On Persuasion

Nobody who is interested in those subjects which are based largely on human interaction – particularly politics, economics, business, science, and religion – can have failed to notice that we can hardly leave each other alone.  Each person has an opinion, and many feel compelled to persuade others to their line of thought.  This fundamental fact may be our species’ strongest trait: it’s the driving force behind the dissemination of knowledge, the true mother of invention, and the thread of conversation that leads a people to improve its lot.  Still, it is often extremely frustrating when you see ideas you are opposed to spreading through your own culture.

There are countless examples.  Some people think that all romance should happen between exactly one convex and one concave person.  Some believe that this is the only natural coupling, despite the vast diversity that occurs in various animal species and human cultures.  (One wonders exactly what they mean by “natural.”)  Other people think it’s no big deal: that an individual’s choice of partner is his or her own business.  Taken from certain perspectives, it’s very strange that somebody you’ll never meet who lives a thousand miles from you has very strong feelings about who you might fall in love with, or go to bed with, and especially who you marry.  They will even donate money, votes, and effort in an attempt to prevent you from doing as you will.  Some of them say that the meaning in their own marriages is threatened by the actions taken by strangers in another part of the country.  Why do they care?  Because, perhaps, of this innate need to persuade others to think as we do.

One of the subjects I personally am most frustrated by is what I think of as the extremely poor quality of argument that can be persuasive.  People, by and large, don’t decide by carefully gathering facts, challenging their own assumptions, and trying to arrive at the most honest and beneficial decision.  Honestly, for most decisions in life we don’t have the time.  Instead, people choose others who they feel they can trust and rely on the integrity of those sources.  In order to persuade people, then, you only have to seem trustworthy.  Present your message as if you’re a member of the group you’re trying to address, make a few claims designed to outrage them, and you’ll whip up an army in no time.  Fortunately, these armies often limit their rage to signing e-mail petitions and belittling politicians.

Here’s a favorite concrete example.

Two hundred years ago, a gentleman traveled around the world making careful observations of the animals he encountered.  This was nothing new: such catalogs are probably as old as humanity.  Through many years of careful study, though, he arrived at a novel idea that still causes huge amounts of debate and politicking: that all the vast diversity we see in every species on the planet could come to exist through tiny beneficial changes accumulated across many thousands of years.  It was, and is, obvious that you can produce a new species through careful breeding.  Take a look at cats, dogs, or even corn for examples of human-created species.  The new idea is that species will be formed without any intelligent intervention: their environments naturally favor some of them above others, just as a farmer will favor certain plants, and the favored traits can accumulate to form entirely new species.

Darwin had the idea, and his published work contains the results of many years of careful study and thought to refine it.  Many of the details he suggested were wrong, and modern evolutionary theory has many millions more hours of thought and experiment backing it up.  We have learned a great deal about the intricite details of the process, and so vast a subject as how species develop is complex enough that the remaining questions shouldn’t be surprising.  The whole concept, though, attacks the root of many religions: that a deity hand-crafted the species, and especially humans.  That this hand-crafting is part of what makes our species – and our lives – meaningful.

People need to spread their opinions around.  Experts in evolutionary theory have made a very strong and detailed case that they understand where we came from, and certain theological experts have made a very impassioned case that they, in fact, have this information.  How does a “regular person” decide?  Well, that usually depends on who they find authoritative.  And, frankly, this makes me crazy.  The discussion often has more to do with catch phrases and memorized lists of flaws in the opposing arguments that seem never to lose an item, even if the alleged flaw is thoroughly explained.  Since we need to attempt to spread our ideas, this has inevitably crept into politics.  There are regular attempts to introduce religious ideas of where we came from into biology classes.  The people who promote these ideas haven’t backed them up with experiments and haven’t addressed the immense volumes of information that support evolution.  They often haven’t even studied evolution, and don’t understand its basic concepts (“no transitional fossils” my foot!).  They aren’t making an argument based on the strength of their ideas, though.  They’re making the argument from an appeal to others’ desire to spread their opinions.  They’re saying, “You know that you’re valuable because your Creator hand-crafted you.  Let’s teach that to kids, instead of the demeaning idea that we’re just another species of ape.”  It’s a powerful argument, and it has nothing to do with proving its case.

I find this type of argument very dishonest, and very character-revealing.  If you want to disprove an idea, disprove it.  This takes a lot of effort, and a lot of intellectual honesty.  You need to be willing to consider that the idea may be correct.  You need to understand it in detail, and not use tools that cater to what your audience doesn’t know.  There are, for instance, a wide variety of transitional species in the fossil record that appear in perfect order, in rock strata that perfectly correlate to when they would have existed.  We have seen new species form from old, and understand why it happened.  Physicians have to account for the rapid evolution of bacteria – which live and reproduce on much shorter time scales – when they’re trying to wipe out the population that caused someone to grow ill.  Any argument that disproves evolution needs to explain why all of these things work.  Most, if not all, of the highly-publicized arguments against evolution are easily refuted by an expert.  This shouldn’t be surprising: their chosen profession is to poke holes in the nuances of evolution wherever possible, in an attempt to move our understanding closer to reality.  They are experts in the real sticking points in the ideas, and identifying a process by which the eye could form just isn’t among them.

The worst type of argument encountered is dishonest wordplay.  “Evolution is only a theory.”  What a relief, the informed hearer might think, that evolution is a detailed, strongly-tested and well-understood explanation that makes very strong predictions that have been accurate countless times.  The word “theory” has special meaning in science; a theory is the strongest possible kind of idea.  It is much stronger than “fact,” which simply describes a single observation (“It is a fact that dropped objects tend to fall.”).  It is stronger than “law,” which provides a specific description of an observed and reliable behavior without necessarily explaining why it happens (the law of gravitation provides a specific mathematical formula for how strongly each of two objects will pull the other, but we’re still not sure why this happens).  This is something like saying, “The Ten Commandments were only carved by the finger of God.”  A scientific theory is one of the few things in this world we actually understand in great detail.  Anyone who resorts to this kind of argument is either so uninformed as to not understand one of the more common terms in science or is expecting his listeners to be both uninformed and gullible.  Neither is an admirable trait.