The triumph of theory over facts

Awhile back I posted, "Why you're wrong and I'm right," an exploration about why human reason and language evolved, what purpose they served our stone-age ancestors and how that affects human societies today.

The vaunted human capacity for reason may have more to do with winning arguments than with thinking straight.  

Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds - The New Yorker This is an good article with summary discussions about why it is true, as the old saying goes, "You can't reason someone out of a position he was never reasoned into."  

And for that matter, you usually can't reason people out of a position they were reasoned into, either. What research shows is that once someone adopts a position on a topic, no matter how rigorously, logically and factually it may have been supported  -- once that position is adopted, abandoning or even modifying it in the face of new facts is unlikely.

And so here we are: Formed by  Megafloods, This Place Fooled Scientists for Decades

Remnant of a lost landscape, this island of ancient soil—
crowned by a crop of wheat—survived the ice-age floods
that sculpted the region known today as the Channeled Scablands. 

Standing in the middle of a broad swath of scablands extending from horizon to horizon, my mind’s eye could clearly see the floodwaters blasting through, like a raging inland sea, ripping up everything not strong enough to stay moored. Driving through what’s known as the Ephrata Fan, a broad open area where floodwaters left the confines of the Grand Coulee and spread out and slowed as they neared what would become Ancient (and very temporary) Lake Lewis, I easily understood why the landscape was riddled with boulders: As the water lost speed, it began dropping all the rocks it was carrying. And when I stood on the lip of the dry falls of Potholes Coulee, looking at this immense canyon with farmland on three sides and a precipitous drop on the other, I felt what Bretz was thinking when he looked at that map a century ago: If a river didn’t carve this, what did?

With the flood story in mind, it all seems so obvious—so obvious, in fact, that it’s almost impossible to see the terrain and not see the floodwaters that shaped it. Why, then, were the experts in Bretz’s day so blind to what now seems like a self-evident geological record? I posed that question to Vic Baker, a geologist with the University of Arizona who became the pre-eminent scablands expert in Bretz’s wake, when we met to tour several of the region’s features. “It’s the mistake people have made most in the history of science,” he said. “They forgot that nature has the answers, not us.”

“Bretz was making arguments, and no one was going into the field to see anything,” Baker said. “They were just countering his arguments with theory.” And because scientists are first and foremost human beings, they’re loathe to change their theories or their minds because of mere data.

Italics added. Even in scientific inquiry, scientists tend to head for the goal of winning arguments rather than uncovering facts and all that follows. As I pointed out, human reason and language probably evolved to enable moving up and down the totem pole non-violently. That is, moving up in the pecking order - status - may be the very basic survival-advantage that reason and language evolved to serve.

Science would be self-correcting, though, were it not for two major facts:

1. Scientific status means more than anything else getting funding in grants and government subsidies. And that always means at some point coming to conclusions that the benefactors want. If you want to continue receiving the funding stream, of course.

2. One result is that a vanishingly small number of published, peer-reviewed scientific papers actually rely on the scientific method.

Think about this dynamic in other social settings and it will explain a lot, I think. And by the way, this is a human characteristic that Jesus tried to suppress.