Long Odds

When ideas are highly unlikely, it can be tricky to figure just how unlikely. It's easy to understand that an even-odds horse is far more likely to win the race than a longshot. But when things are so unlikely that they're outside everyday experience--well, who can "feel" the difference between a billion-to-one shot and a trillion-to-one?

Over at The Huffington Post, Michael Shermer writes about the evolution-creationism controversy. He attacks "Intelligent Design" theory as a gussied up form of creationism, as well as yet another god of the gaps argument.

He goes on, however, to make a parenthetical remark that caught the attention of Eugene Volokh and Clayton Cramer. He calls evolution denial "the doppelganger of Holocaust denial."

Volokh has trouble with this analogy because he believes Holocaust denial has an immorality attached that doesn't fit creationism. While Volokh's essentially right about this, I think Shermer would simply reply he's only comparing, without getting into questions of good or bad, the thought processes of the two groups; that they both have a worldview that makes them ignore the massive evidence against their theory and accept weak or hopeless evidence. Since Shermer has written a whole book on why people believe weird things, and has studied these arguments for years, I guess he feels the kind of "debates" you get into with creationists and holocaust deniers are, intellectually speaking, quite similar.

Cramer goes further and says Shermer's just wrong--that the Holocaust is better proved than evolution. Is it that obvious? We run into the problem listed above: how do you measure the unlikeliness of the counterarguments? Or to put it in a positive way, there's tons of evidence for evolution. As Shermer notes, this evidence comes from numerous independent lines of scientific research. You have to be pretty perverse to deny it.

Moreover, I don't think Cramer understands how tenuous his argument is. Imagine things in a century. We already have plenty of evidence for evolution, and by then we'll have ten times more. Meanwhile, the Holocaust will be outside living memory and means of falsifying historical evidence (already good) will be better than ever. I don't think a Clayton Cramer in 2100 will be quite so sure of himself.

But there's an even bigger point here that I think both Volokh and Cramer miss. Volokh lives and works in America, and most of his friends and associates are American or at least part of the Western world. So when he posted about another aspect of Shermer's piece, the comments he received were somewhat predictable: a number wrote in using the arguments of creationists, but no one (that I noticed) defended Holocaust denial.

Yet, there are places in the world where Jew-hating is popular. In these lands, Holocaust denial is common, and the taint against it doesn't exist, at least not like it does in Eugene Volokh's world. In such places, intelligent people seeking the truth might give more credence to Holocaust denial than Clayton Cramer does. I can easily imagine the smart set at a university mocking creationists while taking Holocaust denial seriously.

I wonder how they'd respond to Shermer's argument on their blogs?