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Thanks, Eric for bringing this up. The notion that people are fabulists has been in the literature for awhile. Claude Levi-Strauss talks about the equivalency of science and myth in the human mind and more recently Steven Pinker has argued pretty persuasively over the years  that humans have an instinct for storytelling and gossip (which transcends culture). If something doesn't fit and we have no knowledge to the contrary we make up stories to fill the gap--none of this is evidence-based, but based on the idea that we have an urge to resolve the tension between cause and effect (which Michotte argued for in the 60s based on research with infants). When something goes bump in the night, we have to decide whether its God, a faulty bedspring, ghosts of dead relatives or the cat. As we start to make patterns out of these ideas and start to link them all together (but, most importantly, never tested or necessarily identified the real cause), we start to have belief systems. "Of course thunder in caused by little men bowling up in the clouds, what else would it be?

But as Levi-Strauss suggests, because people don't understand what science is, and do not have the prerequisite domain knowledge to understand complex explanations, they become science stories that are pitted up against religious myths, and they don't seem different in people's minds. For most, science might as well be miraculous. 

Stephen Miles Uzzo, PhD.
VP, Science & Technology
New York Hall of Science
47-01 111th Street
Flushing Meadows Corona Park, NY 11368 USA
V +1.718.699.0005 x377
F +1.718.699.5227


On Feb 12, 2011, at 8:22 AM, Eric Siegel wrote:

> ISEN-ASTC-L is a service of the Association of Science-Technology Centers
> Incorporated, a worldwide network of science museums and related institutions.
> *****************************************************************************
> 
> Dawkins is very clear that he thinks God emerges from natural processes in the human mind and culture.  He has a *lot* to say about God, none of it good, hence the title of the book.  
> 
> There are two things at issue here, in my mind.  
> 
> The first is that science is unambiguous about evolution, and teachers should be teaching it the way that they teach about gravity (well, maybe not gravity, since nobody really understands it), or about cosmology (newtonian or non-newtonian?), or about the structure of the atom (anyone seen that higgs boson?), or about light (hmmm, this gets complicated).  But anyway, evolution is science and should be taught in the science classes.
> 
> The second is the issue of persuasive tactics.  We all believe from our education backgrounds that you start from where people are and then try to expand their knowledge.  Though Martin is pretty hard core when it comes to teaching science, the evolution exhibition he worked on--Charlie and Kiwi's Evolutionary Adventure-- is actually deeply informed by the need to start where people are, not where you want them to be.  Margaret Evans, the U of Michigan researcher who worked on the exhibition with Martin, studies young people's understanding of the world, and she is rigorous and illuminating on the topic.  I'm sure Martin can point you to literature, but when I heard her speak at a planning meeting for Charlie and Kiwi, I was struck by her insight that young people are naturally fabulists about the natural world, their stories are full of agency (someone made it that way), and lack any sense of the time scale and processes that underly evolution.
> 
> I extrapolated from this research that people in general are naturally fabulists, story-makers.  You see it all over, from how people pick lottery numbers to the myriad ways that psychology tells us that we delude ourselves about our own histories and what we see around us.  No one has a "natural" feel for the kinds of processes and time scale that make evolution work.  They are jarringly unfamiliar and out of scale with our everyday awarenesses.  And of course there are a world of researchers examining the evolutionary psychology of people's understanding of their world.
> 
> I think starting from that point, that a religious or fabulist understanding of evolution is actually more natural for people than the science, which frankly sounds as farfetched as anything (birds are dinosaurs?) is an important insight for science educators to carry with them.  That would soften the sense of superiority that we science believers have, and that comes across so irritatingly in things like Dawkin's writing and speaking.
> 
> Eric
> 

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