster. Your health will be predictably much worse than those whose ancestors went through the first transition millennia ago, even though they are now going through the second.

As I also quote in the Choosing pseudo-realities essay, evolutionary biologists Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein summarise this failure:

Combine a tendency to engage only proximate questions, with a bias toward reductionism, and you end up with medicine that has blinders on. The view is narrow. Even the great victories of Western medicine—surgery, antibiotics, and vaccines—have been over-extrapolated, applied in many cases where they shouldn’t be. When all you have is a knife, a pill, and a shot, the whole world looks as though it would benefit from being cut and medicated. (Heying & Weinstein, p.68)

Western medicine is so addicted to the “cut, drug, inject” paradigm precisely because the evolutionary lens has not been applied to human health. As it is over 160 years since On the Origin of Species was published, this is (or should be) a shocking failure.

Yet this failure is pervasive across academe. The reality is that entire disciplines should be closed down because they are generating toxic nonsense. They are producing pseudo-knowledge generated by simulacra of scholarship.

They are not only not consilient with what we know from the anthropogenic sciences, they are increasingly seeking to block the knowledge such sciences provide because it gets in the way of their investment in status games based on pseudo-knowledge and simulacra of scholarship.

The taxpayer should not be paying for nonsense: especially not toxic nonsense. Even more so when such nonsense is toxic precisely because it cannot tolerate the contestation and exposure that freedom of thought and speech threatens.

Freedom of speech and thought is a matter of institutions and authority. The taxpayer should not be paying for the corrupting of such institutions. Nor for systematic attacks on citizens having the authority to express their concerns or to interrogate claims made.

So, we must discover ways of doing better. But that is much of the point of this series of essays. To interactively hone ideas and to model how good faith dialogue between concerned citizens should work.

The notion of sovereign chooser discussed in the latest essay picks up a line of thinking that is currently alive and well yet fails, as so much of what we are being offered from universities does, to seriously wrestle or engage with what the anthropogenic sciences tell us.

References

Harry Frankfurt, ‘On Bullshit,’ Raritan Quarterly Review, Fall 1986, Vol.6, No.2.

Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein, A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life, Swift, 2021.

Katherine J. Latham, ‘Human Health and the Neolithic Revolution: an Overview of Impacts of the Agricultural Transition on Oral Health, Epidemiology, and the Human Body,’ Nebraska Anthropologist, 2013, 187, 95-102.

Mohammad G. Saklayen, ‘The Global Epidemic of the Metabolic Syndrome,’ Current Hypertension Reports, 2018, 20, 12.