I am irritated by the use of the word "we" in the title, "Why We Don't Believe in Science".

The article begins with three paragraphs discussing the widespread belief in creationism. It appears to the reader (that is to say, me--I clarify just whom I'm speaking for, unlike the author) that this is intended at least as a prominent example of "us not believing in science". In fact, this appears to be the focus of the article.

However, the author talks as though he sees creationism as obviously false, calling the 46% statistic "a stark blow to high-school science teachers everywhere", and asking, "What makes the human mind so resistant to [...] facts [...] buttressed by vast amounts of evidence?" Furthermore, the author does not provide any arguments against creationism, instead proceeding as though it were obviously false to his audience as well.

Well, if neither the author nor his intended audience is a creationist (when evolutionary alternatives to creationism appear to be the "Science" that "We Don't Believe In"), then just who is "we"? The word seems quite inappropriate.

All the article manages to establish about "we" is that, when we're processing and reasoning about physical systems, if they don't map well to visceral intuition, then we use an extra part of our brains; and that this appears to cost some kind of effort and slow us down. I expect even that last effect could be mitigated with practice or by developing a certain mindset; but ignoring that, all it would establish is "We Think More Slowly About [Certain Kinds of] Science", not "We Don't Believe In [Certain Kinds of] Science". Just learn to think slowly and carefully in certain situations; I think I, for one, have that reflex built into my bones. Anyway, it being difficult to think about something is clearly insufficient explanation by itself--how many people "don't believe in integral calculus"?

If you actually want to know why the people who believe in creationism believe in creationism, then you should probably investigate them. Let's see. We have idea A (creationism--really this refers to a category of many specific beliefs), and competing idea B (human evolutionary theory). Both ideas are sufficiently complex and detailed that it is unlikely that many of the people we're interested in came up with it on their own. So let's see when and how they're exposed to both ideas, and how they reason about the ideas on their own after exposure.

At this point, for a journalistic article worth publishing, you would probably want to present some research. Find some creationists, ask them some questions about their background, figure out some patterns, do some large-scale sampling to see if you've found all the common patterns, and do detailed interviews of a few representative people from each pattern.

(Probably the biggest pattern is "grows up in a religious, creationist family; is exposed to human evolutionary theory either not at all, or just a little in high school, and is told by parents and priests or other authorities that it's all bunk, and accepts this; takes a career path that doesn't involve studying human genetics or biology in detail; and doesn't find a need to seriously question creationism at any point in the rest of their life."

If evolution were easier to reason about, it might increase the rate at which people decided on their own--after having been exposed to evolutionary theory--that humans evolved. But... I find evolution easy to understand and reason about--at least in simple cases of obvious improvements to an organism; the evolution of behaviors that are useful only in a group or in a family with certain structure is much more difficult, because it's hard to know what hominid societies were like; but most of the obvious changes between humans and more primitive mammals--getting taller and more dexterous and brainy--are easy to at least decide to be plausible. I think it really just doesn't come up often in these people's lives, except as something like "Another godless rant from a misguided intellectual", which is easily dismissed. I conclude that the scientific content of this article--the studies involving observing how people and their brains respond to "nonintuitive" physical situations--is probably in fact irrelevant to the stuff about creationists.)

Once you've learned why creationists are the way they are, then you might learn what might be good ideas for how to change them. But! Any moral principle that justifies you using any means to try to change them can justify them using the same means to try to change you. Anyone who advocates compulsory, tax-funded public schooling, and then complains about the fact that they're being forced to send their kids to be taught anti-science and to pay for the same disservice to be done to other kids--I consider you to have brought your problems upon yourself and I have no sympathy for you. (Nor do I sympathize with creationists in favor of compulsory public education. A plague on all your houses, dammit!) If you feel the need, then put your efforts into civil, reasoned argument, hopefully in a not-annoying way.

This result about people apparently having to "push back against their instincts" is an interesting thing. I'd be interested to hear more detailed and careful investigation on the subject: can you establish exactly what things are hard to reason about? does it vary from person to person? can you improve by thinking about such situations more, and would this make it hard to do repeated measurements with the same people? etc. This would have been good as a standalone science article. Unfortunately, it was cast as an article about evolution vs creationism, with an annoyingly incorrect (and possibly condescending) title and a probably misleading conclusion.

On the other hand, it'll probably attract a lot of traffic. If that is the author's job, he's probably done it well. I want to go live in a private little world now...

Well, I don't know. Maybe backlash from people like me can have some effect. There's probably a reason they don't put up even more linkbait-y stuff. Some people would decide to read other stuff. Even those who eat up the linkbait, they're probably not discriminating, and they could easily switch to another linkbait source that might happen to give them better content once, or be more convenient once. I guess maybe I can hope for competition and a race to the bottom to wipe out stuff like this. (Come to think of it, that is happening. But this newspaper probably has some highbrow content as well, neh? Hmm... It's possible that an editor (with detailed observation of readers), or the author, might figure out that linkbait eventually loses readers and reputation, and eliminate the column from the paper, or the technique from his writing repertoire. Possible. For now, I'm still going to my private little world.)