(See Part 1)
After 15 years I solved the problem of why Sean Carroll again and again calls those who deny evolution “denyers.” I did it, not the science way of devising hypotheses and then testing them. I did it the religious way, by awaiting new light from a higher authority. In this case, the higher authority is AI.
15 years after the dilemma appeared, 15 years after devising hypotheses which were all lame, I asked newly developed AI why Carroll said “denyers” throughout his book. AI’s answer was that he didn’t.
I was not prepared for such an outright denyal. I pressed it. It pressed back. Maybe he said it once or twice for some quirky reason, it said, but in general, he didn’t. I told it to get off its fat transistors and do a little digging. Whereupon, it said:
“I checked available sources, including excerpts from the book. A widely circulated PDF version of The Making of the Fittest (from around the original 2006/2007 Norton publication) explicitly uses phrases like:
- “denyers of evolution today”
- “evolution’s denyers”
- “The principal means for evolution’s denyers to circumvent…”
This matches what you’re describing—it appears repeatedly in discussions of anti-evolution arguments, tactics of denialism, and contrasts with DNA evidence.” (The source AI cited was pdfcoffee*com)
I believe this is called a vindication. Can any lessons be learned?
To a people who are accustomed to pulling lessons out of anything, the answer is yes. First, note that the answer was almost lost to history, Inaccurate PDFs have a way of being taken down in time. Had I made my inquiry just a few years later, maybe AI’s answer would have been ‘He never sad it! What have you been smoking?’
Moreover, though I had been asking questions—was it an offbeat Scrabble variant? a British spelling? a mutation itself? a taunt on those he considers dummies, as though putting words in their mouth—I had not asked the right question. The right question was, ‘Am I actually reading a true copy of his book?’ I mean, it was a “widely circulated PDF version of The Making of the Fittest.” Who would have imagined it would be wrong? I’ve produced PDF versions of my books. They faithfully reproduce every word. So even this AI answer 15 years later is a little squirrelly, but I guess I will accept it as what actually happened.
The problem wasn’t what I thought it was at all. The problem was the medium. Maybe there are other areas in which the problem is the medium. Maybe there are other areas in which the correct questions have not yet been asked, and the hazy questions that have been asked produce nonsense. Over the past 100 years, the gaps of science from which the credulous, it is charged, create a “god of the gaps,” is not shrinking. It is growing. Or perhaps it is shrinking, but only if you accept seeming nonsense as the proper fill of those gaps.
..to be continued.
****** The bookstore
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