Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Benny Hill and the Theory of Evolution   [Mike Potemra]

I was just reading Richard Dawkins’s forthcoming book The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution and found something quite inspiring. Dawkins describes an experiment conducted by Prof. Daniel J. Simons at the University of Illinois:

Half a dozen young people standing in a circle were filmed for 25 seconds tossing a pair of basketballs to each other. . . . Before being shown the film, we are told that we have a task to perform, to test our powers of observation. We have to count the total number of times balls are passed from person to person. . . . After showing the film and collecting the counts, the experimenter drops his bombshell. “And how many of you saw the gorilla?" The majority of the audience looks baffled: blank. The experimenter then replays the film, but this time tells the audience to watch in a relaxed fashion without trying to count anything. Amazingly, nine seconds into the film a man in a gorilla suit strolls nonchalantly to the centre of the circle of players, pauses to face the camera, thumps his chest . . . and then strolls off. . . . He is there in full view for nine whole seconds – more than one third of the film — and yet the majority of the witnesses never see him.

There is an important epistemological point to be made here, to the effect that crude empiricism can, by limiting the questions we ask, dull our overall intellectual perceptiveness. (This is not, of course, the immediate lesson Dawkins draws.) But that’s not what delighted me about this experiment. No: It’s that as someone who is terribly math-shy, I am thrilled to know that one can advance the cause of science even by running around in a gorilla suit and thumping one’s chest. Milton was right: “They also serve who only stand and thump.”

08/26 10:25 PMShare