Climate change evolutionary quirk
April 2, 2007 at 4:42 am | In Climate change, Environment, Evolution, Psychology, Science Education |Hi Darmok,
I appreciate your response. You are right: I may be overreacting, and I agree with you that informative essays are just as useful as calls to action.
To me, the Harvard psychology professor’s concluding line:
“It remains to be seen whether we can learn to rise to new occasions.”
subtly dismisses the achievements of mankind over the past several millennia. There is plenty of evidence that we can learn, and have learned, to rise to new occasions, and I see that as an important aspect of being human.
This line of thinking seems odd coming from a professor of psychology who has dumbed down a topic to the level of a “comfort read” for his local Los Angeles audience, and in so doing has played into the hands of global warming sceptics who like to ignore or disparage science.
As an American, I am proposing that it does us no good to hold American societal norms as world standards while effectively claiming:
“Americans think the way they do because that is how humans’ brains evolved. Period.”
Think about the implications of that assumption.
The Harvard University psychology professor’s article deals only with instinctive—not rational nor considered—responses but does not make that clear to readers, so it still appears to me as an excuse for people who are too lazy to do anything to combat climate change. I may well have overreacted because I have seen this argument several times before, in various guises, and I disagree with the professor’s gross generalisations which are atypical of experts in scientific fields, even when they write opinion pieces for the general public. In February, I even wrote a post in response to one manifestation of this evolutionary quirk here:
Our species did not evolve to deal with problems like global warming
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I respect your opinion, and I guess we just have different expectations (though I am disturbed how you present your own view of the article’s message as if it were a direct quotation).
I must admit to being surprised that this opinion piece bothers you so much that you’ve written (at least) two blog posts about it, and it makes me think that you’re missing the point of the article, drawing unwarranted conclusions, or both.
However, I see little purpose in this discussion. You are welcome to continue your series of critiques on it as you see fit.
Comment by Darmok — April 2, 2007 #
Hi Darmok. Yes, we have different views on this one, and I thought thrice before summarising my point in a quote. Perhaps I made the wrong decision, although I did introduce my summary with:
which is very different from my introduction to my interpretation of the professor’s actual words where I wrote:
I am summarising the way I perceive the L.A. Times article: it presents a collection of instinctive responses common to all humans to support a particular culture’s typical stance. It does not, for example, include the risk-taking (aka gambling) instinct. I argue that we have to go beyond instincts to deal with climate change, and that may be painful, but is what mankind has always done to overcome distant threats.
I also see this application of the way one group thinks over the way another group thinks as something that needs to be highlighted and challenged rather than accepted without question.
Comment by inel — April 3, 2007 #