That is very true and your post is an important one.
I’ve made very similar statements contrasting the theology academy and the scientific academy—differences which most people assume to be obvious and yet an observation with implications beyond what many have assumed.
I spent a lot of time in faculty lounges in various university science departments, humanities departments, and seminary departments. The various differences and similarities in ways of thinking, life experiences, breadth of academic training, senses of humor, ranges of talents and hobbies, political positions, philosophies, grasps of multi-culturalism, and many other factors were absolutely fascinating—and certainly not always predictable. (And which professors most struck me as widely read and multi-talented “Renaissance men/women”? You might be surprised.)
With all that in mind, I can very much grasp what Dr. Swamidass is saying.
And even though I’m reasonably grounded in the fundamentals of evolutionary biology and I eagerly affirm such science, I continue to be “doubtful” at times about some aspects of evolutionary processes in the sense that I am still training my “intuition proclivities.” In other words, some aspects of evolutionary science still clash with my natural intuitions. Evolution can just plain seem counter-intuitive at times. (Perhaps some day I will organize a list of examples and explain what I had to go through to make sense of them.) That’s why so much of science education actually entails training and guiding our intuition so that it operates in harmony with the available evidence.
I recall a fascinating study by a School of Education professor where she tested eighth-grade students on basic astronomy concepts like “Why are there seasons?” She found that even some of the best students who could properly answer exam questions on this topic immediately after it was covered in science class would revert back to their original wrong answers just a few months later. Why? She posited that such students were retreating to more comfortable, intuitive notions, such as the assumption that a closer orbital position to the sun made the earth warmer in the summer. (Post-exam oral interviews with students provided evidence for this hypothesis.) This education scholar used her results to urge her teachers-in-training to consider that their job is not just to help students memorize science facts—but to train their natural intuitions to better conform to the realities of evidence. (Exactly how she does that is unclear to me because I didn’t read her series of publications on this topic.) Apparently human evolution has given us brains which sometimes reject significant evidence in favor of our innate sense of intuition—because intuition has so often favored the survival of our ancestors.
Another analogy might be illustrative: Some students learn language as if it is a set of mathematical equivalences: Word X in Language A equals Word Y in Language B. (Roughly equals is often more accurate.) Of course, equivalence is what vocabulary flashcards imply but it is only a starting point which must soon be expanded or else the student will never grasp the complexities and nuances of communicating in the new language. Furthermore, one must not just try to speak like a native speaker of that language, one must learn to think like a native speaker of that language. Likewise, as Dr. Swamidass noted, biologists and chemists tend to think in different ways as they work in their respective fields.
