non serviam ergo fiat lux

Sunday, December 2, 2007

TCR: This Week in God

Lots of good God-related insanity this week to read at the TCR's This Week in God.

Pat Robertson has his interpretation of I-35, while Jesus' General has his own.

I promise that if Mr. James Stabile has "turned straight" for good that I'll start going back to church.

See Right Wing Watch for more.

Bush & Republicans gave us "surge" of casualties

Thank goodness we're "winning" with the surge, otherwise, you may be tempted to think that national reconciliation is still as far away as it has ever been; all this completely ignores the cancer of corruption that has eaten Iraq from the inside-out. We're all still waiting on the political "surge" that our troops have paid for dearly, with the bloodiest year of the Iraq war in 2007. But this is how it has been for some time now.

The way Bush and the Republicans mishandled the war and foreign policy in general has weakened our country's national security for decades. In addition, the idiot-in-chief now plans to further cut counter-terrorism funding to our nation's cities. Boy, the GOP is great on domestic and foreign policy!

Vote Obama '08. I will.

Saturday, December 1, 2007

I've been enjoying a back-and-forth with a nice Christian (no, not Dan Marvin) on a facebook discussion board about evolution/science/religion.

In my first long comment, I tried to explain that even if science is devoid of moral explanations, this doesn't validate religious claims. It is entirely possible that neither science nor religion have the tools to explain/justify morality.

In my second long comment, I tried to respond to Andrew's inquiry about whether things like qualia disqualify physicalism.

Check 'em out below:

Comment one:

I think Ryan gave a nice explanation of his answer, and I just wanted to follow up your comment and clarify what I said above.

In regards to what you said:

1) Even if it's true that science doesn't supply any "oughts," that doesn't mean that we can invent them from religious mythology.

2) Science and common sense/logic supply analytical tools to evaluate what is the best thing to do in most situations -- that which serves "the greatest good for the greatest number" is always an easy benchmark. Infidelity and lying are examples of how we have to act at times against our baser instincts (of harm avoidance/self-preservation that make us want to lie, and impulse fulfillment that makes us want to be sexually promiscuous) in order to preserve important higher-order social structures that benefit us all in the long run. Ditto with crime: committing murder or theft leads to rips in the fabric of society; society supplies us with more "high end" goods than it is worth trading for "low end" momentary impulse satisfaction. So in a way, there need not be anything more to morality than that it just so happens that what is "best" = what we "ought" to do and therefore utilitarian ethics is self-contained and very consonant with science and logical analysis.

"I am a fan of intellectual discussion for sure, but at some point I have to leave the white walls of a classroom, drop my pen onto the paper and live life."

And you don't have to stop being logical/analytical/critically thinking as you do so. If you can justify acting morally using nothing but some pretty safe assumptions and solid logical relations, then you're fine. If not, then maybe you ought to abandon whatever aspect of morality you can't justify (I think of lots of religion-related "moral oughts" -- like sex before marriage, etc.).
_____
To clarify a bit regarding what I said earlier:

Evolutionary biology is not (typically) about individuals. Evolution occurs in populations, not individuals, as Mayr spent a great deal of time explaining. Therefore, when we find very useful (true) models of how to scientifically explain adaptations with evolution as exploiting some aspect of an ecological niche, we are almost always referring to an entire species. Evolutionary biology is about principles that explain common descent with modification. It is much more difficult to use evolution to analyze one particular individual and its actions/adaptations to its environment, since part of evolutionary theory is that variation will occur within populations, and *only some of it will be beneficial* -- the way this relates to the examples this thread began with is that it may not be beneficial to be born a sociopath (no empathy or impulse control). That doesn't mean it isn't "scientific" or contradicts evolution.

It's just that being born in society means that there are selective pressures to have those things, so these may be *unfavorable* variants.

When we talk about why person X did some horrible act, it thus becomes necessary to abandon the concept that this act:

1) May be rationally justifiable. Insanity is organic and biology explains it well; it can sometimes be cured with pills, after all.
2) May be the result of something "beneficial" in evolution; evolutionary progress occurs through the weeding out of "bad apples" -- person X may be one of those, having mental disease or defect or etc.

Some animals are not social animals. If we look at non-social animals, the traits that person X exemplifies (selfishness, low impulse control, lack of priority...) may be *best* for non-social creatures. Because humans have to be social to survive, they *must* develop things like moral codes and laws. Some of the weirdness that arises out of the necessity for codes and laws includes religion, with things like animal sacrifice and body piercing and lots of other behaviors that don't seem to have any direct "survival value" and are therefore hard to fit in to general simple evolutionary explanations. These are the "culture" that I mentioned in my first comment -- they arise out of the primary survival pressures, but are not, necessarily, themselves survival-related, and are thus epiphenomena.

Comment two:

Hi Andrew,

Thanks for the thoughtful comments, and I apologize for the long delay in response.

You said:

For me, I don't see evolution, on a grand or individual scale, as sufficient enough for our lives as human beings.

That's an intriguing comment that I may be tempted to agree with, given certain constraints on the interpretation of that claim. If you mean "evolution as an explanation of the origin of the species homo sapiens," then I would disagree, of course. But given that so many other things are necessary to understand ourselves than "just" how we evolved from other apes, I would agree that evolution isn't "sufficient" in the sense that it leaves so much else out of the picture of what/who we are, where we've been and where we're heading.

That line of thinking reminds me to a very good article in the NYT last year; here's a good quote from that article:

"'We should let the success of the religious formula guide us,' Dr. Porco said. 'Let’s teach our children from a very young age about the story of the universe and its incredible richness and beauty. It is already so much more glorious and awesome — and even comforting — than anything offered by any scripture or God concept I know.'"

You said:

I have met some men (George Bowes, Professor of Botany at UF for example) and have also listened to the director of the Human Genome Project who look at science on all levels as one of many means to show us more of who God is, actually explaining how much "life" is in science.

This last part is quite an ambiguous statement (explaining how much "life" is in science). If you look at evolution on the scale of physics and biochemistry, then I'm afraid that "life" itself is rather difficult to define. See, for instance, this article on that topic. Here's a relevant excerpt from that piece:

Carol Cleland first began to mull the definition of life in the late 1990s. She had spent much of her career as a philosopher pondering fundamental, metaphysical matters such as cause and effect. But in 1996, when NASA scientists found what looked like microbe fossils inside a meteorite from Mars, Cleland was invited to speak on a panel about the mystery.

Looking into the matter, Cleland concluded that a lot of the controversy came out of confusion. Critics were treating the NASA report as if it were experimental science, with a hypothesis that could be tested with experiments. But it's impossible to do experimental science on a single 4-billion-year old rock. Instead, the NASA scientists were doing historical science, which Cleland argued was as legitimate a science as experimental science.

Cleland's talk resulted in an invitation to join the NASA Astrobiology Institute. There, as she learned how scientists at the Institute thought about the search for extraterrestrial life, something set off Cleland's philosophical radar. "Everybody was working with a definition of life," she says. Cleland began to feel that the concept of attempting to define life was deeply flawed, and she made her concerns public at a meeting called "The Nature of Life" hosted by the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2001. Speaking to an audience of scientists, she said the search for a definition of life was beyond problematic, and they should simply stop looking for one. The quest could either be impossible or scientifically trivial. End of story.

"There was an explosion," says Cleland. "Everyone was yelling at me. It was really amazing. Everyone had their pet definitions and wanted to air them. And here I told them the whole definition project was worthless."

Not everyone in the audience was yelling, though. "What she said made a lot of sense to me," says Christopher Chyba, a professor of astronomy at Princeton University.

Now, if you want to try to talk about how God = the natural laws of the universe, or some such thing, or is revealed through them, then I suppose we could have a good discussion on the implications of uniformity and what quantum theory does to that notion. The problem is that theists often only look at these laws and claim something akin to, "laws require a lawgiver." They often don't analyze the metaphysical issues at play: that a universe could not exist in the first place without certain properties; that these properties require relationships between space and matter; that these are the basis of our "laws"...

Also, most theists ignore the really ugly consequences of some of these laws, from the heat death of the universe to the prevalence of birth defects like anencephaly.

You said:

The strongest I believe is found in marriage. Be honest with me since you are married and I am not--is there something deeper and more profound in marriage that just physical, biological responses?

I always try to be honest, and in doing so, I must point out that we've waded out here into two areas that are very difficult to talk about "scientifically": 1) qualia, 2) the fact-value distinction.

1) The relationship of qualia to physicalism is vexing and takes up more pages of philosophy than I care to even begin to read, much the less explain here. Whether or not our perceptions and experiences relate to fixed brain states is not likely to ever be proven one way or another scientifically. Long story short, our first-person experiences probably don't reduce very well to reductionist explanations, but there is absolutely no explanatory value to saying, "therefore, a magical, invisible soul explains all this!"

2) The feelings that I feel when I look at my wife are indeed the end result of a cascade of neurological, physical, biological responses that were *caused* by the input of her image into my visual cortex. What you seem to dislike about that is that you feel it cheapens the experiences or value of marriage.

When we say something like, "that's all they are," we're making a value judgment. It's akin to you denying that a bullet through the gut is sufficient to explain your pain by saying, "it's just a tiny piece of lead, but I feel far too much for that to account for it."

Your pain is "more" than *just* bullet and its physical consequences, because your conscious experience of it leads to you assign it a great deal of (negative) value. In just the same way, my feelings for my wife are "more" than *just* a bunch of neurotransmitters, but only in VALUE. That doesn't mean that these physical things are not the *causes* and physical basis of what we come to assign *value* to. You admit yourself that you must wade off into mystical thinking ("...I don't have any empirical evidence here...") in order to ask me the question you asked.

You said:

Also, I am not saying one must get rid of logic and reason, either.

But all you offer here is a fallacy of "argument from ignorance": you think that if science cannot explain qualia, or the experiences of bonding in marriage, that you have, by default, an argument that validates your own presumed explanation of those things (that a God exists, that a soul exists, &c.). Unfortunately, your position of claiming that science is incapable of explanation is not the same as offering one; religion offers no evidence or explanation for these things at all. "It's spiritual," is not an explanation, but an avoidance of explanation -- you offer no mechanisms to explain conscious experience, no reason to choose dualism as a superior option. In fact, if our physical brains are not the sole reason for our consciousness and qualia, then we have a new can of worms that is opened by questions about how physical things can so easily change our states of mind and ability to remember and experience things; about why your own conscious experience only occurs from inside the perspective of your own body, &c., but those arguments are for another time...

You said:

...I will almost always argue from the perspective of "relationship."

But your "relationship" is with an invisible purported creator of the entire universe, of 50,000 billion billion stars, with whom many other people also claim a quite different sort of relationship & with whom you have only one-way conversations & from whom a claimed bunch of "love letters" that date back thousands of years. To top it off, you have to account for things like the problem of evil. And so your "relationship" is not a terribly "living" one, irrespective of the rhetoric used to make it such. It is insolubly similar to the other Abrahamic religions (among others) in this way. Christianity is a pagan modification of Judaism that *claims* a new revelation and relationship with the God of the Jews, not an *actual* relationship.

Some quick politics notes

A round-up:

The DADT policy came under pretty heavy fire as Retired Brig. Gen. Keith H. Kerr admitted he was gay and asked the GOP candidates during the debate why they didn't trust military servicemen and women enough to serve alongside gays & lesbians; now, a group of high-ranking officers is advising the GOP candidates to adopt a more humane and progressive policy -- i.e., to reject DADT.

E&P:
“Nearly two-thirds of Americans do not trust press coverage of the 2008 presidential campaign, according to a new Harvard University survey, which also revealed four out of five people believe coverage focuses too much on the trivial — and more than 60% believe coverage is politically biased.”
You don't say?! You mean, stories on $400 haircuts aren't substantive coverage of issues?

Last Tuesday, I mentioned something on the debate regarding Barack's lack of universal mandated coverage:
...here's someone defending his mandates for health care coverage...and someone criticizing them.
...on Friday, Krugman went after Barack pretty hard.

See a cartoon here in the WaPo that castigates the Washington Post's own ludicrous article on rumors of Barack being a Muslim.

Giuliani isn't just involved in a scandal over using tax dollars to finance his extramarital affair; he's also got a brewing scandal involving his ties to terrorists. I really think his campaign is done, kaput...or else people are ignoring the mounds of dirt on this guy. See TCR's summary of Giuliani's worst week ever.

Also, on the heels of the just-passed energy bill, check out a progressive economic plan that highlights the Dems strengths in green energy and the new manufacturing jobs it will create.

A much better answer to the GOP's race divide question (not as well known towards Swedes).

More to come.

You probably won't hear this from them

A new study shows that sexual dysfunction is directly correlated to abstaining from sex until later in life. You probably won't hear about this from the "abstinence-only" crowd:

While past research has linked early sexual activity to health problems, a new study suggests that waiting too long to start having sex carries risks of its own.

Those who lose their virginity at a later age -- around 21 to 23 years of age -- tend to be more likely to experience sexual dysfunction problems later, say researchers at Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute's HIV Center for Clinical and Behavioral Studies.

The study will appear in the January 2008 issue of the American Journal of Public Health.

Men who lose their virginity in their 20s, in particular, seemed to be more likely to experience sexual problems that include difficulty becoming sexually aroused and reaching orgasm.

Who wants to bet that this study will be conveniently ignored by the RR? Keep in mind that this is the same crew who buried the government report showing the failure of their "wait until marriage" programs. As I said a few months ago, it isn't about the facts, but about religious control of people's sexual freedom:

Anti-choicers would do well to read up on the facts, and a new WHO study shows that abortion rates are highest in countries where it is illegal, and lowest in countries which have comprehensive sex ed programs and abundant contraception choices. Contrary to all the spin and stupidity, although the US is much more religious than European countries, we have higher rates of teen pregnancy, STDs and abortions than them. Why? Because the religiosity of our country blinds people to the reality that curtailing these things is only accomplished through sex ed for teens and widely-available contraceptive choices. In other words, if they really care about "saving" fetuses, they should be pushing contraception. Instead, they push failed "abstinence-only" policies that lead to more teen pregnancies and STDs. These people don't care about other people, just about controlling them.

In addition to that:

Faith-based programs are nothing but a sham to buy the votes of religious-right knuckle-draggers. These programs have no evidence to demonstrate their veracity, and in some cases, evidence to the contrary (i.e., "abstinence-only education" -- "According to a study released in March at the National STD Prevention Conference, 88 percent of 12,000 teenagers who took an abstinence pledge reported having sexual intercourse before they married. Although they delayed intercourse for up to 18 months, when they became sexually active, those who signed pledges were less likely to use condoms and less likely to seek medical help for STD infections than their peers.").

On the same topic -- 237 reasons why we "do it".

Why the GOP will lose in '08

The "Grand Old Party" is in trouble, its own insiders declare. The solution? Convince poorer people that Jesus is a Republican.

Let's analyze some facts:

The country where the terrorists were located who attacked us on 9/11 is Afghanistan
The person who is most singularly responsible for 9/11 is still at large there
15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudis; our continued reliance on Arab oil is a national security risk and strategic error
Iraq had absolutely no connection whatsoever to 9/11 or terrorism before we invaded
Terrorism in Iraq sprang up as fanatical Muslims fought against what they saw as "an occupation" by the infidel West of their homeland -- a cause célèbre, according to the NIE
Justifications about removing a "murderous dictator" ignore the fact that our invasion has caused the death of tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of Iraqi deaths
We armed Saddam with chemical weapons that he later used on his own people
We trained Afghanis in the art of warfare and they are now using these tactics on us
Now, we are losing ground in Afghanistan (and have been now for some time), and it has been the deadliest year yet for our troops there, despite the increasing role NATO plays in the war
The only conclusions one can make at this point center on the fact that even if we "win" in Iraq, we'll only be undoing the damage that we caused by invading and fighting an unjust war; we are clearly not "winning" in Afghanistan, which was a just war that has been bungled by the Bush administration and their failed policies
If Dems don't win this election cycle hands-down, I may be lost in despair over the stupidity of the American electorate

Apropos #3 above, Dems have finally passed an energy bill, one which reduces our dependence on foreign oil and strengthens our national security.

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Papers on information & evolution

Pim van Meurs, frequent contributor to the Panda's Thumb, recently wrote about the incessant lies on the part of ID-creationists regarding (among other things) evolution and information, and he referenced some papers that I have compiled from a few posts that I've written on the topic:

Natural selection as the process of accumulating genetic information in adaptive evolution, M. Kimura, Genetic Research Cambridge, 2 (1961) 127-140
Rate of Information Acquisition by a Species subjected to Natural Selection, D.J.C. MacKay, open-source @ http://arxiv.org/ (1999)
Evolution of biological information, T.D. Schneider, Nucleic Acids Research, (2000), 2794-2799
The fitness value of information, C.T. Bergstrom and M. Lachmann, open-source @ http://arxiv.org/ (2006)
Review of W. Dembski’s No Free Lunch, J. Shallit, BioSystems, 66 (2002) 93-99
The Evolution and Understanding of Hierarchical Complexity in Biology from an Algebraic Perspective, C.L. Nehaniv and J.L. Rhodes, Artificial Life, 6 (2000) 45–67
On the Increase in Complexity in Evolution I, P.T. Saunders and M.W. Ho, Journal of Theoretical Biology, 63 (1976) 375-384
On the Increase in Complexity in Evolution II: The Relativity of Complexity and the Principle of Minimum Increase, P.T. Saunders and M.W. Ho, Journal of Theoretical Biology, 90 (1981) 515-530

In addition to these papers, I wanted to highlight six other recent reviews that give a great overview of the present scientific thinking towards the origin of the genetic code:

"Selection, history and chemistry: the three faces of the genetic code.", Trends in Biochemical Sciences, Volume 24, Issue 6, 1 June 1999, Pages 241-247 (full-text .pdf)
"Genetic code: Lucky chance or fundamental law of nature?", Physics of Life Reviews, Volume 1, Issue 3, Dec 2004, Pages 202-229 (full-text .pdf) [low-quality pub, but expansive overview of the subject]
"Stepwise Evolution of Nonliving to Living Chemical Systems.", Origins of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere, Volume 34, Issue 4, Aug 2004, Pages 371–389 (full-text .pdf)
"The Origin of Cellular Life.", Bioessays, Volume 22, Issue 12, Dec 2004, Pages 1160-1170 (full-text .pdf)
"The Origin of the Genetic Code: Theories and Their Relationships, A Review.", Biosystems, Volume 80, Issue 2, May 2005, Pages 175-184 (full-text .pdf)
"The Origin and Evolution of the Genetic Code: Statistical and Experimental Investigations.", Robin D. Knight, Ph.D. Dissertation, June 2001.

And three more about evolution and complexity:

Understanding the recent evolution of the human genome: insights from human-chimpanzee genome comparisons, Human Mutation, 28(2):99-130, Oct 2006, Download PDF (also see: this article)
The origin of new genes: Glimpses from the young and old, Nature Reviews Genetics, 4(11): 865-875 Nov 2003, Download PDF
Evolution of biological complexity, PNAS, 97(9):4463-4468, April 2000, Download PDF

See a few of my posts for context with these papers: