Physicist and Nobel Laureate Wolfgang Pauli was also a craftsman of withering put-downs. The best known of them is the ‘not even wrong’ (NEW) principle, where an idea or an argument is so absurd that it doesn’t even deserve the dignity of debate. Pauli reportedly coined this term when perusing one of his student’s research papers. Were Pauli alive to hear Union Minister of State for Human Resource Development Satyapal Singh’s statement that Darwinism needs to be chucked out of textbooks because nobody had ever seen an ape become a human, he would probably describe the Minister’s comment as a ‘not even not even wrong’ or some such.
In the court of intellectual jousting, NEWs may appear to exist only for the purpose of comic relief. But they also serve to define various degrees of ‘wrong.’ As the American science writer Michael Shermer explained in a Scientific American article over a decade ago, there’s nothing wrong about being wrong. Learned astronomers of yore thought the Earth was flat, later on other eminences thought it was perfectly spherical. Both were wrong (it’s a squashed sphere or an oblate spheroid). However, the latter does an exponentially better job of explaining nature than the flat-Earth thesis and, therefore, for someone to claim that all wrongs are on an equal footing and can be settled by a debate, as Mr. Singh offers, is downright disingenuous.
When Mr. Singh argues that Darwin is wrong because no one has witnessed apes “turning into” man, he takes it for granted that man is not an ape. When he says that humans have been humans since the beginning, he doesn’t realise that no evolutionist would disagree with that as our species — in 200,000-years — has never gone extinct.
Jean Baptiste-Lamarck, whose theory of evolution involved species changing into another and whose ideas Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace displaced, was merely “wrong” about evolution. Stephen Jay Gould, the palaentologist, held that evolution progressed in bursts — a theory called punctuated equilibrium — rather than in the slow and steady manner of natural selection that Darwin proposed. It’s not yet settled who’s more wrong. Modern ideas of epigenetics now suggest that Lamarck may not have been as wrong about evolution as he’s made out to be.
Many of India’s scientists, who in a rare instance have come together to unanimously voice their protest against Mr. Singh’s suggestion to axe Darwin, have rather blunt weapons in their hands — of evidence and argument — and have only managed to convey so far that Darwin isn’t wrong because of molecular biology. This is the equivalent of trying to dodge a bullet without trying to mess up your hair.
Mr. Singh doesn’t deserve a scientific rebuttal. His theory serves as a signpost for the absurd. What’s worrisome is that when the absurd and the rational collide, the latter doesn’t always triumph.
