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Archive for the ‘biology’ Category
And They have the guns!
Friday, March 25th, 2011Moral Realism
Thursday, March 24th, 2011Sean Carroll has taken issue with Richard Carrier over the latter’s position on Moral Realism.
On reading Carrier I think that his real point is (or should be) that realism and relativism are not in conflict. Moral values, like the economic value of diamonds, may be relative but are real nonetheless. The existence of absolute moral values on the other hand is not supported by anything in his argument.
Carrier is probably correct in asserting the existence of such things as “moral facts” that are “true independent of your opinion or culture” in the sense that our moral sense probably does include principles that are the same in all human cultures, and that we may sometimes be mistaken in our judgement of what action will subsequently give us the greatest moral satisfaction. But he provides nothing to support the idea that such principles are mutually consistent or that their “value” has any meaning outside the context of human culture.
I would add that Carrier shares with Sam Harris the blunder of referring to things like “the consequences you would want most”(assuming blah blah blah) without understanding that there is probably no single real variable which measures our level of “total satisfaction” at even a single instant (let alone integrated over time).
Algorithmic Babies and the Chinese Room
Thursday, February 24th, 2011I commented at Stephen Downes’ website on Patricia Kuhl’s TED talk about “The Linguistic Genius of Babies”. My quibble was less with the content than with the sentimentalized headline, because, although the babies’ brains do appear to implement a sophisticated statistical algorithm (to identify the phonemes of relevance to the language of their community), there is of course no serious suggestion that they actually understand the process any more than our immune system understands the “algorithms” by which it operates or snowflakes and other crystals understands the symmetry groups which govern the way they construct themselves. (more…)
Defining Evolution
Monday, February 21st, 2011
When I read the title of this piece (Theologians Lobby Successfully to Change Definition of Evolution | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine)I was prepared to get angry. But instead I am embarrassed on behalf of those who are complaining about the change (which happened more than ten years ago).
Apparently the US National Association of Biology Teachers was persuaded to delete the word “unsupervised” from the following statement:
The diversity of life on earth is the result of evolution: an unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable and natural process of temporal descent with genetic modification that is affected by natural selection, chance, historical contingencies and changing environments.
Now apart from its awfulness as a bit of language this is indeed wrong on several counts.
Perhaps most importantly, it appears to deny the predictive capacity that is essential for a “scientific” theory. In fact, the theory of evolution does have some predictive capability (though albeit of a stochastic nature). So the unqualified use of “unpredictable” must be inappropriate.
Also, although it does not require supervision or purpose, the theory of evolution makes no statement regarding their absence. So to include the word “unsupervised” was indeed just plain wrong. (more…)
“The Belief Instinct”
Monday, February 21st, 2011Jesse Bering’s “The Belief Instinct” is described as an exploration of possible sources of religion in cognitive tendencies towards a sense of being observed even when we have no evidence for it. To support this idea he reportedly both cites experimental evidence and postulates evolutionary explanations – which lead him to identify “adaptive illusion” as being behind the development of religion in our species (but I suspect what he means is that it is just a susceptibility to illusions of being monitored rather than any specific illusion itself that may be innate).
Apostate Theocon Damon Linker, writing in The New Republic, finds all this “marvelously informative and endlessly infuriating“. He says he does not like the mix of “experimental data about modern civilized human beings and groundless speculation about our evolutionary ancestors“, but what he is most upset about is his belief that if we accept Bering’s thesis then a “possible consequence is that we will take his arguments to heart and seek to live truthfully, without illusions—which in this case is to say, without shame.” And by the end of the review has worked himself up into quite a state of angry confusion and despair. But I think he misunderstands the implications. Giving up and/or resisting the illusion of oversight by an external god-like being does not mean giving up the moral values that entity is presumed to enforce (or the fear of incurring our own self-disapproval and/or of having bad behaviour noted and reported to our peers). So there is no reason to believe that we must either “begin shamelessly shitting on ourselves in public” or be subject to “sustained, ongoing, irredeemable self-deception“. There really is an honourable and moral alternative.
The Chinese Room
Thursday, December 9th, 2010Stephen Downes links to this notice about three free Philosophy courses from John Searle who is famous for his Chinese Room thought experiment. Now Searle may be a great teacher, and the ‘Chinese Room’ may be a useful paedagogical device, but I’m afraid I have difficulty respecting any dsicipline which ever in modern times treated it as anything more than that.
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The Inheritors of What?
Thursday, November 18th, 2010A new book by Eric Kaufmann entitled Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century is Posted in biology, religion, sustainability | No Comments »
Selfish Altruism
Sunday, June 13th, 2010‘Psychological Altruism’ is just a special case of ‘Biological Altruism’ and the “gene” for either is the most selfish of all.
Of course the concept of genes for actual characteristics all being in one-to-one correspondence with discrete sequences of DNA is simplistic, and the “gene” for something as complicated as a behaviour pattern may involve those for many different proteins along with related expression-controlling sequences, but no matter how it works, any hereditary tendency towards “altruistic” behaviour is one which is prepared to sacrifice the rest of its host’s genome in order to enhance the number of its own duplicates that are carried forward by co-specifics of the sacrificed host (even ones who are outside its host’s immediate family so less likely to share other parts of the host’s genome).
Not only this, but the wily and misnamed “altruistic gene” has often also evolved links to behaviours (manifest in humans in concepts like “morality”, “fairness” and “religion”) which ensure that the benefits of the altruistic gene actually are *not* shared with co-specifics of the host who lack that particular “gene”! (Such hosts may take risks with their own lives and relatives for the benefit of their non-related “moral peers” and/or to punish the “immoral” – possibly even including members of their own family)
Psychological vs. Biological Altruism is the latest topic at PholosophyTalk.
[Note added Aug 10: Tim Dean at ‘Ockham’s Beard’ makes an interesting connection between the genetics of morality and of the immune system.]
Is Mental Causation a Problem?
Monday, May 11th, 2009Stephen Downes points to this review by Sara Worley in NotreDame Philosophical Review of the book ‘Mental Causation’ by Anthony Dardis, and he (Stephen) concludes with this:
“The main takeaway? This nice neat picture of ‘A causes B’ is deeply mistaken.”
Now I’m no philosopher, and I haven’t read the book, but I have to agree with Stephen on this. It has long seemed to me that even in the purely physical world the whole idea of cause and effect is just baby-talk. i.e. superstitious nonsense that has no real meaning beyond the question “What is a minimal subset of actual antecedents of B from which the eventual occurrence of B could have been deduced? (indefinite article intended since solution not necessarily unique).”
I Google, therefore I Don’t Think
Monday, June 30th, 2008My friend Gerry Pareja sent this article by John Naughton from The Observer, responding (I think very well) to Nicholas Carr’s ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?‘ in The Atlantic, but I can’t say that its arrival is what distracted me from my previous line of thought. In fact I was just tired, but feeling my need for sleep as a sign of lack of commitment-to-task prompted me to start also on my own intended response to Carr – and others who decry the influence of the web and other technology on our mental capacities. (more…)
Hedonic Man
Monday, June 30th, 2008Hedonic Man is the title of a review by Alan Wolfe of two books on the “new economics”. Like Wolfe (and probably countless others) I am sure that the science of economics is sorely lacking, but also like him I am more than skeptical of the ideas of these revolutionaries (which I must admit I have not read directly but have come across in various contexts). However my objections are often different than Wolfe’s and in fact I think his review misses the point in a number of key respects.
To start with the second of the authors being reviewed, it was a discussion elsewhere (in Scientific American if I recall correctly) of some of the experiments described by Dan Ariely which irritated me so much that I have been meaning for some time to look it up again and write a response. Wolfe’s review now gives me that opportunity.
But in the unlikely event that I actually have a reader for any of this, I am afraid you will have to wait until tomorrow (since my attention span has just expired).
The Hyberbolic Crochet Coral Reef Project
Wednesday, March 5th, 2008“Holding theorems in their hands” is a blog post about the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef Project. It’s a wonderful story about collaboration on many levels and across many interest groups – and with beautiful images to boot. I saw it via Stephen Downes.
Eggheads – The Boston Globe
Tuesday, September 18th, 2007Ravens and octopi both give me hope for the future of intelligence on this planet.
Leaning Tower Illusion
Sunday, August 12th, 2007My friend Gerry Pareja forwarded a link to this story from ‘Improbable Research’ about the first prize winner in the Neural Correlate Society’s 2007 Illusion of the Year contest.
The image certainly is pretty cool. But to test the explanation I tried covering each image in turn and the effect was still there! I wondered if there was a perceptual delay effect in that our memory of one picture affects our interpretation of the other but then I also noticed that the effect changes depending on where the picture is in our field of view. If I position myself facing the right hand edge of the monitor, then the right hand tower seems more vertical and the left one almost seems to lean left or backwards. So the illusion may be more (or at least partly) due to the fact that in the absense of other visual cues in the picture we tend to interpret as if viewed from the direction at which we are looking at the picture – ie we interpret the picture edge as a window frame.
Bonobo Swingers?
Friday, July 27th, 2007Arts&Letters Daily pointed to this fine essay by Ian Parker in The New Yorker. It really is an interesting and entertaining blend of anecdote, history, and good science reporting.