The term “blinders†is tossed about a lot, but some folks may not know what they are. Blinders are a part of a horse’s or a mule’s tackle. They are small blocks of leather that fit on the outside of the animal’s eyes to keep it from looking to its side. Their purpose is to keep the animal looking only to the front so that it will not be startled or distracted by things that would otherwise be in its peripheral vision. Here is a picture of a horse wearing blinders.  ÂÂ
The purpose of physical blinders leads easily to the metaphor of intellectual blinders. A person is said to be “wearing blinders†if he is incapable of understanding another person’s point of view.ÂÂ
A couple of days ago I said that some scientists’ metaphysical commitments make them blind to data that disconfirms their theory. My comment was met with howls of indignation by commentators who insisted that “science†is pristine, self-correcting and ideology-free. Nonsense. Everyone’s perception is colored by their preconceived ideas about the nature of reality (including mine by the way). Part of the human condition is that, to one degree or another, we all wear blinders. The solution is not to deny the obvious, but to embrace it. Only when we admit that we have a blindside, that our perceptions are influenced by our presuppositions, will we be able to keep our minds open enough to perhaps turn our head and see what was previously masked by our blinders.ÂÂ
Darwinists are not exempt from this phenomenon. Their views are colored by their metaphysical commitments just like all of the rest of us. This does mean they are necessarily bad people. It just means they are people.ÂÂ
Stephan Jay Gould, bless him, was especially good at recognizing this phenomenon in his fellow evolutionists. Here are some gems from his writings:ÂÂ
ÂÂ
ÂÂ
“But our ways of learning about the world are strongly influenced by the social preconceptions and biased modes of thinking that each scientist must apply to any problem.  The stereotype of a fully rational and objective ‘scientific method,’ with individual scientists as logical (and interchangeable) robots, is self-serving mythology.â€Â Stephen Jay Gould, “In the Mind of the Beholder,†Natural History 103 (February 1994): 14, 14-23.ÂÂ
“Indeed proclamations for the supposed ‘truth’ of gradualism – asserted against every working paleontologist’s knowledge of its rarity – emerged largely from such a restriction of attention to exceedingly rare cases under the false belief that they alone provided a record of evolution at all!  The falsification of most ‘textbook classics’ upon restudy only accentuates the fallacy of the ‘case study’ method and its root in prior expectation rather than objective reading of the fossil record.† Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2002), 773.ÂÂ
“Before Niles Eldredge and I proposed the theory of punctuated equilibrium in 1972, the stasis, or nonchange, of most fossil species during their lengthy geological lifespans was tacitly acknowledged by all paleontologists, but almost never studied explicitly because prevailing theory treated stasis as uninteresting nonevidence for nonevolution . . . The overwhelming prevalence of stasis became an embarrassing feature of the fossil record, best left ignored as a manifestation of nothing (that is, nonevolution). We expect life’s bushes . . . to tell some story of direction change.  If they do not, we do not feature them in our studies – if we even manage to see them at all . . . Paleontologists are now beginning to study this higher order stasis, or nondirectional history of entire bushes. Stephen Jay Gould, “Cordelia’s Dilemma,†Natural History 102.2 (February 1993): 15, 10-18.ÂÂ
“ but stasis is data . . . Say it ten times before breakfast every day for a week, and the argument will surely seep in by osmosis: ‘stasis is data; stasis is data’ . . .† Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2002), 759.ÂÂ
“Darwin applied a consistent philosophy of materialism to his interpretation of nature. Matter is the ground of all existence; mind, spirit, and God as well, are just words that express the wondrous results of neuronal complexity.â€Â Stephen Jay Gould, Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977), 13.ÂÂ
“Gradualism, the idea that all change must be smooth, slow, and steady, was never read from the rocks. It was primarily a prejudice of nineteenth-century liberalism facing a world in revolution. But it continues to color our supposedly objective reading of life’s history.â€Â Stephen Jay Gould, “An Early Start,†Natural History 87 (February 1978): 24.ÂÂ
“Correction of error cannot always arise from new discovery within an accepted conceptual system.  Sometimes the theory has to crumble first, and a new framework be adopted, before the crucial facts can be seen at all.† Stephen Jay Gould, “Cordelia’s Dilemma,†Natural History 102.2 (February 1993).ÂÂ
“New facts, collected in old ways under the guidance of old theories, rarely lead to any substantial revision of thought. Facts do not ‘speak for themselves, they are read in the light of theory.â€Â Stephen Jay Gould, “The Validation of Continental Drift,†in Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History (1978; reprint, London: Penguin, 1991), 161.ÂÂ
“We can tell tales of improvement for some groups, but in honest moments we must admit that the history of complex life is more a story of multifarious variation about a set of basic designs than a saga of accumulating excellence . . . I regard the failure to find a clear ‘vector of progress’ in life’s history as the most puzzling fact of the fossil record . . . we have sought to impose a pattern that we hoped to find on a world that does not really acquiesce.â€Â Stephen Jay Gould, “Death and Transfiguration†in The Flamingo’s Smile (New York: W.W. Norton, 1985).ÂÂ
Other evolutionists have said similar things:ÂÂ
“[E]ver since Darwin’s work inspired the notion that fossils linking modern man and extinct ancestor would provide the most convincing proof of human evolution, preconceptions have led evidence by the nose in the study of fossil man.â€Â John Reader, “Whatever Happened to Zinjanthropus?†New Scientist 89, (March 26, 1981): 802-805.ÂÂ
“In other words, when the assumed evolutionary processes did not match the pattern of fossils that they were supposed to have generated, the pattern was judged to be ‘wrong.’ A circular argument arises: interpret the fossil record in terms of a particular theory of evolution, inspect the interpretation, and note that it confirms the theory. Well, it would, wouldn’t it?â€Â Tom S. Kemp, “A Fresh Look at the Fossil Record,†New Scientist 108 (December 5, 1985): 66-67.ÂÂ
“How is it that trained men, the greatest experts of their day, could look at a set of modern human bones the cranial fragments and ‘see’ a clear simian signature in them; and see in an ape’s jaw the unmistakable signs of humanity.  The answers, inevitably, have to do with the scientists’ expectations and their effects on the interpretation of the data.â€Â Roger Lewin, Bones of Contention: Controversies in the Search for Human Origins (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 61.ÂÂ
“Whenever Darwinism is the topic . . . science and philosophy get completely intertwined. Scientists sometimes deceive themselves into thinking that philosophical ideas are only, at best, decorations or parasitic commentaries on the hard, objective triumphs of science, and that they themselves are immune to the confusions that philosophers devote their lives to dissolving. But there is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination.â€Â Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 21ÂÂ
“Biochemists and biologists who adhere blindly to the Darwinism theory search for results that will be in agreement with their theories and consequently orient their research in a given direction, whether it be in the field of ecology, ethology, sociology, demography (dynamics of populations), genetics (so-called evolutionary genetics), or paleontology. This intrusion of theories has unfortunate results: it deprives observations and experiments of their objectivity, makes them biased, and, moreover, creates false problems. . . . The code of conduct that the naturalist wishing to understand the problem of evolution must adopt is to adhere to facts and sweep away all a priori ideas and dogmas. Facts must come first and theories must follow. The only verdict that matters is the one pronounced by the court as proved facts. Indeed, the best studies on evolution have been carried out by biologists who are not blinded by doctrines and who observe facts coldly without considering whether they agree or disagree with their theories.â€Â Pierre Grasse, Evolution of Living Organisms: Evidence for a New Theory of Transformation, (New York: Academic Press, 1977), 7-8.
“If deterministic constraints exist, then certain regularities or trends in the large scale pattern of evolution should be evident. Yet very few studies have addressed this problem. One main reason is that natural selection is strictly a local mechanism and hence inherently unable to account for any global trend or pattern. Another reason is that evolutionary pattern itself is the product of inference from available data. Where inference is habitually made under certain presumptions, the resulting pattern becomes correspondingly biased. A case in point is the phylogenetic classification of organisms.â€Â Mae-Wan Ho and Peter T. Saunders, Beyond Neo-Darwinism: An Introduction to the New Evolutionary Paradigm (London: Academic Press, 1984), 7.ÂÂ
“And it has been the paleontologist my own breed who have been most responsible for letting ideas dominate reality . . . We paleontologist have said that the history of life supports that interpretation [i.e., gradual adaptive change], all the while knowing that it does not.† Niles Eldredge, Time Frames: The Rethinking of Darwinian Evolution and the Theory of Punctuated Equilibria (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985), 144.ÂÂ
“Contrary to what most scientists write, the fossil record does not support the Darwinian theory of evolution, because it is this theory (there are several) which we use to interpret the fossil record.  By doing so, we are guilty of circular reasoning if we then say the fossil record supports this theory.â€Â Ronald R. West, “Paleontology and Uniformitarianism,†Compass 45 (May 1968): 216 ÂÂ
“We must learn to accept the fossil record at face value and construct our theories around it, not the other way round. Too often we have endeavored to force it into a particular mold or to ignore awkward facts contained in it . . . We still have a long way to go before we look at the fossil record for what it is and not for what we would like it to be. Historically, from Lyell and Darwin onwards, people have looked at the fossil record with a particular pattern in mind. They have failed to find the pattern they sought and have appealed to the incompleteness of the fossil record to explain way this anomaly. We are still doing this . . .â€Â Christopher R.C. Paul, “The Adequacy of the Fossil Record,†in ed. K.A. Joysey and A. E. Friday, Problems of Phylogenetic Reconstruction, 115-16 (London, Academic Press, 1982).