Our brains are wired for teleology (Introduction)
by David Turell 
, Thursday, October 18, 2012, 05:23 (4421 days ago)
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121017102451.htm-You agnostics, keep fighting it!
Our brains are wired for teleology
DAVID: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121017102451.htm-You agnostics, keep fighting it!-A quote: "To test the hypothesis that there is a natural preference for teleological explanations, the researchers asked a group of physical scientists from top-ranked American universities to judge explanations such as "Trees produce oxygen so that animals can breathe" or "The Earth has an ozone layer in order to protect it from UV light" under speeded conditions so they had little time to reflect on their answers. Another group of scientists made judgments of the same statements without any time restriction. The researchers found that, despite maintaining high accuracy on control items, scientists who were under time pressure demonstrated greater acceptance of scientifically unwarranted purpose-based explanations than their un-speeded colleagues who generally rejected them."-David, you are constantly complaining about money being lavished on useless research projects, and yet you are happy to support this gibberish. Of course I can only go by the report as given here, but if this is the best they can come up with, it suggests sheer trickery on the part of the researchers. Yes, trees produce oxygen which animals breathe, and yes, the ozone layer protects the Earth from UV light. No scientist is going to deny this, and if you put scientists (or anyone else) under time pressure (speeded), they may well focus on the facts and not on the misleading wording. Scientists are not necessarily experts in the finer arts of language manipulation. But give them time to think about it (= unspeeded) and they will reject the teleological wording. Why didn't the researchers simply ask them whether they thought Nature was controlled by a divine purpose? What do you think would have been the majority answer?
Our brains are wired for teleology
by David Turell , Thursday, October 18, 2012, 17:52 (4420 days ago) @ dhw
> David, you are constantly complaining about money being lavished on useless research projects, and yet you are happy to support this gibberish. -My problem is reading too many reports and seeing scientists, in their articles, constantly referring to the 'design' in the finding and then backing off to clearly state that they feel the design (teleology) inference should be ignored. The report is not gibberish, even if it sounds that way. It is a clear observation of what I see constantly in my reading.-> Why didn't the researchers simply ask them whether they thought Nature was controlled by a divine purpose? What do you think would have been the majority answer?-Of course, nothing divine. But there are some of us who see it. I keep commenting on Alfred Russel Wallace, but no one here will respond about him. He took the same findings as Darwin, in fact gave Darwim much of the material Darwin used, and with the same brilliance, reached the opposite conclusion that evolution was not purposeless.
Our brains are wired for teleology
DAVID: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121017102451.htm-You agnostics, keep fighting it!-This project involves researchers asking scientists to give an immediate judgement on misleading statements like: "Trees produce oxygen so that animals can breathe". Since it is a scientific fact that trees produce oxygen which animals can breathe, not surprisingly the immediate, unthinking response was a yes, whereas when scientists were given time to think about the sneaky "so that" wording, not surprisingly the response was no. From this the researchers draw the astonishing conclusion: "It seems that our minds may be naturally more geared to religion than science." This is like a reporter asking me for an immediate response to the question: "Is it true that the name of the stupid British Prime Minister is David Cameron?" I say yes, and the headline reads: "Dhw says the Prime Minister is stupid." DAVID: My problem is reading too many reports and seeing scientists, in their articles, constantly referring to the 'design' in the finding and then backing off to clearly state that they feel the design (teleology) inference should be ignored. -You may well be right, but it's no justification for the method used in the above experiment. I wrote: "Why didn't the researchers simply ask them whether they thought Nature was controlled by a divine purpose? What do you think would have been the majority answer?" You responded: "Of course, nothing divine." So the scientists themselves would say they are not geared to religion, and even the researchers qualify their highly suspect findings with "seems" and "may be". So what was the point of the exercise? -DAVID: I keep commenting on Alfred Russel Wallace, but no one here will respond about him. He took the same findings as Darwin, in fact gave Darwin much of the material Darwin used, and with the same brilliance, reached the opposite conclusion that evolution was not purposeless.-Not having read Wallace, I'm in no position to comment. However, if it is true that two brilliant scientists used the same material and the same findings, but drew opposite conclusions, you have made an excellent case for agnosticism.
Our brains are wired for teleology
by David Turell , Friday, October 19, 2012, 15:15 (4420 days ago) @ dhw
> Not having read Wallace, I'm in no position to comment. However, if it is true that two brilliant scientists used the same material and the same findings, but drew opposite conclusions, you have made an excellent case for agnosticism.-Read a little about Wallace in Wikipedia. You will be surprised. He worked much longer and further in the field and fed Darwin much material to digest.