waka waka waka

A couple of weeks ago I posted an essay in response to a post of Bill Vallicella’s on whether life might have an objective meaning. In his piece Bill argued that any attempt to offer a purely subjective interpretation must lead to an infinite regress, and therefore must be false. I responded, drawing on work by Daniel Dennett, that the regress argument might not block a suitable naturalistic account. This led to a long discussion in the comments thread, with over a hundred entries. Toward the end, philosopher Peter Lupu offered some extensive criticisms of my position, which I would like to begin to address here.

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Dr. William Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, is back in harness after a month-long layoff from blogging. I’m glad he’s back on the job: he is as interesting and provocative as always. I’d like to weigh in on this post in particular, in which he argues that meaning, in particular the meaning of life, must either have an objective basis, or founder in an infinite regress.

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It is far too hot to write, or even think cogently. New York’s infrastructure is collapsing under the strain: the power grid is failing, and subway service is becoming chaotic as outdoor sections of track begin to buckle in the heat. Broken-down vehicles are clogging the streets and highways, and after waiting to cross Madison Avenue at lunchtime today I noticed that I had actually left footprints in the asphalt. It even seemed at times this afternoon that some of the buildings themselves were sagging, but I might simply have been hallucinating as my vital organs shut down.

…what’s that you say? “How hot is it?”

It’s so hot that I saw a dog chasing a cat, and they were walking.

So for tonight, just a fascinating little news item about evolution at work in the laboratory: further confirmation for this greatest of all human insights, as if any were needed. Here.

Like may others I am an admirer of Winston Churchill, and have lately been reading an excellent book by the managing editor of Newsweek, Jon Meacham. It’s called Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship, and as you can imagine from the title, it chronicles the enormously important friendship between Churchill and FDR during a critical passage in the history of the civilized world.

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The lawyer, actor, writer, economist, professor, former Nixon speechwriter, and game-show host Ben Stein is starring in a new movie, called Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, that challenges the Darwinian account of life’s history. It was given a screening in Minneapolis on March 20th, and among those attending were Richard Dawkins, who had actually consented to be interviewed for the film before he knew what its angle was going to be, and the biologist PZ Meyers, author of one of the world’s premier science blogs, Pharyngula.

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Here’s Richard Dawkins, opening a conversation with J. Craig Venter at a recent conference in Germany:

I thought I’d begin by reading a quotation from a famous philosopher and historian of science from the 1930s, Charles Singer, to give an idea of exactly how much things have changed. And Craig Venter is a leader, perhaps the leader, in making that change today. So, this is a quote from 1930, Charles Singer:

“Despite interpretations to the contrary, the theory of the gene is not a mechanist theory. The gene is no more comprehensible as a chemical or physical entity than is the cell or, for that matter, the organism itself. If I ask for a living chromosome, that is, for the only effective kind of chromosome, no one can give it to me, except in its living surroundings, any more than he can give me a living arm or leg. The doctrine of the relativity of functions is as true for the gene as it is for any of the organs of the body. They exist and function only in relation to other organs. Thus, the last of the biological theories leaves us where the first started in the presence of a power called life, or Psyche, which is not only of its own kind but unique in each and all of its exhibitions.”

You couldn’t ask for a more comprehensive destruction of a conventional view than that. That is not just wrong. It is catastrophically, utterly, stupefyingly wrong. It’s wrong in an interesting way, and Craig is the best person to tell us what’s wrong with all that.

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In his recent New York Times Magazine article on the evolutionary and biological underpinnings of morality, Steven Pinker acknowledges the nihilistic shadows nearby, and, like other popularizers of Darwinian naturalism, reassures us that we needn’t worry. I think he’s right — we needn’t — but not for the reasons he suggests.

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As promised, Steven Pinker has written what I think will be seen as a a fairly important article for the New York Times Magazine about human morality. Having banged on the topic of morality a great deal myself lately, I encourage all of you to read it. I found little to disagree with, though his attempt to ameliorate the discomfort of moral nihilism by arguing that moral systems such as ours are sort of an evolutionary “forced move” — which I also think is about the most one can do in that department — will be unsatisfying to some. (Then again, the Copernican system was unsatisfying to some, too.)

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A little while ago I ran across an interesting, if rather sad, item in the Physorg.com daily newsletter, having to do with the small stature of pygmies. Previous notions had been that having such wee bodies better adapted them to food shortages, or to moving about in dense forests, but neither of these explanations has held up well.

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In Daniel Dennett’s most important book, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, he makes with brilliant clarity the case that Darwin’s great insight — arguably, I think, the greatest ever had by anyone, so far at least — is, as Dennett calls it, a “universal acid”, eating at the foundations of many of Man’s smugly cherished notions about himself. I believe he is right about this, but I have also thought for some time now that even Dennett, arch-naturalist that he is, has stopped short of acknowledging what is perhaps the most unsettling conclusion of Darwinism:

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Readers will probably be familiar with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born Muslim apostate and political writer. You may have heard of her in connection with the film Submission, about the opression of women under Islam — for which she wrote the screenplay, and for which its director Theo van Gogh was murdered in an Amsterdam street by a Muslim zealot.

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The discussion of Divine Command Theory linked to in yesterday’s post is fascinating for me in more ways than one. I find it of interest not only in itself, as a thoughtful examination of an ancient and vexatious philosophical problem, but also on another, deeper level as well.

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A couple of days ago the Nobel laureate James Watson was all over the news: he had expressed, in an interview for the London Times, his opinion that scientific results indicated that black Africans were, on average, less intelligent than white Northerners. In a subsequent article, we read:

Dr Watson, who runs one of America’s leading scientific research institutions, made the controversial remarks in an interview in The Sunday Times.

The 79-year-old geneticist said he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really”. He said he hoped that everyone was equal, but countered that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”.

He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because “there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don’t promote them when they haven’t succeeded at the lower level”. He writes that “there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so”.

It’s not surprising that this has caused quite a stir. From the Left, we hear cries of racism. And from the Right, we hear that Dr. Watson is being unfairly vilified for refusing to put political correctness before impartial scientific inquiry.

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Here is some interesting reading for you all, courtesy of Edge.org.

First up is an essay called Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion, by Jonathan Haidt, in which he takes the “new atheists” to task for failing to develop a subtle enough appreciation of the adaptive underpinnings of religion, and of morality. He draws on recent shifts in how the notion of group selection is understood, and introduces some non-traditional functional concepts about morality.

Next, read responses by Michael Shermer, David Sloan Wilson, and Sam Harris, here.

I haven’t had time to digest all of this myself yet. Have a look, and let’s talk about it a little later.

Today’s Physorg.com newsletter (which I enthusiastically recommend as an excellent source of news about all branches of science) had an interesting item about social hierarchies in fish. As is so often the case with discoveries of organizing principles in nature, the research is likely to help us understand not just the particular system under examination (in this case reef colonies of gobies), but ourselves as well.

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An article in today’s Times raises an interesting issue. The story concerns a Dr. Marcus Ross, who was recently awarded a Ph.D. in paleontology by the University of Rhode Island. His professors all seem to agree that he did good solid scientific work in the pursuit of his degree, but there is one curious wrinkle: the newly minted Dr. Ross is a young-earth creationist.

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Readers will probably be familiar with one Deepak Chopra, who has made a handsome pile over the years by peddling pseudo-scientific New Age pablum to legions of credulous and uncritical admirers. Now, in an item at the Huffington Post, he swivels his intellectual popguns to bear upon Richard Dawkins’s book The God Delusion, and does about as little damage as you might expect. If you enjoy seeing intellectual justice in action, visit the website eclexys, where blogger “gordsellar” gives Chopra’s gormless review, which is a basinful of the purest hogwash, the fisking it deserves, in a satisfying post entitled Deepak Chopra: Who Is This Idiot?

Thank you Kevin Kim for linking to this post, which I might otherwise have missed.

As I’ve mentioned recently, there is always something at Edge.org to engage the curious mind. One of the more interesting features of the website is the annual World Question project, which consists of asking a diverse collection of thinkers some simple but provocative question, and presenting their responses.

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In yesterday’s post we noted the difficulty people naturally have in grasping the immensity of the timeframe at which evolution occurs. But despite the zoomed-in view our fleeting lifespans impose upon us, we can still detect the occasional tick of the evolutionary clock. Just such an observation has recently been made regarding the genetic trait known as lactose tolerance.

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I often wonder why some people are so resistant to Darwinism. The idea, once grasped, would seem to have everything going for it: it is elegant and simple, but despite its simplicity has amazing depth and explanatory power. It has been abundantly confirmed by a diverse and mutually supporting body of evidence, and provides a sturdy framework for our understanding of all life on Earth.

Nevertheless, the fact of Darwinian evolution is flatly rejected by a majority (!) of Americans. One obvious reason for this is the persistence of fundamentalist Biblical literalism in our country, with its insistence upon the Old Testament creation story. But the acceptance of such folklore as fact is abetted by another, quite natural difficulty: people have, generally, absolutely no concept of deep time.

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I receive a number of daily newsletters. Among them is one from Physorg.com, a website that serves as a clearinghouse for news on various scientific fronts. The stories are generally brief, rarely very technical, and their purpose is simply to alert the reader to the fact that that some new development or other has occurred in the field at hand; the curious reader may then, having been given the scent, follow it to its source on his own initiative. The whole thing is usually very professionally done, and is an excellent way to keep abreast of current events in science and technology.

Imagine my disappointment, then, to observe that Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, the utter incomprehension of which we may sadly take as a “given” among its many detractors in religious circles, is also a source of confusion, even at the broadest and most superficial level, to the editors of the Physorg newsletter. I refer to the following headline, found atop a story in yesterday’s issue:

Do galaxies follow Darwinian evolution?

What is it that bothers me so? Read on.

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However you may feel about Richard Dawkins’ recent campaign against religion, he is indisputably among the greatest living scholars of natural history. One of the many topics he discusses in his richly informative book The Ancestor’s Tale is the notion that “evolvability” itself may be amenable to natural selection. He suggests that certain watershed developments in life’s history greatly increased the facility of organisms to adapt, and that such developments would themselves have been adaptive. There is tricky footing here; it is important to keep in mind that natural selection never “looks ahead”. But, as Dawkins writes near the end of the book, “we might find with hindsight that the species that fill the world tend to be descended from ancestral species with a talent for evolution.” There are a number of developments that Dawkins cites as having improved life’s “evolvability”: among these are the birth of eukaryotic cells, multicellularism, segmentation, and sex. He also discusses another, less obvious milestone: bottlenecking.

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I’ve mentioned oysters before in these pages (I should probably give posts about them a separate category by now), but while scooping a few dozen of them out of Wellfleet Harbor this weekend, I noticed something about them that I hadn’t realized before, which is that they seem to exhibit a consistent chirality.

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Here’s an interesting bit of convergent evolution: I see from an item in today’s PhysOrg newsletter that tarantula venom targets the same pain-inducing capsaicin receptors that plants such as chili peppers have learned to activate to discourage predators. Learn more here.

My friend Eugene Jen has sent me some links to a lively academic discussion. The topic is one that I am keenly interested in — evolutionary psychology — and the question at hand is what the future of the field might be, both here in the USA and in Asia.

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Yesterday’s post was about “ring species”, both as interesting natural phenomena in themselves, and as a reminder that the persistent human tendency to impose discrete categories on continuous phenomena can lead us, if not to outright error, at least to an inaccurate model of the world. Keeping in mind that we are all inclined toward this prejudice — Richard Dawkins calls it the “tyranny of the discontinuous mind” — can help us to avoid not only taxonomic pitfalls, but philosophical ones as well.

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One of the obstacles that some people face in understanding evolutionary theory is the natural tendency to think in excessively discrete terms, insisting on parsing the continuity of the world into distinct categories. Richard Dawkins, in his book The Ancestor’s Tale, addresses this problem — which he calls “the tyranny of the discontinuous mind” — and offers some examples of how the categories we see in the natural world are not sharply bounded, but merge quite seamlessly into one another. I have promised to write about some of the fascinating ideas in this book, and this topic seems a good one to begin with.

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In a recent post, I recommended that readers with an interest in biology pay a visit to the Tree of Life Web Project, an interactive display of the taxonomic relationships linking all life on Earth. Upon seeing the post, one of our commenters, microbiologist Andrew Staroscik, mentioned that he had rather a low opinion of the ToL website, and, when I asked him if he would explain in more detail, offered a detailed and piquant critique of the way the tree is organized and presented. We are fortunate to have experts such as Andrew among our readership, and rather than let his response languish in the comment thread, where many of you might not have seen it, I am republishing it here.

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As I mentioned a while back, one item getting frequent play in my rotating reading stack is the hefty volume The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins, and as I expected, it is hugely engaging and informative. I’m about halfway done with it - the backwards pilgrimage is currently marching through the latter Carboniferous period, where we mammals have just been joined by the Sauropsids (including all reptiles and birds). I’ve already learned a great many interesting things, and will be sprinkling some of them about these pages in days and weeks to come. For today, however, I’ll call the attention of any of you who have an interest in natural history to a marvelous website, the Tree of Life Web Project. Onto the waka waka waka sidebar it goes.

There is more I’d like to say about Robert Wright’s Nonzero, and I’ll be getting to it tomorrow, most likely, but meanwhile I’ve just begun reading The Ancestor’s Tale, by Richard Dawkins.

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The multidimensional Kevin Kim, over at his one-of-a-kind weblog Big Hominid’s Hairy Chasms, has posted a response to my mention of Robert Wright’s book Nonzero. In his post Kevin calls into question the idea of any directionality or purpose to biological evolution, making common cause in this regard with the late Stephen Jay Gould. Kevin writes:

[…I] wonder whether Wright isn’t making a mistake similar to that made by certain process theologians– people who (1) look at events happening in the “cream of the crop” of the evolutionary tumult and (2) mistakenly conclude that evolution at this top layer somehow represents a universal telos. I think human arrogance tends to suggest the “ladder” paradigm to us when we assess natural phenomena: we can’t help seeing ourselves as some sort of culmination of natural (or supernatural) processes. My own view is that life and mind are not representative of any telos at all: they are simply stochastic occurrences. Most of this cosmos, pretty though it be, is not alive.

Closed systems tend toward greater entropy over time. Within those closed systems, regions of anti-entropic activity may arise, but the overarching history of those systems is foreordained to follow the path of the “thermodynamic arrow,” as Stephen Hawking calls it. That is why, in a (theoretically) closed system like our universe, tiny pockets of life can form while most of the universe remains (as far as we know) abiotic. Billions or trillions of years hence, all that life will disintegrate as entropy settles more comfortably into its ancient throne. Those tiny pockets of life, then– those little bits of animated telos– are no evidence of a larger cosmic end or purpose. They– we– are a brief spark in the Nabokovian blackness: here and gone. The pessimist views this state of affairs with rue; the man of religion, by contrast, knows this means that each moment is absolutely precious. Life’s finitude and frailty are what give it its value.

Kevin, writing with customary eloquence, makes some very good points, and most of all I agree with his remarks about what gives life its value. But I think that he is missing the point made by Wright in his book, and is wrongly conflating the idea of telos with the possibility of there being a directionality, an “arrow”, to Darwinian evolution.

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I had put it aside for a while (I tend to have too many books going at once), but have just finished reading Nonzero - The Logic of Human Destiny, by Robert Wright. It is quite brilliant, and I highly recommend it.

“The Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg once ended a book on this note: ‘The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.’ Far be it from me to argue with a great physicist about how depressing physics is. For all I know, Weinberg’s realm of expertise, the realm of inanimate matter, really does offer no evidence of higher purpose. But when we move into the realm of animate matter — bacteria, cellular slime molds, and, most notably, human beings — the situation strikes me as different. The more closely we examine the drift of biological evolution and, especially, the drift of human history, the more there seems to be a point to it all. Because in neither case is ‘drift’ really the right word. Both of these processes have a direction, an arrow. At least, that is the thesis of this book.”

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The English clergyman and philosopher William Paley (1743-1805), who among his many other achievements was also the Christ’s College senior wrangler of 1763, is probably best known today for his analogy of the “watchmaker”, which was an argument-from-nature for the existence of God.

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My friend Eugene Jen has brought to my attention a sad item: Harriet, a Galápagos tortoise brought home on the Beagle by Charles Darwin himself, has died at the age of 176.

Harriet, we hardly knew ye.

In considering the question of how “mere” matter can exhibit intentionality, I argued in a previous post that living things have purposefulness and “aboutness” by virtue of their being designed, just as our artifacts have. The designer, however, in the case of living things, is not a purposeful Mind, but the blind processes of evolution and natural selection. If we are willing to acknowledge that our complex intentional apparatus might, as we look backward through our ancestral history, take simpler and simpler forms, all the way back to the earliest replicators, we go a long way toward establishing the “gradualist bridge” that many dualist philosophers insist cannot be built.

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It having been a long day - it’s eleven p.m., and I’ve only just got home from the kung fu school - I’ll just leave you tonight with an interesting tidbit from today’s paper.

Apparently, recent study of the human genome has turned up an interesting kink in our lineage. It seems that the human-chimp divergence wasn’t quite as neat and tidy as was once believed; it now appears that after the human and chimp lines had parted ways, they rejoined, thereby producing chimp-human hybrids for a while (not sure what you’d call them, maybe humps). In other words, proto-humans, and then female chimp-human hybrids, crossbred for a while with the proto-chimps.

This is bound to give some people fits, which of course tickles me no end. I haven’t checked to see how the chimps feel about it. Read more here.

One of the knottier topics in philosophy of mind is intentionality. The term refers to the way our thoughts are about their objects, and intentionality is often considered to be an exclusive hallmark of the mental. A thought can be “about” Paris, but a stone, or a lampshade, cannot be.

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For fans and foes of Daniel Dennett, The Prosblogion has posted a page with links to several audio files of recent interviews and panel discussions with the feisty philosopher.

They are big files, so they take a minute to download and get running. Worth the wait, though, for those who are interested.

I’m sure we have all, at one time or another, had the experience of being dazzled by a bright light. The other day it happened to me, and I noticed something quite surprising about it.

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My friend Jess Kaplan, who often sends me interesting tidbits, has called my attention to a curious item from Turkey. It’s a story about a group of siblings who, some are saying, are examples of retrograde evolution.

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I’ve finally taken up Daniel Dennett’s latest effort, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. The book is an attempt to apply the methods of evolutionary psychology and sociobiology to a critical examination of the possible reasons for our fondness for religion. It has unsurprisingly ruffled a few feathers, something Dennett always seems to relish.

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Quite a few years ago I ran across a book - I can’t recall where - called The Descent of Woman, by Elaine Morgan. Published in 1972, it puts forward a most unusual idea about human evolution, and it’s worth a mention here. I’m curious to know if any of you are familiar with it.

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It suddenly dawned on me this evening that I had not yet written a post formally introducing my readers to The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The world first learned of the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s role in the creation of all that is when one Bobby Henderson, a “concerned citizen”, wrote an open letter to the Kansas School Board in which he explained that humans received the spark of life from His Noodly Appendage, and described the teachings of Spaghetti Monsterism. Mr. Henderson quite reasonably requests that the Pastafarian account of the origin of life be taught alongside Intelligent Design and Darwinism:

One third time for Intelligent Design, one third time for Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, and one third time for logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence.

In his letter he also insists that the correct presentation is essential:

Furthermore, it is disrespectful to teach our beliefs without wearing His chosen outfit, which of course is full pirate regalia. I cannot stress the importance of this enough, and unfortunately cannot describe in detail why this must be done as I fear this letter is already becoming too long. The concise explanation is that He becomes angry if we don’t.

In addition to the revealed Truth (which includes scientific evidence that “global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking numbers of Pirates since the 1800s”), the site also offers some nifty merchandise, and even a festive holiday card. Don’t wait another minute.

Educational and psychological theories of the mid-20th century saw the human brain as an infinitely flexible learning machine, with no “factory presets”. But the picture that is now emerging of our mental apparatus is of a suite of prewired cognitive modules, located in various areas of the brain, each of which has been shaped by natural selection for some useful task. These modules provide us with a common a priori framework for organizing our model of the world, and each module contributes an intuitive description of some aspect of our environment.

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There are many in the scientific community, including some of its most prominent spokespersons, who seem to have embraced a rather militant form of atheism. Richard Dawkins seems to be the most visible just now, but there are many others.

I used to be a strongly committed atheist myself, but my viewpoint has softened, and I would categorize myself now as a curious agnostic. One of the reasons that I abandoned the atheist position is the simple fact that reason itself is silent on the question of God’s existence. Efforts have been made to put faith in God onto a solid naturalist or philosophical foundation, but the fact remains that there is still no way to compel either belief in or denial of the existence of God.

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The campaign by Biblical literalists to have their mythology masquerade as science in the public schools has been dealt another setback. In a welcome and much-needed decision, U.S. District Judge John E. Jones has struck down the Dover Township, PA school board’s attempt to smuggle “Intelligent Design” into the biology curriculum.

You can read the judge’s opinion here.

There is a heartening item in today’s New York Times: the creation myth known as Intelligent Design is having a tough time taking root. The ID movement’s complete and unsurprising lack of any scientific agenda is apparently beginning to catch up with it.

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Here’s Charles Krauthammer, in today’s Washington Post, getting off a shot at “Intelligent Design”:

“How ridiculous to make evolution the enemy of God. What could be more elegant, more simple, more brilliant, more economical, more creative, indeed more divine than a planet with millions of life forms, distinct and yet interactive, all ultimately derived from accumulated variations in a single double-stranded molecule, pliable and fecund enough to give us mollusks and mice, Newton and Einstein? Even if it did give us the Kansas State Board of Education, too.”

Read the full article here.

Yesterday I left a comment on a post by Bill Vallicella (who maintains one of the most interesting sites anywhere in the blogosphere) about Richard Dawkins’ antipathy toward the “theory” of Intelligent Design. Dr. Vallicella has responded here, and I’ll take this opportunity to respond to his response.

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