Turning a Hypothesis into History
by MikeGeneIn an interview with Richard Dawkins, Jim Holt writes:
"Why did humans lose their body hair? Why did they start walking on their hind legs? Why did they develop big brains? I think that the answer to all three questions is sexual selection," Dawkins said. Hairlessness advertises your health to potential mates, he explained. The less hair you have on your body, the less real estate you make available to lice and other ectoparasites. Of course, it was worth keeping the hair on our heads to protect against sunstroke, which can be very dangerous in Africa, where we evolved. As for the hair in our armpits and pubic regions, that was probably retained because it helps disseminate "pheromones," airborne scent signals that still play a bigger role in our sex lives than most of us realize. (It occurred to me that becoming hairless also meant we didn't have to spend all our leisure grooming one another to remove lice, like other primates, thereby freeing up time to create capitalism. But I kept this thought to myself.)
Let me offer some thoughts that I won't keep to myself. While there are many lessons to be derived from this hypothesis, for today, I will hit on one.
I would agree with Dawkins that humans evolved. After all, I have not heard a good creationist explanation for armpit and pubic hair. I would also agree that sexual selection occurs (although one evolutionary biologist declared that Darwin's theory of sexual selection is dead ). However, does the acknowledgement of human evolution and sexual selection mandate that we all must embrace Dawkins' hypothesis?
Of course not. What Dawkins offers is a hypothesis, otherwise known as an educated guess. And there are problems with the hypothesis. For example, how does such a generalized explanation work to explain such an unusual event "“ mammals losing their hair? Surely there are many other primates and mammals where hairlessness would also advertise their health to potential mates. Dawkins would need to explain why his hypothesis applies to the lineage that led to humans, but not chimps (etc.). Furthermore, less real estate available to lice and other ectoparasites means less need to groom, which means less opportunity to evolve social bonding, which is a problem for explaining such a thoroughly social being as a human.
Yet even if there were no problems with Dawkins' hypothesis, would we still be expected to embrace it as history? No. By its very nature, it remains a hypothesis and thus it is Dawkins' job to turn his hypothesis into history. As a skeptic, one acknowledges the hypothesis as a reasonable, even testable, speculation. But the proponent of the hypothesis has no epistemic justification for demanding others embrace it and insulting them if they don't. That would be an attempt to turn a hypothesis into history with the use of rhetoric and public intimidation.
At what point does any hypothesis become history? There is no objective standard or checklist. There is no AI program. Instead, what happens is the hypothesis is used to make predictions. Successful predictions become a track record of success. Humans are drawn to success and thus a consensus develops within a community. In other words, the transformation of a hypothesis is a squishy endeavor, depending on judgments of success, the accumulation of data that can be viewed as circumstantial evidence, and the extent to with which an idea becomes popular among a community of inquirers.
With judgments of success, we should be concerned about human psychology and our tendency to cherry pick and engage in revisionism. A proponent of a hypothesis is more likely to focus on the successes and remember only the successes. With circumstantial evidence, there is always of the Lesson of Microsporidia, where a hypothesis that was so strongly supported turned out to be fundamentally wrong. There is also the fact that data only become evidence as a function of mind. With consensus, we should be concerned about sociological factors and cultural reasons that may influence such mass agreement. Like I said, it's squishy.
In the end, the decision to turn a hypothesis into history is a function of our free will. There is no neuro-algorithm that will automatically transform the input of data into the output of belief. And there is no guarantee that belief must necessarily reflect actual history. With respect to any hypothesis about history, there will always be at least three options: 1) reject the hypothesis as wrong; 2) remain agnostic about the hypothesis; 3) embrace the hypothesis as history. Those who choose one of the options will plead their case and the circle continues.
June 12th, 2007 at 12:19 am
Body hair increases the likelihood that we will feel disease-carrying mosquitos and flies landing on our skin, and increases the chance that we will swat or shoo away the critters before they infect us. In other words, NDE might have predicted that we would retain our body hair. Unless we have lost our body hair. Then Dawkins' ectoparasite explanation applies. Either way, NDE predicted it, which is why NDE is such a powerful explanatory tool.
Comment by russ — June 12, 2007 @ 12:19 am
June 12th, 2007 at 12:37 am
I do believe Stunney was trying to make that point on the frontloading thread.
Comment by onething — June 12, 2007 @ 12:37 am
June 12th, 2007 at 11:04 am
Hairlessness can also be interpreted as lack of health. Thin hair can be sign of dermal diseases.
Perhaps all primates were health experts! When they met a less hairy "potential mate" they could immediately figure out the vital importance of hairlessness for a healthy family.
If less hair means less parasites and more health, then why does it happen only to human but not to the rest of 10,181 hairy species on this planet?
Funny! A perfect example of Dawkins' one-dimensional reasoning.
IMHO, The world's top 10 intellectuals list should be rearranged as:
1. Rudyard Kipling
2. Richard Dawkins
3. …
Comment by Farshad — June 12, 2007 @ 11:04 am
June 12th, 2007 at 12:03 pm
Hi all, long time lurker, first time commenter,
Dawkins is so locked into the "African savannah ape" dogma that he never considered other possibilities of why we might be practically hairless. Possibilities that might explain some peculiar and universal legends handed down from forgotten times.
As you can probably tell from the content of my first contribution here, I'm a big fan of Joy.
Comment by angryoldfatman — June 12, 2007 @ 12:03 pm
June 12th, 2007 at 3:20 pm
angryoldfatman,
What has the aquatic ape hypothesis to do with legends of Atlantis and the flood?
Comment by onething — June 12, 2007 @ 3:20 pm
June 12th, 2007 at 3:53 pm
Hi MikeGene,
Did Dawkins demand others embrace his sex selection hypothesis of human hairlessness and insulted them if they didn't? I couldn't find where he did that in the interview, and if he didn't, its unkind to imply he did.
Comment by Aagcobb — June 12, 2007 @ 3:53 pm
June 12th, 2007 at 4:15 pm
Ah yes, the aquatic ape hypothesis - it's more formal title is known as the "Sea Monkey Scenario". A beautifully simple solution to numerous problems…. I'm surprise it hasn't been invoked more often.
Comment by Doug — June 12, 2007 @ 4:15 pm
June 12th, 2007 at 4:43 pm
Hi angryoldfatman,
You wrote…
Well, that's too bad Fat Man because I was here before you. Wanna fight over her?
At any rate, welcome to Telic Thoughts.
Regards,
TP
Comment by Thought Provoker — June 12, 2007 @ 4:43 pm
June 12th, 2007 at 11:16 pm
Nicely put. With such a powerful predictive tool, one could correctly call every sporting event, whichever way it turned out (provided one can make the final prediction after getting the results).
There is a joke told among physicists (where it can be recognized as a joke):
Comment by eric — June 12, 2007 @ 11:16 pm
June 13th, 2007 at 4:39 am
They say that Darwinism is consistent with the facts of biology; i.e., that Darwinism is consistent with those things which are known to be true. But Darwinism is also consistent with those things that are known to be not true, such as: humans have opposable big toes, monkeys evolved from man, apes and humans can interbreed, etc.
Comment by Vladimir Krondan — June 13, 2007 @ 4:39 am
June 13th, 2007 at 9:03 am
Hi onething,
You asked:
What has the aquatic ape hypothesis to do with legends of Atlantis and the flood?
Those two things are possible narratives that may have arisen from collective memories of being aquatic.
According to the aquatic ape hypothesis, we acquired our hairlessness, our posture, and (most importantly) our unique aptitude for language from being partially aquatic.
If this were so, we went into the water as inarticulate hairy apes and came out as talking naked humans (or protohumans).
That being the case… what would be the first things these new humans would talk about? If they were anything like my immediate ancestors, they'd be saying something like, "Back in my day, we didn't have all this fancy land mass and whatnot, we had WATER, and we were THANKFUL!" Pass that kind of story down for a few hundred generations, and you'd probably end up with stuff like Atlantis and the flood stories.
Comment by angryoldfatman — June 13, 2007 @ 9:03 am
June 13th, 2007 at 11:14 am
Oh, this seems interesting.
Comment by stunney — June 13, 2007 @ 11:14 am
June 14th, 2007 at 12:52 pm
Quite a good post.
I take "history" to mean an established explanation of past events. "The proponent of the hypothesis has no epistemic justification for demanding others embrace it" unless the proponent has the evidence, of course. People can be rightly accused of perversely withholding assent. The Earth does move, after all.
My only real quibble, and possibly it may just be my reading of it, is that people have to belong in camps. Our confidence in scientific assertions is more of a continuum (or perhaps some chaotic function) than a strict division into accepted, not accepted, or I don't know.
Comment by Zachriel — June 14, 2007 @ 12:52 pm