Psychologists Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg recently wrote about why people resist the counter-intuitive findings of science and concluded their essay with a plea for trust:

The community of scientists has a legitimate claim to trustworthiness that other social institutions, such as religions and political movements, lack. The structure of scientific inquiry involves procedures, such as experiments and open debate, that are strikingly successful at revealing truths about the world. All other things being equal, a rational person is wise to defer to a geologist about the age of the earth rather than to a priest or to a politician.

Given the role of trust in social learning, it is particularly worrying that national surveys reflect a general decline in the extent to which people trust scientists. To end on a practical note, then, one way to combat resistance to science is to persuade children and adults that the institute of science is, for the most part, worthy of trust.

The whole trust issue is something I have been writing and warning about for years. It doesn’t matter how smart and knowledgeable someone is if they don’t have the trust of their target audience. Because without this trust, the average person will simply conclude the speaker is using his/her high intelligence and great knowledge to carefully and selectively “frame” the issue. But sometimes, the problem can be even more basic than this. To show this, let us use Paul Bloom himself as a case study.

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I finally watched the movie, Flock of Dodos. I thought it was actually quite good and filmmaker Randy Olson did a nice job of putting a human face on the sociological aspects of this whole debate. Olson, like all filmmakers, provides his own angle to the story, but it is clear to me that he makes a sincere effort to understand what is driving the cultural debate and wants to share this with his viewers.

So what is the main message that comes out of this film?

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Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. He has criticized Intelligent Design as follows:

Another practice that isn't science is embracing ignorance. Yet it's fundamental to the philosophy of intelligent design: I don't know what this is. I don't know how it works. It's too complicated for me to figure out. It's too complicated for any human being to figure out. So it must be the product of a higher intelligence.

As someone who has been seriously thinking about intelligent design for many years, I can report that Tyson’s characterization is NOT “fundamental to the philosophy of intelligent design.” On the contrary, Tyson is simply repeating a superficial perception of ID that is common among its critics. Thus, this is one reason why I simply do not assign much weight to the criticism of many ID critics. They may be very intelligent and very good at what they normally do, but their basic grasp of ID is not very impressive. For example, when it comes to the type of questions that interest me, someone like Neil deGrasse Tyson doesn’t seem to offer me anything useful or interesting.

Well, what d'ya know? Look what those cadherins are up too:

And finally, a nice little summary:

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has just taken a picture of a Hole in Mars:

My, just how deep does that hole go? Lucky for TT readers, we have the software and expertise to magnify and enhance this image to peer inside:

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Here is a little background information about the formation of a multi-cellular state:

Okay, now we are ready to meet an important player, the cadherins. Notice how the eukaryotic cell design seems awfully well-suited to facilitate multi-cellular existence, where a network of cytoskeletons are physically linked together to become one:

But it gets better…..

The fascinating discussions from this thread deserve a new home. Enjoy.

Macht made me do it.