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Restructuration in Practice : Challenging a Pop-Culture Evolutionary Theory through Agent Based Modeling

An ordinary, non-scientist person’s exposure to science through pop-culture is ever growing. However, science is still believed to have a high threshold of entry. For most people, doing science means going through rigorous training of literature, specialization, and learning formal mathematics. Many people feel that they have no means to figure out which idea is scientifically accurate and which one is inaccurate. More importantly, they only have the trustworthiness of the source as heuristic for believing or not believing in a particular scientific message. In this paper, we argue that agent-based modeling has the potential to lower the threshold of entry to science and to empower people against the flood of scientific messages in pop-culture. To demonstrate our theory in practice, we conduct a thought experiment in which we extract a much debated scientific theory on the evolution of sexes from a BBC Earth documentary and show how one can easily recreate and explore the assumptions of such a theory using the NetLogo agent-based modeling environment. Then, we compare traditional formal mathematics based scientific analysis approach with our agent-based modeling approach and show how the latter affords people with little or no training in high level formal mathematics or evolutionary biology literature to challenge scientific ideas. Figure 1. BBC Earth’s documentary and the agent based model we developed based on it.