[Fair warning: this post is merely the scratching of a pet peeve. No grand significance here. You have been warned.]
I don’t know why, but I still, more or less as a reflex, skim Gregg Easterbrook’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback column over at ESPN. (No linky, ’cause I’m kind — but it’s easy enough to find if you are so moved.)
That Tuesday habit is one I really should break, not least because even a quick scan robs me of five minutes I’ll never get back.
But the real reason to give the column a miss is because it is depressingly often larded with nuggets like this:
A Cosmic Thought: Last week researchers announced they had found, in a South African cave, evidence of painting 100,000 years ago. The previous oldest evidence of painting was from 60,000 years in the past; the famous Lascaux cave paintings in France were made about 17,000 years ago. The latest find, in South Africa, shows both that our ancestors were experimenting with iron oxides to make permanent paint 50 millennia in the past: all that time ago, they painted inside caves, seeming to hope their work would last long enough to be seen by distant descendants.
Each time telescopes improve, the universe is revealed to be larger, older and grander. Each time anthropology makes an advance, the human experiment is shown to be older and more complex than thought. Who can say where the cosmic enterprise may be headed?
A bit of backstory. Easterbrook has been around a long time, promoting a technological optimist’s view of a lot of problems facing us. He’s been a climate change scoffer — Naomi Oreskes, (whom I interviewed this week — podcast available here) called him out for deeply misleading writing on global warming as far back as 1992, when he put professional denialist Fred Singer’s words in the mouth of the enormously distinguished climate researcher Roger Revelle — all in an attempt to paint Al Gore as a (not yet fat) environmental extremist. (See p. 194 of her excellent book, Merchants of Doubt.)
Easterbrook is also one who pulls cards from the bottom of the deck when it comes to science and religion. One tactic he’s used fairly often is to chip away at the authority of science as a measure of the material world by stray snarking at all that science doesn’t know. Things like dark matter (who knew!) and dark energy — what? 95.3 % of the mass-energy density of the universe is made of stuff we can’t see? — all add up (for Easterbrook) into a sly case that maybe scientists don’t know as much as they think they do…which leaves room for more supernatural speculation.
That’s the old God of the gaps argument in defense of faith. It’s a semi-regular source of fun in my science writing class to bring in a scientist to talk to our graduate students about what it’s like to be on the other side of the notebook — and in such sessions we’ve regularly found Easterbrook’s classic bad faith advance of this tired old trope in this Wired feature serving as a “don’t-do-this” example.