I’ve recently had the revelation that belief in evolution seems to be negatively correlated with one’s replacement rate. Let that sink in.
"Belief" is a right to be asserted bluntly. People feel socially comfortable saying they "believe" in all kinds of non-evidence based conjectures.
But ask someone whether they "understand" evolution, and they are likely to give the question more thought.
An unapologetic "no" has a bit of self-inflicted Socratic burn to it.
This isn’t understanding the concept of a spherical planet. The radial symmetry of gravity, for instance, is critical to understanding why penguins aren’t constantly falling off Antarctica. Someone can understand the physical possibility of a sphere without grasping the fuller concept.
I don't understand how your point challenges the notion that people can understand something while not believing it. A flat earther can understand how gravity protects penguins on a sphere, but not believe that it is relevant to the flat disk they inhabit.
Of course.
"Belief" is subjective. It requires no fact or reasoning, and is independent of "understanding", so can correlate with it or not.
> I'm sure flat earthers understand the concept of a sphere or more specifically a oblate spheroid.
Your example isn't quite what I was talking about. A rational person can understand and believe in a relationship between spinning and oblate spheres, without logically concluding that the Earth is a sphere, spinning or oblate.
Relevant "understanding" questions would be, do they understand General Relativity? The Higgs field? The Coriolis Effect? Gravitational density maps? The topology of airport locations and travel times, the topology and latencies across the internet, land, sea and orbital, the ring of geocentric satellites? Etc.
Understanding any of those things, means understanding: why large masses pull themselves into (spinning oblate) spheres, that Coriolis torque is a measurement of speeds varying across latitude, or that travel and communications map to a sphere, or that anyone can directly view an unbroken circle of satellites directly above the unbroken ring of the equator, etc.
All without getting mired in someone's unilaterally subjective "beliefs".
Orthodox Jews, Conservative Christians, the Amish, all seem to have organically developed a memetic defense (at least partially) against the demographic nihilism of postmodernity. I think developing these memeplexes will be an important decider wrt what ideology looks like in in the next few centuries
I see this sort of statement sometimes, and I really haven't figured out what it means. I can point to exactly zero consequences in my life for either believing in evolution or not at any given point. The time scales evolution requires are simply too long to matter to even the next thousand generations of my family, and evolution is simply too flexible to exclude other worldviews (e.g. theism).
Are you suggesting a status thing, i.e. belief in scientific theories is high status and skepticism/alternative worldviews are low status?
Look at that bio lol. He’s seen it.