I've been thinking recently that I believe in the Theory of Evolution on about the same level as in the Theory of Plate Tectonics. I have grown up being taught that both are true, and I am capable of doing research in either field, or at least reading the literature to examine them for myself. I have not done so in either case, to any reasonable extent.
I am not swayed by the fact that some people consider the former (and not so much the latter) to be controversial, primarily because those people aren't scientists. I tend to be self-congratulatory about this fact, but then I think that I am essentially not interested in examining the evidence, but I am essentially taking it on faith (which the creationists are quick to point out). I think I have good Bayesian reasons to take science on faith (rather than, say, mythology that is being offered in its stead), but do I therefore have good reasons to accept a particular well-established scientific theory on faith, or is it incumbent upon me to examine it, if I think its conclusions are important to my life?
In other words, is it epistemologically wrong to rely on an authority that has produced a number of correct statements (that I could and did verify) to be more or less correct in the future? If I think of this problem as a sort of belief network, with a parent node that has causal connections to hundreds of children, I think such a reliance is reasonable, once you establish that the authority is indeed accurate. On the other hand, appeal to authority is probably the most famous fallacy there is.
Any thoughts? If Eliezer or other people have written on this exact topic, a reference would be appreciated.
What you are talking about is a lay sense of evolution. Sure, things change, and the more adapted thing should survive with higher frequency, this much is obvious even to creationists. It is also obvious to me (as it was to Aristotle), that things which are in motion tend to come to rest. Turns out, it's not really true. Just because a theory is intuitive, doesn't mean that's how the world really works. You only need to think about Heliocentrism, let alone something like quantum physics.
One problem that Darwin had was the lack of mechanism for evolution (i.e. genetics). If I were alive at the time he wrote his books, I would have liked his theory, but would have been forced to acknowledge that it does not truly explain how the world works. I am told that now this is all solved, but have been taking that largely on faith.
It also may be that the theory is wrong, but there is no better theory to replace it, a la physics in 1900. If that were the case, I'd like to know that too.
We should expect some amount of evolution by natural selection 'a priori', from various obvious premises such as
(1) There is a reproduction process in which characteristics are inherited (2) Things with X characteristics in Y environment die/live etc.
There seems to be an absence of similarly parsimonious explanations, and the account given by natural selection is compelling. I suspect that even a small amount of knowledge of the empirical evidence for natural selection would establish a lower bound on the share of evolution it causes, such that searching f... (read more)