Why our intuitions about how the world works are often wrong

July 31, 2006 on 10:41 am | Friedrich Braun | Atheism/Agnosticism, Christianity , Science & Technology | | Email This Post | Print this Post

Folk Science

Why our intuitions about how the world works are often wrong

By Michael Shermer

Thirteen years after the legendary confrontation over the theory of evolution between Bishop Samuel Wilberforce (”Soapy Sam”) and Thomas Henry Huxley (”Darwin’s bulldog”), Wilberforce died in 1873 in an equestrian fall. Huxley quipped to physicist John Tyndall, “For once, reality and his brain came into contact and the result was fatal.”

When it comes to such basic forces as gravity and such fundamental phenomena as falling, our intuitive sense of how the physical world works–our folk physics–is reasonably sound. Thus, we appreciate Huxley’s wry comment and note that even children get the humor of cartoon physics, where, for example, a character running off a cliff does not fall until he realizes that he has left terra firma.

But much of physics is counterintuitive, as is the case in many other disciplines, and before the rise of modern science we had only our folk intuitions to guide us. Folk astronomy, for example, told us that the world is flat, celestial bodies revolve around the earth, and the planets are wandering gods who determine our future. Folk biology intuited an élan vital flowing through all living things, which in their functional design were believed to have been created ex nihilo by an intelligent designer. Folk psychology compelled us to search for the homunculus in the brain–a ghost in the machine–a mind somehow disconnected from the brain. Folk economics caused us to disdain excessive wealth, label usury a sin and mistrust the invisible hand of the market.

Full article here.

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