Chapter 24: Seeking Homeostasis in a Heteroscedastic World: A Sense of the Stakes in the Age of Inference

Evolving as a social species, we have needed assurances. There is good reason that organismal traits, behaviors, cultures, and institutions, from schools to governments to religions, are slow to evolve, even when changes in surrounding conditions appear to outpace the adaptations. Krebs (1978) best described life’s conflicting pressures with the statement, “The distribution and abundance of organisms are fixed by the evolutionary processes of the past impinging on the changing environments of the present” (p. 16).

Humans must certainly promote traits suited for survival under the current circumstances. A drive to also predict behaviors and innovate for future success is uniquely innate in our self-aware and intelligent species. Nevertheless, our cleverness for invention often appears to surpass the wisdom of its proper utility for long-term benefit. Even as new discoveries and developments have grown exponentially over the past few centuries, societies have been reluctant to discard older ideas that have had apparent benefit throughout our known verbal or written history. Embedded in this reluctance seems to be an aversion to being wrong or, equally, to permit wrong (as the dominant group may define it) in others. Science and society have long been at odds over this resistance to change, sometimes with deadly consequences.