[LINK] The meaning of climate change denial

[Jim Birch]

The human brain was developed by the process of evolution to solve a
variety of practical problems but understanding climate change was not one
of them. If you were trying to stay alive in the Pleistocene, tackling
complex multivariate problems that required huge inputs of time, energy and
resources would be ample grounds for rapid induction to the Darwin Award
alumni.

Like any biological adaptation, the capacity for gathering knowledge has an
cost benefit trade-off.  (The brain consumes around a quarter of the energy
resources of a human but more like 10% or less for other successful
predators.)  The effort put into developing a particular knowledge or skill
set needs to be repaid quickly in improved returns.  This can be seen in
our built in preference for low-cost knowledge.  We are constantly looking
for short cuts rather than doing the hard work.  We want the key fact or
figure, we avoid trawling through piles of evidence, we seek out expertise,
etc.  This is also why science - the long, thorough, meticulous way of
knowledge - only got going recently as a serious proportion of human
activity.  It's not that people were stupid 20,000 years ago, they just
didn't have the surplus produced by farming and mechanisation to support
this kind of activity.

The biology of knowledge is further complicated by it's role in sexual
selection.  Demonstration of superior mental skills indicates a good brain
and a healthy body which indicates good breeding material.  Thus, we don't
just collect knowledge, we flaunt it.  Knowledge is sexy and we are all
programmed to appear as sexy as we can manage, even when we aren't
specifically thinking about sex.  I can't go past this beautiful quote from
the evolutionary biologist Geoffery Miller:

"I think the interesting thing about human intelligence and capacities for
abstract reasoning, and metaphor and analogy, is how very poor most people
are at being evidenced based and sceptical. What we love to do is pick up
little factoids and half-understood theories and repeat them to others to
be interesting. Particularly on first dates. So we try to be interesting,
we don’t really much care about the truth of what we’re saying, and
scientists have to be extremely self conscious about this: not just to be
interesting but to be right. Most humans most of the time though adopt
ideologies and beliefs that are there principally to make their minds
attractive to others, not because those beliefs actually correspond to the
world."

This to me is is the key to the maverickism that Tom and others display; it
seems to be a plague everywhere in our relentlessly sexualised culture.
(Confession: Me too, though it's something that I have become less prone to
since I discovered that the urge to be both right and contrary is a kind of
biological acting out. I can't take myself so seriously.)  It's clearly
crazy to believe that you can beat a large global community of trained
climate scientists who have been working on a complex problem for decades
with a few hours of googling but in terms of biological programming it's a
matter of life and death: Admit that the experts are right, and - somewhere
down at the base of the brain - you become a genetic dead end.  To me, this
makes the denialist methodology of cherry-picked factoids, Galileo
complexes, and conspiracy theories at least intelligible where before it
was just plain batdung crazy.  Of course, it is still a very serious
problem for a species that is hitting the holding capacity of it's planet.
It also shows why rational discussion with these people feels like banging
your head against a wall, which is in a way a kind of relief.

Jim