evolution: a case of bad marketing?
Could the reason why passionate activists aren’t trying to get school boards to teach intelligent falling instead of gravity be just a case of better marketing? According to a marketing guru, in a way, yes. But Seth Godin’s review of why people are more ready to accept gravity than evolution runs into a few factual problems.
Godin says that gravity didn’t change the scientific paradigm of the day. There was a force that made things fall and stick to the Earth and Newton just came along and gave it a better name as well as a better explanation. That’s true. But according to Godin there was no one else trying to explain why things fell which is not true. There was no shortage of theories about why anything fell and experiments trying to define and measure this force were being done for hundreds of years by all sorts of scholars.
When it comes to evolution, Godin makes another great point. It challenged the paradigm that persisted for thousands of years. But when he notes that it’s too slow to be seen, he’s also a bit mistaken. Evolution is a process of change. When key genes in our bodies change the way they work, resulting in new body shapes, sizes and physical traits, that’s evolution in action and we can see how this process works in a lab. We can watch how embryos develop and how all of the subtle changes in Hox genes and genetic toolkits can suddenly become dramatic. We can take the steering wheel and demonstrate how changing genes around changes the resulting living thing and if we really wanted to, demonstrate natural selection in a microcosm.
Overall, Godin does have a very good point when he compares marketing pitches to evolution and gravity. Some things are met with less resistance than others and you need to be aware of the rules by which people will accept something new. But what he’s missing about evolution’s acceptance as a theory is that the resistance to it is active and sees it as a threat to all that is good in this world. Whatever you call the force by which things fall down is fine. When you start messing around with why living things look and act they way they do and start cutting out the accepted explanation of the time, that’s when you encounter opposition. It’s too new and it’s too different to be accepted by some. New enough to be feared and loathed.
Of course, you are completely correct with the details, but they are beside the point.
No one threatened to excommunicate Newton. Actually, the masses hardly noticed what he did. There wasn’t a social upheaval. The Czar wasn’t influenced by cultural gravitationalists or Social Newtonists.
The key to maintaining a story in the face of facts is simple: poke the tiniest possible hole in the facts and trusting people will find it easier to just stick with the story.
I think you talk about flu shots and purebred dogs. One simple fast example. then another. then another
let people draw their own conclusions….
Mr. Godin,
Makes perfect sense and pardon me for getting technical, but this is a science blog and as a science writer I have to nitpick. =)
It’s funny you should write this. I’ve actually said the opposite on my creation blog. Do you remember the Seinfeld episode where George Costanza had a job interview, but at the end of the interview he wasnt sure if hed been offered the job or not? The hiring manager was going to be out for a week so George had the idea that he would just show up at the office while the manager was gone and say hed been hired. Whenever the manager returned, it would be hard to deny his employment because he would already be ensconced. It finally dawned on me that evolutionists have been using this same tactic for years. Now, Im not claiming any conspiracy. Perhaps its unintentional but the effect is still the same.
A couple of obvious examples of this are Nebraska Man and Piltdown man. Both of these were once held out to the public as examples of evolution; both were later dismissed. But even though they were dismissed, evolution was already “ensconced” in the public’s mind.
While those are extreme examples, subtle examples can be found in nearly any biology text book from 50 years ago. It’s amazing to see the amount of junk we used to call science. But even though all those old theories have been replaced by new theories, THE theory continues chugging along.
I call it the Constanza Tactic: Present evidence for evolution, convince the public evolution is true, throw out evidence because it was flawed afterall, public continues to believe evolution. It’s great marketing!
RK,
To use hoaxes dismissed by science and biologists intensely questioning existing evidence over and over again as proof of evolution’s falsehood is not just misleading. It’s dishonest. Basically, it’s a lie that Piltdown Man and Nebraska Man were authenticated by scientists and they were found to be false by some random soul who cared about scientific integrity.
Both hoaxes were engineered by people who wanted money and publicity and had a political agenda in mind. They wanted to show how different races supposedly had different evolutionary lineages to take the attention away from Africa. As they paraded their “proof” around after getting an initial ok from someone with a PhD in something to make them seem authentic, scientists examined the remains and immediately said that both were fake. They were never in a museum. They were never in biology textbooks. They were sideshow attractions.
So when you wrote about this on your creation blog, you gave people a false story, mislead them to believe that racially and politically motivated attempts to corrupt scientific knowledge were seen as pivotal proof of evolution and then wrapped it all up by lying about who blew the whistle on the hoaxes and how.
So this is how you’re going to prove creationism? By revising history? Do you think that maybe you should use a tactic that actually involves truth and fact? The theory of evolution has grown and added complexity. Creationism countered it by trying to change its definition into strawmen and when that doesn’t work, changing history and making false accusations about how proof for it was collected.
“Do you think that maybe you should use a tactic that actually involves truth and fact?”
See thats the great thing about being a christian, everything the bible says, is a FACT. Then all they have to do is make “humility observations” (ie. the human endocrine system is soooo complex, surely their HAS to be a divine creator)