Pharyngula

The Salem Hypothesis

Posted by PZ Myers on February 22, 2006
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The Salem hypothesis is an old chestnut from talk.origins. It was proposed by a fellow named Bruce Salem who noticed that, in arguments with creationists, if the fellow on the other side claimed to have personal scientific authority, it almost always turned out to be because he had an engineering degree. The hypothesis predicted situations astonishingly well—in the bubbling ferment of talk.origins, there were always new creationists popping up, pompously declaiming that they were scientists and they knew that evolution was false, and subsequent discussion would reveal that yes, indeed, they were the proud recipient of an engineering degree.

Stating the Salem hypothesis was also a good way of stirring the pot, because there are always engineers around who have not succumbed to creationist nonsense, and they’d get all huffy and denounce the very idea. Of course, it doesn’t say that engineers are all creationists: it says that creationists with advanced degrees are often engineers, a completely different thing altogether.

Here’s an excellent example of the Salem hypothesis in the form of letters to the Electronic Engineering Times. Engineers, your honor is safe: for every foolish declaration that organisms are examples of design, there are a couple of sharply worded smackdowns.

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Comments

  1. #1 buck
    February 22, 2006

    As an engineer, I’d like to point out that there is nothing within normal engineering education that would equip one to overcome the incredulity at the idea that random mutation and selection are capable of bringing about the diversity of life that we see today. Even after reading Dawkins’ persuasive The Selfish Gene, I was not completely convinced. It finally took this article in talk origins on genetic algorithms (especially the engineering examples in it) to convince me completely.

    I think a lot of scientists in the biological fields do not fully realize how counter-intuitive the idea of evolution is. I’d guess that a large section of us layhumans simply do not comprehend the magnitude of the timescales we are talking about here. For engineers, I think examples of the principles of evolution at work (outside the natural world) would go a long way in overcoming the incredulity barrier.

    I can only hope that as genetic algorithms become a more mainstream way of seeking optimum solutions in engineering design as well as other fields, the principles of evolution become as obvious to the rest of us educated folks with an open mind as they are to the scientists.

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