Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine, has been writing a "Skeptic" column for several years for Scientific American. In the August 2006 issue, he looks at "Folk Science".
The Christian Right loves to say that evolution is "just a theory". Heck, gravity is just a theory, too. But, as Shermer writes, our intuitive notions about reality don't have too much trouble recognizing that when you drop something or fall off of something, it (or you) heads towards the ground.
But when you start getting into other aspects of physics, such as Einstein's notion that gravity exists becaues space-time is curved (someone correct me if I've misstated that!), it's not so intuitive. As Shermer writes:
But much of physics is counterintuitive, as is the case in many other disciplines, and before the rise of modern science we had only our folk intuitions to guide us. Folk astronomy, for example, told us that the world is flat, celestial bodies revolve around the earth, and the planets are wandering gods who determine our future. Folk biology intuited an élan vital flowing through all living things, which in their functional design were believed to have been created ex nihilo by an intelligent designer. Folk psychology compelled us to search for the homunculus in the brain - a ghost in the machine - a mind somehow disconnected from the brain. Folk economics caused us to disdain excessive wealth, label usury a sin and mistrust the invisible hand of the market.
In the last sentence we see that even a careful skeptic in matters of physical science can be bamboozled by quacks in the fields of economics. It may be "folk economics" to "mistrust the invisible hand of the market". It's also sound, empirically-based economics. I'm confident that Shermer wouldn't want to leave, say, medical licensing, drug safety and food inspection strictly to "invisible hand of the market".
He has more to say about the Invisible Hand. It's amazing, though not that surprising, that someone so sophisticated in the ways of the hard sciences can buy such simpleton concepts of economics as this column one lead one to believe. Let's be generous and just say that maybe he's not familiar enough with the "folk" terminology in which these things are discussed to realize how silly his comments on that subject sound.
But I can go along with him on his observations from the hard sciences:
The reason folk science so often gets it wrong is that we evolved in an environment radically different from the one in which we now live. Our senses are geared for perceiving objects of middling size - between, say, ants and mountains - not bacteria, molecules and atoms on one end of the scale and stars and galaxies on the other end. We live a scant three score and 10 years, far too short a time to witness evolution, continental drift or long-term environmental changes.
Causal inference in folk science is equally untrustworthy. We correctly surmise designed objects, such as stone tools, to be the product of an intelligent designer and thus naturally assume that all functional objects, such as eyes, must have also been intelligently designed. Lacking a cogent theory of how neural activity gives rise to consciousness, we imagine mental spirits floating within our heads.
He also reminds us that "folk science" gives heavy credibility to anecdotal evidence, a mainstay of quack medicine, often described as "alternative".
On the latter, I'm more of the attitude that there is no such things as "alternative" medicine and "mainstream" or "school" or "allopathic" medicine. There is only real medicine, which is stuff that can be scientifically demonstrated to work, and other stuff that can't be scientifically demonstrated to work.
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