The Agency Problem
Good teachers learn early on to tell stories wherever possible — it’s a lot easier to remember "that time Professor Jones got $300 off on a plane ticket" than "certain goods have high elasticity of demand in the short run." We’re hard-wired to think in terms of other conscious actors ("When Bill walked too close to the firepit…"), so it makes sense that anecdotes stick.
The problem is that in the process of anthropomorphizing, or anecdotalizing, or allegorizing, we can impute agency where it isn’t due. When we teach kids that "electrons follow the path of least resistance" or "genes want to survive," when we insist that there’s a Mother Nature or Father Christmas, we occlude understanding.
For instance, a friend of mine recently argued that future generations of humans will have no pinky toe because we have stopped using ours. Her faulty assumption was that Nature actually "selects" against what She perceives as unnecessary features, or even, that our bodies are trying to improve. She missed the fact that evolution, like every other blind, unconscious, and tasteless mechanism of the natural world, just is; whichever genes survive, survive. That’s what’s so impressive and important.
Likewise, electrons don’t know where the resistors in a circuit will be, though thinking they do has obvious intuitive appeal. When I was in high school doing AP physics problems, I practically imagined myself at some fork in the road looking ahead to determine which path will have the least brush — 40 ohms v. 20 ohms worth — and I plodded along in the obvious direction. Again, I missed the important part: that an electron’s velocity and momentum is probabilistic and that resistors, in ways I still haven’t fully grasped, affect the distribution.
Of course, it’s possible to do the opposite: ignore living, breathing agents in favor of some cold "idea." Much of the history curriculum works like that. Instead of individuals arguing in salons there was "The Renaissance"; instead of little girls suffocating in overcrowded textile factories in a small town in Massachusetts there was a "Progressive Movement." Pamphlets and memoirs and speeches are abstracted into "isms", and kids look at history as a logical progression from one to the next.
I know I did. Until I got to college and saw professors struggling to get papers published and grad students politicking for funding, I thought the world of ideas was somehow stable and well-defined. At fault was my misguided conception of agency. I would say things like, "they’re working on a new way to…" or "scientists have figured out…" Now I know that "the latest study" is written by actual people, teams of finicky, farting humans working under all kinds of pressure and falling prey to trends and fads, just like me.
It’s not a long stretch to imagine that the American public would be reluctant to bestow so much power upon one man if they realized he was indeed a man. And a President would care more about his people if he saw them as such.
So a measure of "agency awareness," either way, could be tremendously useful. We should all be wary when we see parents teaching their kids that some guy at the North Pole decides which presents they’re getting, rather than Mom and Dad’s paychecks and Wal-Mart’s prices. And equally disturbing should be our habit of erasing agency (like in history textbooks) in the name of testing standards. Though easy to ignore, the Who is as important as the What, the How, and the Why.
Stories are powerful, but can we attribute their power to genes or to experience?
this is an ill-formed question. on some level, the power of stories is obviously genetic. try telling a mouse a story, and see how much he gets out of it. the reason the mouse doesn't get it is because the basic machinery (genetically encoded) just isn't there. if human brains respond to stories, it's because our genetically encoded machinery is capable of it.
Our brains are adapted to a universe where time is sequential and people act with motives. Maybe your question is: if we were transplanted to a universe where that were not the case, would we still respond to stories better than exposition? When you put it like that, it's maybe an interesting rhetorical question (my answer would be yes, of course), but there's no way of testing it.
It may be the case that there is individual variation in the degree to which people respond to stories vs. exposition (you could imgaine traits like patience and intelligence playing a role). In this case, it is theoretically possible to identify the individual genes themselves that play a role in the bias.
I just thought it unlikely that commonplace random mutation from crossover and the like would be so uniform ("every single fetus") as to wipe the pinky toe out of the gene pool. In other words, without some selective pressure (altering reproduction rates), I don't see the "random mutation" story accounting for a loss or reduction of pinky toes, especially in the short term.
you mean random mutation (crossing-over is something different). in the short term, you're right, the pinky toe isn't going anywhere. But if there's no selective pressure maintaining the pinky toe (that is, if it is "neutral"), there no reason why it couldn't disappear in the long run (thousands/ hundreds of thousands of years). Of course, it could still be around-- the evolutionary process is stochastic.
Pete,
Your explanation was clearer, though my (2) was trying to make the same point about the "increase of entropy in the 'pinky toe genes.'" I just thought it unlikely that commonplace random mutation from crossover and the like would be so uniform ("every single fetus") as to wipe the pinky toe out of the gene pool. In other words, without some selective pressure (altering reproduction rates), I don't see the "random mutation" story accounting for a loss or reduction of pinky toes, especially in the short term.