There are those for whom certainty is more important than clarity. Sometimes, I think the best minds just have to admit on a seemingly on-going basis “we don’t know”. This doesn’t sit well with some.
As one specific example–the one that prompted this post–people in the field of evolutionary biology want to reduce all human behavior to artifacts of our evolutionary history. It is logical enough: we are machines, programmed by our DNA, which itself arose as a complex system in response to the adaptive needs of millions of years of periodic scarcity and competition for survival among numerous organisms.
They can categorize observable human behavior, and work backwards to figure out what need each type of behavior may have met on some distant, dark, foggy shore. It all seems so clear. They can derive altruism as a derivation of the group instinct; Love as an extension both of the group instinct and the sexual urge; etc. (Note: these may not be the precise cases presented; what matters, obviously, is the intellectual framework within which it happens.)
Yet, what about this categorizing behavior itself? Can we not point to an evolutionary urge to avoid ambiguity? Can we not posit a coercive urge deriving from our social history to manufacture consent by any means possible? Can we not, in short, deconstruct the evolutionary deconstruction process as one example of itself, and thus flawed instrinsically and at root as a “truth” system”?
What comes first, matter or consciousness? We can’t know, but phenomenologically it is quite clearly consciousness. We don’t know what we don’t know, so we can’t speak to possible experiences which do not include our conscious presence, in some form.
Further, our best theories of the nature of the universe tell us that consciousness precedes the formation of matter. This was the conclusion von Neumann–who wrote the “Grundlage”, literally the book on the topic of quantum physics–reached.
Ideas obviously compete, and the best ones rise to the top, but only in conditions of open competition. And I don’t think we have had open competition in the biological sciences in some time.
That makes what passes for science nowadays much closer to the bloody and zero sum rivalries of chimp colonies, not homo sapiens. It is retrogressive.