These days biologists routinely display enormous overconfidence. They routinely claim to understand very deep things they do not understand, and that are a hundred miles over their heads. Biologists also have the very bad habit of repeating groundless triumphal legends claiming that scientists have developed explanations for wonders of biology that are actually vastly beyond the understanding of our biologists.
Science journalists should act as a check inhibiting the extreme overconfidence of biologists, just as speed bumps are checks that limit the speeding of reckless drivers. But alas, today's science journalists act like cheerleaders. Science journalists act like they are afraid to ask scientists the tough questions such scientists should be asked. This is only one of many very bad failures or very poor habits of today's science journalists.
But we may hope that one day we see more science journalists acting like real journalists rather than North Korean journalists who reverently accept everything told them by authorities. Below is a sketch of how a science journalist could interview an overconfident biologist. The interview follows a general strategy:
(1) First, the journalist asks a few "softball questions" that will typically result in the overconfident biologist making his most overconfident claims.
(2) Instead of immediately disputing the overconfident answers, the journalist asks about very many smaller issues related to the overconfident claims.
(3) Finally, the journalist points out the discrepancy between the overconfident claims made by the scientist at the beginning of the interview, and the answers given in the main part of the interview, pointing out the contradiction between the two.
Below is a sketch of how this might occur.
Reporter: I am here with the distinguished biologist Professor Doe. Thanks for giving us some time, Professor.
Scientist: It's a pleasure to be here.
Reporter: So I know that authorities such as you are very big on the insights of Charles Darwin, and the idea of natural selection and evolution, isn't that right?
Scientist: It certainly is. In fact, we're fond of quoting the geneticist who said that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.
Reporter: So does Darwinism and evolutionary theory explain the history of life on Earth?
Scientist: Yes, absolutely. Darwin rules! As someone once said, "In the final analysis, the answer must always be Darwin."
Reporter: I'm sure it's great to have that kind of sweeping insight. And speaking of simple ideas that explain a huge amount of things, would you say that the human mind and human behavior can all be explained as aspects of brain activity or results caused by brain activity?
Scientist: Yes, everything that we call the mind is really just the brain, or effects produced by the brain.
Reporter: I know that neuroscientists like to say things such as, "We're all just brains and the brain's activity."
Scientist: Yes, exactly. That is correct.
Reporter: So everything that goes on in the mind can be explained by something happening in the brain, correct?
Scientist: Yes, exactly. The brain explains everything in psychology.
Reporter: So can you list some unsolved problems of biology?
Scientist: Well, there's the origin of life. We don't understand that.
Reporter: You mean the origin of prokaryotic cells. But what about the origin of the vastly more complex eukaryotic cells?
Scientist: We have a theory that covers that, a theory of a huge leap in organization by endosymbiosis, kind of like a house suddenly converting into a high office tower.
Reporter: Is that a Darwinian theory, involving nothing but very gradual steps over a very long time, a "nature makes no leaps" kind of thing?
Scientist: No, it actually involves a gigantic sudden leap.
Reporter: And so what about the Cambrian Explosion, when all or almost all the animal phyla seemed to have originated rather suddenly within maybe something like ten million years or twenty million years? What caused that?
Scientist: That's quite a mystery. We're still working on trying to explain how that happened. Some say it had something to do with a change in the oxygen levels on planet Earth.
Reporter: Oxygen? So can oxygen design incredibly complicated new blueprints for making many new types of organisms, unlike any that have existed?
Scientist: No, I didn't say that. But oxygen is very important. We couldn't live without it.
Reporter: Each of us has more than 20,000 types of protein molecules in our bodies, and almost all of these types contain hundreds or thousands of well-arranged amino acid parts. How did Darwin explain the origin of all those molecule types?
Scientist: Well, that kind of complexity was not discovered until the 20th century, so it's not fair to expect he explained that.
Reporter: Do you understand the origin of language?
Scientist: Little progress has been made on that.
Reporter: What about morphogenesis, the problem how a speck-sized zygote progresses to become the vast organization of an adult human body?
Scientist: That's one of the biggest unsolved problems of biology. The people called developmental biologists are working on that.
Reporter: Do you understand how a single human cell is able to reproduce?
Scientist: Well, we can describe the stages. But the "how" is very puzzling. We don't really understand the how.
Reporter: And how does a human being instantly remember a complex answer upon hearing a single name or short question?
Scientist: I don't know. That's a puzzle the neuroscientists are working on.
Reporter: How can people remember things for fifty years, when the proteins that make up neurons and synapses have lifetimes of only a few weeks?
Scientist: Memory is quite the mystery.
Reporter: People can remember very many types of things, can't they? They can remember images, school lessons, music, facts, emotions they've experienced, life experiences they have had, and how to do physical things such as ride a bike or type or play an instrument. How could all of those different types of learning and memory be stored as brain states?
Scientist: Well, when you learn something called encoding goes on. That means translating your experiences and learning into brain states. Then when you remember such things, there's an opposite process called decoding.
Reporter: Does anyone understand how such encoding could occur? Has anyone ever found a "brain code" that works in some very specific way, kind of like how the genetic code works?
Scientist: Not actually. But we're looking for that. Give us time. Rome wasn't built in a day.
Reporter: But microscopes today are very many thousands of times more powerful than when the genetic code was discovered in the 1950's, so wouldn't scientists have found such a "brain code" for storing memories if it existed?
Scientist: We haven't found it yet, so I guess the answer must be "no."
Reporter: Has anyone ever read a memory from a dead person, so that you could tell what they learned? Has anyone ever done something like looking at some brain tissue using a microscope, and then said, "I know this dead guy must have learned about Spanish medieval history, because I see facts of Spanish medieval history stored in his brain?"
Scientist: No, I've never heard of that happening. But you know science is moving so fast, we may see that some day.
Reporter: But given the power of today's microscopes, wouldn't you have found such memories in the brains of dead people, if brains store memories?
Scientist: Apparently not, because no one has ever done that.
Reporter: So how could some brain chemical reactions ever add up so that you get the reality of a person with a unified sense of a single self having experiences?
Scientist: They sometimes call that "the hard problem of consciousness." It is generally thought that it hasn't been solved yet. But there are some interesting theories I could discuss, such as the integrated information theory and the global workspace theory.
Reporter: Can you describe what goes on in a brain when a person starts to have a belief or an opinion? Do you know of some kind of chemical reaction that corresponds to that, or some neural restructuring?
Scientist: No, but it's not really fair to ask that, because most of experimental neuroscience has been done on mice and rats, and they don't really have opinions or beliefs.
Reporter: I can't help noticing that what you said at the beginning of this interview very much seems to contradict what you've been saying after the beginning of the interview.
Scientist: What do you mean?
Reporter: At the beginning of the interview, you said that evolutionary theory explains the history of life. But based on your answers after that, it seems like evolution theory and Darwin's ideas do not explain most of the biggest things that occurred in that history. It seems that you don't have evolutionary explanations for most of the biggest things happening in the history of life. And it sounds like you don't really have much of any explanation for some of the biggest things happening in the history of life, such as the Cambrian Explosion, the origin of protein molecules, the reproduction of cells, the origin of language, the origin of consciousness and the origin of creatures that can remember for as long and as quickly as humans remember.
Scientist: Not so. I was taught in graduate school that in biology "ultimately the answer is always Darwin."
Reporter: Also I can't help noticing how your statement at the beginning of this interview (saying that the brain completely explains the mind) is contradicted by your statements after the beginning of this interview. For you have repeatedly confessed that you don't have an explanation for most of the things going on in the mind, things like consciousness and self-hood and instant recall and memory storage and remembering things for fifty years. Based on your statements after the beginning of the interview, it sounds like you don't have any detailed or credible brain explanation for such things that constitute the core of what goes on in the mind.
Scientist: Not so. I was taught in school many times that everything in the mind is explained by the brain.
Reporter: Would it make sense to claim that you understand the physical origin of some species when you don't understand the origin of any of the adult organisms of that species?
Scientist: No, that would probably be kind of like saying you were very rich when you couldn't even pay your modest rent.
Reporter: So why do you claim that you understand the origin of the human species when you don't seem to understand the origin of any adult human, because you don't understand morphogenesis (how a speck-sized zygote progresses to become a full adult human), and you don't understand how minds like ours and memories like ours arise?
Scientist: So why are you casting such doubt about what people like me say? Don't be so "anti-science."
Reporter: I'm not "anti-science" at all. I'm pro-science. I just want better science, in which scientists don't claim so often to know things they don't know.
Scientist: In my department we all agree: whenever someone doubts certain things, that means they're enemies of science.
Reporter: Thank you for your time, Professor Doe.
Were we to get an interview like this with a biologist, it would really help to "pull back the wizard's curtain" and show how groundless are the biggest explanatory boasts of biologists. But you should not expect any science journalist to ask questions this challenging when interviewing a biologist. Science journalists act like rock star fans when dealing with scientists, and they treat scientists as reverently as North Korean journalists treat North Korean officials. The rule of the science journalist doing an interview seems to be, "Only gently pitch softballs that are easy to hit."
Asking the right questions and getting confessions about lack of knowledge about smaller matters is one way to help show that overconfident biologists do not actually know many of the grand things they claim to know. Another technique is to diligently collect statements by scientists in which they confess they do not know the type of smaller things they would know if their claims about knowing larger things were true. A very large collection of such statements is found in my long post "Candid Confessions of the Scientists" which you can read here.
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