Folk Evolution

To start with (Via Pharyngula), an astoundingly ignorant rant:

“My primary reason for being here is because I believe the Supreme Court should not be legislating from the bench. But I also believe that homosexuality is bad thing,”? he said. “It used to be useful when we were cavemen and we needed people to guard the caves full of women and children. If I’m a guy out hunting, I want to leave someone back at the cave tending to my wife and kids, and I don’t want a normal guy having that kind of access to my wife and kids. So, in our evolution, you can see that there use [sic?] to be a utility for homosexuality, but that was when we were cavemen and we aren’t cavemen anymore. So, homosexuality is obsolete.”?

Although Crawford believes that homosexuality is no longer needed by modern mankind, he brushes off the idea that he automatically dislikes people who are gay. He says he believes that private lives are just that and that he took a “live and let live”? attitude until he discovered something more sinister at work.

“If people want to behave like the homosexuals I knew in high school, college and so-forth then it isn’t a problem,”? he said. “But you can see what happens when homosexuals get power – like in Iowa City. They are running rampant. They are doing vicious stuff. “¦ Read Shakespeare’s Othello. Basically the homosexuals are like the Iago figure.”? [Source]

Of course the main problem with this is the anti-gay bigotry that’s masked so poorly. The best hint is the standard case of projection in that any attempt to stop bigots from discriminating is seen as discrimination, persecution or worse. This can be usually be seen transparently, for instance here in his assertion of people running “rampant” and doing “vicious stuff”.

But all of that goes without saying. What I find interesting in the rant is that a stereotypical person with such views is also a creationist. Crawford does not fit in that category and thereby provides a great list of ways in which people who accept evolution can be astoundingly ignorant of it. It’s even debatable whether they can be said to accept a theory if their idea of it is so far from reality — in fact I might start calling it Folk Evolution. Either way, Crawford hits absolutely all the popular misconceptions of Folk Evolution:

• Naive adaptationism — it is assumed that every trait that evolved must be good for something (usually directly contributing to survival). So everything is done by natural selection; there are no by-products, no genetic drift, no sexual selection and so forth.
• Ignoring evolutionary history — on a related note, it’s assumed that these pefectly adaptive traits just popped out of nowhere. Interestingly, this contradicts his later claim that homosexuality is obsolete — if evolutionary history doesn’t matter and we always get the best adaptation wouldn’t it have disappeared on his view?
• survival not reproduction — one mantra of Folk Evolution is the phrase “survival of the fittest”, which is often misapplied. The ultimate function for which natural selection optimises our genes is for increased reproduction over competitors, not some general survival mechanism. This misunderstanding is also necessary for the whole “evolution tells us to be selfish and led to eugenics and Hitler” nonsense. For this to be true, natural selection must be striving towards survival not towards reproduction using survival as just one possible mean to an end. It’s most ridiculous in an example like this because Crawford seems to be playing up the supposed survival benefit of having gay men guard the caves of straight men.
• naive group selection — this is the whole good of the species fallacy. In Folk Evolution, all adaptations are to help perpetuate the species even while detrimental to the organism itself. Sometimes this is used along with the previous fallacy without seeing the contradiction. It’s most glaring here since he seems to be saying homosexuality was a benefit for us: “we needed people”. So how did this come about and what’s in it for the gay cave guard in terms of differential reproductive fitness? Of course there might be a mathematical model where Crawford’s scenario is actually true, where by guarding the cave a gay man is increasing the fitness of his genes through kin selection. But that requires analysis, something absent here. Which brings us to…
• just so stories without evidence — many believers in Folk Evolution seem perfectly happy to concoct scenarios without a hint of self-awareness that at this stage it’s a story that hasn’t been tested. I can imagine evolutionary explanation X, therefore X happened. Of course this is a trap easy for everyone to fall into, including evolutionary scientists — but in Folk Evolution it’s explicitly made up.
• naturalistic fallacy — this is the crown on the great strawman, for of course Crawford’s whole point of homosexuality being obsolete is that it’s bad. This is more than a fallacy of drawing unwarranted conclusions, it’s a sign of a very deep misunderstanding of how evolution proceeds (neutrally, with no internal preference, no intrinsic goal, no overarching guiding factor).
• naive mendellian genetics — for of course this requires homosexuality to be a simple on-off gene, like eye colour. There’s some “gay gene” and that’s it. The second sub-fallacy is that this gene is supposed to be dictated by the genome, with no environmental/embryological influences.
• assumptions — like much speculation in Folk Evolution, Crawford rests on priors that are simply bad. For instance the laughable idea of women and children staying in the cave to do nothing while the men hunt. How does that fit into the whole notion of usefulness and “good of the species” Crawford is enamoured with? The truth is because of the assumptions the scenario is nonsense for a thousand other reasons.

Sometimes a bit of ignorance hits the spot just right. Next time you encounter some Folk Evolution just point them back to this passage by Crawford and they will see their fallacy exaggerated to the point of caricature.