Boudry on Plantinga

I rag on philosophers often as being obscurantists, nit-pickers, and lovers of gratuitous complexity. But sometimes there are exceptions. I have some expertise in English composition as well as both general and religious philosophy, and Maarten Boudry's review of Alvin Plantinga's book, Where the Conflict Really Lies. Science, Religion and Naturalism, is a masterpiece of philosophy and perfect compositional technique. The review appears in the International History, Philosophy and Science Teaching Group Newsletter, September/October 2012starting on page 21 [linkrot fixed]. (via Larry Moran)

The evolution of altruism by individual selection

Jerry Coyne reviews Michael Price's review of A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and its Evolution, by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis. Basically (and I can't do justice to Coyne's comments), the evidence suggests that "altruism" as we actually see it looks like a standard evolutionary "arms race" between cooperators and would-be "free riders", which is explainable by individual selection.

The blind watchmaker

Here's an interesting video about evolution.



(via Daniel Fincke)

To me, it's more interesting in what it says about evolution than as a rebuttal to Paley's argument against evolution. What I really get from this video is that major changes appear to be abrupt, not gradual. We see the "pendulum era" for hundreds of generations, and then in only a few generations we get the "single-handed clock era"; the pendulums almost completely die out. It's an important illustration of one mechanism of punctuated equilibrium. There are, of course, other mechanisms in the much more complicated and varied world of both biological and social evolution, but the model is interesting nonetheless.

While punctuated equilibrium in biological evolution seems strongly (but not exclusively) associated with allopatric speciation, the idea of some internal more-or-less "abrupt" transitions (in "geological" time) seems more pronounced in social evolution, and the mechanism from the video (the accumulation of neutral variation) also seems to have special application to social evolution.

Basically, there's a lot of neutral variation in our ideas. People think up new ideas (or variations on old ideas), and they more-or-less float around the population with no positive or negative selective effect. There are a lot of people, so sooner or later some fortuitous combination of neutral variations comes together into an "ideology" that really takes off; its prevalence now indirectly exerts a negative selective effect on the old dominant ideology.

Which is why, I think, I don't worry too much about numbers, both of atheists or communists. I don't know that either atheism or communism (or, more precisely, some ideology that includes atheism and/or communism) will actually dominate human society, but if it does, it will probably do so very abruptly. Thus I'm not too worried about my recent commenter's boast that atheism is on the decline, and not just because any statistics coming from the religious are probably outright lies. There isn't really anything at all we can infer from day-to-day or even year-to-year numbers; social evolution happens on a generational time scale.

Furthermore, evolution happens only when there's real negative selection pressure against some ideology. In the clock model, the selection pressure is a constant and fairly simple part of the experiment; in social evolution, selection pressure is considerably more complex and non-obvious. Therefore, one of the prerequisites for the growth of both atheism and communism is the removal of direct negative selection pressure for these ideas. Atheist activists have been especially successful — as have racial, gay and women's rights activists — at eliminating this selection pressure. More work in all these areas still remains, of course, but reducing and eliminating simple selection pressure (it is much less intrinsically shameful today than a generation ago to be an atheist, woman, gay, or a racial minority) is an essential first step.

Social construction and critical thought

I will boldly assert: every belief held by every person is in one way or another socially constructed: either the belief is directly held causally because it was told to the believer by one or more other people, or it was indirectly socially constructed, formed by observation and experience substantially resting on directly socially constructed beliefs.

Commenter Ben Finney remarks: "I think we have to work hard, and persistently, not only to learn critical thinking (and teach others to do so) but to reinforce habits of critical thinking, precisely because they're counter to our nature." Ben's point isn't bad, but I don't think it hits the bulls eye. I suspect that Ben is confusing the social construction of beliefs with critical thought. If my bold assertion is correct, then critical thinking itself is either socially constructed or — if social construction and critical thought are antithetical — critical thinking is impossible, at least with our present cognitive equipment.

Assuming my bold assertion is correct, and assuming that critical thinking is compatible with (and established by) social construction, what kind of story can we tell about social construction, critical thinking and early childhood cognitive development?

Ben notes plausibly that "Young children demonstrate a massive tendency to believe whatever claims are spoken to them." (Young Children Hear It to Believe It) But does that mean that critical thinking is therefore counter to our nature? One alternative hypothesis is that our "advanced" cognitive tools are intrinsically neither part of nor excluded by our "nature". Our (biological) nature, rather is that we are learners, therefore what we actually learn is itself critically important. We not only learn facts and specific assertions, we learn — indeed we have to learn — how to actually think about and integrate facts and assertions.

In other words, our nature is neither critical nor uncritical; we are only naturally predisposed to acquire the most basic foundation of learning, i.e. acquiring language; how we proceed from there depends sensitively on what we are subsequently taught.

It is hard to understand how, if critical thinking were contrary to our intrinsic, biological nature, how we would ever have developed it at all. Contrawise, if critical thinking were intrinsically part of our nature it is hard to understand why we didn't develop it much sooner. The explanation that the process of critical thinking have to be learned (and therefore had to be initially constructed in an evolutionary manner) nicely explains both how it could be developed, as well as why it developed slowly.

If critical thinking is compatible with social construction, what precisely is critical thinking?

First, critical thinking could not be that one believes only that which she constructs for herself; she remains radically agnostic about everything that anyone else tells her. Such a construction would require that a critical thinker be radically agnostic about every belief she retrospectively discovered to be directly socially constructed; she would have to recapitulate the intellectual development of at least 10,000 years, if not the hundreds of thousands of years the human species has been extant. Such a task seems at least daunting and probably impossible in practice.

It follows then that critical thought cannot be a belief formation mechanism. If it were a belief formation mechanism, it would have to be an exclusive mechanism; otherwise alternative mechanisms and the beliefs so formed would simply be outside the domain of critical thought, a conclusion contrary to the claims of most advocates of critical thought, myself included, that critical thought should be universal, it should apply at least in theory to all beliefs. No belief ought to be a priori exempt from critical thought. But while critical thought might be compatible with social construction, they are clearly different: we can easily observe that non- or anti-critical thought can be socially constructed. If it is true that all beliefs — including the establishment of critical thought — rest substantively on some socially constructed beliefs, then critical thought either cannot be exclusive or cannot be universal.

Critical thought therefore must be a belief rejection method. This construction eliminates the paradox of exclusivity (subtly embedded in the insufficiency of Logical Positivism). At the most superficial level, constructing critical thought as a rejection method entails only that it is self-consistent: someone who adopts the idea of rejecting beliefs on the basis of critical thought will not therefore reject the idea of using critical thought to reject ideas. And, suitably constructed, critical thought is at least self-consistent.

However, self-consistency is not enough. If we also accept the premise that our socially constructed ideas evolve, we must create a plausible evolutionary story for why critical thought became pervasive when it did, and not before. There are, of course, many different kinds of plausible evolutionary stories in general; the most trivial story is the idea of critical thought just happened to arise by variation at some particular time; once it arose, non-critical thought was therefore rendered less fit and began to be selected against. Another plausible story is that material conditions (including the material conditions of our existing social constructions) were such that for some time critical thought was selected against, and then material conditions changed, which either removed the old selection pressure, allowing the variation to at least spread, or created new selection pressures that selected against non- or anti-critical thought.

Which of these stories (or some other alternative; evolution has more than two mechanisms) is correct is a matter of rigorous scientific investigation. However, I'm a philosopher, so I'm allowed to speculate.

Authoritarianism seems antithetical to critical thought. Authoritarian government entails the strong claim that the interests of a minority (the ruling class) should dominate the interests of the majority (the ruled class)*: when the interests of the ruling class ineluctably conflict with the interests of the ruled, the interests of the ruling class are always fulfilled, sacrificing without compensation at any level the interests of the ruled. Sophisticated democratic protections of minorities fundamentally rests on higher-level protections on the interests of the majority. We protect the right of free speech for unpopular minorities, for example, because the higher-level idea of free speech for everyone protects the interests of the majority. This is a different idea than that the interests of a minority should be preferred over the majority however constructed, just because that minority is somehow privileged. However, critical thought necessarily rejects this abstract social construction of authoritarianism: there is no reason to prefer the interests of any minority to those of the majority. Therefore, authoritarianism should exert (by violence) a selection pressure against critical thought. So long as this negative selection pressure exists, and no alternative selection pressure against non- or anti-critical thought exists, any emergent variation of critical thought will be removed from the pool of socially constructed ideas.

*A weaker claim — e.g. the "physician effect" — is that some minority has special expertise to fulfill the interests of the majority.

We should therefore see some material conditions change to explain the relatively modern rise of critical thought.

We have an obvious candidate: technology. The first important technological advance was the invention of the printing press. This invention is too useful to itself be selected against by authoritarians (because it is an extremely valuable tool in intra-ruling-class conflict), but it makes the suppression of ideas — including the suppression of critical thought — qualitatively more difficult: one cannot intimidate the text of a book, and the printing press makes book-burning an ineffective method of censorship.

The development of modern technology of production, i.e. the industrial revolution, provides the second, crucial impetus to the expansion of critical thought. Once we have stumbled upon a method of drastically improving economic productivity, failing to exploit this method will have obvious selective disadvantage: if one party can produce orders of magnitude more and better guns, and more, better and better-fed soldiers, another party that fails to also improve his production will lose head-to-head conflicts.

The development and improvement of technology requires critical thought. If you do not think critically — if you do not try out a lot of ideas, reject those that fail to conform to observation, and keep the rest — you cannot improve your technology. Authoritarianism is, therefore, in a fatal bind: critical thought is essentially anti-authoritarian, but critical thought itself cannot be completely eliminated without compromising the science and technology necessary to prevail against competing authoritarians. The best they can do is isolate, marginalize and "other" scientists and engineers... which is exactly what we observe in modern society. But this is a poor strategy: if you have any group with a large enough niche, you dramatically increase the variation within that niche, and one way or another variations can tunnel out of the niche. And again, we observe exactly this effect today, with many scientists and philosophers of science leading the charge against the central pillar of authoritarianism: divine sanction.

I am not, of course, a scientist, and I cannot prove this speculation with any sort of rigor. Still, as a speculation, it seems at least superficially plausible:

1. Critical thought is a belief rejection method
2. Critical thought is, like other beliefs, itself socially constructed
3. Socially constructed beliefs evolve according to abstract mechanisms of the evolutionary paradigm (i.e. heritable variation and selection)
4. Changes in technology (subject to different selection pressures) changed the material conditions and began to favor critical thought
5. We are still within that evolutionary process

Evolution is hard!

A really good article on evolution by the inestimable PZ Myers: It's more than genes, it's networks and systems:

What's left out in the 101 story, and in creationist tales, is that: evolution is about populations, so many changes go on in parallel; selectable traits are usually the product of networks of genes, so there are rarely single alleles that can be categorized as the effector of change; and genes and gene networks are plastic or responsive to the environment. All of these complications make the actual story more complicated and interesting, and also, perhaps to your surprise, make evolutionary change faster and more powerful.

If biologists can figure out this:



and hundreds of other pathways like it, then there's simply no excuse for economists to complain about complexity.

Open their minds!

All hail Jesus & Mo!


open

Failure of demand

First, we have to understand the underlying nature of the problem: demand. People have to want stuff and they have to be able to buy stuff. (The producers also have to be able to collect the money, a problem (with several interesting solutions) for free software and free information in general in a capitalist economy.) The financial crisis in the current economy is caused by a failure of the second part of demand: people want stuff, but they can't buy it.

Capitalism prior to the Great Depression was driven primarily by production to make the working classes more productive*. There was tremendous pressure not only to use machines to make workers more immediately productive, but also to improve their standard of living to make them better workers overall and to support more workers. (Note that Marx was not incorrect in noting the poor quality of life of industrial workers in the mid-19th century; there was no "altruism" whatsoever in the capitalists drive to improve workers' standard of living. Utopian fuckwits notwithstanding, it still remains arguable, however, that the quality of life of pre-industrial agrarianism was even lower than under industrial capitalism. Secondarily, capitalist production created the professional-managerial middle class, which absorbed much of the luxury production afforded by improved productive efficiency.

*Per-capita consumption as a percentage of total production by the ruling class has fallen substantially from feudalism, and continues to fall. Contrast Versailles with the Hearst Castle and Bill Gates' home.)

The problem, becoming apparent even by Marx's time and underlying the recessions of the 19th century, was that the personal demand of the upper and middle classes was beginning to fail: they no longer wanted stuff. Contributing to this failure was the social attitude that created the capitalist ruling class in the first place (and which permeated to the middle class): a distaste for consumption in favor of saving and investment. The feudal ruling class consumed not only ostentatiously but proudly: they were, in their own eyes (and to some degree justifiably) turning what little surplus labor there was — surplus labor that couldn't be invested — into works of great art and beauty, which they (again to some degree justifiably) conceived themselves to be holding in trust for future generations. One reason why the capitalist ruling class arose as a distinct class — rather than the feudal ruling class simply embracing industrial production — was precisely because the capitalist attitude favoring investment over consumption afforded a much higher rate of industrial development.

This crisis of demand came to a head in the 1929 stock market crash and subsequent depression. The professional-managerial middle class (relatively large compared to early capitalism), whose individual desire to consume was saturated, tried to gain entry in the capitalist ruling class by exploiting loopholes in the stock market.

It is entirely incorrect to view the loopholes and weaknesses in the stock market in 1929 or the shadow banking system today as the problem that needs to be corrected. It's certainly a problem, but it's impossible to build a system with no loopholes or weaknesses at all, especially when there's any negative selection pressure that can be escaped by finding or creating loopholes. (Most simple systems work only because no one is actively trying to subvert them; the most well-designed complex systems fail even though no one is trying to subvert them.) At best, advocates of "regulation" are fighting the last war.

FDR's New Deal and Keynesian economics was the last, best hope to "rescue" capitalism from its own contradictions. It succeeded — at least for a while — because not only did FDR et al. improve regulations on the stock market and financial system, but also because it pushed a considerable amount of social demand — the ability to buy stuff — on the working class. Of course, the United States supplied this demand in no small part by creating the most powerful international economic empire in the history of the world, hyper-exploiting tens or hundreds of millions of foreign workers as well as tens of millions of American minority and illegal immigrant workers. Even so, without the demand of a huge chunk of the American working class, American imperialism would have faltered.

However, the New Deal and Keynesian economics did not address the primary selection pressure operating on members of the capitalist class: losing their money and being ejected from the capitalist class. Indeed the entry of hundreds of thousands of new members to the lower rungs of the capitalist class increased this selection pressure. It doesn't matter, for example, that there is a vastly expanded demand for shoes if you yourself cannot efficiently produce shoes: you'll still go out of business. The selection pressure remains, and to evolution it doesn't matter how you escape selection pressure; all that matters is that you do escape it.

"Efficiency" in capitalist economics has two* definitions: producing goods with less actual labor time ("good" efficiency), and producing goods with less actual labor cost ("bad" efficiency). One company that can produce 100,000 shoes a year with 100 workers paid $10/hour, is "more efficient" than another company that can produce 100,000 shoes with 75 workers paid $20/hour. There are always loopholes and weaknesses in regulations that mandate that workers be paid $20/hour; the companies that find and exploit those loopholes will escape selection pressures that will eliminate companies that don't find them or have some "moral" compunction against exploiting them. [see comments]

As long as there is labor cost selection pressure, the labor market will find ways to "fall downhill" to a market for labor power rather than a market for labor time, i.e. the price for labor will fall to its cost according to the law of supply and demand. All you can do with regulation is select against some particular methods of making the market for labor a market for labor power, and whatever you don't select against will end up being selected "for".

*Three, actually: the third is producing more (or better) goods for the same time/cost.

From the late 1940's to the 1970's, we had tremendous economic growth in the United States (and Western Europe). The vastly increased demand (ability to buy) afforded mostly by labor unions and government labor regulations eased selection pressure overall: with demand so high, even relatively inefficient producers were not selected against. The chief problem of the era (and we were lucky to have that problem) was convincing people to want to consume what was being produced. There also was a certain symbiosis between foreign and American workers. The hyper-exploited foreign were producing mostly raw materials and some technologically unchallenging manufactured products, such as textiles; American workers were producing more complex and technologically challenging products, such as automobiles and airplanes. Technological issues, especially shipping, worker education, and management, prevented "outsourcing" and made American workers more cost-efficient overall, despite a much higher unit cost.

But selection pressure was not absent: companies were going out of business and a lot of capitalists in the 50s and 60s failed and were expropriated. Even if only a small fraction of companies just looked for ways to reduce labor costs rather than labor time, that small fraction still escaped selection pressure more often than companies that didn't look for (or didn't find) ways to reduce labor costs. As evolution shows us, even a small reduction in selection pressure against a minority always* leads to that minority eventually dominating the population and often completely eliminating alternative variations.

*Almost always: there are some exceptions due to higher-level selection pressures.

Because of the way selection pressures work within the capitalist ruling class, no amount of regulation or "artificial" constraints on the capitalist class will ever be effective in the long (i.e. 30-40 years) term. We would literally have to regulate with the power, knowledge and benevolence of an deity* to successfully overcome the selection pressures inherent in the capitalist system.

*It should be noted that no such omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent deity actually exists.

In the New Deal years, while the upper middle professional-manager class was struggling — often successfully — to enter the capitalist ruling class, the working class and lower-middle class were storing some of their new ability-to-buy demand into housing and pensions. Naturally, when labor costs started to decline — i.e. actually working was creating less ability-to-buy demand — ability-to-buy demand devolved to first pension funds and then home prices, producing the bubbles of the 21st century. When these bubbles were exhausted (in the space of just a few years each), ability-to-buy demand completely collapsed.

To a certain extent, this stored demand was simply stolen through chicanery and outright fraud. It makes a certain amount of sense to look for ways this chicanery and fraud can be prevented and eliminated, and it seems that a lot of "progressive" economists have focused their entire attention on this effort. But the fundamental problem is that there was an opportunity for these areas of stored demand to be stolen in the first place. Two conditions are necessary for anything to be stolen: the stolen property must of course exist, but more importantly it must be placed at risk by its owners. No matter how much gold there is in Fort Knox, it's not going to be stolen from there. It's very difficult to take someone's house when it's paid for (or they have enough ability-to-buy demand to maintain their mortgage payments): if you want to steal someone's house, you have to convince them to put it at risk by taking out a mortgage they can't pay for. Because ability-to-pay demand on the basis of wages was declining for the working and lower-middle classes, that's exactly what they did: take out second mortgages and home-equity loans on their more-or-less paid-for (or being paid-for) houses. And they more-or-less "rationally" had to do so: because their mortgage payments were tied to their incomes (and their pensions tied to the health of the companies), had they not propped up overall ability-to-pay demand by tapping their houses, they risked losing their jobs (predicated on supplying that demand) and their houses anyway. Because of the fundamental nature of the capitalist system, the working class and lower-middle class was in a "damned (tomorrow) if you do, damned (today) if you don't" double bind.

In a purely engineering sense, any competent, honest and caring economist could design a system that would maintain aggregate demand, keep full employment, and guarantee a dignified standard of living to everyone on the planet. Throw in the scientific, engineering and technical knowledge we already have, and we could probably support ten times as many people as we have, all with dignity and a reasonable level of comfort. Even I myself could probably make a decent attempt, with my amateur and half-assed understanding of economics and physical science.

Figuring out how to design an economic system is not the problem. If we had a reasonable level of good will and common desire, I can't see that it's really even as technically or intellectually challenging as designing a computer operating system. The problem is that we don't have good will. Even if 90% of the capitalist ruling class had even a little Keynesian good will and common cause with the working and middle-classes, they would be eliminated by the other 10% of Randians long before they could actually implement any economic system that was good for everyone. They partially succeeded in the 1940s only because a "perfect storm" of circumstances diminished the power of the proto-Randians (i.e. there was a "group selection" event) leaving them in a position of temporary advantage. But the proto-Randians weren't completely eliminated; more importantly, the fundamental selection pressures didn't change: the selection pressures that afforded a Randian attitude (improved cost-efficiency, not time-efficiency) a relative advantage didn't change.

To be honest, drilling down to the evolutionary pressures on politics and economics isn't all that comforting. One imagines, per Marx, that somehow the working class can directly exert selection pressure: they certainly appear to have the raw power to do so. But they do not appear to have the political and psychological will to do so, and a century of communist and socialist agitation and propaganda failed to make this will pervasive in the working class: FDR and the Keynesians threw the working class a bone in the 1940's, and they couldn't run away from communism fast enough. The massive anti-communist propaganda in the 50's and 60's had a lot to do with the outcome, but even the best propaganda cannot succeed where there isn't fertile ground in people's minds for its ideas.

With all due respect to many of my friends, whom I like and admire greatly (and even many people I consider to be well-intentioned jackasses), the radical anti-capitalist (communist, socialist and anarchist) movement is entirely ineffectual and meaningless. Even the capitalist liberal and "progressive" left appears almost completely unable or unwilling to exploit the catastrophic — and frankly egregiously stupid — blunders of the Randian capitalist right.

We're running out of options, and running out of time. All I can see is a literal mass extinction of most human societies, perhaps of all humanity. Even if some are left standing to rebuild the world, the "victors" will mostly be selected by pure chance, not by any intrinsic moral virtue.

Selection-against

I suspect that not even evolutionary biologists pay enough attention to the fact that in any evolutionary process, selection is a fundamentally negative process. Natural selection in evolution does not select for, it selects against.

The usual narrative of evolution is that some heritable variation (such as a mutation) gives an individual a reproductive advantage. The individual's descendants inherit that advantageous variation, and because it is indeed advantageous, the variation comes to dominate the gene pool of the population. Not a bad story, and it gets the gist across, but it's missing an important component of the story: what precisely do we mean by "reproductive advantage"? The straightforward intuitive meaning isn't bad, but it misses important subtleties, especially when we want to intelligently direct evolutionary processes, such as social evolution.

A more accurate and direct narrative of evolution is that there is no selection-for, there is only selection-against. Some individuals have — for various reasons — a reproductive disadvantage; they fail to create descendants to inherit their individual variations. A specific variation can confer a reproductive advantage only indirectly, by changing the environment so that lacking the specific variation directly entails a disadvantage. A variation dominates the population's gene pool only when its competitors are selected against.

The selection-against narrative makes the creationist objection that, "If human beings are descended from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?" more obviously fallacious, A naive or superficial grasp of the selection-for narrative makes this objection plausible, but the selection-against narrative makes the answer more obvious: because nature did not select against monkeys nor did nature select against humans; nature selected against that which we do not see.

Another somewhat less naive example is Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini's book, What Darwin Got Wrong (reviewed by Ned Block and Philip Kitcher as well as PZ Myers). I don't want to excuse the authors — they're professional intellectuals, and they shouldn't allow themselves to be misled by superficialities — but it seems clear to me that a narrative of negative selection would make their thesis more obviously incorrect.

Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini argue that

Darwinists say that evolution is explained by the selection of phenotypic traits by environmental filters. But the effects of endogenous structure can wreak havoc with this theory. Consider the following case: traits t1 and t2 are endogenously linked in such a way that if a creature has one, it has both. Now the core of natural selection is the claim that phenotypic traits are selected for their adaptivity, that is, for their effect on fitness. But it is perfectly possible that one of two linked traits is adaptive but the other isn't; having one of them affects fitness but having the other one doesn't. So one is selected for and the other "free-rides" on it.

The follow this critique up with a deeper philosophical critique. As Block and Kitcher describe

... Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini think that problems about selection-for are omnipresent... [b]ecause they envisage a vast space of properties and expect proponents of natural selection to discriminate among all the rivals. Not only is there a property of being-a-melanic-moth, there is also a property of being-a-melanic-moth-and-smaller-than-Manhattan. These properties are not only correlated in the world’s actual moth populations, they are correlated universally. Maybe it is impossible, even with the most rarefied genomic technology, to build a moth bigger than Manhattan. If so, the correlation between these properties could not be broken. How then could there be a sense in which one of the properties—being-a-melanic-moth—rather than the other—being-a-melanic-moth-and-smaller-than-Manhattan—caused the increased reproductive success?

Block and Kitcher would have us simply shrug off this object (nobody really cares whether nature is selecting for being-a-melanic-moth or being-a-melanic-moth-and-smaller-than-Manhattan), but even a definite error can be an opportunity to learn.

Block and Kitcher accept the narrative of selection-for, but they seem more flexible about its interpretation.

Natural selection, soberly presented, is about differential success in leaving descendants. If a variant trait (say, a long neck or reduced forelimbs) causes its bearer to have a greater number of offspring, and if the variant is heritable, then the proportion of organisms with the variant trait will increase in subsequent generations. To say that there is “selection for” a trait is thus to make a causal claim: having the trait causes greater reproductive success.

But a narrative of selection-against makes Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini argument more obviously invalid. We don't have to distinguish between selecting for being-a-melanic-moth and being-a-melanic-moth-and-smaller-than-Manhattan, because nature is not selecting for anything. Rather, nature in this case is selecting against getting eaten by a bird (before leaving descendants). It happens to be the case that being-a-melanic-moth (or perhaps being-a-melanic-moth-and-smaller-than-Manhattan) exempted individuals from this selection-against.

Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini philosophical critique just doesn't apply to a selection-against narrative. A selection-for narrative makes what is being selected for ambiguous; it's easy to see, however, in a selection-against narrative that nature is selecting against being-eaten-by-a-bird and being-eaten-by-a-bird-and-smaller-than-Manhattan (and being-eaten-by-a-bird-and- anything else). There's no ambiguity we have to shrug off.

If you want to understand why different outcomes occur in different evolutionary scenarios, look for differences in the negative selection pressures.

Consider three modes of negative selection in a population with a fixed food source. There's never enough food for all the individuals in the population. Some individuals will starve (before they reproduce): nature will select against those individuals and their heritable characteristics. Under ordinary circumstances, without any relevant variation, this selection is random: some individuals are just "unlucky" and don't happen to find enough food. But random selection is still selection, and over time it will from time to time happen to be the case by pure chance that all or most of the individuals with some variation will happen to starve by accident. Thus the competing variation(s) will dominate the population even though there is no causal reason why the dominant variation is "better than" the eliminated variation. Selection-for creates a mystery; selection-against provides an explanation: sometimes shit just happens; given enough time, shit will just happen.

In the second case, consider a variation that appears to provide a "reproductive advantage": individuals with this variation are faster, smarter, stronger or whatnot, and more likely to find food... specifically food that, but for their "advantage", other individuals would have eaten. This variation will (probably) dominate the population, but it will do so not because it's advantageous, but because the competing variations have become disadvantageous: individuals without the variation are disproportionally selected against.

Consider the third case: a variation that gives individuals access — even a little — to an alternative food source. In this case, the individuals have a reproductive advantage — if they fail by chance to eat the primary food source, they might not starve and be selected against — but this advantage does not create an immediate corresponding disadvantage in the rest of the population: all the food that was available to individuals without the variation is still available. The outcome in this situation is unclear precisely because we don't know what negative selection-against will actually operate: we have to look more deeply into the situation to identify how nature will select against individuals.

The selection-for narrative does not really distinguish between these situations. Why does some particular trait dominate the population? Because it was selected for. Why was it selected for? Using a selected-for narrative encourages the adaptationist fallacy: we don't know that just because a trait dominates the population it therefore confers a reproductive advantage. We can simply invert the question: the trait was selected for because it wasn't selected against, which encourages the question: why wasn't it selected against. But that's still not quite the correct question. We want to ask: what was selected against, and why? The selection-for narrative leads us down a winding mental path with many pitfalls; the selection-against narrative leads us by the nose to the correct question.

Clarity and precision are important in their own right, but there's a more compelling reason to stress the negative nature of selection in evolutionary processes. Human societies also evolve — dialectical/historical materialism is evolution — and although the low-level mechanisms obviously differ greatly (people do not transmit ideas and beliefs to their children through their DNA) the abstract mechanisms of heritable variation and negative natural selection still apply. If we are to "intelligently" affect our social evolution, we must understand how evolution actually works, and the negative character of selection becomes critically important.

UTA: I don't want to minimize the importance and subtlety of forces other than selection: e.g. mechanisms of heritability and variation as well as accidents large and small. My point is that to understand how selection operates in an evolutionary system, you have to look at what is selected against, not for.

Florien Finds a Fucktard

Daniel Florien of Unreasonable Faith presents bwinwright's fucktardery on Allvoices:

[A]theism is a false idea because it is based on the false premise that orderliness does not require intelligent direction.

His proof?

I ask them to give me a single example of anything, outside of what they call nature, that came into being without intelligent direction. Of course, they can not. Everything manufactured by man required intelligent direction, right?

It's not all bad, though. "[D]ueling with atheists has made me a more patient, accepting, and loving person." 'Tis a pity it didn't make him any smarter.

Ken Miller is lying

I don't see any other way to interpret Jerry Coyne's latest rebuttal to Ken Miller than that Miller is either intentionally lying or is too stupid to read the plain meaning of Coyne's remarks.

I don't see how anyone can remain a professional scientist, regardless of his intelligence and skill, without an absolute commitment to the factual truth.

Perhaps Coyne can't say it, but I can: Ken Miller is a liar and unfit to be a member of the scientific community.

Coyne is right, Mooney is wrong

Coyne is Right, Mooney is Wrong:

Are you seriously telling me that is poor tactics? A very good, thoughtful, extensive book review in a high-level venue like TNR is just too much for those poor, delicate liberal Christians to handle? Please. Any Christian who has genuinely made his peace with evolution is not going to be driven to the other side because Jerry Coyne offered a few contrary thoughts.

[h/t to Butterflies and Wheels]

Condescending fucktardery

The fucktardery just keeps coming.

Fucktard Peter Heck doesn't like evolutionary naturalists:

It never ceases to amaze me how intellectually condescending evolutionary naturalists can be. Keep in mind, these are folks who believe that an indescribably tiny wad of nothingness exploded into a fully functional, structured, and ordered universe of orbiting planets and complex creatures without any supernatural agency involved. They are the ones who cling to a theory known as spontaneous generation – the notion that dead matter can just suddenly pop to life. They are the ones who champion a man (Charles Darwin) who suggested that Africans were more closely related to gorillas than Caucasians. They are the ones who believe that a wolf-like animal with hooves took to the water, lost its legs, and morphed into a whale (Cetaceans). If anyone should go easy on the intellectual condescension, it's these people. But they don't.

I'll let PZ Myers handle the rebuttal, since he's way fucking smarter than me:

Who should be intellectually condescending here? I think the side that presents the evidence, actually seeks out new knowledge to test their conclusions, and actually demonstrates some knowledge and scholarship deserves to be a little uppity and arrogant. It's the people like Peter Heck, who are utterly ignorant of the science, mangle what little they know, and actively mislead people about the evidence who might deserve a little condescension. My only reservation about that is that I tend to favor treating ignorant, lying twerps with open contempt instead.

Preach on, brother!

Truckling to the Faithful

Jerry Coyne blasts the accommodationists: Truckling to the Faithful: A Spoonful of Jesus Helps Darwin Go Down:

[T]he accommodationist position of the National Academy of Sciences, and especially that of the National Center for Science Education, is a self-defeating tactic, compromising the very science they aspire to defend. By seeking union with religious people, and emphasizing that there is no genuine conflict between faith and science, they are making accommodationism not just a tactical position, but a philosophical one. By ignoring the significant dissent in the scientific community about whether religion and science can be reconciled, they imply a unanimity that does not exist. Finally, by consorting with scientists and philosophers who incorporate supernaturalism into their view of evolution, they erode the naturalism that underpins modern evolutionary theory. ...

The NAS is saying that most religious people and scientists have no problem with evolution and faith. Given that 40% of Americans reject evolution outright (almost entirely on religious grounds), while 92% of NAS scientists reject the idea a personal god, the National Academy is clearly pushing its agenda in defiance of evidence. ...

In his accommodationist books God After Darwin and the more recent Deeper than Darwin, [NCSE website contributor John Haught] espouses a teleology in which evolution is ineluctably drawn by God to some future point of perfection. ... But any injection of teleology into evolutionary biology violates precisely the great advance of Darwin’s theory: to explain the appearance of design by a purely materialistic process — no deity required. ... If we’re to defend evolutionary biology, we must defend it as a science: a nonteleological theory in which the panoply of life results from the action of natural selection and genetic drift acting on random mutations. ...

If natural selection and evolution are as powerful as we all believe, then we should devote our time to making sure that they are more widely and accurately understood, and that their teaching is defended. Those should be the sole missions of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Center for Science Education. Leave theology to the theologians.

Also read PZ Myers, Larry Moran and Richard Dawkins on this important position.

The only way that religion can be compatible with science is to suck all the meaning out of "religion": To hold the position that God is a vague deity, with vague properties and no effect whatsoever on the world, neither physical nor moral; to hold an Einsteinian "God" as a metaphor for the nonteleological physical laws that govern our world. The vast majority of self-described religious people do not hold such a vacuous view of God: they see God has having some influence on the world, many see God as having a profound and continuing influence. I cannot imagine how those few self-described religious people who do talk about a "God Who Makes No Difference" (Greg Egan's phrase) and really mean it can muster up the energy to regularly meet.

Abiogenesis

[h/t to 1 2 3 Religious Comics]

50 reasons to reject evolution

50 Reasons I Reject Evolution

20.) Because my mom dropped me on my head when I was a baby.

21.) Multiple times.

22.) On purpose.

read the rest

Liberal theology

Larry Moran on liberal theology:

The "sophisticated" version of Christianity that [liberal theologians] proclaim in public is just a sham designed to make them look as though they accept science and all its implications. ... [A]ccording to what we know about the natural world, humans are not special in any way and life does not have a purpose. There are very few believers who can stomach those ideas, hence their science and their religion are in conflict.

Larry Moran praises Seeing and Believing, Jerry A. Coyne's review of Saving Darwin and Only A Theory.

Quotation of the day

What did "intellect" ever do for us? For Denyse [O'Leary], it seems, not so much.

-- PTET

Quotation of the day

It is all too easy to confuse fundamentalism with passion. I may well appear passionate when I defend evolution against a fundamentalist creationist, but this is not because of a rival fundamentalism of my own. It is because the evidence for evolution is overwhelmingly strong and I am passionately distressed that my opponent can't see it — or, more usually, refuses to look at it because it contradicts his holy book. My passion is increased when I think about how much the poor fundamentalists, and those whom they influence, are missing. The truths of evolution, along with many other scientific truths, are so engrossingly fascinating and beautiful; how truly tragic to die having missed out on all that! Of course that makes me passionate. How could it not? But my belief in evolution is not fundamentalism, and it is not faith, because I know what it would take to change my mind, and I would gladly do so if the necessary evidence were forthcoming.

It does happen. I have previously told the story of a respected elder statesman of the Zoology Department at Oxford when I was an undergraduate. For years he had passionately believed, and taught, that the Golgi Apparatus (a microscopic feature of the interior of cells) was not real: an artefact, an illusion. Every Monday afternoon it was the custom for the whole department to listen to a research talk by a visiting lecturer. One Monday, the visitor was an American cell biologist who presented completely convincing evidence that the Golgi Apparatus was real. At the end of the lecture, the old man strode to the front of the hall, shook the American by the hand and said — with passion — ‘My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years.’ We clapped our hands red. No fundamentalist would ever say that. In practice, not all scientists would. But all scientists pay lip service to it as an ideal — unlike, say, politicians who would probably condemn it as flip-flopping. The memory of the incident I have described still brings a lump to my throat.

-- Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

(h/t to You Call This Culture?)

Googling Expelled

Just to see, I Googled "Expelled". Here are the results from the first page in order.

1. A review from Google Movies
2. The official Expelled website
3. Another page from the official website
4. The Wikipedia entry
5. An alternate URL for the Wikipedia entry
6. A trailer on YouTube
7. Another trailer on YouTube
8. The IMDB entry
9. A Pharyngula post about Expelled
10. Expelled Exposed
11. An article on WorldNut Daily

Yes, folks, Google-bombing Expelled has pushed Expelled Exposed to the first page. But with all our Google-bombing, PZ's post still comes up one notch higher. Verily, the god of the Internet walks among us, in the snows of Minnesota.

Shut up, Godwin!

Don't be shy, Jeff, tell us what you really think.

I'm not calling Ben Stein a Nazi. All I'm saying is: had he had the opportunity, he would have been a wholehearted Nazi supporter.

Dorchen makes a important point:

Just because George W. Bush won't be in office next year doesn't mean we've dodged the bullet of a white Christian supremacist dictatorship. We are not out of the woods yet, my darlings.

Anyone who thinks that Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and the rest of the Democrats intent on establishing equal rights for members of all phyla, not just chordata, will stop or even slow the theocrats and Republicans intent on transforming the United States to a third-world middle-class-free wage-slavery economy is on more drugs than even this hedonist and libertine can endorse.