The Idiot's Guide to Quote Mining (now without quotes!)

Anti-theism doesn't always--or even usually--cross over into bigotry toward a particular religion, specifically, but when it does, it's interesting how how often these special cases happen to coincide with existing cultural biases and stereotypes. Last week we saw arch-atheist Richard Dawkins, who grew up in Anglican Britain (and for some years in then-colonial Malawi), describe Catholicism as a contender for "the title of greatest force for evil in the world," as compared to his own native Anglican church with its "few shreds of decency, traces of kindness and humanity... [including] a generosity of spirit, of respect for women, and of Christ-like compassion for the less fortunate." Many of Dawkins' criticisms of Catholicism are valid, of course, including its ostrich-like policy on AIDS prevention and its cover up of large scale child molestation. But his rhetoric insinuating that it is institutionally devoid of compassion speaks to something other than a rational analysis.

England has long had an anti-Papist streak that is not entirely separable from its political history, so much of which saw the small island pitted against a very formidable Spain and France. Varieties of paranoia that would be familiar to us in the age of the "birther" movement were common, perhaps most famously in the case of the "Popish Plot," a fictitious conspiracy to assassinate Charles II, the invention of which resulted in, among other things, the banning of Catholics from Parliament for 150 years. Another British arch-atheist, A.C. Grayling, seams to display the same, possibly unconscious, prejudices as Dawkins in a Guardian piece from August 2009, in which he contrasts the Jesuits, representing dogma and orthodoxy, authority and ignorance, with the "reformers," representing "learning and intelligence... reason, and the quest for knowledge." Of course the "reformers" were not atheists or enlightenment rationalists, but Lutherans and Calvinists--the forerunners of today's evangelicals and fundamentalists. But they come in for much more favorable treatment in Grayling's analysis than the dreaded Jesuits, despite the fact that the "Black Monks" made huge contributions to scientific exploration. (Much misunderstanding rests on Loyola's remark that if the Church declares an object black that appears white to our inspection, we should call it black, which is not, in context, as simple an endorsement of blind faith as it seems).

Something more than a low regard for religion accounts for these distinctions, and we see it too in Jerry Coyne's unfortunate adoption, this week, of the Sam Harris-Christopher Hitchens interpretation of Islam as possessing a special virulence, beyond that of baseline religious ignominy. Coyne can barely to bothered to mount (as is his wont) a coherent argument for this "inherently belligerent" quality. He refers to (but does not cite) the Qur'an with its "plenty of belligerence." But then, remembering that people have made the same observation about Judeo-Christian scripture (which would seem to neutralize the argument), he enjoins us to "look then [at] all the imams calling for jihad." (None are cited.) Then he concludes, half-heartedly, with an appeal to historical illiteracy (again, with no substantiation):

And how many Muslims stood up to protest the widespread jubilation in the Middle East that ensued after 9/11, or stood up to defend the right of Danish newspapers to publish cartoons mocking Mohamed [sic]?

I'm not sure exactly how defense of Jyllands-Posten constitutes a denial of "belligerence," but in the example of 9/11, Coyne appears to have replaced the actual history of 9-11 with the Fox news version. There were widely televised reports of celebrations in the West Bank after 9-11, but the celebrations themselves were few. As such they hardly needed condemnation. As for the attacks themselves, even the Taliban denounced them (though it's fair to say they probably knew what was coming and that this was more a political than sincere stance). Also condemning the attacks were the Muslim Brotherhood, the chief Mufti of Soudi Arabia, The Ayatollah of Iran, The President of Iran, the Secretary General of the OIC, and scores of others including every American Muslim organization of note. In fact the Muslim reaction to 9/11 was near-unanimous in its characterization of the attack as profoundly anti-Islamic. It's possible, though, that none of these scholars and statesmen have read the Qur'an, and thus don't know how "belligerent" it is.

Nothing dethrones the primacy of scrutiny, evidence, skepticism, and analysis that are supposed to be the hallmark of the scientific mind like a good boogeyman. Major Nidal Hasan will do, since he quite evidently wouldn't have committed the same crime if he were a Christian stationed in a predominantly Muslim country. That's just good science, right?

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Speaking of belligerence in foundational documents, here's Francis Bacon, the developer of the scientific method, who made frequent use of the idiom of rape and sexual conquest in his advocacy of method:

I am come in very truth leading you to Nature with all her children to bind her to your service and make her your slave...

I invite all such to join themselves, as true sons of knowledge, with me, that passing by the outer courts of nature, which numbers have trodden, we may find a way at length into her inner chambers...

For you have but to follow and as it were hound nature in her wanderings, and you will be able, when you like, to lead and drive her afterwards to the same place again...

[Science and technology do not] merely exert a gentle guidance over nature’s course; they have the power to conquer and subdue her, to shake her to her foundations.

Shall we conclude from this that contemporary scientists are inescapably sexist and hostile to woman and nature?

Deepity Structure

Dan Dennett, on his way to a not-very-interesting point about why some atheist clerics remain in the clergy, makes reference to his coinage of the word "deepity" (n.), indicating a faux-profundity that "balances precariously between two readings":

On one reading [the deepity] is true, but trivial. On another hand it's false, but would be earth-shattering if true.

As Santi Taferlla notes at Prometheus Bound, clever as this may appear, it rests on a definition of "truth" so narrow it threatens to condemn all figurative language, including most poetry, as shallow. I would go further and say that without figurative language, the very concept of profundity becomes impossible. (In some moods I would go further still and assert that all language is figurative, anyway).

We might ask how Dennett's own famous axiom about natural selection as a "universal acid" fares when subjected to this semantic crucible. Is Dennett speaking literally or metaphorically, when he writes that natural selection “eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view, with most of the old landmarks still recognizable, but transformed in fundamental ways”? That would be pretty "earth-shattering" (or dissolving), if true.

And yet, in fairness, we know the kind of phenomenon Dennett is talking about. The key is in the balancing, between the plausible deniability contained in the first reading, and the dramatic promise of exciting, revolutionary news contained in the second reading. Lean too hard on the former, and your audience gets bored. Lean too hard on the latter, and your audience gets jaded.

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This is precisely the kind of skillful balancing act I have tried to call attention to in Carl Zimmer's recent article on the "instinctual" nature of mathematics. It's clear enough that Zimmer doesn't believe that trigonometry is innate in the same sense as the gag reflex or the sex drive, nor that Arabic numerals are innately assigned to quantities in the mind. And he makes several concessions to the effect that all truly mathematical operations, including counting, rely on representations, which must be learned. That's enough for plausible deniability. At the same time, in key passages (not the least of which is the article's title) he seems to contradict these concessions, referring repeatedly to an ill-defined "innate skill for number."

The connotation, never explicitly stated, but clearly implied in numerous passages (though contradicted* in others [balance!], which acknowledge the critical importance of the symbolic faculty, not present (or at least not evident) in birds, apes, or human newborns), is that mathematics is reducible to, or explainable in terms of, this instinct for recognizing quantity. That's the deepity. In its banal aspect, it's true that a symbolic analysis of number requires a sensitivity to number to exist. But this is about as interesting as saying that rods and cones in the retina and motor control of the fingers and hands constitute an "innate skill" for the visual arts. It hardly warrants mentioning.

In its false, would-be earth-shattering aspect, the article suggests that mathematics ("using numbers" in Zimmer's phrase) is tantamount to a genetic disposition to recognize quantity and pattern, and that as such is not a "learned" skill or behavior. Monkeys, crows, and even ants can "do math." Man, that's deep!

Along the way, of course, Zimmer cannot help but slander the actual discipline of mathematics. Is there any mathematician, amateur or professional, who will not take offense at the concept of "intuitive addition"? This dignified-sounding term is Zimmer's euphemism for guessing, (a "skill" shared by numerous species) which is in diametric opposition to the spirit of mathematical analysis. Zimmer observes, as though it supported his point, that humans (and other species) do fairly well at guessing when the quantities are small, and when the ratio between disparate quantities is high. But this is the very reason why the systematic study of quantities we call math was developed; at a certain level of complexity, guessing doesn't work so well anymore. Math begins where guessing breaks down. (Which is part of why math instructors require students to "show your work" on exams).

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Perhaps Dennett is correct, after all, to charge that theologians rely on "deepities" to maintain an aura of importance and relevence. But Carl Zimmer is not, as best I can tell, engaged in the practice of theology. He is a science writer--"as fine a science essayist as we have," says the New York Times, an assessment I don't quarrel with. And yet, no clearer example of a deepity will you find than the assertion that math is an instinct. (Though equally clear examples abound in evolutionary psychology, especially in the work of Denis Dutton and Steven Pinker.)

I don't, however, wish to attribute Zimmer's deepity quotient to chicanery, the way Dennett wants to with theologians. I think Zimmer is motivated, in earnest, to correct long-held misapprehensions of human culture as a blank-slate phenomenon, without genetic foundation. He significantly overplays his hand, probably out of zeal to make such a strong case, and here we have to pause to ask what unites both science writing and theology (not to mention philosophy in general, as well as politics, economics, lit crit, and more); namely, rhetoric: The desire to persuade--to entice another human mind to share one's own understanding. I think there's an enormous urge for communion underlying the rhetorical arts that we could even call spiritual, and if it's not too much of a deepity to say so, it binds together advocates from the farthest reaches of every dispute, whether nativist/empiricist, atheist/theist, rationalist/mysterian, or any other. (Perhaps the same urge turns a different cast of mind toward credulity).

Nevertheless, I hold out some hope that populizers of science will continue to measure their efforts against mere fabulism, even if theologians will not.

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* As so often the case in papers asserting that cultural element X is actually genetic, the fine print actually supports the opposite conclusion.

Around the world with Cataglyphis fortis

Just so Carl Zimmer doesn't think I'm picking on him personally, here's another example of the kind of lazy anthropomorphism that creeps in so easily to "scientific" conversations about mind. Robert Krulwich, of WNYC's Radiolab, had a spot on Morning Edition this morning discussing ants who "count" their footsteps to find their way around. To be fair to Krulwich, the piece has a couple of disclaimers sugesting that maybe the ants aren't "really" counting, "the way you and I" do, but the essence of the distinction is left to the listener. And according to the biologist he interviews for the piece, James Gould of Princeton, the ants "really do count."

There does seem, on the experimental data, to be some relationship between the number of strides and navigation among desert ants. In the study Krulwitch cites, ants who had their leg lengths altered away from the nest tended to either overshoot or undershoot the nest, on returning home, in proportion to their new leg length. It is nearly impossible, admittedly, to discuss this in terms that do not somehow anthropomorphize the ants, who are alternate said to "count" thier strides, "measure" the distance, or "analyze" the navigational data. The problem is that all three of these terms refer to symbolic activity in humans, and that analogizing to this activity tends to weaken the significance of this symbolic aspect. Whatever the ants are "doing," they are not assigning a conceptual, additive symbol to each step. They are not abstracting their experience into general quantifative categories. They are not counting.

Surely it's pedantic for me to point this out. Surely, as one anonymous commenter responded to my last post, the idea that anyone really believes that animals are "doing" math is made of straw. While I certainly don't think scientists like Gould are stupid, I'm not sure what kind of firewall exists in his mind that distinguishes the "counting" that ants "really" do, from the kind humans do. It is continually left unsaid.

The risk with this kind of usage is an erosion of knowledge of our own species, that occurs every time we apply it to try and understand another. When we say that insects, or birds, or mammals "count," "navigate," "think" or "communicate," we diminish the meaning of these words to a pale and crude metaphor. Behaviorally the effect is the same: ants act as if they really are counting, rats act as though they really are reasoning, birds act as though they really are communicating, and the explanandum for this behavior retreats into a kind of a black box.

We have gotten used to this kind of behavioral pseudo-explanation in the animal kindgom to such a degree that it has become legitmate to talk of ourselves in this murky way, so that thought and language are imagined to occur not in the mind, but behind the scenes, "in" the brain, in the neurons, in some as-yet undiscovered way, though no one has ever observed such activity. Meanwhile, a rich and detailed study of how minds create and use concepts and symbols, developed over the better part of a century by philosophers such as Peirce, Cassier and Langer, remains neglected by most biologists, who don't know into which organ or "module" to insert it.

Adequate to the Greatness

At least one otherwise intelligent commenter on my post on Carl Zimmer's "math instinct" article was not able to discern my distinction between the foundation of a cultural form like math (or language), which may be innate, and the full symbolic expression of it, which cannot be. Jim Harrison, of inanis et vauca, reminds me that almost 300 years ago philosopher Thomas Reid "studied our ability to see how many objects we were looking at without actually counting them."

But is this the same as "doing math"? Mathematics is something much more than the awareness of differences in pattern and quantity. It is the systematic study of these patterns. Confusing the instinctual aspect of our capacity for math with the conceptual, symbolic, intentional aspect is a little bit like calling an epileptic seizure a genre of dance, because it demonstrates our ability for rhythmic limb movement.

Susanne Langer writes, in the introduction to her 3-volume essay Mind, on the problem, so common to philosophy of mind, of keeping "the biological concept adequate to the greatness of the ability it is supposed to make comprehensible."

It is relatively easy to carry a biological principle, discovered in protozoan or even the lowest metazoan forms of life, through to higher and higher levels; but in the course of that advance the principle usually becomes less and less important until its manifestations, though still discoverable, are trivial. The simple taxes, such as phototaxis [response to light], which are major principles of behavioral control in lowly organisms, still have some effects in most mammalian species, but generally very little significance. What is interesting at the higher levels is to find the principles which eclipse the ones that are prominent in the little flagellate and still important in the earthworm. Such scientific advances are not quickly made, and our real understanding of life consequently can't be reached by hasty generalizations of a few biological findings... [my emphasis]

It is not completely uninteresting that humans share an innate faculty with birds and other creatures for keeping track of patterns of quantity, and it would be the most astounding coincidence if humanity's development of math were not directly based on this faculty. And yet to call math innate or instinctual quite obviously fails to account for why our species, and not those of rats, gulls or primates, developed a complex, robust system of analysis and categorization based on this faculty.

Such a system is almost completely reliant on learning. Human infants are not born knowing the quadratic equation. There are savants like Ramanujan, who, deprived of a university education independently worked out numerous mathematical principles that had already been discovered (and a few that had not). But Ramanujan was only "self-taught" after receiving formal instruction in trigonometry in childhood.

What is Zimmer trying to say, then, when he writes "Cantlon and others are showing that our species seems to have an innate skill for math... going back least 30 million years." This is a statement that can either be banal or false, but in neither case significantly or positively contributes to the scientific understanding of human culture*.

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* It is interesting to consider that in a 2008 NYT article, Zimmer characterized the ability of the vinegar worm to avoid poisonous bacteria when feeding as a type of "learning." No doubt this characterization is fair, but surely according to a different standard than the one we are discussing here.

Wordpress

I'm slowly migrating over highlights, oldest first, from this blog over to its future new home on wordpress. When I catch up to the present, all new posts will appear at the new site only. I'll make additional announcements when the date draws nearer. Meanwhile, enjoy the memories.

The Instinct Instinct

As if on cue, acclaimed science Journalist Carl Zimmer has provided me with a signal example of the kind of popular science writing that mucks up our understanding of evolutionary biology, and ultimately undermines our conviction of moral agency. Zimmer writes, in an article for Discover, that math is "instinctual:"

The central role of numbers in our world testifies to the brain’s uncanny ability to recognize and understand them. [...] Despite the late appearance of higher mathematics, there is growing evidence that numbers are not really a recent invention—not even remotely. [Neuroscientist Jessica] Cantlon and others are showing that our species seems to have an innate skill for math, a skill that may have been shared by our ancestors going back least 30 million years.

There is an uncontroversial way in which the innateness of math is true. The fact that humans can do math is not prohibited by our make-up, in a way that is not true, for example, of our ability to breed asexually or breathe underwater--which are, of course, non-existent, at least without the aid of various technologies. All nurture is natural, in the sense that it is not supernatural. But this is not what is usually meant by "innate," a word that conventionally exists in contrast with that which need be learned anew with each generation. If we conflate the two, we destroy the significance and meaning of each in a single bound.

Indeed it does seem, in places, that Zimmer is intending to say that math is truly innate in the sense that it need not be learned, ridiculous as that sounds to the sensible ear. "Traditionally," he writes, setting up the common-sense view he claims is under assault by "new research,"

[S]cientists have thought that we learn to use numbers the same way we learn how to drive a car or to text with two thumbs. In this view, numbers are a kind of technology, a man-made invention to which our all-purpose brains can adapt.

We must pause here to note the strange concept of a brain "adapting" to something it has already created. This is a very eccentric use of the word "adapt," akin to writing that a melanic peppered moth, for example, has adapted to its own ability to camouflage itself on soot-darkened branches. This is just a muddle.

Zimmer then addresses the research which purportedly establishes that math is not a "learned" technology after all:

One sign that this skill truly is innate: Children enter the world with a head for numbers. Veronique Izard, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard University, demonstrated this in a recent study of newborns. She and her colleagues played cooing sounds to babies, with varying numbers of sounds in each trial. The babies were then shown a set of shapes on a computer screen, and the scientists measured how long the babies gazed at it. (The length of time a baby spends looking at an object reflects its interest.) Newborns consistently looked longer at the screen when the number of shapes matched the number of sounds they had just heard. [...] Izard’s study suggests that newborns already have a basic understanding of numbers. Moreover, their concept of numbers is abstract; they can transfer it across the senses from sounds to pictures.

And yet there are no actual "numbers" in the experiment, in the mathematical sense of conceptual, symbolic entities. Rather there is an almost certainly unconscious association of patterns, which is a far cry from a "basic understanding" of numbers, if that is to be anything but a tautology. No doubt math cannot proceed without the ability to make such associations, but the associations themselves are not mathematical in any meaningful sense. Moreover, a number of non-human animals can make such associations, including rats and birds, very few of whom are found in accredited math programs.

This may sound like a quibble, and in a sense it is. There is certainly a relationship to the ability to recognize numerical patterns, and the ability to manipulate symbols representing those patterns. We might even be justifed in saying that these two faculties exist along a kind of continuum of numerical understanding, with no clear line dividing one from the other (though abstract, symbolic thought continues to impress me as a pretty significant elaboration). But crucially, if we are going to say this, then we have no reason to stop at this "basic understanding of numbers." For pattern recognition is, in its turn, a specific form of a much more general ability among organisms to interpret environmental data, and this faculty is something we share with the simplest protozoa.

The claim that "mathematics" is innate, then, replies upon a bait-and-switch reduction of math's essence to some more primeval form. For what part of culture is this not possible? We have dance in common with bees, song in common with canaries, war in common with ants, courtship in common with bowerbirds, tool-use in common with crows and finches, but while these cultural forms bind us to our relations throughout the animal kingdom, they are hardly interchangeable.

Zimmer knows this, and concedes as much in the closing lines of his article, though in doing so he completely repudiates his own thesis:

[O]nce our ancestors began to link their natural instinct for numbers with a new ability to understand symbols, everything changed. Math became a language of ideas, of measurements, and of engineering possibilities. The rest—the skyscrapers and supermarkets and weddings—were just a matter of derivation.

"Everything changed," that is, when the crucial ingredient of symbolic communication, which can only be transmitted by culture, never by genes alone, was added to humanity's "natural instinct for numbers." The "derivation" of everything that followed traces back not to a "basic undertanding" of number such as one sees in human infants (and rats), but to the first developments of symbolic thought. This is as clear an admission as you can find that math is not reducible to a sensitivity to patterns, any more than language is reducible to an ability to vocalize.

Why, then, make the claim in the first place that math is an instinct*, and not a piece of learned culture? The answer is probably complex, but is at least partially explicable in the context of the project of scientific "consilience" which seeks to slowly colonize the humanities under the guise of reconciling the "two cultures." We seem to have an increasing hunger for the certainty of quantity over the indeterminacy of quality, which drives us to find explanations in genetic over cultural terms, in brains over minds. Calling the mathematical faculty "innate" only serves to augment this bias toward quantification. The unfortunate result is an increasing sense in our culture of inevitabilty and powerlessness, just when we are at our place of greatest need of making intelligent, informed decisions.

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* Not just an instinct, Zimmer's subtitle bombastically implies, but a primary one, second only to the sex drive.

"Igon Value"

Ouch.

[Gladwell responds here].

It is always a temptation for writers with Big Ideas in the social sciences to haphazardly mine subjects they are not expert in to score points. I've done it, and probably will again. Gladwell certainly has his flaws as a writer and thinker, tending to press his rhetorical advantage just a step too far, just past the point where it becomes implausible (though many of his supporting arguments are sound, and his writing is enjoyable).

Pinker, however, should not be especially quick to cast this particular stone. He is notorious for getting details wrong in subjects he clearly has little interest in. Louis Menand, in his NYer review of Pinker's Blank Slate, made this point well, writing "it seems that aesthetics, unlike cognitive science, is not a body of knowledge worth acquiring," and proceeding to catalogue in a single passage these howlers: (1) Modernist literature constituted a denial of human nature, (2) modernism and postmodernism are primarily Marxist literary movements, and (3) social satirists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid proved the "universality of basic visual tastes" with their "United States: Most Wanted Painting." Pinker also gets a number of details wrong, as in his botched quotation of Virginia Woolf, and his obvious regurgitiation of know-nothing rhetoric from the culture wars about Andres Serrano and Chris Ofili.

Gladwell's error, though less egregious, is more embarassing because it can't be couched in tough-guy dismissal. We can say (falsely) about art we don't understand "My Kid Could Paint That," but we cannot say about math we don't understand "My Kid Could Formulate That." Despite all the whining about "Unscientific America" lately, there is clearly a double standard at play where cultural literacy (or what used just to be called just plain literacy) doesn't matter as much as scientific literacy. This is just machismo and we should all--especially those of us with chairs at Harvard--just drop it.

Baldwin Revisted: Epilogue

Most of us know, or think we know, that Lamarckism* is wrong, but would be hard pressed to say precisely why. Part of the reason for this is that the oversimplification of heritability in Lamarckian explanations is also a common feature of most Darwinian explanations, at least among lay persons**. There is something enduring and compelling about the notion of "fixed" hereditary traits, probably because it gives us a sense of solidity and permanence. But this ignores the inherent fluidity and plasticity of most organisms, and in consequence, how the diversity of life has come to be.

The last gasp of neo-Lamarckism (excluding Lysenkoism, which was never taken seriously outside the USSR), was probably Paul Kammerer's experimentation on the midwife toad in the 1910s and 20s. There is still controversy on whether or not Kammerer's data was faked (probably not by him), but his experiments still aptly demonstrate how neo-Lamarckism was at least supposed to have worked: Midwife toads mate on land, and thus lack the spiny callouses on their fingers called (rather ghoulishly) "nuptial pads" that male water-mating frogs and toads use to keep the female from slipping away during sex.

Kammerer induced the midwife toads to mate in water, in the expectation that they would, over the course of several generations, "acquire" the helpful nuptial pads. When the trait emerged, he then bred the newly padded toads, to see if the trait was passed on to its offspring.

Right away, those who have been following this series might be moved to ask where the nuptial pads trait in the experimental toads "came from," unless there was already a genetic disposition for developing them. When a blacksmith develops large biceps, it is because humans have a genetic propensity to bulk up muscle tissue that has been strained by exertion. The fact that nuptial pads--or large biceps--are "acquired," does not mean they are following some alternative, non-genetic process. The origin of variation in a population is not something that Lamarckism has ever been very good at explaining.

But even overlooking this problem, the main obstacle to neo-Lamarckian theory has always been what is called the "Weissman barrier," after German biologist August Weismann, who first established that genetic information is a one-way affair: what happens in the body is an effect of, not a cause of, what happens in the genome (which Weissman, writing 20 years before Mendel, called "the germ plasm.") 75 years later, upon the discovery of the structure of DNA, Francis Crick would come to call this principle the "central dogma" of evolutionary biology: A change in the phenotype (say by mutilation) will not effect change in the genome.

With few negligible exceptions, the central dogma appears to be well-established. But to hang neo-Lamarckism's failure on this principle distorts the picture we have of how genes and bodies really interact, implying a much more rigidly determined relationship. Gregory Bateson, the son of Paul Kammerer's great nemesis, the genetic pioneer William Bateson, lays out the logical problems of acquired characteristics in his 1979 book Mind and Nature. He observes that if an "acquired" trait is "passed on," then the offspring's gain is the species' loss. Where before, the blacksmith (or midwife toad) had the "option" of enlarging his biceps (or thickening his nuptial pads) when the circumstances demanded it, the offspring of the blacksmith (or toad) is now shackled to that trait, whether it's appropriate or not. The offspring now requires a more steady-state environment to thrive in, having lost their inherent plasticity (in regard to the acquired trait).

This is exactly what we see in the process of genetic assimilation, described in my last post, which so superficially resembles Lamarckian inheritance. Through repeated exposure to an environmental stress, latent traits within the stock become calcified in later generations, so that what was once a temporary strategy in drosophilia for reducing internal salinity (the growth of anal papillae) is now a fixed trait regardless of the amount of salinity in the environment. The experimental strain of drosophilia has lost the option of responding variably to its environment. It is quite possible that Kammerer's work with toads was actually a success, but that the pads were not acquired, but rather assimilated.

This, too, may be what is happening with the birdsong of the great tits I began this series with. We can only speculate, because birdsong observations are not a controlled experiment, but it's possible that the variation of higher pitched song in the urban great tit population was not an adaptation in the standard sense (either memetic or genetic), but a latent trait in the gene pool, brought out in those birds who habituated urban areas, in the same way that diabetes is a latent trait brought out by a highly saccharine diet. (The role of "initiative" in those birds, so important to conversations about the Baldwin effect, will have to wait for another post).

Because the low-pitched ambient din of the city is constant over many generations, it's possible, then, that this variation is being--or has been--assimilated into the urban tit population, so that the plasticity of pitch has disappeared, in the same way that Waddington's fruit fly larvae lost the ability to stop growing anal papillae, even in the absence of a saline environment.

The guardian article I originally linked to provides some circumstantial corroboration for this idea, noting that urban and forest tits can no longer communicate with each other.

"We played back the songs we'd recorded in the cities to the birds in the rural areas and vice versa. And we also played the city birds other city bird songs and the same in the countryside. We found that they responded much more strongly to the songs of the birds form the same area, birds with a similar noise background."

Of course we don't know with any certainty that the two traits existed in the population before they it was separated into forest and city dwelling birds. The change could have been a spot mutation (genetic or cultural, though I've tried to cast doubt on both in this series), occurring contemporaneously with the move of some birds to city environments (or, we should say, to the loudening of these environments. London, Prague, Paris and Amsterdam were just as bucolic as the forests we are contrasting them with just a few short centuries ago. The birds could have stood still while the cities around them got louder. Or, the birds whose pitches did not change could have fled for the country. Without more study, it's not possible to do more than speculate.)

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* I should really say neo-Lamarckism, since Lamarck's own writings were much more precocious than most of the more modern variants of the doctrine that bear his name. We can call neo-Lamarckism any attempt to establish an inheritance of acquired characteristics after the turn of the last century, when the science of genetics was born.

** A common complaint I get on many of my posts here is that I paint biology as excessively naive and out of touch, when in fact most working biologists have an acute awareness of the kinds of complexity and indeterminacy I claim is missing from most evolutionary thinking. I won't debate this point here, but to say that you'd never know it from the descriptions in the popular press, include popular science organs like Scientific American, Seed, or Nova.

Baldwin Revisted, Part IIA

John Wilkins has been thoughtful enough to reply at length to my (soon to be) suite of posts on cultural evolution in animals. John is absolutely correct to characterize the subject as "hard to disentangle," but while I surely make errors in my argument (which I don't claim to be terribly original), I'm not sure they are the ones that John thinks I am making.

Starting with a brief word about the use of the word "meme," John wants to defend its validity as a synonym for "cultural items" apart from the overarching theory put forth by Dennett and Blackmore that imagines these items to be autonomous and self-replicating. I wish him luck. To my mind, use of the word meme is a signal that one is a memeticist in the standard sense, and one would have about as much luck trying to communicate effectively with a casual version of the word proton or quark.

The very introduction of a technical term for the word idea (or what Cassirer called, collectively, "cultural forms," which I prefer) indicates that one can now talk about this item with scientific precision. I think that Dennett and Blackmore fail to deliver such precision, but they do promise it, which is why we are liable to make the assocation with memetics when the word meme makes an appearance in a reasoned argument.

I hope it is clear by now, however, that I do not hold John to believe in standard Blackmore-Dennett memetics (though do I think he reverts to this way of thinking later in his response.)

Next, John argues that evolution need not require "equiprobability of all possible variants."

Mutations need not be equally likely. You may have biases in what mutants can form, from, say, constraints in development or in replication of genes, and the end result – selection based on what of the actual variants are the fitter in that circumstance – is still darwinian. So another red herring is that if variation is biased this makes it non-darwinian. So long as there is some variation with respect to fitness, there will be selection (ceteris paribus*).

I'm not entirely sure what is gained dropping the 'D' to lower case, though I imagine it is meant to contrast "Darwinism"--what Darwin actually believed according to the science of his day-- with "darwinism"--contemporary evolutionary science that doesn't conflict with Darwinian theory (often called neo-Darwinism, to indicate a synthesis of population genetics and evolution by natural selection). At any rate, my argument here is not with the idea that where there is variation there wil be selection (though I still tend to believe this explains less than it should).

Rather than proposing that variation in birdsong was non-darwinian because it was biased or constrained, I was simply asking how a non-genetic trait in a non-linguistic, non-conscious species could be biased or constrained. This is where I think John backslides on his disavowal of formal memetics. (Later he talks about the "generations" of memes lasting for "hours or days," which again re-establishes the analogy to genes). You cannot invoke constraints on cultural traits without simultaneously positing a system of rules and mechanics for those traits. If not memetics, then what? Whether or not John follows Blackmore and Dennett all the way through to their rather drastic conclusion that minds are mere meme colonies (that somehow have the capacity to observe themselves), he clearly seems to believe that "cultural items" are particulate entities that are distributed in a population in a way that can be described (at least in theory) mathematically, subjecting the cultural items themselves--as opposed to the bearers of those items--to darwinian logic. I will remain agnostic on this (at best) until something empirical emerges to show why this is a better explanation than its alternatives.

Next, John writes that I conflate the Baldwin effect with Waddington's canalization. I actually never mention the word canalization, though it is admittedly in the air whenever Waddington's name comes up. Rather I point out that Waddington himself argued that what Baldwin, Osborne, Morgan (and later AC Hardy) put forth as a non-Darwinian mechanism of evolution could actually be explained via "genetic assimilation," a process whereby traits that are merely potential in a population become fixed through repeated exposure to certain environmental stresses. I didn't give an example in my last post so let me do so here, drawing from Waddington's own work.

When drosophilia larvae are grown on a salt-rich media, they tend to develop papillae--little wartlike bumps--around the anus, in a way that is thought to help regulate their own internal salinity. Too much salt is lethal to the larvae (as to us), and there is some variation in drosophilia populations regarding salt-tolerance. In one experiment, Waddington bred successive generations of drosophilia larvae in a salt-rich media, from which many of the larvae died, thus selecting for salt-tolerance. In the larvae that survived, the papillae tended to be larger, and these increased in size over successive generations.

At the same time, the sensitivity of the larvae to salt was increased, such that they grew the enlarged papillae at lower and lower dilutions of salt media. Thus a trait which had been merely latent in some of the population, became, through (admittedly artificial) selection, "assimilated" into the population such that it was much more comparatively fixed. Even when the environmental stressor (salinity) was reduced or removed, the trait remained. Such an outcome superficially resembles a Lamarckian mechanism, with individual organisms appearing to pass on "acquired" traits to their offspring, though it occurs by means entirely explicable in neo-Darwinian terms.

The point is not to overthrow Darwinism. It is simply to demonstrate that what an organism "is," at least in terms of its phenotype, is in large part dependent upon what environment it finds itself in, though its genome does not change (within a single lifetime). This has, I believe, very dire implications for the kind of Williams/Hamilton/Dawkins/Maynard-Smith selfish gene theory that relies on mathematical games and cost-benefit schemes to explain how genes persist and spread in a population, since no game can predict what genes will be expressed as traits in what environment at any given time. In short, it requires a theory of systems to explain biological morphology, and with that, a much greater role for biological indeterminacy. What is called the "Baldwin effect" is simply a recognition of this fact: that organisms and environments are interpermeable, with influences that run in both directions, making biological cause and effect a dicey affair.

I wrote of "intelligence" at a few important junctures in these two posts, and John seems to have misapprehended this as my invocation of a mystical force of some kind. I mean nothing mysterious by intelligence, though I think it functions in a different manner than John seems to, at least in humans. I certainly don't believe intelligence tends toward "clairvoyance," and I don't believe it bequeaths an epistemological advantage of any kind (the concept of Umwelt would make this a near-meaningless proposition). But I do think that John makes a too-linear assertion about the nature of intelligence when he writes that humans, for example, "learn by trial and error and transmission without prior knowledge of what will work" by "building up our knowledge piecemeal."

Knowledge is cumulative, surely, but that is not the same as its being piecemeal. Intelligence is not simply a matter of iterations of reason and logic, from primitive to formal, though rationality plays a part in it. Intelligence also works through a powerful associative function we might call poetic. I used the example of Kekule's "discovery" of the benzene ring structure earlier, but there are literally countless alternate examples we could choose. Our mental ability to form pictures and analogize their content in an instant (rightly or wrongly) is just as important a feature of intelligence as our ability to linearly analyze the details of such pictures.

(Perhaps interestingly, the "ready-made" nature of these analogous forms and visions (which I don't deny have rudiments in earlier, simpler forms) are very similar to what we see in the emergence of "new" traits in nature, where entire complexes of dormant genes, perhaps pre-arranged for some prior, now atavistic task, suddenly spring into action under the pressure of some new environmental stress, analogizing as it were, the old trait for the new. This process may be blind in the sense that "nature" has no prior epistemic access to the problems or solutions that may later arise, but it need not respond to them through simple reliance on the emergence of the right random mutaton, like a hacker trying to crack a password with a random number generator.

It will perhaps be objected that no one "really" believes in such a simplistic, paint-by-numbers version of darwinian theory as I have just dscribed, but I still contend that an examination of the reigning darwnian explanations (especially in Dawkins in Dennett, but also in D.S. Wilson, Shubin and many others) reveals the alarming degree to which such stories still wield influence.)

Having said that, I don't think my comment on memetics being a deus ex machina is that hard to grok, and I hope John will read the offendin paragraph again. I simply mean that far, far less is gained from an invocation of memetics than was already available from an invocation of genetics, which at least has the advantage of real, explicable science behind it. In the end, memetics cannot avoid asking the same questions that genetics must ask about the origin of variation--not, importantly, the same thing as selection of that variation once it has emerged.

I'll wrap this up with sincere thanks to John for taking this discussion on. My vantage point is admittedly idiosyncratic, and not easy to separate from some of the more classic debates which this topic has engendered (Dawkins/Gould, Dennett/Fodor, Dennett/Searle, Putnam/Putnam), and I appreciate John's willingness to take it as it comes. In my turn I'll try to make more explicit some of the influences that make my approach divergent from these others (e.g. Cassirer, Langer, as relates to philosophy of mind).

Baldwin Revisted, Part II

As the story goes, in 1921 a lone blue tit in Birmingham, England, (close relative of the singing hero of our last story) "learned" to poke through the cardboard top of a milk bottle and suck out the cream. Soon all the blue tits in England were doing it--but, interestingly, no other species. When milk bottlers switched to aluminum tops between the wars, one of the tits figured out how to pierce those tops too, and the cream-sucking continued unabated.

Other birds--notably robins--were known to also enjoy milk cream, but for some reason never figured out as a species how to pierce the tops (though the occasional robin would figure it out on its own). According to one version of the story, milk bottles in Britain originally had no caps at all, and both robins and tits enjoyed drinking from milk bottles, but only the latter learned to pierce the caps.

Milk is still delivered by bottle in Britain, but the last recorded case of milk-sucking was in 2000. The practice has died out, perhaps because today's milk is lower in fat, or perhaps because modern homogenization keeps the cream from rising to the top.

This story is sometimes given as an example of something called the Baldwin effect, after James Mark Baldwin (1861-1934) who called it "ontogenic evolution," where a trait that originates in behavioral learning later becomes fixed the population (as opposed to the random origination of traits proposed by Darwin.) Though it resembles in some respects Lamarckian evolution by acquired characteristics, Baldwin proposed this mechanism as an alternative to Lamarck. He did so before the discovery of Mendelian genes or population genetics, but later biologists and philosophers of science have tried to reconcile the Baldwin effect with modern genetics.

The original attempts to explain the Baldwin effect in neo-Darwinian terms, such as those by G.G. Simpson and Julian Huxley, were unsatisfying. (I should pause to note that none of the papers on Baldwinian evolution mention blue tits and milk bottles, which may not in the end be a very promising example, but which we'll return to for other reasons. One example of possible Baldwinian evolution mentioned by Simpson, however, is--yes!--birdsong).

Simpson and Huxley essentially argued that the Baldwin effect described traits that were held in the population culturally until the appropriate genetic mutation could arise (by chance) to fix it in heredity. This is one of those explanations that seems to reconcile conflicting ideas, but makes little sense on further reflection. Remember that Darwin's theory of evolution was dependent upon the recent discovery of deep geological time. Until Lyell demonstrated that the age of the earth was so much older than scientists had previously supposed, there simply was not enough time for evolution by the selection of randomly generated traits to take place.

Thus, for a species to hold the line, behaviorally, while the random genetic processes take their time to catch up, obviates the need for instinctual bases of behavioral traits in the first place. If a species can display that kind of trait fixity, over the course of perhaps millions of years (since the kind of complex traits we are considering are unlikely to be the result of the production or suppression of a single enzyme), then we would be right to wonder why it was so important for the trait to exist in the genome at all? Genetic heredity would seem to be moribund in the face of such robust stability of traits. (There are also interesting questions about plasticity which I will return to shortly).

It took the geneticist C.H. Waddington, who is still hugely under-esteemed today, to develop an alternate explanation, according to the theory of what he called genetic assimilation. Waddington imagined the genome in a much different way than most of his contemporaries. Rather than a static blueprint for a certain type of biological machine (which is still more or less the picture underlying present-day selfish gene evolutionary theory), Waddington thought of the genome in terms of latent potentialities. Entire cluster of genes exist, according to Waddington, in each organism, with the potential to express quite complex traits under the right conditions. If an organism were exposed to a certain kind of stress, these gene complexes would be triggered to produce entirely new traits. "If you have a pistol with a hair trigger," he said, "just chuck it on the floor and it will go off." (This is more a commonplace idea today than it was a half century ago, especially in the field of biological development called "evo devo," but the implications have still not influenced evolutionary thinking as they should.) Genetic assimilation is, to put it more briefly than it deserves to be put, the crossing over of genetic potentiality into phenotypic actuality, as a response to certain environmental stresses.

This change in perspective on just what is "coded" in the DNA has a huge impact on what we mean by "random" mutations. As fortune favors the prepared mind, natural selection favors the prepared genome. This may seem like a paradox of regress: what, after all, "prepared" the genome, if not natural selection? But Waddington was also revolutionary in appealing to what is still best called "systems theory," in which causes and effects take on a certain indeterminacy by virtue of their being non-linear. Even the simple example of the peppered moth, whose change in pigment can be attributed to a single gene, cannot simply be attributed to adaptation in the classical sense. To be adequately camouflaged, the moth must, in addition to being pigmented properly, also behave properly, by resting on the dark patches of tree limbs. Can anyone say which came first? Did leporids evolve separately into rabbits and hares because enclosed areas favored rabbits and open spaces favored hares, or because rabbits favored enclosed spaces and hares favored open ones?

In other words, rather than casting phenotypes as the blank canvass upon which environments paint (through the medium of the genes), Waddington (and other early systems biologists, such as Paul Weiss and Ludwig Bertalanffy) saw the phenotype--the myriad forms of all life--as negotiations between environments and genes. This is an idea most biologists will pay some lip service to today, as long as they don't need to revise the notion--explicitly promoted by the metaphor of natural selection ever since Darwin proposed it, and still demanded by "adaptationist" neo-Darwinism--that life is essentially a passive and reactive response to environmental forces.

This brings us back to the question of my last post: where do new behaviors, like the raised pitch of a great tit's song, or the piercing of the tops of milk bottles, "come from"? It is evident to us, as reasoning creatures, that higher pitched songs can be better heard over urban rumble, and that a bird's beak is probably strong enough to pierce cardboard or foil. But the tits cannot have reasoned their way to these new behaviors. And it is unlikely that a new gene for (in the latter example) bottle-top piercing just happened to arise in the population just as bottle tops were emerging in the environment. And yet something must explain why the blue tits were smart enough to "figure out" the bottle top problem, while robins, who apparently liked cream just as much, were not.

It is tempting to invoke memes where genic explanations falter, but such an invocation amounts to a deus ex machina of the kind Dennett dubs a "skyhook." If the word "meme" is to function merely as a synonym for "idea," we can refer to our concepts of mind and intelligence to explain how various idea-memes have come to exist. But memes are supposed to provide a way to think of ideas without recourse to "mind." Memes precede thought the way that genes precede phenotypes. Our minds are, according to meme theory, the product of our memes, not the other way around. If our options for the origin of a trait are (as they seem to be) that it either be random (monkeys at the typewriter) or directed (humans at the typewriter--or--monkeys at a programmed typewriter), then memetics seems pretty tightly shackled to the former, since the only mechanism for their direction--intelligence--has been relegated by meme theorists (Dennett, Blackmore) to the status of an epiphenomenon. It's at the wrong end of the causal chain. But monkeys at the typewriter does not seem a very likely way for great tits to have successfully raised the pitch of their birdsong.

There are two very tempting directions to proceed toward from here. The first, at its most extreme, is to deny that birds have any culture at all--that all avian behavior is somehow genetically determined, in conjunction with environmental influences. Following Waddington, we might say that the propensity for a higher pitched song was in the tits' genome all along, and just needed a basso profundo environment to bring it out, in the same way that people with a propensity for diabetes or obesity won't express it without a sugar-rich diet. To the objection that birds clearly "learn" birdsong from their parents, we could propose that we are projecting instead the appearance of learning, and point to a recent study showing that zebra finches isolated from their parents were found to re-acquire their songs within a few generations.

But this approach seems to recall Descartes' idea, inherently hostile to nature, that all creatures except humans were mere deterministic automatons. It's behaviorism for thee, but not for me. This is where I think Susanne Langer's attempts to re-cast nature through the hermeneutic of the biological act, rather than (quite coldly Newtonian when you think about it) reaction. But as I am only now finishing volume one (out of three) of her work on this, I'll have to save more substantive comment for a future posting.

In the meanwhile, I'll close, with part III, with a little postscript on Gregory Bateson's brilliant rejection of Lamarkian inheritance, which fleshes out the importance of genotypic plasticity.

Baldwin Revisted

A couple of weeks ago I posted a comment at John Wilkins' Evolving Thoughts right before he left for a tour of the US to deliver a paper and to promote his book, Species.

It was not the optimum time to start a conversation. But I remain intrigued in the topic (on which more in a moment), so I'm recapitulating the comment here, less as a passive aggressive way of spurring John to respond than to open up the question to anyone else among my readership who may follow these things with passing interest.

The topic is birdsong, or, specifically, how birdsong spreads among bird populations, by genes or culture. On the way to making a much different point about scientific ideas and their fitness among humans, Wilkins writes this about songbirds:

And since songs can be spread independently of genes, these two fitnesses [of the song, and the bird who sings it] are not the same.

Wilkins is a recovering meme theorist. When he originally wrote this post in late 2006 (the version I commented on is a re-post), he was already calling the word meme "otiose." One reason is the one that has long been Mary Midgley's critique; that memes violate Occam's plea for scientific parsimony. They invoke a cognitive apparatus that would make the epicycles of Ptolemy an exemplar of Pythagorean elegance. But a more primary reason is that memetics casts the organisms who make culture (humans, generally) as entirely passive; as reagents rather than agents. As John put it in a comment on this blog earlier this summer, humans are "partially determined by our social context, but we remain agents within it." (This approach echoes Susanne Langer's re-imagining of evolution around the concept of the biological act in her magnum opus, Mind, which I've been meaning to ask John if he's read or otherwise encountered.)

The question of whether we might make the same statement about non-human animals, including passerines (songbirds)--are they, too, "agents" within their own social context?--is too large to dive into just yet. But birdsong sufficiently resembles aspects of human culture that we can't exclude it from all consideration. It's well-known, for example, that birds will adapt their song depending on the aural environment they are in. Wilkins links to a paper [subscription needed, but here's the Guardian on the same topic] discussing such a change in song in the great tit, whose pitch is higher in urban environments to better stand out (it is supposed) against the rumbly ambient din of the modern city.

Many reports of this finding, including John's, contain an important imprecision: there is no evidence that individual birds will alter the pitch of their song depending on their environment. Rather the researchers compare the average pitch of birds in urban areas to those in forested areas, and find the former statistically higher than the latter. In other words, no actual change in pitch has been observed; rather only differences in pitch implying a change, upon migration of the species from country to city.

This bears upon the question of whether the change in pitch is truly cultural or not--that is, non-genetic. Loud, modern cities have not been around long enough for natural selection to work in the classical, neo-Darwinian sense, beginning with a "random" (or at least non-directed, non-teleological) mutation in the gene which is selected for its survival benefit. Because of this difficulty, the theory of memes is invoked. It is the song itself which mutates, and confers its own survival benefit. Birds with the higher, mutated, song, survive differentially, and thus the song spreads through the population.

But does this really solve the problem? Whether the mutation takes place in the genome or in the "memeplex" (which no one has ever managed to observe or even effectively describe), shouldn't it be subject to the same laws or logic? Mutation of DNA is still imperfectly understood, but it is generally thought to be the result of copying errors during mitosis meiosis, or exposure to mutagens. Most mutations are either deleterious or neutral, which is why evolution takes such vast spans of time to show noticeable effects. (In fact it is probable that the vast majority of mutations are "corrected" in the cell before they have chance to show effects, a fact we will return to).

The concept of the meme is modeled after the concept of the gene, for the very purpose of invoking Darwinian selection of cultural elements. It would seem contradictory, then, for this process to be able to violate one of the most important principles of Darwinian selection: namely, the enormous ratio of failed or neutral mutations to "successful" ones, and the subsequent long durations of time needed for changes to occur. In the case of the rising pitch of the the great tit's song, the question is the the same whether we postulate its origin in genes or memes: how did it manage to arise so quickly, in just a matter of centuries (if not decades)? If the process of mutation was truly random, as classical Darwinian theory proposes in each case, was the urban great tit not remarkably lucky that just the right mutation arose right when it was needed?

***

Put this way, I think it becomes easy to see one of the flaws in memetic thinking. Changes in "culture" differ from changes in biology in that they are not random; they are directed toward a specific challenge or concern. For most of the history of human culture that we have access to, we can assume human agency in the form of consciousness. Ideas without a context never make it to the "phenotype." They are discarded by the mind to whom they make no sense before they are ever allowed to live in behavior. They are, in short, not visible to natural selection at all, but rather to a kind of human filtering more closely related to artificial selection. (The same principle applies to ideas that arise in the unconscious). We don't try out, in practice, everything that occurs to us in cognition.

Similarly, an intelligent organism does not randomly run through each possible variant of a behavior until it seizes upon the right answer. (Even chess-laying computers don't work this way). Rather it operates (in part) by association, which is one of the primary components of intelligence. When a daydream vision of Ouroborous inspired Kekule to "discover" the ring shaped structure of the benzene molecule, we don't imagine his vision was one in a series of others with no possible relation to the structure--starbursts and cubes and various tinker toy constructions. There is a reason why cultural evolution happens so much faster than biological evolution, and that is because it is a function of intelligence. It need not rely on random occurrences to proceed.

This brings us to the Baldwin Effect, which I will look at in Part 2.

On passing through doorways

The biologist David Sloan Wilson, who is the recentest addition to the brain trust at Seed's Science Blogs, has a series of posts up defending group selection that now runs to ten parts, called "Truth and Reconciliation for Group Selection."

I am sympathetic to this effort, since it seems to offer a challenge to the crude gene-selectionism that has dominated evolutionary thought for the last 30 years. But in the end, Wilson offers very little in opposition to Dawkinsian selfish gene theory except a subtle change in emphasis.

Wilson's view is summarized in this pithy maxim:

Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary."

But talk of "selfish groups" and "altruistic groups" seems to confuse the categories we are trying to better understand. Tautologically, a group is a collection of individuals which have subsumed their identity. Formerly wholes, we imagine these individuals now as parts of some larger whole. The group itself (whether we are talking about a machine, made of parts, an organism, made of cells, or a community, made of individuals) is inherently altruistic, in the sense that it relies on cooperation of these parts--but the new whole that is formed by this cooperation assumes the burden of whatever selfishness the parts may have sheltered. This presents no challenge to the standard neo-Darwinian, selfish gene view, which is very forthright about the need for selfish genes to cooperate within vehicles, the way rowers cooperate within racing shells.

In turn, groups in competition with each other are more properly thought of as individuals, just as organisms (such as ourselves) are groups of cells (or genes, or atoms) that have a singular identity viewed from a certain perspective.

Arthur Koestler viewed this part-whole duality through the framing device of the Roman god of passageways, Janus, who faced in two directions at once. Facing inwardly, we focus on an integrative tendency: parts working together; facing outwardly, we focus on an assertive tendency: wholes existing independently. Each part/whole Koestler called a "holon," and the systems of order formed by holons he called "holarchy." There is no group or individual but through our frame of reference. (Even the gene, presented by orthodox neo-Darwinism as the indivisible unit of heredity, is a grouping of nucleic acids, which must cooperate to persist in a heritable form. The "selfish" gene is also a prime example of what we could call molecular altruism.)

Where, then, do selfishness and altruism reside? What begins to be exposed here is a point that Mary Midgely has been patiently making for over 30 years: the present conversation over biological selfishness and altruism is horribly distorted by anthropomorphized political ideologies. Darwin himself was very explicit that a primary inspiration for his theory was in the economic writings of Malthus and Adam Smith, which focused on a competition of entities for scarce resources. Darwin adapted de Candolle's notion of "nature's war" to a general principle of a "struggle for existence." This phrase has a great deal of emotional resonance for us, since we are a species intimate with struggle, but it is increasingly clear as the naturalistic sciences describe the world with greater and greater precision that there is no room in most of nature for the mind or intention that would give rise to such a struggle.

"Competition" is the picture we get of nature when we project our own anxieties onto other organisms. It ignores the unfathomable amount of cooperation that resides in the interrelations of, and within, organisms (the very cells that make up our bodies and that of most animals and plants arose not through a "war" of any kind, but through the cooperation of organelles, which were once completely independent bacterial species.)

Perhaps more fundamentally, the Hobbesean self-interest that classical and Victorian economists saw as the driving force of human behavior (which Darwin, Luell and de Candolle applied to organisms generally, and a century later Willams and Dawkins relocated in the gene), is something for which there is no unambiguous empirical evidence. If we apply the null hypothesis, what appears to be the rankest selfishness in nature could just as easily be characterized as the most saintly altruism. Every species, with very few exceptions, depends upon other species for survival. One of the worst things that could befall any organism, or any gene within that organism, would be to have either its food source or predator species fall into extinction. The former would only increase the amount of "struggle" among the surviving species, which would now have to compete for new food sources, and the latter would lead to overpopulation, with much the same outcome. What appears, in the mind that imagines it, as pure selfishness, has so many "altruistic" ends it seems to break down the differences between the two. Ghiselin famously wrote "scratch an altruist and see a hypocrite bleed," but might we not just easily say the opposite?

Wilson's challenge to gene selection, then, ironically only strengthens the deep-seated conviction in biology since the 19th century that "selfishness" is an innate quality, and altruism is merely an emergent one. What really needs challenging is the notion of genes as possessing (per Dawkins) "absolute" control over the forms of life, rather than just another of many contingent factors.

On needing something to do with one's stake

Serendipitously, John Wilkins has put some words up on Evolving Thoughts toward a definition of religion just a few days after I've done the same.

John is concerned that existing definitions of religion suffer from an ethnocentric distortion. Our planet is presently dominated by the so-called "world religions" (The Abrahamic religions and Hinduism and Buddhism), which distracts us from seeing the full range of human religious impulse and expression, such as found in the "folk" religions that preceded the forms that have accompanied the rise of our civilization.

This is the strength of the otherwise somewhat shoddy book (on which more later) Religion Explained (2002) by anthropologist Pascal Boyer. Boyer shows how many of the suppositions we have about what religion "is" are extrapolated from monotheism like Christianity and Judaism, which have only a very brief historical pedigree, and are not supported by countless counterexamples existing today and throughout the historical record. Many of the most vociferous assaults on religion in recent years, such as those of Dawkins and Dennett, begin with this error (ironically, since each cites Boyer as a source). Most of the features they present, implicitly or explicitly, as universal religious features are anything but.

But I think John takes this reasoning too far when he calls Christianity, Islam, etc. "outliers." The folk religions John mentions as more religiously essential count their adherents, collectively, in the tens of millions, as opposed to the billions who follow the Abrahamic and Indian religions, and no one thinks that these folk religions could be supported by the kinds of society that we might imagine supplanting our own in the foreseeable future. Folk religions are, for better or worse, living fossils. If we want to take the phenomenon of religion seriously, we have to consider the living, robust expressions of it we see all around us as just as typical as more primordial forms.

I think it is also wrong to attribute, as John appears to do, the development of the more theologically complex Abrahamic and Indian religions merly to an increase in the population density in the areas where they arose:

The religions of the high population density European and Asian regions are not any the less real or divergent; but they are what happens to folk religions in such circumstances. Folk religions end up as large scale institutions in large scale societies, because everything does. But folk religions are how they begin, and these are usually quite specific in form.

It is not simply the institutionalization (or we might say the industrialization) of the modern religions that differentiates them from folk forms; it is also (and I think more importantly) the intellectual development that these forms have undergone. The refinements in philosophy and scientific thought that Western Civilization has achieved have direct correlates in the conceptual and symbolic development of its religious substrate. We characterize contemporary religion as folk religion on administrative steroids at the peril of explaining away some of our most sublime and cherished cultural forms.

On his next point I think John is half right. He argues that an important function of religion is that of ideological demarcation:

Religions begin as cults [like the Maria Lionza cult of Venezuela]. They either act as eponymous representations of a political status quo, or they are representations of alternative political structures to the status quo. Still, to be a religion, these ritual traditions and cults cannot be identical with the political structure or else they are not, as it were, a religion at all; they are just a particular social order. If democracy is the shared political value of all Americans, for instance, then advocacy and protection of democracy cannot be a “religion” of America – it just is the social fabric of America. But if democracy is something that is separable from American polity, and which some propound as a core value system while others have competing (let’s say, Republican) values, then it may be regarded as a religion.

This gets at the etymology of the thing. The Latin religio is related to our word ligature, that is something bound or "tied off." (It is also, crucially, related to our word rely.) It indicates something that has been roped off, and given a special status. To the extent something is coextensive with the social structure as a whole, it cannot be seen as special. It is difficult, if not impossible, to make something sacred, without making something else profane, whether that sacred thing is a ritual space, like an altar, or a concept, like the "enlightenment values" of liberty and reason. When we carve out such spaces, we inevitably carve away many of our fellow humans, who are now on the other side of the rope.

But what can John mean when he says that religion "begins" as a cult, using the example of Maria Lianza? The historical Lianza lived in the 16th century, meaning that the people who came to worship her already had tens of thousands of years of cultural history to apply to their experience. We have to trace the "beginning" of any religious beliefs or narratives to the beginning of their culture itself, which is to say at a minimum to their earliest use of language, and possibly to pre-human primate cultural forms (though I think these influences are over-emphasized by contemporary sociobiology).

To talk about religion in this (anthropological) way, as a strange thing that other people do, is create a new shibboleth, rope off a new sacred area of belief and discourse, and create the new religion of non-religion. Perhaps this is inevitable for a language-using species, but I think we are intellectually, if not psychically, evolved enough to now admit that the impulse to religion is so universal that it runs species-wide, to secular rationalists as well as to "faith-heads."

John is absolutely right, then, to point out that adherence to a political party is the same, in substance, as adherence to a church, and that there is no position from which to stand and denounce other people's religious disagreements without fomenting one of your own. I'll wait to see where he's going with it before I worry that he falls into the very trap he sets, by separating out reason and scientific inquiry into religion as liberations from the patterns and tendancies he describes.

On thinking again

Though she writes it in a way that is destined to turn off (If not piss off) anyone with a negative association with the word "religion" (this includes part of myself), I agree in general with Karen Armstrong when she writes, in Foreign Affairs, that "God isn't going anywhere."

We are meaning-seeking creatures. While dogs, as far as we know, do not worry about the canine condition or agonize about their mortality, humans fall very easily into despair if we don’t find some significance in our lives. Theological ideas come and go, but the quest for meaning continues. So God isn’t going anywhere. And when we treat religion as something to be derided, dismissed, or destroyed, we risk amplifying its worst faults. Whether we like it or not, God is here to stay, and it’s time we found a way to live with him in a balanced, compassionate manner.

Obviously this argument requires a pretty fungible notion of what we mean by God. If people can become atheists, as they can, and do--and will-- then there is nothing preventing the death of God as he is depicted in the Abrahamic religions. But this is clearly not how Armstrong means the word. As a historian (in the auto-didact sense) of religion (and author of The History of God) she knows there was religion long before our modern conception of an all-pervasive supernatural deity.

Rather she means by "God" a name for everything that we and our world are not (or seem not to be): eternal, infinite, unfathomable. Though the phrase "search for meaning" reads as hackneyed to anyone who has been over-exposed to the self-help shelves, Armstrong is absolutely right that it is one of our defining features as a species. No anthropologist could disagree. As long as we traffic and trade in concepts, we need to know how these concepts fit together, including those concepts we call self, and society, and the world.

Putting aside the Abrahamic, supernatural god, as Dawkins advocates in The God Delusion, and so many of his critics, Armstrong included, support, does not obviate our need for the orienting concept of God. The finite literally has no meaning if it is not contrasted with the infinite. If everything is contingent, then nothing is. As Scott Atran argues, religion is like sex: If we repress it, it will find expression some other way. After the Positivists, the Social Darwnists, the Stalinists, and the Objectivists, atheists all, this now approaches the status of a scientific law.

Another defining feature of our species is our enormous creativity, which we often think of as a capacity for invention, but is better considered as a facility for recycling. The Hagia Sophia, once a church, later a mosque, is now a museum. We did not need, thankfully, to tear it down to change its significance. In his essay Reinventing the Sacred, biologist Stuart Kauffman (an atheist, and not a particularly touchy-feely one) notes that "God is the most powerful symbol we have created" and argues that we can "transfer" it from representing an "agent" to "the very creativity of the universe itself... a sense of oneness, unity, with all of life, and our planet." Indeed it already has changed, radically, in a very short time; the Old Testament and New Testament Christian deities are two quite different dudes, and even book to book in the Old Testament you can trace the development of the Hebraic concept of justice and the greater good.

If religion, as the neo-atheists write, is truly nothing more than a clinging to supernatural protectors, then I agree with them that we can let it go (thought it would be a mistake to rush this process, for the same reasons it's a mistake to try to rush the revelations of psychotherapy, or any other "consciousness raising" scheme, since this just entrenches the neuroses; we are now seeing this writ all too large with the ascendancy of hardline fundamentalism).

But if religion indicates that part of human nature that is sometimes called metaphysics, where we define and act out our relation to all of existence, then it cannot be shaken off any more than our need for food and shelter. So much of my writing here in defense of "religion" has been an attempt to show, however obliquely, that this is a universally shared heritage. That even the staunchest rationalists are failed by their naturalism at a certain juncture and must resort, consciously or otherwise, to a unifying myth that weaves the facts of the world together. The word "religion" becomes, in this context, a mere shibboleth, where one distances oneself from the crude myths of other people, more simple, transparent or superstitious, perhaps, than ones own. It takes only the merest act of humility to remember that what divides this inferior kind of religion from one's own is less substantial than moon shadows.

***

I myself think that "God" has a lot of baggage. I don't think we can, with any haste, separate the word from the concept of, in Alan Watts' phrase, a "cosmic boss." (And in this regard, God is, pace Armstrong, incompatible with Democracy. How can earth meaningfully be democratic when heaven is a dictatorship?) But here is where our own biases and aversions mislead us. Words change in both connotation and denotation in frighteningly short duration. Who thinks twice today when an astronomer looks up and points to "the heavens"? The word "atom" means "indivisible," but no one is embarrassed that it turns out they are not. (The modern conception of the atom would be almost incomprehensible to Democritus.)

I think the more important influences will come from traditions outside the Abrahamic, from the so-called non-dual religions of Vedanta, Buddhism, and Taoism, which either have no concept of "God" at all or use it to denote, like the mystic Kabbalists and Sufis, not a person, but the divinity underlying ever-changing reality itself. That is to say, change itself. Nowness. We reify such a concept, with a pompous word like God, and with fables and rituals, to affirm its incredible importance to us, in its vastness and limitlessness; that is, to express how incredibly unvast, limited, and evanescent we each are. To say that one should "get on with your life," as the atheist bus as do, is to miss the point that it is part of living that life to acknowledge our identity as ripples in a pond. How to live or lives, much less enjoy them, if we can't say who it is that is doing the living?

The Greeks, so much admired by today's prominent neo-atheists, knew this. Their commitment to truth included both the internal and external worlds ("Know thyself.") To the extent "religion" reduces to only this maxim, I suspect it's a pastime even Richard Dawkins could get behind.

John Pieret call your office.

***

UPDATE: It looks like John was in the process of posting a response to Coyne, but not (yet?) to Blackford) when I put this up.

The point that Coyne still seems unwilling to address is that once a creationist argues that the world just looks as thought it's billions of years old, though in fact it's a mere 6,000, no scientifically compelling response is possible, given the metaphysical presumption of that creationist (namely, that there is a god, who is willing and able to have falsified the fossil record and other data to test our faith.) Science requires methodological naturalism--the working presumption of the absence of supernatural effect, which we might also call methodological atheism, or at least methodological deism--to function. Once that position is abandoned there is no possibility of arbitration. The disagreement is not a scientific one, it is a metaphysical one.

Just as an omnipotent god could easily wreak havoc on a naturalist epistemology, so too can a commitment to naturalism wreak havoc on a hierophanic epistemology. Coyne argues that there are "a million ways ... god could have shown himself to us," but would we abandon our metaphysical commitment to a non-theistic cosmos so readily? Presented with our own burning bush, would we not first consider that we have gone a little crazy? Or that we were being elaborately duped? Even a truly wild hypothesis, where powerful beings from the future have come to our own time, giving forth the appearance of gods, would likely be more probable to a staunch non-theist than that there was an Abrahamic god, after all. Or maybe we would lean toward a brains-in-vats explanation.

Once we abandon our mooring to a metaphysical stance it becomes impossible to scientifically evaluate these competing explanations. Our very epistemology depends on there not being a trickster god who puts ersatz fossils in the ground. To say that we have "evidence" that this has happened is, to recycle a pet phrase, to bait one's hook with the fish one means to catch.

The One True Faithlessness

Thony C., who writes at the excellent and recommended blog Renaissance Mathematicus, has commented that I misrepresent PZ Myers when I claim he is upset that an NPR piece he was interviewed for ended up focusing on "ideological differences among atheists rather than emphasizing their points of social cohesion."

To briefly recount the matter, Myers began, petulantly:

[Journalist Barbara Hagarty's] emphasis is on the differences within the atheist community, and she makes it sound like atheism is about to blow apart into a collection of warring sects, just like religion... [bold emphasis mine]

Religion, we should observe, is inherently fractious. Atheism is different:

I said that atheism doesn't have a central dogma or doctrine, so of course we have a variety of different views under the catch-all category of atheism; and that is a strength of our ideas, that we can freely argue among ourselves. I also explained that we need a variety of approaches to appeal to a wide range of people, and that my personal belief was that we should encourage a thousand flowers of godlessness to bloom, all different. [bold emphasis mine, italics in original]

Is this or is this not nonsense? Religious groups have similarities and differences. When they converse with each other they sometimes stress their similarities and sometimes squabble over their differences. Non-religious groups, including atheists, do likewise the same. So why characterize one conglomerate as consisting of "warring sects" and the other as a thousand flowers harmoniously blooming?

Indeed, given Myers' recent passionate disagreements (to put it politely) with fellow blooming flowers Chris Mooney, Sheril Kirschenbaum, Josh Rosenau, among many others, would we not expect any reasonably objective journalist to portray "incompatibalists" and "faitheists" as warring sects within the atheist movement? Hagarty's phrase a "bitter rift" should seem accurate to anyone who has followed the kind of "free argument" that Myers and his interlocutors have engaged in on Pharyngula.

One thing that is often offered as a difference between theists and atheists is that the former have a doctrine, and the latter are (or strive to be) entirely undogmatic. And indeed, as I quoted above, Myers maintains that "atheism doesn't have a central dogma or doctrine," which is, I suppose, what is supposed to explain the difference between religious "schism" and atheist "free debate." But he almost immediate contradicts himself in an effort to deny the implication put forth in the segment by Paul Kurtz that that neo-atheism (which Myers extends to include all atheism generally) makes no positive metaphysical or ethical claims:

As to the charge that atheism is a purely negative philosophy, I also said that wasn't so: that it's a rejection of old dogmas and superstitions, sure, but that it's built on the positive value of rationalism and materialism, and scientific thinking. We adopt moral values from humanistic ideas that are centered on stuff that actually exists, like other human beings, rather than imaginary commands from an invisible man in the sky.

This is just No True Scotsmanism. It isn't an accurate statement about atheism generally (are there no "spiritual" atheists?) any more than orthodox "modern synthesis" neo-Darwinism represents the fullness of what contemporary science has to say about evolutionary biology (cf, Lynn Margulis, Stuart Kaufmann, Brian Goodwin, John Dupre, CH Waddington, or Evelyn Fox Keller). Myers is using his fellow atheists here as a kind of Potemkin Village, trotting them out to show how diverse atheists can be when accused of demagoguery, then excoriating them later on his blog for being false prophets. Yes, he is to be praised for not having them shot, (much as most religious combatants, at least in the contemporary West, do not resort to violence in their disputes) but why, I wonder, can't he have the courage of his convictions, rather than trying to appease those in the media who would have him be more inclusive than his disposition allows?

Speaking of Bollocks

About six weeks ago, science bloggers Carl Zimmer and Sean Carroll announced, with some sanctimony, that they were severing their ties with bloggingheads.tv, a site that posts split-screen video of unscripted realtime conversations between less than optimally telegenic pairs of writers.

The reason they each gave was that the site had allowed conversations friendly to pseudo-science--in the form of creationism and intelligent design--on the "Science Saturday" segment, and that this unwillingness to put up a firewall against religious intrusion would only end up diluting real science in a way neither writer could continue to endorse with his particpation.

I'm sympathetic to this concern, though I think in articulating it, Zimmer and Carroll overstate their case. Zimmer, for example. suggests as a standard that "All the participants must rely on peer-reviewed science that has direct bearing on the subject at hand, not specious arguments that may sound fancy but are scientifically empty." I've seen a number of scientific conversations on bh.tv that had nothing to do with creationism that veered into speculation preceding any serious study--in fact I think that Bloggingheads would be prohibitively dry and stale if it could not move freely in and out of this kind of informal, speculative conversation.

Even if they take it too far, however, Carroll and Zimmer invoke a valid principle. We count on a site like WebMD not to advise bloodletting. We count on CNN (perhaps in vain) to rebut the idea that Obama was born in Kenya. Legitimacy matters, and even though we are always negotiating the fine points of what constitutes science, medicine, news, and history, there are things we must insist fall outside their borders for these terms to have any meaning at all.

And yet, even for "respectable" scientific organs like Seed magazine, it appears to be harder than it should be to keep out the wolves in sheep's clothing. In a story appearing today on the Seed website that suggests Seed's editors have no scientific or journalistic standards whatsoever, psychologist Denis Pelli and designer Charles Bigelow write that the rise of Twitter means that "nearly all" of the world's projected population of 10 billion people will be, by 2013, "published authors," in the same sense as people who publish books and articles today, and that the ancient Greeks published plays and philosophy.

The article is a marvel of thoughtlessness and illogic. I can't waste much time on what should be self-evident: that 140-character tweets are examples of "writing" the way that roll call is a conversation. This is not to polemicize against Twitter; just to insist that our sense of the word "literate" is more than the ability to decode typed characters into words. It includes what used to be called "learning," a passing familiarity with rhetoric, logic, history, poetry, and a lot more. Without some remnant of this it really doesn't matter what we type into our news feeds.

Much more to the point, a billion people today live in slums and shanties. One in seven worldwide. This would seem to present a bit of an obstacle for the "extrapolation of the Twitter-author curve." The authors write as though social problems far less intractable than this will melt away in the wake of "universal authorship" which "stands to reshape society by hastening the flow of information and making individuals more influential." But the anecdata they muster would seem to argue otherwise. "Protestors used Twitter to discredit the election in Iran," they write. But the results of the election stand. Down to the real micro level, then:

In July, Dawn Staley, University of Southern California’s women’s basketball coach, complained on Twitter of rude service at her favorite pizza spot; the employee responsible was fired the next day.

It is not clear how this is any different a result than if Ms. Staley had called the management talked to her friends, staged a boycott. Would we call her a "published author" if she had used that horribly outre medium of the picket sign, rather than the Twitter feed? How many millions need to particpate in the enforcement of human rights standards at a mom and pop pizza stand? (For that matter, was firing the rude employee the necessary response? We don't have enough information to say whether a reprimand might be better, but that's the problem with the wide dissemination of 140-character sentiments; it results in lots of people having opinions about something they know very little about.)

The quality of theorizing and analysis in this piece makes intelligent design look Nobel-worthy. It certainly does nothing to burnish Seed's scientific imprimatur. So will the legitimate scientists and writers at Science Blogs (owned by Seed Media Group), such as PZ Myers, Greg Laden, Coturnix, and so many others, pull up stakes and move elsewere so as not be associated with such an affront to their dedication to reason and methodology? Or is it OK for a science magazine to publish rank nonsense as long as it does it without reference to religion or "woo"?

Gander, with extra gravy

PZ Myers is upset that the NPR reporter who interviewed him about the atheist movement decided to focus her piece on ideological differences among atheists rather than emphasizing their points of social cohesion. I can't quite put my finger on why this strikes me as funny...

In which I am nearly converted to Incompatibalism

I'm just now getting to the exchange between Karen Armstrong and Richard Dawkins in the Wall Street Journal that made a minor stir in the atheosphere last month. Halfway into the first paragraph of Armstrong's piece, I have a road to Damascus moment. Dawkins is right: Armstrong is, at long last, an "Appeaser" and in classic accomodationist fashion she is bending over backwards to support myths and narratives with no scientific basis, seemingly preferring the avoidance of hurt feelings over any real intellectual transaction.

I'm, of course, referring to Dawkins' own Spencerian mythography, which Armstrong seems to have bought into hook, line and sinker (or at least wants the rest of us to believe):

Richard Dawkins has been right all along, of course—at least in one important respect. Evolution has indeed dealt a blow to the idea of a benign creator, literally conceived. It tells us that there is no Intelligence controlling the cosmos, and that life itself is the result of a blind process of natural selection, in which innumerable species failed to survive. The fossil record reveals a natural history of pain, death and racial extinction, so if there was a divine plan, it was cruel, callously prodigal and wasteful. Human beings were not the pinnacle of a purposeful creation; like everything else, they evolved by trial and error and God had no direct hand in their making. No wonder so many fundamentalist Christians find their faith shaken to the core.

The fallacies here are numerous--"life itself," for example, is not a product of natural selection, though individual life forms may be. And the characterization of the story of life as solely of "pain, death, and extinction" is a 19th century myth romanticizing struggle. As Mary Midgley has written (in response to Dawkins' endorsement of Tennyson's "Nature red in tooth and claw") "Nature is green long before she is red, and must be green on a very large scale indeed to provide a context for redness."

But the most striking mythical element in Armstrong's attempt to synopsize Darwinism is the teleological appeal to immortality in the phrase "innumerable species failed to survive." We're all so familiar with the Spencerian trope "survival of the fittest" that we rarely pause to wonder what survival might actual means in a biological context. We cannot seem to help but associate survival with some kind of success--an understandable association given our fear of death. But this success is at best a delay. Death comes to everything and everyone eventually. So what does it mean to succeed or fail at survival?

The way the question has been understood over the last half century or so (thanks largely to Professor Dawkins) is in terms not of the individual or of the group but of the gene. What really survives, in this view, is not the organism, the bloodline, or the species, but information encoded serially in living chromosomes, across the generations. Success, then, resides in those genes that are best adapted for and to their environments, such that they effectively become "immortal replicators."

But here arises a strange contradiction, for the information that has survived the longest is (by definition) that which has changed the least, and this would seem to challenge the Darwinian view that selective adaptations lead to improved fitness (or "stability")--that is, to an increase in "differential survival." Just about everything we think of as a complexly adapted organism--flowers, insects, animals, land plants--are flashes in the pan compared to basic microorganisms, which have been around since the beginning in much the same form they are today. And the educated guesses have it that all this complexity actually diminishes our chance of survival in the event of some cataclysm. Bacteria will most likely "survive" if an asteroid hits our planet. For the rest of us, all bets are off.

(This reveals a very interesting logical problem in Dawkins' work on selfish gene theory. If it is the replicators--genes--themselves that are in competition, then how do we describe the identity of a replicator when it mutates? Dawkins speculates, in The Selfish Gene, that primordial replicators (pre-DNA, pre-prokaryotic cell) "were struggling in the sense that any miscopying that resulted in a new higher level stability ... was automatically preserved and multiplied. The process of improvement is cumulative." But this is having your cake and eating it too, since the new miscopied replicators would be something completely novel, with interests suddenly in conflict with their precursor replicators, with whom they previously shared an identity up until the moment of mutation. There is no continuity of "self" to be improved upon. Every mutation is not a change [the way it would be if we considered the organism the unit of selection], but rather a terminus; the abrupt end of an old "species" of gene, and the beginning of a new one. This is an uncommon way of understanding immortality, and it now looks as though the gene's "long reach" is really an ideological sleight of hand.)

By whose standard, then, can we say any species has "failed to survive"? What is the threshold for a good run? Who brandishes the laurel? These are more or less meaningless questions, and the while the concept of survival in biology itself is perhaps not a completely meaningless one, it is not something that can be "succeeded" or "failed" at. Everything passes away in time, and no awards are given for longevity. The fact that over 99 percent of all species that have ever lived is not any more a failure than that over 99 percent of all the meals we have ever eaten have been digested. That last fraction of one percent will also have its due. Impermanence is the rule, not the exception. To think otherwise is to project our own highly personal struggle against oblivion onto the biosphere as a whole, where no such drama actually exists.

Karen Armstrong knows this, of course, since it one of the central teachings of a number of world religions (most notably Buddhism) that everything, without exception, passes away, and that all of existence is in a state of flux. In her WSJ article she had a wonderful opportunity to "raise the consciousness" of Professor Dawkins, who does not seem to be in command of this basic truth, but instead she chose the "accomodationist" approach, resigning Professor Dawkins to remain in the darkness of his ignorance. Perhaps she was afraid of coming across as too "strident" or "shrill"? One hopes that she will reconsider her tactics the next time around, for all our sakes.

Hierophany and its Double

John Wilkins has a thought provoking new post at Evolving Thoughts which anticipates some of the themes he intends to address in his upcoming work on the evolution of religion.

Wilkins writes:

I believe that there is no such thing as a monotheism. No religion in existence lacks any nondivine or demonic entities other than the central or highest deity. If the saints and angels and demons of modern Catholicism or any other flavour of Christianity were represented in Greek mythology, we’d call them gods. So they are gods (a view that Justin [Barrett] argues in his book).

My own experience contradicts this claim, though I was admittedly raised in a liberal non-denominational Protestant church in the elitist Northeast U.S. and recognize that my experience was not typical. I stopped attending church in early adolescence, and never had any serious theological conversations with the pastor, but I am quite certain that no entity was ever presented to me as an actual supernatural being apart from God. There were biblical stories, obviously, of angels and devils, but they were never talked about as actual beings one might have a relationship with or be influenced by. My childhood church was truly monotheistic, and while perhaps rare, it was not unique in this regard. (I would be surprised, for example, if any but the most orthodox denominations of Judaism treated angels and devils as real supernatural propositions).

Wilkins is writing in the tradition of Pascal Boyer and other evolutionary anthropologists who attribute the development of religion (specifically the aspect dealing with supernatural entities) to the survival value of "agent detection:" if you assume an intent underlying a certain stimuli (say, a twig snapping), and can reliably anticipate that intent (i.e., it's a predator, or, it's a potential mate), your chances of survival are enhanced. Abduct this tendancy far enough and pretty soon you'll be populating the world with supernatural agents of all kinds.

I think this school of thought is enormously problematic for a number of reasons, not least of which that it presumes one metaphysical stance (naturalistic atomism) while seeking to explain away another. This, to me is cheating. Indeed, Wilkins' observation about the difficulty monotheism has had in supplanting polytheistic tendencies is readily explained by a handful of alternate theories. He writes:

The reason why no religion is monotheistic, not even Islam (djinn, remember, and angels), is that we have a disposition towards dramatic narratives, and a god with no peers is largely going to be boring. This is why Buddhism, which in theory has no deity at all, nevertheless has scores of devas and demons in folk theology, and why the Buddha himself has been made divine. This is why the Christian god, who in theory is infinitely powerful, can be challenged by an angel of his own making. Even secular and supposedly non-supernatural “religions” like Confucianism and Stalinism have their divinities. In Confucianism, Kung FuTzu is not a divine figure, but all Confucianists practise ancestor worship and believe in various kinds of supernatural beings.

This creation story bears no weak resemblance to the etiology of the Rig Veda, if we'll only change the word "we " to "Brahman." According to the Hindu doctrine of lila (play), the universe is the way it is because excitement is better than boredom. (Or more precisely, excitement-boredom is better than either.) All the cosmos is a dance, or drama, undertaken by the godhead. This is obviously a myth we can't take too literally: if everything we have a name for (or ever could have a name for) is an illusory part of an eternal cosmic drama, then we can never escape the crudest metaphor, since the reality behind the drama is forever unknowable (at least as expressed in language). But that doesn't, in itself, mean the myth is false, just that it is needfully and eternally imprecise.

Such a story is the end of science, and while I think it is interesting, I don't advocate it as a general replacement for religious anthropology. Our compulsion, as a species, to do science is at least as robust as our compulsion to do religion, and it is this fact that I think presents the biggest difficulty for the kind of religious anthropology put forth by writers like Boyer and Barrett. For Darwinian explanations of human social behavior to be complete we have to surmount a problem that most adaptationists will not even acknowledge, commonly known as the genetic fallacy, which says, in short, that the importance, or meaning, of a thing cannot be reduced to its origins.

If we are going to ask why humans are religious, and be satisfied with the answer that there is something innate in us that predisposes religious belief (like agency detection), while not simultaneously granting that religion may also offer some kind of truth or similar desideratum, then what do we do with the question "Why are humans scientific?" Should we not get the same kind of dismissive answer? That there is something innate in us that drives us to investigate things which is propelled not by the success of this investigation on its own terms, but by its adaptational value? How do we answer any differently without creating a double standard for the scientific mode we are attempting to valorize over the religious mode we are attempting to discredit? And yet such an answer should negate any moral argument advocating scientific exploration.

Conversely, if we allow that even though we may be inclined to pursue scientific investigation because of an innate inclination to do so, yet we also find that it has some value (such as truth value) beyond simple Darwinian survival, on what grounds do we deny the same allowance for religion?

Now that we understand the Darwinian origins of god-belief, the evolutionary anthropologists propose, the only reasons to cling to such ideas would be through fear, habit, peer pressure, or dullness. But this denies the essentially creative nature of evolution, both cultural and biological (which is emblematic of the unfortunate tendency to view evolution as a fundamentally mechanistic, inert enterprise.)

A more appropriate question would be, having been bequeathed these supernatural concepts by our biology, can we put them to good (or at least interesting) use? The fact that religious ideas (not just "god" specifically, but entire metaphysical schemes) have undergone enormous evolution since as far back as we can study them seems to answer this question in the affirmative. We can trace tremendous imaginative developments across the centuries both in folk mythography and scholarly theology. To attribute this great wealth of mythic content to simple fear and superstition in the face of encroaching scientific advances seems neither historically supportable nor intuitively satisfying. A writer like Whitehead, or Buber, or Isaac Luria, or even the authors of the gospels, is not writing reactively out of fear and dullness. Some positive, narrative initiative is clearly in effect, in parallel with the adnittedly numerous craven influences that there is no shortage of evidence for in the history of religious thought.

This doesn't make evolutionary anthropology wrong, it just renders it incomplete, since it only asks part of the question of why humans are the way they are. In fact the Darwinian answer is only slightly more illuminating than the cosmological answer (What is the explanation for human nature? Why, the Big Bang, of course!) At some point we must acknowledge the fact that human beings are moral agents, and have reasons for the things they do, and these reasons must be investigated in terms of meaning, both factual and evaluative (never forgetting that we, the investigators, too, are every bit as human as our subjects). This gets messy, and will require some fortificaton, so perhaps it is best here to end with advice from Samuel Johnson, whose 300th birthday was just a few weeks ago: "Claret is the liquor for boys; port, for men; but he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy."

The Anita Bryant School of Humanism

Liberal humanists make an important distinction between respecting someone's beliefs, and respecting their right to hold and convey those beliefs. So, for example, when someone holds the noxious belief that it was not the Third Reich that caused the Holocaust, but the US, Britain, and allied powers, as historian David Irving does, the Jeffersonian thing to do is to defend his right to hold (and publish) this belief, even while condemning it.

This is a difficult thing to do, and writers such as Johann Hari and Christopher Hitchens (each of whose flaws I never tire of enumerating) should be given credit for coming to the defense of Irving's right to be a Holocaust denier (Irving is English, and thus has no right to protected speech, except for the relatively toothless provisions of the UN Charter on Human Rights.) There is no greater test of one's commitment to free speech than defense of the thing most hateful to you.

Hari and Hitchens's fellow neo-atheist A.C. Grayling, however, fares much worse in this task, as I wrote earlier this week. In an article for the Guardian from 2006, Grayling writes that we should not, in fact, respect the right of religious people to publicly "advertise" their beliefs, either through conventional discourse or through "eccentricities of dress" (a form of speech) because religious commitment "properly belongs in the private sphere."

It is time to demand of believers that they take their personal choices and preferences in these non-rational and too often dangerous matters into the private sphere, like their sexual proclivities. Everyone is free to believe what they want, providing they do not bother (or coerce, or kill) others; but no-one is entitled to claim privileges merely on the grounds that they are votaries of one or another of the world's many religions.

This deeply illiberal move carves away a full half of the protection intended by the great Enlightenment thinkers. It preserves protection for the private act (belief) while jettisoning protection for the public one (speech.) It is essentially an extension of the Clinton Era doctrine of "Don't Ask Don't Tell," wherein we express our profound tolerance of people by pretending they don't exist. Of special interest is the idea that "bothering" others with one's ideas is a transgression; a funny thing for a philosopher to maintain.

After Russell Blackford approvingly linked to this piece, I asked him here and in comments on his blog whether he thought it was consistent with liberal, humanist principles to "demand" that the religious keep their beliefs to themselves. I called such a position "intolerant," a word that Russell takes issue with:

I'm not sure what you mean by "intolerant". He may not like public expressions of so-called religious identity, but I don't see where he says he won't tolerate them. To tolerate something is to put up with it even if you don't like it. It looks to me as if he's prepared to put up with it, even if reluctantly.

This is a remarkable dilution of the word "tolerance." Grayling is explicitly going after not the religious ideas (and "eccentricities of dress") themselves, but after the right to traffic in them (or, in the language anti-theists share with homophobes and other bigots, to "impose" them on the rest of us).

I suppose you could say that he stops short of calling for legal means to constrain religious speech. By this standard, of course, anyone who speaks out against the public actions of gays, atheists, sexual libertines, communists, or Hollywood producers--but refrains from calling for them to be locked up for these actions--can be called "tolerant" because he or she is "prepared to put up with" them (while bemoaning "What choice do I have?").

By this standard, Anita Bryant was a great humanist folk hero. In the 1970s Bryant defended her support for a Florida ordinance banning gays from adopting children on the grounds thqat such adoptions “infring[e] upon my rights as a citizen and mother to teach my children and set examples of God’s moral code as stated in the Holy Scriptures.” We've heard similar sentiments ad nauseam recently in the bizarre campaign to argue that opposing gay marriage is a "defense" of heterosexual marriage. Compare this to Grayling's language when he writes:

[I]t is time to demand and apply a right for the rest of us to non-interference by religious persons and organisations - a right to be free of proselytisation and the efforts of self-selected minority groups to impose their own choice of morality and practice on those who do not share their outlook.

Such arguments turn the ideals of the Enlightenment on their head. There simply is no right not to be exposed to things we disagree with, outside of the fairly narrow confines of the right to privacy we enjoy in our homes and our bodies. To live in a democratic society means that things will be "imposed" on us every time we leave the house. Let us rail against these things all we like--I know I will. But let's not give in to the temptation to rail against the conditions that expose us to these annoyances, which are the conditions of democratic society itself, the best way we've discovered to date to ensure equal protection for all.

Humanism and its discontents

[Update: through the comments section over at Russell's place I'm made aware that the Grayling article under discussion is 3 years old. I'd missed the dateline the first time through.]

The kind of intolerance I have suggested lies below the surface of neo-atheism is made dazzlingly explicit in this Guardian piece by AC Grayling, "Religions don't deserve special treatment" [via Russell Blackford]. What sort of special treatment does Grayling have in mind? Tax-exempt status? The best parking spots? Nothing like that. Grayling wants to do away with the privilege we presently afford the religious by allowing them to assert a religious identity in public.

He starts, reasonably enough, with the recognition that all human beings deserve respect on the basis of their humanity alone, regardless of the beliefs they hold, and reiterates the point that Dawkins, Dennett and Harris have been making for a few years now that merely being religious doesn't entitle anyone to an extra helping of respect. (Though the implied corollary that others have not only a right to disrespect religious beliefs, but a duty to do so, seems a little far fetched to me.)

But look how quickly Grayling moves from this modest point to arguing that the religious should not have the right to "impose themselves" on the rest of us. "It is time to demand and apply a right for the rest of us to non-interference by religious persons and organisations." What does that mean? Not that they have TV programs coming into our homes ("TV sets have off buttons"); and not that they have places of worship in the public square. So what then? Grayling is referring to one of the main pillars of the "respect agenda:" self-advertisement.

When people enter the public domain wearing or sporting immediately obvious visual statements of their religious affiliation, one at least of their reasons for doing so is to be accorded the overriding identity of a votary of that religion, with the associated implied demand that they are therefore to be given some form of special treatment including respect.

Grayling doesn't give any example of these "obvious visual statements" but it would seem fair to apply this term not just to the headscarf or the veil but also to the star of David pendant, the cross lapel pin, or even the Jesus fish on the rear bumper of one's car. One doesn't present these any of these "visual statements" in ambiguity or irony. And to Grayling, they represent not just an affirmation of religious identity, but also (though he can't be bothered to explain why) an implicit demand for respect. Indeed, such statements are socially corrosive:

That asserting a religious identity as one's primary front to the world is divisive at least and provocative at worst is fast becoming the view of many, although eccentricities of dress and belief were once of little account in our society, when personal religious commitment was more reserved to the private sphere - where it properly belongs - than its politicisation of late has made it.

Clicking through to the linked article will confirm that we are in fact talking about scarves and veils after all, and not pins and pendants. In other words, this is a Muslim thing. But either way, it's a remarkable statement, and one that's indefensible from anyone purporting to be any kind of a liberal. The fond nostalgia for a simpler time when religion "was more reserved to the private sphere" is eerily reminiscent of bigoted boilerplate from the civil rights movement. We wouldn't have to change many words to be referring to uppity negroes who have forgotten their place. The very term "special treatment" Grayling employs is a direct echo of right wing opposition to gay rights in the 1990s. (One wonders just what Grayling means when he talks about "sexual proclivities" belonging in the bedroom. Does that include same-sex couples holding hands in the street, or kissing each other goodbye at the depot?)

I'm also reminded of Jimmy Cagney, gone reactionary in his old age and railing against hippies in the streets in his autobiography: "I began to see undisciplined elements in our country stimulating a breakdown of our system... Those functionless creatures, the hippies ... just didn't appear out of a vacuum." Indeed, in the next paragraph Grayling is now referring to those who deign to publicly declare their religious affiliation "discontents." What is going on here? Is this what tolerance looks like in the "post 9-11 world"? It is one thing to argue for a level playing field of respect and criticism, but when one begins to defend one's right not to have to be exposed to certain people being themselves, and further to call this self expression "divisive," we are now looking at a Jungian game of projection of very troubling proportion. Russell Blackford writes that "it's a privilege to have friends and allies like this." I hope he'll read it through again with an eye not just for the personal struggle he's engaged in, with all the myopia that understandably engenders, but also for the liberal, humanitarian values that struggle is supposed to ultimately promote.

The House Always Wins

We haven't heard much from Sam Harris in while, but, as promised, he has emerged [via Massimo Pigliucci] to tell us of a neurological study in which he employed a battery of expensive brain imaging machines to demonstrate and confirm the meaning of the world "literal." Or maybe that's not what he promised he would do. But that's what he did.

Harris and his co-researchers solicited 15 "committed Christians" and monitored their brain activity while presenting them with statements about literal religious belief such as “Jesus Christ really performed the miracles attributed to him in the Bible." Their responses were compared to those associated with non-religious, factual statements like “Eagles really exist." Both sets of responses were in turn compared to those of atheists exposed to the same statements.

The hypothesis Harris was ostensibly testing was that religious beliefs function in the same way as factual beliefs, as measured by the parts of the brain that are stimulated by each. Luckily, a positive correlation was built into the testing protocol. In the report on his findings, Harris et al write:

While gradations of belief are certainly worth investigating, our experiment sought to characterize belief and disbelief in their purest form. It was, therefore, essential that we exclude subjects who could not consistently respond “true” or “false” with conviction. [...]

These exclusions ensured that our final group of subjects did, in fact, strongly believe/disbelieve our religious stimuli. We note, however, that the subjects retained in this experiment do not represent the full range of religious commitment found in the general population.

The 15 religious test subjects that participated in this experiment were chosen because they literally believe in Christian doctrine and did not hesitate to say so. This is what Harris means by "committed." Subjects who could not so "commit" were excluded from the study. What possibility was their for surprise, then, that the literally-held religious beliefs would stimulate the same parts of the believers' brains as the non-religious factual ones? Isn't that what literal means?

In reporting on this paper for Newsweek, journalist Lisa Miller draws the lesson Harris undoubtedly wants to be taken from this experiment, though it is not the one the study actually provides any support for: "Our believing brains," summarizes Miller, "make no qualitative distinctions between the kinds of things you learn in a math textbook and the kinds of things you learn in Sunday school." But this is just what we don't know. Study subjects who identified as Christian but who didn't express their religious beliefs as empirically factual were conveniently excluded from the study.

As is so often the case, cognitive biases are for other people.

"And wisdom is a butterfly/And not a gloomy bird of prey."

Andrew Brown makes, in a short space, a couple of points I have argued here before. The first is that when atheism crosses over into anti-theism (which is all that distinguishes "neo-atheists" from the garden variety, it seems to me), it often takes on the form of a pseudo-science. (I would even argue it takes the form of a superstition).

Brown also rejects the idea (offered in this case by philosopher Carlo Strengler) that education leads inexorably to an abandonment of religious ideology, which he is correct to do. (I'm currently in the middle of reading James Hannam's God's Philosophers, a book which has its flaws, but which makes a strenuous and sustained case for the flourishing of reason and science among monastic scholars throughout the medieval period, in contrast with the supposed antipathy between science and theology proposed by "the conflict hypothesis," which is largely, Hannam shows, a piece of Enlightenment propaganda not borne out by the historical record. )

Nevertheless it is this myth that Strenger appeals to when he cites a Pew study that only a third of U.S. scientists believe in God, as opposed to 83% of Americans overall. The problem is that science education is just one subset of education overall, and we shouldn't be surprised to find it a haven for atheists, given that it is methodologically (if not metaphysically) devoted to a materialist naturalism. I have been unable to find, on the other hand, any studies that correlate greater education generally (for example as measured by advanced degrees) with decreased religious belief. The closest I have come is a study that inversely correlates higher education with a literalist belief in religious scripture, but that is hardly the same thing as atheism.

But does it really make sense to implicate our educational systems in this problem? There is so much wrong with American schools that it is easy to overlook how historically revolutionary free, compulsory public education for all citizens is. As much as we might prefer more and better training on how to think (and communicate) logically and abstractly (and maybe even humanely) over rote memorization of facts, we nevertheless convey the (formal, abstract) basics of math, science, rhetoric, grammar, civics, and law to millions of children and teenagers daily. Strenger is writing about the UK, which differs in some particulars from the American system, but in each case schooling is mandatory until age 16. What, then, is he getting at, when he writes that

Complex theories like classical physics (let alone relativity and quantum physics) and evolutionary theory can only be taught once the mind achieves the ability to abstract thought (what Piaget called "formal operations"), ie in adolescence. Understanding these theories requires training, and they are always at a disadvantage vis-a-vis anthropomorphic stories used by most religions.

Who are the poor unfortunates being deprived of such training, and thus left as sitting ducks for religious dogma? If there is some secret truancy scandal afoot, Strenger shares no details. Nor does he point to any particular defects in our education system that would deprive the adolescents who do attend school (which is almost all of them) from getting the kind of training they need to resist the seductive fables of the sundry religions. He hints that we aren't giving our children enough rigorous training to promote a scientific (by which he means atheistic) worldview, but this does nothing to explain why some well-educated children pursue science, some medicine, some finance, some manufacturing, some politics, some poetry. We live in the most scientific age in history. To what efforts should we compare it if we want to suggest it falls short?

***
Richard Dawkins is still being asked to explain why calling people "ignorant" as he is wont to do is not an insult. Is the insistence that it is not an insult itself not an example of ignorance? --ignorance of what an insult is, for example? Ignorance of basic human psychology and politics? Even those with a deep and lifelong dedication to science and rationality can seem remarkably dimwitted about certain things.

Sometimes it seems as though the sciences themselves have a tin ear. Take, for example, the recent NYT article "How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect," which at the time of this writing is the second most popular "health" article on the NYT website. It's commonplace among students of poetry and other arts that novelty of form is arresting. We prick up our ears when something unexpected encounters us, and our perceptions heighten, whether in alarm or delight. This is one reason why art must continually revolutionize itself, why poets must always "make it new." Not because we are jaded and dissolute or otherwise morally inadequate, but because human beings are so good at predicting patterns; we readily nod off, content that we know what is going on, and what it means.

As I say, old news. There's nothing wrong with cognitive science picking up on this trope and running it through its paces. But look how quickly it rushes in to co-opt the arts that long preceded it into this area of study (despite being perenially trivialized and underfunded):

Researchers familiar with the new work say it would be premature to incorporate film shorts by David Lynch, say, or compositions by John Cage into school curriculums. For one thing, no one knows whether exposure to the absurd can help people with explicit learning, like memorizing French. For another, studies have found that people in the grip of the uncanny tend to see patterns where none exist — becoming more prone to conspiracy theories, for example. The urge for order satisfies itself, it seems, regardless of the quality of the evidence.

What, we might ask, was wrong with including John Cage in the curriculum before he showed promise as a cognitive enhancer? Was it not enough that he is widely considered one of our era's greatest composers? A science that does not ask why John Cage should not be exposed to school children for the sake of his work, but only so that they can learn French more quickly (and then to quickly turn around and worry that all that John Cage might just make the children paranoid), might rightly be accused of being "ignorant" of something.

And yet, in the taxonomy of Strenger's article, though he intends it or not, "science" is the pinnacle of human knowledge and understanding. The eye in the pyramid. We could easily chalk up this misunderstanding to the education system Carlo Strenger emerged from. But perhaps it's less important to lay blame than to insist that the kind of "schooled mind" we should be interested in is not a simple matter of logic-chopping, and that Piaget's "formal operations" include far more than scientific theories. (Certain readers will note with disappointment that I include various forms of theology among these formal operations. As Brown puts it, "We can't get rid of [our failings] by wishful thinking, only by rigorous self-examination and self-discipline. The irony here is that some forms of organised religion promote just those virtues." Another irony is that few rationalists ever argue in favor of abstract, formal expressions of religion--or philosophy, or aesthetics--with anything near the vigor and zeal with which they promote physics and evolutionary biology. I take this as evidence that neither abstraction nor formalism are really held all that dearly by them, when compared to membership in the right club).

Persona, Non Grata

John Pieret has mounted a very vigorous response to Nick Smyth's proposal that Creationism is not properly called "pseudoscience," but rather just "bollocks." I think I agree with John for the most part, to the extent I understand Nick's argument at all. (He seems to be saying that "science" is too poorly defined to be meaningfully caricatured by a pseudo-entity, and that we should focus on epistemology generally, in deciding what is true and false. But epistemology must have a method; if not "science," then what?)

In my ongoing effort to make everyone else look more reasonable, I'd like to suggest that epistemology itself is not actually an important factor in whether Darwinism or intelligent design prevail as ways of understanding biology.

Rather I think the important distinction is a metaphysical one, hinging on how the world is supposed to work, and this in turn is greatly influenced by psychological dispositions of desire and fear. The actual practical distinctions between ID and Darwinism (as fought over in the Kitzmiller case, for example) are pretty small-scale. ID concedes that (macro)evolution is a fact, and that natural selection plays a role. (No one suggests, for example, that God turned white moths black by fiat when industrial soot darkened trees in 18th c. England, so they would remain well camouflaged.) And I think it's strongly insinuated that if Creationists took over the NIH, any halts in gene therapy or antibiotic research would be on ethical grounds, not on their scientific untenability.

Pragmatically, the war between orthodox neo-Darwinism and ID is over a very small patch of ground--comparable to debates in physics between those that favor the Copenhagen Interpretation and those that favor multiverse theory. It doesn't impact applied science much at all. But metaphysically, the whole universe (or multiverse) is at stake.

I don't meant to burnish ID's reputation by comparing to a legitimate branch of physics. I agree with Nick that it's "bollocks." The whole ID program hinges on "evidence" of "design" which is a sloppy, even unscientific way of looking at things. ("Irreducible complexity," for example, is real, but not in the way the creationists mean it. Protein folding is not atomistic, but we don't need God to explain it, outside of a possible first cause for the laws of physics). There's a huge hermeneutical leap involved in moving from a recognition of biological complexity and the importance of systems to supernatural design, but strict neo-Darwinism actually encourages this leap by refusing to engage the phenomenon of self-organization in non-theistic ways. We can't talk about complexity theory, because it gives aid and comfort to the creationists, and yet evolutionary biology is being stunted on this account, with neo-Darwinism beginning to resemble Ptolemaic astronomy in its desperation.

In the very modest sense that nature is not an industrial machine, the creationists are right. (Though to be fair, the mechanistic model of the Cosmos is not as unsubtle as it was in the late 19th c.) Not being able to talk about the matter metaphysically (for the very valid constitutional reasons that Pieret details) has entrenched the matter--and the evangelical movement has been greatly strengthened by it. How much energy currently directed against the wicked materialists would be dissipated if we allowed ourselves to talk about non-theistic alternatives to mechanistic atomism? We seem to be afraid to find out.

In the meanwhile there are people for whom it is plausible that God has directly interfered with his creation throughout history. The reasons are not primarily epistemic. The disposition to believe in Creationism is as much emotional as anything else, appealing to a sense that we're under the care of a great magical being. If we're honest, however, we can't deny a certain emotional underpinning to the mechanistic model as well. It. too, has problems and inconsistencies, but we rely on it nevertheless for a certain security that the world is regular and makes sense, partly as a liberation from the tyranny of a universe run by an often capricious cosmic dictator. We (Darwinists and Creationists alike) have identified Truth--to return to Nick's preferred area of focus--in terms of what we can't allow it to be, so that it resembles a hardened mask that's difficult to remove. The spirit of true inquiry cannot arise under these conditions.

This mutual entrenchment between shrunken, overly-simple metaphysical myths is so great and bitter that it strongly argues for a Jungian interpretation, where each side attributes to the other the thing most feared in itself. The only epistemological options then, would seem to be very wan ones. Elevating the heat of the rhetoric against the enemy (from pseudo-science to bollocks) does not seem to me the most promising tactic in the pursuit of not just truth, but harmony and happiness as well.

Philosopher, heal thyself

3 Quarks Daily announced the winners of their philosophy prize on Monday, and I want to breifly congratulate the winners.

The first prize, or "Top Quark" has gone to the blogger Tomkow for a piece on the epistemology of science, specifically as it regards global warming denial (Nick Smyth has a piece up at 3QD on a similar topic that has been generating a lot of interesting discussion). I've only just read it thoroughly. Tomkow ends up as an epistemological skeptic, with discouraging things to say about the power of empiricism to convincingly reveal the truth, and Dennett's selection of it should allay any suspicion that he was using ideological affinity as a criterion.

Second prize ("Strange Quark") went to a musing on the nature of responsibility as portrayed by Harvard philosopher Tim Scanlon. It's an interesting subject--whether or not we can hold the same moral standard for "attitudes" like racism, and compulsions like OCD--and the writer (Tulane philosopher David Shoemaker) raises interesting questions about the role of unconscious motivations in these kinds of stances and behaviors, but without a more fleshed-out examination of what a mind, psyche, or self is, these kind of questions ends up seeming impotent to me, sort of like questions about medicine in the time of Galen or Hippocrates. (I haven't read Scanlon myself; perhaps he has a robust philosophy of mind that considers these questions and which professional philosophers can take for granted. Perhaps.)

Third prize, or "Charm Quark," went to 3QD blogger Gerald Dworkin for a piece on the possible artistic nature of food. I commented on this piece when it was published with the complaint that it ignored semiotics, without which any discussion about art and aesthetics is going to remain either shallow or quaint. Other than that it's not a bad piece, though it makes too much use of lists for my taste.

Since I was a finalist in this contest (and because I've been rather brutally critical of Dan Dennett, who acted as the sole judge of the final round), the rest of what I say here runs the risk of coming off as sour grapes. But the essay in which Dennett announces the final winners is remarkably pissy to a degree unbefitting a major philosopher (let alone one with celebrity status), and which seems to me to sully the proceedings, generally. He begins with a lament for the poor quality of not just the field he has been asked to judgte but the genre, generally:

I wish philosophy blog postings were more like the best science blog postings: short, jargon-free, and lively (if wit is too much to hope for, as apparently it is).

Indeed, bloggers apparently take delight in grinding down thier readers:

the blog genre is celebrated as a casual, self-indulgent form of self-expression. Easy to write, but not always delicious reading. (Remember, I tell my students, it is the reader, not the writer, who is supposed to have the fun.)

Later, he redeems himself, just a little, by suggestion maybe the speck (or beam) is in his own eye (though he can't resist a dig at the judges of the final round with a sacrastic "if"):

Tastes in philosophy are deeply idiosyncratic, of course, and one conviction driven home to me by reading through the finalists is that my own taste in philosophy marks me as an outlier, far from the mean, if these nine entries represent the cream of the crop as determined by some suitably diverse judges. Most of them did not draw me in—but then they were not meant for my eyes. So one must bear in mind that my choices may well tell much more about the vector of my eccentricity than about the relative merits of the candidates.

Dennett closes with a remark about length and clarity that is well taken, at least in regard to my own entry, as I remarked upon its nomination. But there is something deeply ungenerous in his attitude toward the contest in general, finalists, judges, and promoters alike, that perhaps he would have softened after the interval of night's sleep or a hot meal (indeed it's hard to imagine these sentiments making into the pages of a journal, let alone his next best selling-book) which makes his comment about indulgence more than a little ironic. All of which is perhaps to say that now that Dr. Dennett has, with this short essay, popped his blogging cherry, and may be better poised, next time, to better empathise with the temptation to publish one's first-draft thoughts in all their inglory.

Reality on pennies a day

Because my last post was on the topic of theodicy, the new or casual reader might be inclined to presume I believe in a creator god, which I don't--but not because I don't believe in god (which I also basically don't), but rather because I don't believe in creation.

Richard Dawkins likes to say that atheists only differ from monotheists in having let go of that one final supernatural being. They accord in their rejection of Mercury, Odin, Enki, Demeter, and so many others, but there's the thorny matter of that last deity. Dan Dennett compares the condition of such a theist to person clinging to the lowest branch of a tree, and exhorts one to "Let go! Let go! You'll hardly notice the drop!" (Dennett's presumption of complete arrival at the solid bottom of things, with the earth planted directly under his feet, is part of what makes his condescension here so rankling.)

But I think this argument can be volleyed back to Dawkins' side of the net. As Alan Watts expertly observed in a number of his essays and lectures, the modern conception of the cosmos we like to call "scientific" actually owes a significant metaphysical debt to the Christian worldview it overthrew. God has been disposed of, but not the system of relations God belonged to, where a creative force, or spirit is needed to modify an inert and passive mundane world. When we ask questions about how things came to be a certain way, as in the case of evolution, we look for something external to the phenomenon in question, to the causes that are responsible for a given effect. (The infinite regress implied by such a system, so that everything needs a cause except for the first thing, whatever that was, still tends to inspire a frantic tone in defenders of this model. I suppose you'd like to go back to having God start everything off?) Such a view is traditionally called "dualism," though I think a more immediate word would be something like "separatism." Causes and effects, actors and actions, are, in this scheme, different entities, alienated from each other.

Watts called this species of metaphysics "The Ceramic Model." In the earlier, theistic version of this tale, God molds the world as a potter molds clay. The potter is active, and the clay inert. Without a mind to guide it, matter is formless and void. In the post-theistic, mechanistic version of this story, Mind is still required to shape formless matter,but now it goes by the name "information." Like God, information has no physical or otherwise observable existence. It is a ghost, like the square root of -1, but we can't explain anything without it.

There is a good deal of sense in this way of looking at things. Many people have noted that mind/matter dualism is reflected in our language, which relies on a particular structure of subject and verb, verb and object: In any describable event we identify someone doing something to someone or something else. Nothing can occur without each of these separate components, and this is why it seems natural to believe that effects need causes external to them. After all, we say, this X isn't going to Y itself.

But when we compare the Western, Abrahamic cosmology that preceded our own to some of the historical alternatives the relation of external causes becomes a little less self-evident. In the Hindu ontology that was being developed around the same time as the Abrahamic "Ceramic Model," there is no process of fabrication whatsoever. What the world "is" is not something that someone made, but something that someone is doing. It is sometimes described as a drama, sometimes as a dream, and sometimes as a dance, but in each case there is no separation between who is doing the doing and what is being done. It is all (and this includes each of us), Brahman, pure Being.

Taoist metaphysics, similarly, suggests no distinction between actor and action. A central principle in Taoist thought is wu wei, which is often translated as "effortless action," indicating not just an inherent naturalness to all events, but an inherent aliveness. Things arise spontaneously of their own accord. You don't have to push any brute, stubborn bits of matter around to make things happen; things just happen.

Of course all of these metaphysical schemes are just metaphors. There is no pot-throwing potter-god, and there is no cosmic drama. These are just stories made of words. But neither is there any such thing as "design," "selection," or "information." These, too, are words approximating a truth we struggle to imagine. They are an over-investment in the common-sense truth value of our language, which has come to resemble a Ponzi scheme in recent times. Science, if I may unduly stretch this loose and off-the-cuff analogy, is the prospectus, in all its Whiggish hope and promise. Will we be seduced by the allure of such unrealistically high returns?

Light Prizes, Lightly Won

Jerry Coyne doesn't like Andrew Sullivan's response to Russell Blackford on the "problem of evil," but I think Sully acquits himself well. The problem of evil comes down to the problem of finitude. There will always be something we cannot have, or cannot be. No amount of omnibenevolence or omnipotence can change that. Sullivan writes:

My notion of a fallen world is related to the fact of mortality, which embraces almost everything on our planet, and causes terrible suffering to animals as well as humans. The difference is that, so far as we know, only humans experience this suffering as a form of alienation; we feel somehow as if we belong elsewhere, as if this mortal coil is not something we simply accept, as if our home was form [sic] somewhere else.

Here's what he said in the earlier post that got Coyne so verclempt:

[S]uffering in itself can be a means of letting go to God, of allowing Him to take over, of recognizing one’s own mortality and limits. That to me is not some kind of crutch. It is simply the paradox of the cross.

Coyne responds, somewhat thoughtlessly (debate is easy when everyone that disagrees with you is an idiot, but only light prizes are lightly won):

When a tsunami sweeps away a bunch of Indonesians, when a baby dies of leukemia, when Jews were driven into the gas chambers of Auschwitz: how, exactly, are those ways of “letting go to God”? Or of “recognizing one’s own mortality and limits”? This is intellectual nonsense. These are words without meaning. And they are insulting and infuriating to anybody with a brain.

What Sullivan wrote was that such events can be ways of letting go, not that we should be blase in the face of catastrophe. No one (human or otherwise) is guaranteed a good life, and for a so-called compassionate creator to have instituted such guarantees would be enormously problematic, philosophically. For one thing it would put fetters on the possibility of positive hardship. (Presumably a man who did his doctorate at Harvard knows the value of hard work and postponing gratification.) How much of what is good in each of us comes in part from things we might rather not have done or undergone? This is not, of course, to argue that there is an inherent value in all suffering; that tsunamis and holocausts are character-building (though they may well be, as Viktor Frankl, himself a survivor of Theresienstadt, argued). It is to say that it is no easy logical task to say what amounts to meaningful suffering, and what to gratuitous.

In the post that started it off, Blackford writes:

An all-powerful God did not need any of this. It could have created the world in a desirable form without any of it just by thinking, "Let it be so!" That's what being all-powerful is about, if we take it seriously.

To the extent that an all-powerful God could have created a world of only eternal, aetherial spirits, Blackford is correct. But there is a reason why in almost all literature, both secular and religious, the immortals are jealous of the living. The question is not what exists, or in what form, but what it means to those who experience it. An all-powerful God could create meaning for us, if we are to be automatons, but it is hard to find the benevolence in this. Life is precious to us because it is finite and beset by vicissitiude. It is, at best, a feathery abstraction to the angels. What Blackford and Coyne seem to be asking as evidence for God's omnipotence and omnibenevolence is that he give humanity Good without Bad, but this is simply not a logical possibility. Our words indicate nothing if they do not also indicate their opposites. Good without evil is no more possible than light without shadow. If there is any "intellectual nonsense" in this debate, it is the attempt to banish one side of a logical polarity, while preserving the other.

The Tao of Buffy

I'm getting to this late, but I want to link to a very nice piece by the evangelical Christian blogger Fred Clark, who writes the blog Slacktivist. Clark is a Baptist, and we all know what Baptists believe: that God is vengeful, and as real as the hair on your knuckles, and that the only way to understand the bible is as a description of things that really happened that God wants to make sure we remember, or secretly wants us to forget so he can punish us for it. So it is perhaps surprising that Clark begins this way:

I should note here, before we go on, that I believe in vampire stories. I don't mean that I believe these stories are "literally" true -- they're not that kind of story. But I believe they are true stories -- stories by which we tell ourselves true things so that we do not forget them.

It appears that Clark is not a real Baptist after all, since Baptists don't believe in allegorical truth, only in "literal" truth. Perhaps Clark is one of those "closeted atheists" Dan Dennett has been talking about. (But then, if the whole blogosphere is one's closet, what constitutes the rest of the house?)

Another reason Clark can't be a real Baptist is that all the faitheists like him. (Faitheists, like any good object of derision, are all congenital hypocrites, just like the white 60s radicals who claimed to support black power, but who wanted all African Americans to talk like Sydney Poitier. Remember?) Here's Andrew Brown, at his Comment is Free blog, making what I consider a very essential--and dangerous--point:

Stories don't arise from facts, any more than religion arises from theology. Stories are what make our implicit explanatory frameworks work. They determine what counts as a fact. This is why discussions about "evidence" so completely bog down, because when someone talks about "evidence" for God they are doing so from inside a story, just as the atheist is when he dismisses the same fact as evidence. (my emphasis)

This is what Muriel Rukeyser meant when she wrote "The world is not made of atoms, it is made of stories." Contemporary scientists who have been persuaded by C.P. Snow that there are "two cultures" take this remark as a kind of grab for territory. But there are not two cultures, as Iris Murdoch observed in "The Idea Of Perfection" (1962):

There is only one culture, of which science, so interesting and so dangerous, now plays important part. But the most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education on how to picture and understand human situations. We are men and we are moral agents before we are scientists, and the place of science in life must be discussed in words. (my emphasis.)

This is not a squabble over who gets more government funding, or who gets the corner office overlooking fabled orchards and gardens. It is a conversation about how to understand the world. The case--presently led by biologist and blogger Jerry Coyne--that the best way to understand the world (and therefore the only way) is through science unalloyed by philosophy, mythography, and linguistics, is an extraordinary weak one. As John Pieret remarks, it resembles nothing more than the kind of know-nothing bluster whose recent exemplars have been demagogues like Michael Horowitz.

Coyne, in the post I linked to above, is responding to Josh Rosenau, who writes the blog Thoughts from Kansas and who recently defended Eugenie Scott's assertion that there are multiple "ways of knowing," and indeed this phrase is coming up for ridicule at citadels across the scientific blogosphere. According to Coyne's formulation, no way of knowing besides the scientific one can produce truth. Whatever these different "ways" might be, they won't lead to anything worth knowing.

Rosenau, in reply, referred to to the Clark vampire piece we began with: Vampire stories, though empirically false, convey truth. They are in this sense a "way of knowing" that differ from the scientific model in that they do not deal in objective facts. As I can tell, Rosenau is now being acceded this point, though such accession may be obscured by quibbles over semantics.

At Butterflies and Wheels, Ophelia Benson writes

Telling stories about anything can be a great way to convey certain truths about the world we all live in, but conveying truths about the world is not the same thing as being a "way of knowing."

She does not pause to elaborate.

Along the same lines, at EvolutionBlog Jason Rosenhouse describes an arduous chess match (which he ultimately won), fraught with setbacks and challenges, from which he learned things about himself he might not have otherwise discovered, and concludes:

Is playing chess now to be considered a way of knowing? If it is, then the phrase has truly lost all meaning.

I think these objections amount to a resistance to the idea that some truths arrive in humble packages. Certainly chess, specifically, is not a "way of knowing" in the grand sense of a systematic tradition or methodology. It's main function, in as much as it has one at all, is not to be instructive in such a way. (Though we should note that Asian cultures are famed for using very specific cultural components, such as ikebana or the tea ceremony, as vehicles for truths that transcend the simple social concerns of flower arranging or tea serving. Yoga is perhaps the example that would be most familiar to us, beginning with what seems like mere calisthenics, and coming to touch on every aspect of our existence (for those who care to deepen thier pracitce accordingly).

But the function this one match performed for Rosenhouse is very much a narrative one. It concretized his experience in a way that made it "real" for him. This is what stories, paradoxically, do. If someone had recited to him the lessons " fortunes can change quickly" or "one must be ever vigilant for opportunities" they probably would have meant much less, because they would not have been connected to something he cared about. Games like chess are, in this sense a subset of storytelling and narrative, and it is not at all foolish to call this larger category a "way of knowing" in the grand sense.

Rosenhouse goes on, trying to make a point about science's omnicompetance:

It is simply bizarre to say there is something we know from reading great literature that we can not verify in more conventional ways.

But this is not what Rosenau, Eugenie Scott, or Fred Clark are trying to put forth. We can verify the truth of the vampire story by looking at history, which is a kind of science. We can do psychological experiments that may verify these truths. (Though I would not go so far as to say literary truths can be scientifically falsified). The question is what is the best way for these truths to take purchase in an actual human heart? Is there not overwhelming evidence that stories are still the most effective conveyence? Is this not the reason why the most popular and influential science writing, such as Dawkins' Selfish Gene, makes liberal use of mythological tropes?

In the end, I'm ready to conclude that this dispute is a matter of vanity. Rosenhouse asks who among us wouldn't be embarrassed to admit that we "knew" something because we'd watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer. We can all relate to the sentiment, regardless of how we feel about that particular show. Certain forms of entertainment are, to us, simplisitic, base and vulgar, and incomparable to the sublimity of the greatest arts and sciences. And yet the truths of literature are perhaps the most important truths, and we are desperate for them. Are we really prepared to sneer at their conveyance through popular culture, because of pride?

"Self" Abuse

The Art of Making Stronger What We Cannot Kill

[Discussed in this essay: The Selfish Genius, by Fern Elsdon-Baker. Icon Books. 270 pages. USD $21, UK£8.99]

When a public figure consistently displays the kind of self-congratulation that leads him to self-refer as "the most formidable intellect in public discourse," and to dub his cyber-home "a clear-thinking oasis," it seems almost an expression of natural law that the responses to that public figure's ideas will take on a personal tone. Thus, for example, theologian Alister McGrath's book-length attempt to rebut Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion did not begin and end with Dawkins' argument, but with his state of mind, the soundness of which was questioned in the very title: The Dawkins Delusion.

Dawkins seems to take delight in personalized attacks such as this, finding them as evidence that he has struck a nerve so deep that the only response his victim can summon is a feeble "I know you are but what am I?" He calls such critics "fleas" after the fashion of the Yeats poem dismissing "bad poets and imitators."

There's a taste of sour grapes to such a stance; a convenient excuse not to give the benefit of the doubt to—and perhaps actually read—the flea-critic in question. However haughty Yeats may have been in his original dismissal, he was merely declining to praise his imitators for political points, not asserting a right to (so to speak) judge their books by their covers.

And yet, judging books by their covers is, as all publishers know, an incomparable human skill. Why invite the inevitable suspicion that one's criticism is rooted in pettiness or hurt feelings, rather than high-minded engagement with the issues of the day?

For whatever reason, writer Fern Elsdon-Baker could not resist the temptation to orient her criticism around the man himself—Professor Richard Dawkins—rather than his ideas, titling her recent book The Selfish Genius in a play on his most famous title. I can sympathize with her choice: Dawkins is so wrong about so many things of great importance that one longs for a one-stop shop of rebuttals. But I'm not sure such a decision is worth the price of seeming to prioritize personality over ideas. The Selfish Genius will only appear relevant as long as there is enmity for Dawkins the man (which I do not here endorse). In a few generations, few people will care whether Dawkins was right or wrong, though it will still matter whether or not his ideas endure.

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This is a shame, because so many of Elsdon-Baker's critiques of Dawkins' positions are well presented, and well taken. Unlike McGrath, whose quarrel with Dawkins is largely restricted to discussions of religion, or a figure like the late Stephen J. Gould, whose titanic feud with Dawkins was largely confined to the mechanics of evolutionary biology, Elsdon-Baker has chosen Dawkins' entire oeuvre as her subject, from his appearance on the scene in 1977 with The Selfish Gene, to his late role as an evangelist for atheism and scientific naturalism. Her critiques of each mode are apt, and I will take a moment to highlight some of them below.

But in so choosing her scope she casts Dawkins (intentionally or not) as the spokesman for a cohesive ideology, philosophically uniting the adaptationism and gene-centrism of his biological writings, with the hyper-rationalism and scientism of his writings against both religion and literary criticism. This attempt at a unified field theory of Dawkinisiana founders on too many easy counter-examples: some of Dawkins' staunchest allies in the campaign against religious "accomodationism," such as the biologists PZ Myers, Larry Moran and Jerry Coyne, take significantly heterodox stances on strict gene-selectionism. And conversely there is nothing inherent in Selfish Gene theory that demands an atheistic or "incompatibalist" stance on religion. Many notable theistic biologists are essentially party-line Selfish Genists, including Francis Collins and Ken Miller.

And yet Elsdon-Baker has many important things to say about Dawkins' various dogmas, and The Selfish Genius is very much worth reading as an antidote to popular, but mistaken, ideas about biology which should have given way long ago, but for the forceful advocacy of writers like Professor Dawkins.

---

She begins with a bit of needed revisionism, in this anniversary year, about the history of evolution as a concept, devoting two full chapters to putting Darwin's theory of natural selection in context and very effectively putting the lie to the notion that before 1859 the only possible explanation for the myriad forms of life was Creationism. Besides Alfred Wallace, at least two other writers anticipated the theory of natural selection, including the 9th century Afro-Arab scholar al-Jahiz—a Muslim—who wrote about the "struggle for existence" long before Malthus came on the scene, and whose ideas about the influence of "environmental determinism" on physical characteristics (including camouflage) are startlingly accurate precursors of Darwin's theory. (The other writer was Patrick Matthew, whose description of natural selection in a 1831 book on navel timber Darwin himself called "complete.")

This is not to call Darwin out as a fake; Elsdon-Baker's general task in these early chapters is to show that Darwin's work was far more incremental than revolutionary, in an attempt to defuse the tempting myth-making that surrounds the idea of "Darwinism," neo- or otherwise. Darwin would likely have never come close to the theory that bears his name without the crucial work of Lamarck on adaptation and the deep scale of time evolution requires. Yet, to this day, "Lamarckism" is a term of abuse; an accusation that one is in the grips of a pseudo-science.

Part of the point of all this ledger-balancing (which I confess sometimes seems a little off-topic, though it never flags) is as a prelude to an important component of Dawkins' ideology Eldson-Baker calls "Whig History," after the political party of that name. This is the conviction that each progressive moment contributes a positive increase in truth and knowledge, exemplified by the assertion by Victorian British historian Thomas Macaulay that the history of Britain was the history "of physical, or moral, and of intellectual improvement."

(Marilyn Robinson and Terry Eagleton each raised this point about Dawkins in their respective reviews of The God Delusion. When writer Laurie Taylor brought this criticism to Dawkins directly, in an interview in the New Humanist, he conceded that this outlook, rather than being rational or scientific, reduced to little more than his disposition as "an optimist.")

There is, admittedly, a clever way Elsdon-Baker's arguments begin to adhere: Dawkins is the public face of what is generally known today as "neo-Darwinism," which uses the science of population genetics to redeem Darwin's notion of natural selection as the central mechanism of evolution. Because of the implicit "Whiggish" nature of evolutionary biology, neo-Darwinism appears to be the inevitable fulfillment of plain old "Darwinism," which in the pulp-novel version of the history of science is tantamount to the fact of evolution itself. So, to criticize "neo-Darwinism" specifically is almost invariably seen as an assault on evolution generally—perhaps a stealth move by some Creationist ideologue. This matters a great deal, because neo-Darwinism has been in crisis for a while, and there seems to be an unfortunate reluctance to talk about it for fear of giving succor to religionists.

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This is the portion of The Selfish Genius—a survey of the valid standing challenges to orthodox neo-Darwinism—that I would like to praise the most highly. Accurate accounts in the popular press about the actual state of evolutionary biology are are all too uncommon. And any book on the systematic thought of Richard Dawkins should devote its greatest part to his place of greatest influence, which is gene-centric evolution and the primacy of the "replicator." But the two chapters Elsdon-Baker devotes to this topic seem inadequate, and I find this aspect of her critique a mixed success.

Elsdon-Baker spends a considerable amount of time trying to rehabilitate Lamarck, and she is in a sense partly right to do so. The notion we have of Lamarck today is woefully simplistic; his doctrine of "use and disuse" or inheritance of "acquired" characteristics is not accurately conveyed by examples like a blacksmith passing on his bulging muscles to his sons. But even a rehabilitated Lamarck mounts little in the way of challenge to orthodox neo-Darwinism. Exceptions to the "central dogma" that information from the cell can't travel back to alter the DNA sequence are few, and have limited impact on the role of heredity.

But Lamarckism never really offered a promising challenge to neo-Darwinism. Rather the two areas that provide the most headaches for a gene-centric theory of evolution are systems theory (sometimes called biological systems theory, or BST) and epigenetics. Epigenetics is, put simply, the study of influences on traits from outside the genome. Diet is an illustrative example. Among humans ther eis a varying genetic capacity for developing diabetes. But almost anyone can manage or even reverse the disease by dietary means. A highly glycemic diet is just as much a "cause" of diabetes as a genetic predisposition for it is.

In the classical, now deprecated view of genetics, each gene "codes for" a specific protein, which has a specific role in the cell, which contributes to various phenotypic traits. But not all genes are actively coding all the time (if they were, cell differentiation would be impossible, since each cell in the body has an identical genome. We would all be made of undifferentiated goo.) Genes alternate between activity and quiescence in a complex of activity known as gene expression. This creates obvious problems for the selfish gene/replicator model, since a gene can't turn itself on and off any more than a lightbulb can.

Systems theory is the study of how entire cells, and groups of cells, function together, including not just influences like epigenetics and gene expression, but also "autopoesis," which is the science of the inherent structure of biological forms that Stuart Kaufmann calls "order for free" and Conrad Waddington called "homeorhesis." (A related concept, dubbed by Waddington "canalization," describes the ability of the organism to preserve a phenotypic trait despite conflicting information from the genome or the environment. This principle has been demonstrated experimentally in fruit flies, and may partially explain how two species of fruit fly, D. melanogaster and D. simulans, can be nearly identical though they have significantly divergent genomes).

Further complicating the prevailing gene-centric view is that genes themselves don't have anywhere near the autonomous existence they would need to have to function as "immortal replicators." (Indeed some biologists, such as Evelyn Fox Keller, believe it's time to retire the concept of the "gene" altogether.) Through a process called "alternative splicing," a single DNA "transcript" can be translated into multiple mRNA sequences, and consequently multiple proteins—as many as 576 have been counted in a gene influencing inner ear cilia in a chick.

In light of all of this the notion of autonomous genes spreading through populations starts to sound oversimplistic, if not outright semantically dilute. Elsdon-Baker does a decent job of cataloging some of these dissident facts (including some I haven't mentioned, such as horizontal gene transfer, or HGT). But after coming on so strong, her punches seem pulled here, and her argument tentative; perhaps because she still has the looming task ahead of her of arguing against Dawkins' divisiveness on the matter of religion. It is one of the reasons why I think she would have been better advised to choose to address either Dawkins' work on biology, or on religion, but not, in one book, both.

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This may be a good time to mention that Elsdon-Baker—or her editor—has given The Selfish Genius the obligatory subtitle*: “How Richard Dawkins Rewrote Darwin's Legacy.” Part I, which we've just discussed, sticks closely to this theme, but Part II—which goes on to take Dawkins to task for his advocacy of science as a vanquisher of both religious superstition and constructivist philosophy—feels like a case of mission creep. Whatever Darwin's “legacy” is, or should be, it has little to do with science as an ideology.

The fiber connecting Part I and Part II is in Dawkins' employment of Darwin as a symbol of the triumph of science over religion, through Darwin himself never took this view. (And, as Elsdon-Baker makes clear in Part I, Darwinism did not directly topple Creationism, which already had a number of contenders for the ultimate explanation of the origin of species before Darwin published his theory).

Elsdon-Baker uses this as a launching pad for a general criticism of Dawkins' scientism. I find this criticism welcome and have made many of the same points myself in this space, but still find her ad hominem tone a distraction. I would contrast Elsdon-Baker's approach with that of philosopher John Dupré, whose 2003 book Darwin's Legacy is echoed in Elsdon-Baker's subtitle. Dupré makes many of the same points as Elsdon-Baker regarding what is not implied by Darwin's theory, and doesn't shy from singling out Dawkins for the negative influence of his selfish-gene metaphor. But having done so, he returns to the prosecution of his thesis in its positive aspect. With just a few calibrations, Elsdon-Baker could have written such a book. Not the least of which calibrations would have been the selection of a less salacious title.

Richard Dawkins has built the late portion of his career on haphazard and philosophically naive remarks about the role and function of science. For this he has earned the opprobrium of Fern Elsdon-Baker, and many others. But negative statements (such as this review, perhaps?) are not generally remembered as long or as well as positive ones, whatever attention they might at first attract. Positive, not in the sense of sunny or pollyannish, but in the sense prioritizing the ideas that fill a cleared space over the clearing of old ideas from that space. We need new and enduring ways to think about biology and our relationship with the world, much more than we need reasons to disapprove of the old ones. Elsdon-Baker does, to her credit, roughly sketch out some of the work being done to develop these ideas, but her central placement of Dawkins as a bedeviling obstacle to this development only serves, in the end, to strengthen his influence.

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* See a great take on modern publishing's rampant subtitle-itis here.

I've just finished reading the 9 (minus one) finalists for the 3 Quarks Daily 2009 philosophy prize, announced today. It's a good field, and I don't belong among their number*, but somehow this has come to pass. One thing I have learned reading the other finalists is that the typeface I employ here is comparatively big, like those large-print editions of the newspaper my grandmother used to read.

The two posts I'd been rooting for, by John Wilkins and Nick Smyth, respectively, did not make the cut--did not, in fact, even make it to the semifinals, though they each deserved to. John and Nick are both able and thoughtful writers with a lot more consideration behind their musings than most of the half-cocked posts you'll find here. Both pieces strike me as more philosophically original than most of the finalists, myself included.

Of the actual final entries, I favor this one, from the blog Grundelgung, to which I think I'll be returning. Interestingly, none of the final nine traffics in the themes that characterize Dennett's main focus over the years on philosophy of mind. I hope he won't take it personally. And I hope his eyes won't glaze over after he encounters, in the second sentence of my entry, the dismissive term "rationalist avengers." Out of context (the context of my private thoughts, and all they are conditoned by) the term seems more hostile than the piece requires.

I've pasted the official finalist graphic into my sidebar because I've never gotten this far in a contest before without cheating. Perhaps I'm still trying to expiate fraudulently winning the giant stocking full of toys (which I ultimately returned) at the town nursery, circa Christmas 1974, by stuffing the sweepstakes box. Best of luck to my fellow nominees.

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* If anyone writes a comment to the effect that I am being unduly modest here, I will reject it.

Tab Dump

Not much time to post for a few days, but here are a couple of highlights from my feed reader:

Thoughts in a Haystack on the Bloggingheads kerfuffle, and how Jerry Coyne gets it completely wrong.

The triumphantly pragmatic return of Unspeak.

John Wilkins goes deep into the weeds to examine the claim that natural selection is a tautology. A seven-parter. Build up your Labor Day cookout appetite!

To the Best of Our Knowledge does a show on "Religion 2.0," including "The Religious Case Against Belief."

Today is the last day to vote for semifinalists in the 3QD Philosophy Prize award. There is an Underverse post among the nominees, but also several other worthy candidates. Voting ends at 11:59PM ET.

Happy Labor Day to all the laborers, and best of luck to the rest of us!

Quark Philosophy Awards

3 Quarks Daily has wrapped up the nomination round of its 2009 prize for philosophy. Public voting is now open, through September 7. The top 20 vote-getters will be winnowed to a tidy group of 6 finalists by the 3QD editors, and philosopher Daniel Dennett will choose three winners from these.

One of my posts from May of this year has been nominated:

Refuting "It," Thus

I'm somewhat fond of this piece--though now that it's under scrutiny I'd love a chance to go in and tighten it up. It seems to me to have very little chance to be awarded a prize by Daniel Dennett, but if that's not the kind of thing that bothers you, I whole-heartedly encourage you to vote for it.

However, before you do, I encourage you to have a look at two other very deserving nominees:

Information and Metaphysics, by John Wilkins of Evolving Thoughts

and

The Ethics of Honor, by Nick Smyth of Yeah, OK, But Still


You get just one vote. Cast it here.

Evolutionary Psychology & The New Calvinists

Jerry Coyne proves to be an unlikely* ally, again, in a two-part critique at his place of the suggestion, recently put forward recently in a Scientific American article, with jaw-dropping superficiality, that depression is an adaptation, not a malady.

The authors of this Scientific American piece, Paul W. Andrews and J. Anderson Thomson, Jr., call their idea the “analytical rumination hypothesis" (ARH). Depression, they write, gives its sufferer a selective advantage because it enhances a rational approach to a "life problem." The wheel-spinning, obsessive rumination that severs the depressed person's engagement with life is, according to this theory, a boon, helping the person to solve, and thus avert, the underlying crisis.

Coyne offers a number of objections to this view, many of which can be applied to most Ev Psych theorizing, generally; some of which are specific to Andrews and Thomson; all of which are sound. He has saved me a lot of trouble in cataloging them. But I want to add a couple I think he has missed.

Thomson and Andrews introduce, as significant evidence for ARH, a receptor in the brain called 5HT1A, which inhibits serotonin, one of the primary neurotransmitters influencing mood. When experimental rats are bred without this receptor, they are shown to display "fewer depressive symptoms in response to stress," which Thomson and Andrews take to mean that 5HT1A is a switch that can "turn on" depression.

As Coyne notes, what passes for "depression" in rats is not directly comparable to depression in humans, and we'll return to this idea in a moment. He also notes the seeds of a fallacy: if we bred rats without an appendix they would be invulnerable to appendicitis. That doesn't in itself show that appendicitis is an "adaptation."

But staying with the 5HT1A receptor for just a moment longer, is it fair to reduce it to a mere "depression switch"? Remember that the rats had to be genetically modified to be absent this molecule; normally we all have it, not just humans but sundry mammals with similar brains. And yet we don't all experience clinical depression in response to stress. (One of the weaknesses of the Thomson and Andrews piece is a failure to define depression specifically, or even recognize the standard diagnostic variants. If all they are referring to is the colloquial term, where we all get a little "blue" sometimes, their thesis may be strengthened somewhat, but its ability to explain severe forms like bipolar depression or major depressive disorder is drastically impaired).

What, in other words, is the switch that turns on the switch?

Let's look for a minute at how "analytic rumination" is supposed to function adaptively. Thomson and Andrews write:

So what could be so useful about depression? Depressed people often think intensely about their problems. These thoughts are called ruminations; they are persistent and depressed people have difficulty thinking about anything else. Numerous studies have also shown that this thinking style is often highly analytical. They dwell on a complex problem, breaking it down into smaller components, which are considered one at a time.

This analytical style of thought, of course, can be very productive. Each component is not as difficult, so the problem becomes more tractable.

Rumination, however, seems to be a highly exhausting activity, quickly depleting a certain type of neuron in the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC). How is it able to continue unabated until these problems can be solved?

Studies of depression in rats show that the 5HT1A receptor is involved in supplying neurons with the fuel they need to fire, as well as preventing them from breaking down. These important processes allow depressive rumination to continue uninterrupted with minimal neuronal damage, which may explain why the 5HT1A receptor is so evolutionarily important.

This is sensible on the surface, but something nags with these repeated reference to "depressed rats." If the authors mean to argue that the primary function of depression is to promote positive, pragmatic analytic rumination, what could it possibly mean to characterize rats as "depressed"? What sort of "ruminating" are these rats doing, do we suppose? Depression, write Andrews and Thomson, is "nature’s way of telling you that you’ve got complex social problems that the mind is intent on solving." What kind of "complex social problems" do these rats have, now made "tractable" by their adaptive state of undistracted analysis?

To be sure, rats brains, like all mammalian brains, are similar in many ways to our own. We share much of the same brain chemistry with all our mammalian kin, and can seemingly "relate" to the moods and other mental states of our pets, and other distant cousins, rodents included. Some anthropomorphizing is appropriate when talking about the emotional palettes of certain animals, and if a rat appears to be withdrawn, listless, uninterested in food, sex, or other social activity, it is not a senseless thing to use our word "depressed" to describe this.

But having drawn this wide biochemical circle around ourselves and our close relations, we cannot simultaneously use this shared disposition to prove the origin of something that only a narrow subset of us possess: abstract, symbolic cognition. Only humans "analytically ruminate." If "depression" is intractably bound up with such an activity, then we have to call whatever the rats are going through something else, however similar it appears--and we certainly can't use it to stand as proof for our own, quite unique experience. Andrews and Thomson's primary piece of evidence is self-negating from the start.

***

One has to give credit to a certain amount of intellectual bravery and original thinking for a thesis about depression that completely marginalizes the emotional component. Coyne observes that the important word "suicide" appears nowhere within Andrews and Thomson's piece. Neither does the word "sad." Sometimes to understand something we have to completely rethink it, and in this case, setting aside the profound distress that depressed people feel as a non-essential feature, qualifies as a significantly new perspective.

But one is struck by the degree to which the depressive state is valorized--almost made normative--by Andrews and Thomson. Life is full of complex social dilemmas. In fact if we look closely and honestly at it, life can appear to be a never-ending series of complex social dilemmas. Is the extreme state of social isolation, lethargy, apathy, loss of empathy, (these last two unremarked by the authors) and other crippling features really the best way to cope with difficult problems?

There are hints within the piece of a quasi-puritanical myth of the virtues of privation underlying the authors theorizing. They write that "Even the loss of appetite often seen in depression could be viewed as promoting analysis because chewing and other oral activity interferes with the brain’s ability to process information." But depressive episodes can last for days, weeks, or months. Surely all that important ruminating needs the support of some good brain nutrition? (In comments at Coyne's blog, Bjorn Ostmon wryly observes that not-eating and not-procreating are not generally considered fitness-enhancing activities, but let us concede that humans are complex.)

In fact, is there any evidence at all that depressive, "ruminative" analysis is any better than the garden-variety analysis done by a non-depressed person? Conventional psychoanalytic theory strongly suggests that the kind of obsessive thoughts and ruminations that accompany depression are not reality-based at all, but rather distortions and artifacts, possibly endowed by one's parents, and that one only sees one's problems clearly when one's depression has lifted. (Incidentally, the clinical definition of "rumination," which one would expect any psychologist to know, highlights its essentially non-productive nature of this kind of thinking.)

In this sense "analytic rumination" may be a kind of oxymoron. Depressed thoughts are generally characterized not by a spirit of problem-solving but by a spirit of futility. The sufferer feels that conditions will never change; that there is some insoluble flaw within him- or herself that occult any possible good outcomes. To be depressed is to believe that one cannot solve one's problems. Any serious discussion of depression needs to take this, fundamentally illusory, quality of depressive thoughts as a starting place, or be misled.

***

There is a Puritanical grimness in the “analytical rumination hypothesis," where the asociality and anhedonia of depression are put forth as essential to survival itself, and by implication, the sociality and joie de vivre of the non-depressed state are put forth as perilous distractions. Any serious ethology of primate or other mammalian species would put the lie to this notion; it is sociality and the pleasure we take in it that is the "adaptation," if anything is. But evolutionary psychology does not derive from the study of human or animal behavior; it derives from an essentially Hobbesian ideology of social atomism, of the war of all against all, and excessive fixation on the self (sometimes, though not always, with the gene as proxy, but serving the same ideological function).

The fact that such poorly argued, poorly thought-out, poorly researched papers as this are given prominence in some of the most influential and well-regarded scientific publications (at least by the lay public) show what a grip the ideology of socal atomism still has upon us, and how--ironically--Calvinist our scientific conversation about ourselves remains even 150 years after Darwin. (For more unacknowledged fealty to Puritan/Protestant ideology, see A.C. Grayling's recent comments about the wicked Jesuits).

In terms of its impact on our social structure alone social atomism is inarguably more influential on our culture than any form of supposed supernaturalism. (Recent events in the health care debate in the US show it to be a far more sacred and motivating creed). And yet so few if us define ourselves according to the terms of this debate, especially in the wake of Marxism's failure. Some environmentalists--especially as relates to food policy--are beginning to talk more of our inter-relationships with each other and with nature, but ecology still remains something of a niche topic, referring not to every aspect of our lives, but to having something nice to look at on vacations. A deeper look is needed, before we really have something to be depressed about.

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* In fairness to Coyne, he is a consistent and vocal critic of "evolutionary psychology" in general, though I've found much to criticize lately in his very staunch "incompatibalism" concerning science and religion.

Greater Care

Neo-atheist doctrine, as it has come down to us thus far, simultaneously holds that, on the one hand, religion is characterized by its prioritizing of faith and divine authority over independent, "free thought," and, on the other, that it doesn't matter what theologians and religious leaders believe (for example: "evolution is true"); it's "the (wo)man in the pew" whose view really counts.

This would seem to portend a doctrinal crisis; one that perhaps calls for an ecumenical council. If religion operates according to a principle of faith and obedience, why are the clerics' orthodox views not being transmitted?

Richard Dawkins offers a case study of this problem in his new book, The Greatest Show on Earth, which is being serialized in The Times in advance of its September 10 publication. Dawkins writes, in his first chapter:

The Archbishop of Canterbury has no problem with evolution, nor does the Pope ... nor do educated priests and professors of theology... Bishops and theologians who have attended to the evidence for evolution have given up the struggle against it. Some may do so reluctantly, some, like Richard Harries, enthusiastically, but all except the woefully uninformed are forced to accept the fact of evolution.

What we must not do is complacently assume that, because bishops and educated clergy accept evolution, so do their congregations. Alas there is ample evidence to the contrary from opinion polls. More than 40 per cent of Americans deny that humans evolved from other animals, and think that we — and by implication all of life — were created by God within the last 10,000 years. The figure is not quite so high in Britain, but it is still worryingly large.

The standard explanation given for this disparity is that there is another source of divine authority that competes with that of the men and women in the pulpits; namely, scripture. But while there is surely some truth in this, it is not entirely satisfying to suggest that scriptural literacy is the primary reason that the least educated religious followers believe in (let's be frank here) heretical doctrines. (Surely it's just as sinful to say God did something He didn't do, as that He didn't do something He did do). The Pope says that evolution is true and creationism false. The Pope! Who are you Catholics going to believe, Il Papa or your lying eyes?

But Dawkins does not say that creationists are cleaving to beliefs in tension with the stated views of the clergy; rather he puts it as a question of misunderstanding and confusion among the unschooled laity over which parts of scripture are intended to be taken literally:

To return to the enlightened bishops and theologians, it would be nice if they’d put a bit more effort into combating the anti-scientific nonsense that they deplore. All too many preachers, while agreeing that evolution is true and Adam and Eve never existed, will then blithely go into the pulpit and make some moral or theological point about Adam and Eve in their sermons without once mentioning that, of course, Adam and Eve never actually existed! If challenged, they will protest that they intended a purely “symbolic” meaning, perhaps something to do with “original sin”, or the virtues of innocence. They may add witheringly that, obviously, nobody would be so foolish as to take their words literally. But do their congregations know that? How is the person in the pew, or on the prayer-mat, supposed to know which bits of scripture to take literally, which symbolically? Is it really so easy for an uneducated churchgoer to guess? In all too many cases the answer is clearly no, and anybody could be forgiven for feeling confused.

"All too often" and "all too many" writes the man who for over decade was charged with the Public Understanding of Science. And this is based on a sample size of how many sermons attended or researched? Dawkins asks churchmen: "Shouldn’t you take greater care, when speaking in public, to let your yea be yea and your nay be nay?" Greater care than they do, or greater care than he imagines they do?

(We would want to ask, first off, if the intelligent design and other similar anti-evolutionist movements are coming from the independent biblical research of hundreds of millions of parishioners, how are they able to maintain such a high level of development and organization? We would expect, under this view, a panoply of idiosyncratic folk beliefs with no more than a family resemblance between them, not a highly mobilized united front that has lobbied both court and classroom for the right to be the ascendant view on the origin of species.)

In fact, the statistics show a quite different picture. Interestingly, it is a relatively low number of religious believers (in the US) who invest the bible with literal authority: consistently about a third of those polled, which is 10-20 points lower than the number rejecting evolution. More to the point, Dawkins (curiously) leaves out a significant portion of Christian sectarianism in his analysis. The Archbishop of Canterbury and Bishop Harries are both Anglicans, which translates to Episcopalian in America, part of a more broad group often called "mainline Protestant," which also includes Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, and UCC. These represent about 13% of US adults, with Catholics representing another 25%--together these make less than half of the total Christian population in the US. The remainder is largely composed of what we variously call, with some overlap, the fundamentalist, evangelical, pentacostal, and charismatic churches.

The leading theologians and clerics of these churches do not accept evolution, and they are quite explicit in their rejection of it, in and out of their churches. This fact alone can't account for the staggeringly high majority of Americans who report that they reject some aspect of evolution. But it casts serious doubt on the "man in the pew" hypothesis, which rather cynically suggests that religious leaders can have no influence on the rationality and embrace of science and history among their flocks.

It is encouraging that Dawkins offers a mild form of compatibalism in this piece. Instead of appealing to clergy to be more explicit about their embrace of science, he could have easily maintained a more hardline, Hitchensian "religion poisons everything" position. But if this chapter from The Greatest Show on Earth is any indication, Dawkins is still relying upon a very dubious equivalence between fundamentalism in particular, and religious adherence in general. To the contrary, the American religious minorities of Jews, Hindus and Buddhists report levels of support for evolution indistinguishable from the non-religious, showing that there need be conflict on this topic whatsoever, simply asa matter of religion qua religion.

Making things more complicated is the fact that Dawkins is never completely transparent about what he means by evolution, the mechanisms of which are still being hotly debated by biologists. But that is a topic for an upcoming post, coming later this week.

Living with Uncertainty

Today's link of the day: Thony C. of Renaissance Mathematicus patiently disassembles A.C. Grayling's oddly paranoid, Catholo-phobic argument in the Guardian that the Jesuits' main role in the 16th and 17th centuries was to impede scientific development and understanding.

Grayling writes to remind us of the importance of choosing the right side in the battle "between those who seek the truth and those who claim to have it." The good guys in that battle, in case we've forgotten, are those who

inquire, examine, experiment, research, propose ideas and subject them to scrutiny, change their minds when shown to be wrong and live with uncertainty while placing reliance on the collective, self-critical, responsible and rigorous use of reason and observation to further the quest for knowledge.

While the bad guys are those who--well, you can guess, but it's more fun to say it out loud, like Milton did, over and over, and over:

...espouse a belief system or ideology which pre-packages all the answers, who have faith in it, who trust the authorities, priests and prophets, and who either think that the hows and whys of the universe are explained to satisfaction by their faith, or smugly embrace ignorance.

Whenever such a choice is offered to any of us it's clear that no matter who we are there is only one possible right answer. No one self-describes in the latter fashion in these modern times, or at least no one we are likely to encounter on the internet. This is part of the reason why we have ersatz scientific doctrines like "intelligent design;" the time where any sentient person can tolerate having opinions that don't show at least the veneer of having been exposed to scrutity has ended.

So it is interesting to note the way Grayling opens his piece, in light of the importance of choosing sides correctly in this epic battle. I suppose all of us right-minded people have by now agreed that

If one were asked to prescribe the fundamental condition for a good world, it would be: peace and freedom for all, where "freedom" means personal autonomy and mental liberation from prejudice, superstition, ignorance and fear.

But perhaps some readers more familiar with Grayling's ouevre than myself will direct to a place where he shows the work that led to this agreement? (And, especially, how he squares this assertion with the importance of being a seeker, rather, than a possessor of truth. How does one simultaneously "live with uncertainty," and remain liberated from ignorance and fear?)

Un-meming the Gene

Before it falls too far below the fold, I want to highlight this excellent post by John Wilkins from a couple of weeks ago, on the implausibility of meme theory, particularly the variant espoused by thje populizer Susan Blackmore. I hope to assemble some of my own thoughts on the question of memes, from a different angle than Wilkins offers (namely that memetics represents a form of resurgent Behaviorism), but his point that cultural entities like ideas and behaviors are rarely digital, and not, in any way we can observe, encoded, deserves repeating over and over again.

Along the way Wilkins casually and very economically (so much so it's easy to miss the import of it) describes the crisis that's more or less silently arisen in orthodox, neo-Darwinist evolutionary biology over the last decade or so (though hints of it were always there, in the work of systems theorists like Weiss, Bertalanffy, and Waddington, going back well into the previous century). Wilkins writes:

And there is the hint – neo-Darwinian theory is a special case of evolution, not the general theory that all evolutionary processes must obey. In fact, we are finding more and more cases in biology where the neo-Darwinian account is either incomplete or fails.

This seemingly modest point is one that's been patiently made by biologists like Brian Goodwin, Dick Lewontin, and Stuart Kaufmann--and philosophers and sociologists of biology like Evelyn Fox Keller and John Dupre--for several years. The primary culprit is the highly idealized (and mythographically compelling) concept of the gene, for which most credit goes to Richard Dawkins, though he was expanding on prior work by Hamilton, Price and Williams in the 1960s:

[W]hen the Mendelian, Weismannian, Crick-and-Watsonian form of evolution was abstracted by Hamilton, Price, Williams and eventually Dawkins, it was, per necessity, a limited form of evolutionary theory that got so abstracted, and which captured the imagination of the non-biologists.

[...T]he notion of a replicator so beloved of Dawkins and those who followed him, is based on an abstraction from Mendelian genetics (hereditary factors) in terms of a “digital” molecular gene. G. C. Williams, who proposed the notion of an “evolutionary gene”, noted that it was a “cybernetic abstraction” in 1966, but this qualification was overlooked by the meme theorists who took information to be a causal power.

Forty-plus years of examination of this abstraction as a hypothesis have failed to validate it in the strict and pure sense proposed by Dawkins (though, in fairness, the model does approximate biological processes with sufficient accuracy to make possible disciplines like genetic engineering.) Wilkins' point is that gene-centric neo-Darwinism is an inadequate--because incomplete--description of evolution, and that it leads to tempting but invalid scientific metaphors like memetics.

It also potentiates (though I don't think Wilkins would agree with this part as strenuously) the old Hobbesian myth of the bellum omnium contra omnes as the natural state of nature, as Mary Midgley has been observing since The Selfish Gene was first published (most recently in a series on Hobbes at the Guardian's philosophy blog "How to Believe.")

It is difficult to say which is the glue, and which is the thing being affixed: Does our culture's fondness for the myth of the alienation of nature and its parts make selfish gene theory so hard to let go of, in spite of voluminous counter-evidence, or is it the other way around? Or both? In any case, the nonchalant way Wilkins raises the matter seems to me, at the moment, the best way to have the conversation on both the scientific and metaphysical level.

Secret Agents

Commenting on my post about Bob Thurman, Mickle approvingly cites Dan Dennett's working definition of religion from his conversation with Thurman:

A social system that postulates supernatural agents whose approval is to be sought.¹

This is essentially the same definition Dennett presents in Breaking the Spell (where he further elaborates that everyone who doesn't hold to this defintion is secretly an atheist). I've mentioned in passing that I think it is an inadequate definition, but I want to say a little more about it here.

Reducing all that we know of religious experience to a "social system that postulates supernatural agents whose approval is to be sought" is a little like defining a car as "a portable combustion engine that emits noxious gases." Yes, it's something they all have in common, to a degree, but even if we hated cars unambiguously and supported their post-haste eradication, we would want to be a little more comprehensive (and honest) about their function and history.

Most religions that we know of today (Buddhism is an arguable exception) have forms that postulate supernatural entities, and it is perhaps inescapable that many people seek their approval, often at the behest of religious authorities. But before we rest our case here, we need to be honest about two things.

The first is that atheists do this too. You don't need religion to have superstition. Baseball players, gamblers, theater directors, soldiers, and lawyers all have been known to make petitions to fortune or luck. Some people pray to god for a good outcome, some wear the same underwear for a week, or say "The Scottish Play" instead of "Macbeth" within the theater walls. Why?

Whatever "luck" is, it cannot be curried or swayed. There is, in other words, no room in the metaphysical naturalism that most atheists hold a form of for any kind of appeal to fortune. And yet it persists² , which suggests that perhaps it is not one's metaphysical outlook that is the main cause of superstition and a desire for hand-holding. (About which I would argue that anyone who has not felt the strong desire for hand-holding by some super-human power has had an impossibly charmed life.)

The second thing is that even in the most mainstream expressions of religion, there is more going on than comfort-seeking and approval. In the black churches they say "let go and let God," referring to our powerful desire for a good outcome; for things to go well.

To be fair I think the phrase is often understood as a belief that god is looking out for us all the ways we want him to. It's not, in that sense, a completely Buddhist proposition, despite the similarity of language. But it does, nonetheless, entail letting go in some form, to acceptance of what-will-be, largely in proportion to the courage and openness of the letting-goer. This is quite the opposite of asking God for the week's lottery numbers.

Something similar is found in the so-called serenity prayer. (The fact that this prayer has been embroidered into a billion pillows and magneted to a billion refrigerators may embarrass us, but only underscores the point that it is widely embraced, and not an esoteric text.) The serenity prayer functions in a way opposite to superstition, asking not for good outcomes but for the recognition that "hardships are the pathway to peace" and acceptance of the world "as it is." It has its roots in the Prayer of St Francis, which appeals to personal sacrifice, not comfort or security.

We find these themes in Islam and Judaism too. Islam itself means "surrender." To be sure, this is all-too-often taken in the sense of "surrender to the boss, since he's the biggest guy on the block anyway." But it need not, and does not mean only this. It also means surrender to things as they are, outside of our preferences and fantasies: a call to courage instead of cowardice.

If we're truly curious about the phenomenon of religion, we'll notice that these two currents--protecting and exalting the fragile and grasping ego, and letting go to experience the world as it is--are intertwined throughout its major forms. This is a much more complicated picture than the one suggested by Dennett's definition, and by the adaptationist theories of religion that Dennett calls upon (such as the work of Pascal Boyer, whose definition of religion as the phenomenon of invisible entities is similarly problematic and one-dimensional). The transcendent aspects of religion in its contemporary forms do not follow the Darwianian logic of maximizing the chance of personal (or genic) survival. At the same time, no religion (Buddhism included) has been able to fully unburden itself of the kind of transient solace and security our hearts naturally reach out for. It's messy and complicated, but it seems perfectly suited to the nature of humanity at this moment in time. Religion is in this sense a mirror; one of many. If we don't like what we see, we might consider the notion of changing ourselves, or at the very least, our ideas about ourselves.

---

¹ The phrasing "is to be sought" is curious. Why not just "is sought," unless there is some incipient conflict between what someone (God? Scholars?) want religious practice to be, and what it is.

² In an important sense, hope itself is a form of superstition, since it focuses the mind on security and good outcomes, and puts an an emphasis on things that cannot be changed.

Robert Thurman on reincarnation

One of the stops Daniel Dennett made during the promotion of his 2006 book "Breaking The Spell" was a visit to Columbia University, where he had a conversation with Tibetan Buddhist scholar (and practitioner) Bob Thurman. Their talk is engaging for a number of reasons. For one, Thurman's light (almost silly) conversational style seems to disarm Dennett, who makes concessions here (and in a collegial tone) that I have not seen the like of in his other public conversations about religion. For another, it's interesting to watch Dennett get stuck on the same dilemma that hobbles Susan Blackmore's writings on consciousness and the self: he seems to want to maintain that consciousness presents itself as an illusion under analysis (which Buddhists would agree with), while returning, in the rest of his thought, to the kind of social atomism that should be rendered meaningless by the revelation that the self is a fiction.

But my focus today is--by request--Thurman's exposition of the Buddhist doctrine of punarbhava (re-birth or re-becoming), which is often pointed to as an example of Buddhism's debt to superstition. And there's no doubt that a large number of mainstream, orthodox Buddhists take the doctrine of rebirth literally (though we should resist the temptation to conflate this concept with the one most familiar to us--reincarnation--since most forms of Buddhism teach that there is no self to transmigrate in the first place).

Thurman surely has discussed his interpretation of Buddhist rebirth at greater length elsewhere, in lectures or podcasts, or in his many books, and I don't claim this conversation exhausts the implications of his view. But he seems to be pretty clear here in presenting rebirth not as a literal scientific fact, but as an ethical myth, where our notions of separateness from the world are revealed as illusions, so that even in death we are never something "other." This prevails against the common-sense view that the world that goes on after our existence is over is not "us" and therefore that any consequences of our actions are not of much interest to us after our deaths.

Here are Thurman's (and Dennett's) words (more or less; the transcription seems less than perfect. I've made corrections where I can.), starting just after a minute into the conversation. Passages in bold are my emphasis:

Dennett: I thought [we] were thinking that reincarnation was an important idea?

Thurman:I think it is an important idea in a certain context.

Dennett: Why? Why?

Thurman: There's a Buddhist ... principle that I like to take a moment to explain to you, and that is that all teachings or theories about relative reality are only relative.

Dennett: They got to be.

Thurman: Therefore, they're only valid or invalid in a certain context. All teachings about ultimate reality are actually completely useless *except* the absolute negation that there is no capturable ultimate reality, like a refutation of the idea of an absolute God that creates the world, or any absolute, actually, that's relevant to the world. In a way, it's a very simple thing: an absolute can't be relative, so therefore it's irrelevant to the relative. Only that theory has definitive status in Buddhist philosophy. This basically opens all theorizing about relativity to being relational and useful in this context or that. The theory of involuntary rebirth – which it is better called than reincarnation, at least for ordinary people – is considered very important in a general ethical level, not in a deep metaphysical level.

Dennett: Now, I confess I simply can't fathom most of what you just said.

Thurman: That's good!

Dennett: I expect that there's a great deal in what you say, but it's the last bit I want to ask you about. Why should a *moral* point of view hinge at all on this idea of rebirth? Why not the life that we lead right now? Aren't we lucky to be alive? I certainly feel very fortunate to be here.

Thurman: Well, we went through this earlier, if your theory of consciousness is correct, when the physical apparatus that you *know* about ... ceases, *you*, eternally and permanently, *cease*. That's what you believe.

Dennett: That's right. That doesn't scare me, it doesn't bother me.

Thurman: Of course not! You need not be scared, it's like a super escape! Are you kiddin? It's like "Get me outta here!" Come on: you're healthy, you're happy, you're a great philosopher, you have a farm, a grandchild. You're happy. So that doesn't bother you. If you're in agony all the time, you wouldn't know. That state of annihilation would be seductive. People seek it. Not only religious people lure us towards it, Jack Kevorkian lures them towards it when they're in a certain state. It's not something to fear. Who's afraid of nothing?

Dennett: Exactly.

Thurman: Exactly. The belief, however, in becoming nothing is considered by all spiritual people, as well as religious people throughout history, to be a very destructive belief. Because it gives a person an 'après moi la deluge' type of undergirding. It means, I get out of here no matter what I did with my life. There's no consequence. In other words, it is the lack of relationality to everything that is the danger in the belief. Furthermore, there's nothing that I can do that is really great, that will last. Materialists or humanists will say: Well, it's my children; it's the world after me: it's my legacy – and that's enough. But in our largely materialist dominated society, the industrial society of the modern times, does it seem to be enough? ...

I am not arguing for the *absolute* truth of the story of rebirth. I don't argue for that, which makes me a little heretical from the Dalai Lama's side and others. That's the absolute theory. But, I do argue against the idea that the absolute theory is that at death, Dennett or anybody will be nothing. And that therefore, right now, if it got too bad for either of us: Bang! we would become nothing.

[...]

Dennett: It seems to me that if I were reincarnated as I don't know what, it would be the luck of the draw whether anything that I had ever done in *this* incarnation mattered to whoever that was. I just don't see why this is an interesting idea

[...]

Thurman: All I am trying to do is suggest to you is one thing: if everything is interrelated and all is relativity, which is the ancient view, then if you have one element of yourself that has a way out, simply by dying, then you are giving yourself immunity from that interrelationship. That's all. If you do that, that has consequences and that affects your ground of being. It affects the way you are. Just like those religious people who have that God is telling them what to do – it affects the way they are.

But absolutism could be attached to the idea of an absolute God or an absolute nothing. In other words, we have seen equally that a fanatic materialist, like a communist can crash a plane into a building and kill a bunch of people. And they do not say "Allahu Akbar!" They're not expecting God to reward them. They're just expecting to be annihilated beyond pain and become nothing. And then the other kind expects to be taken beyond pain by some absolute force. Both are from a radical relative point of view equally irrational, and are therefore behaving equally destructive.

Some shall pass

Mickle writes, in comments, that my criticism of neo-atheism amounts to a double standard:

No matter how un-nuanced someone might be when complaining broadly about capitalism, you wouldn't get so up in arms as you do about those who have perfectly reasonable issues with the drear fruits of religion.

I think the way Mickle phrases this gets at something important: "perfectly reasonable issues with the drear fruits of religion," not religion itself. The source of the "issues" has been cleaved in two before the argument has even been mounted, and this is as it should be. But before elaborating I want to examine his analogy more closely.

The significant difference, to my mind, between capitalism and religion is that the former is a unitary phenomenon, with several working parts, and the latter is several related phenomena which can't (necessarily) be judged by virtue of each other's sins. (Is Sufism to be faulted for Sunni extremism? Or, for that matter, is Sunni Islam to be faulted for (non-religious) Arab atavism? Only according to the mad logic favored by Dawkins and Harris sanctioning guilt by association.)

I see capitalism as having hugely problematic features, including commodification, alienation of labor, externalization of "nature," and others. But the concept of the market is so finely interwoven with our sense of liberty, equality and fairness it's hard to see, on a casual glance, how we would ever do without it. Any critique of capitalism that doesn't account for this difficulty would appear to me "un-nuanced." And yet I agree that critiques of capitalism are not only "perfectly reasonable" but necessary. We just need to be careful to clarify what we are talking about. Wholesale critiques likening it to a cancer that should just be excised are neither accurate nor productive.

It is much harder to say with equal accuracy that "religion" has hugely problematic features, because universally it does not. Name such a feature and I'm relatively confident I can find at least one important exception with equal claim to the term "religion." (Mickle wants to exclude the outliers from the conversation on the grounds that they are "ecstatic navel-lickers." But when we are talking about a category of potentially hundreds of millions of people--depending on how we define the slippery term "religious"--this just seems like an exercise in ethnocentrism. And even if it weren't a matter of numerical significance: is "ecstatic navel-lickers" really the name we want to apply to a group that might include as members Rumi, the Dalai Lama, Paul Tillich, Bonhoefer, A.N. Whitehead, BKS Iyengar, or Chuang Tzŭ, just to name a few. Are Oral Roberts and Pat Robertson really more entitled to the term "religious" than they?).

The argument to Fideism fails, because there is no clear line dividing religious and secular forms of "faith." The appeal to truth value fails because there is no clear line dividing secular and religious "fiction."

The mantle of neo-atheism is borne by prominent scientists and philosophers. My request to them is thus that they define their terms with scientific and philosophical rigor. The Four Horsemen (Dennett included) have been alternately fuzzy and inconsistent on just what they are against, paragraph to paragraph. It might not matter if I didn't think there was enormous social and moral good in these overgeneralized domains which to the neo-atheists apparently seems like just more bathwater.

Horsemen Dennett and Dawkins in particular are keen on waving around the null hypothesis to show why religious belief is credulous. As I've written elsewhere, this is a misconstrual of the function of the null hypothesis, which is not a prescription to believe as few things as possible, but a methodological tool to counter confirmation bias. Oddly, I've never, to date, seen an exercise of the null hypothesis in the context of the neo-atheist thesis that religion is inherently harmful or corrosive.

Such exercise could easily go something like this: It seems to us that wherever religion goes, it has a baleful effect. But an alternate hypothesis that would account for this observation is that human nature is, itself, quite often baleful. Perhaps we should not be focusing on ideas, per se, but on the minds which hold them. After all, this would explain why the "same" religious doctrines and texts will often express themselves as differently as in the lives of Martin Luther King and Billy Graham; Dorothy Day and Fred Phelps; the Burmese monks of 2006, and the Aum Shinrikyo cult.

We also would like to pause to note that we have not quantified the purported baleful effect of religion in a way that allows us to measure it against any possible beneficial effect, which we have also not yet quantified.

The possibility that minds are emotionally and psychologically conditioned, and not mere clear vessels to be filled with competing ideas would offer a challenge to our corollary hypothesis that cognition is a matter of active "memes" infecting passive (and phenotypically null) minds. But on the data we have, it can't be ruled out that, broadly speaking, religion is no greater cause of suffering than it is a balm to suffering--any more than "culture" itself, is.

Is there a category of any importance that does not yield "drear fruits"? Literature lends itself to fantasy, poetry to propaganda, music to intoxication. Sex can take the form of lovemaking, or rape. Power can be exercised in munificence, or exploitation. The drear fruits we set aside as specifically religous can fill blood-soaked volumes, but it is unclear how this makes them special. Such a direct causation between religion and sorrow would do well to aspire to the precision of Traditional Chinese Medicine, whose "meridians" and "stagnant chi" come under gleeful derision by the same tongues who matter-of-factly assert that "religion poisons everything." As David Golightly writes (in the same thread), we might just consider the ("perfectly reasonable") possibility that religion

may not be either wholly bad or wholly good, but rather be a complex and multifaceted issue with deeply troubling aspects and deeply inspiring aspects as well, and you can't just cut it all off like an unwanted appendage without addressing its deep roots in the human psyche.

This, if anything, is what I am "up in arms" about. We've seen such attempts at excision before. Like the Freeman-Watts prefrontal lobotomy craze of the 1940s and 50s, such programs are almost always designed to treat the discomfort of the doctor, not the patient.

A conversation

Musicians, I say, are a menace. They are loud, emotionally unstable, and socially parasitical, and ultimately their whole raison d'etre (their music itself) is of no aesthetic, moral, or practical value whatsoever. There's a romantic ideal that seduces young people to become musicians, but ultimately its appeal is base and delusional and enriches no one's life, least their own. Meanwhile our society suffers terribly as we continue to endure all the loudness and instability and parasitism. We should therefore discourage pursuit of music among young people, and we should not demur to decorum in doing so (especially given how loud they are).

That may certainly be true, you say, of some musicians, but certainly not all musicians. What about classical musicians, for example? They are not loud, are no more unstable than the average banker, and generally hold good jobs and teaching posts at distinguished universities and conservatories. The pieces of music they play are some of the most sublime instances of the artistic enterprise known to humanity! What do you have against them?

For Pete's sake, I say, I'm not talking about classical musicians! Sure, there will always be some select elite to whom "music" means something rarefied and even respectable. But that's not the kind of music most people listen to. I'm talking about the average listener-between-the-earbuds. Just turn on your television or ride the subway, or read the Billboard charts--what more proof do you need that music, as played by typical musicians, is a menace!

Ah, you say, you've narrowed the terms of your proposition. But even within popular music, there's an enormous range of genres and styles and idioms, and within those genres are subgenres, each of which differently interprets what the true nature of that genre should be. Take country music, for example. As a generic term it might seem to signify slick, over-produced, formulaic exploitation of feel-good tropes like "God" or "Country" or traditional sex roles, or the virtues of auto-racing. But it just might as well signify the music of someone like Gillian Welch, whose spare and straightforward arrangements reject the slick Nashville sensibility and whose lyrics offer not simple comforts and platitudes, but stark reminders about difficult truths like mortality and loneliness.

Musicians like Gillian Welch just provide cover, I say, for the more virulent form of country music that is a such a scourge in our culture, with the loudness and the tropes and the ubiquitous beer commercials. If Gillian Welch really wanted to make a positive impact, she could give up country music, give up music altogether, and present the content of her songs in unambiguous prose form, perhaps read from a lectern, so that no one would ever be tempted to mistake them for anything musical. If she doesn't want to perpetuate all the ills of country music, why does she call herself a country music performer in the first place? Why confuse people?

This assumes, you say, that the "virulent" mainstream country music produced in Nashville is the essential or “true” expression of the musical impulse, and that someone like Gillian Welch is just creating a watered down version of it, for people who can't handle the loudness and slickness and beer commercials at full strength--

--And who might not be seduced into the musical life at all, I say, if it weren't being promoted as so innocuous by the likes of Ms. Welch--

--Hold on, I'm not finished, you say. How do you know it's not the other way around, so that the spare, quiet challenging music of Ms. Welch (among may others, let's not forget) is the pure expression, and the loud, slick, Nashville product is the corruption? Or perhaps neither has claim to more musical "purity;" perhaps they are just different *kinds* of music. You seem to be silently employing a kind of confirmation bias according to which all the things you don't like about music are essential to it, and all the things you don't mind so much, or even, may I say, that you admire, are simply other forms of expression masquerading as music.

Wouldn't it be simpler, you go on, to call bad music the menace, and reserve some encouraging words for good music? (I might add, you add, that it seems as if you feel that the typical listener-between-the-earbuds is awfully stupid if she or he can't be trusted to tell the difference between good and bad music even with a smartypants like yourself offering rhetorical support. It's awfully paternalistic, isn't it, to cast all music as a "menace" rather than taking the risk that people will inevitably make mistakes in separating good from bad?)

Well, we haven't even begun to discuss the real issue, I say. After all, musical notes aren't even real! In fact there is no universal agreement on what a proper musical scale would even sound like. Is it diatonic? Pentatonic? Modal? Tempered or unjustified? Is it absolute, like the Western scale, or relative, like the Indian Raag? And if we are to follow the Indian model, are we to choose the Hindustani system, or the Carnatic?

I resolve this problem, I continue, not as Schoenberg did, by making the 12-tone scale the One True Scale, but by taking his "atonality" one step further, and denying the existence of any scale whatsoever.

Oh brother, you groan, gently tucking an earbud in each ear, and slowly walking away.

Wait--I shout after you--You're going to ruin your hearing! But the sound of my voice is softly drowned out by the voice of Gillian Welch singing "the devil had a hold of me..."

Don't worry, we have an awesome plan

It is an odd conviction to hold that one's ideology permits of no fanatical variant (isn't this insistence on purity itself a fanatical variant?) but this is precisely what is being argued across the blogosphere, presently, in reference to the charge that there is such a thing, in theory if not in practice, as "fundamentalist atheism."

Timothy Garton Ash writes to this end, in his new collection of essays Facts Are Subversive, that "there are no al-Darwinia brigades making bombs in secret laboratories in north Oxford.” Clever, but specious. Fundamentalist and terrorist are not synonyms, as John Gray points out (though he shouldn't have to) in his New Statesman review of Ash's book. It is an open question whether all terrorists are fundamentalists, I suppose, but it is certainly not true that all fundamentalists are terrorists, or even criminals of any stripe. In fact the proportion is vanishingly small.

Furthermore, the fact that one of the major fault lines today between theism and atheism is "al-Darwinia" is a red herring. The real reason that atheists are supposed to be incapable of fundamentalism is because the values of the Enlightenment (not atheism per se, but its wellspring) are a hedge against intolerance. But this proposition was falsified long before Mao, Stalin and Pol Pot (who massacred, it is true, not "in the name" of atheism, but instead in the name of a putatively scientific ability to engender political and economic fairness at the point of a sword) in the terror of Robespierre. The brigades of the eminently rationalist and vehemently atheist "al-Jacobin" and "al-Marx" were all too numerous and all too real.

Dawkins is not, by a long shot, bin Laden, and Dennett is not Pol Pot, or even Robespierre. Every "New Atheist" I have ever heard of has affirmed a commitment to democracy and the rule of law, and with the exception of Sam Harris, none has offered violence as an answer to the ideological conflicts that concern them. But this is not the charge that Gray and others are making. Rather the charge of "Atheist fundamentalism" is not of lawlessness and violence but one of a certain rhetorical Manichaeism, which many of its defenders freely own up to, as does Jerry Coyne when he approvingly cites the Economist editiorial which states:

Finally, there is the bogus equivalent with atheist certainty and religious certainty. Yes, Answers in Genesis is certain that the world is 6,000 years old, and Richard Dawkins is certain that it isn't. The fact is that only one of them is right, and I'm going to say it right here: it's Mr Dawkins. There is a difference—call it a fundamental one—between being certain and wrong and being certain and right. (my emphasis)

This is a benign (and somewhat misleading) example of a fairly malignant creed, since "Mr. Dawkins" is only given the benefit of a negative belief in Young Earth Creationism, as opposed to the positive belief of same put forth by AiG . But if only negative beliefs were at issue, and we were dealing entirely with a phenomenon of skepticism, there would be much less cause for concern. Instead, the "certainty" on offer extends to a number of extremely dodgy propositions that collectively form the pseudo-science of neo-atheism: that religion is inherently antagonistic to reason, that teaching the doctrine of hell to a child is worse than locking him up in a dungeon or dashing his teeth out, that religion is the result of the activity of "memes," that mockery and name calling are effective forms of impacting public debate, and many related others.

There are many complicated factors which tip more or less lawful and civil displays of "certainty" into acts of terror. I don't predict here that the neo-atheist certainty of knowing what's best, and what's worst, for the people of the world will cross over to a kind of despotism comparable with Stalin's. (The present confluence, however, of market capitalism and commodification with scientific omnicompetance and "humanism" offers us a kind of more subtle despotism to contend with in the meanwhile). The argument is not in the likelihood, given all that we know, but in the possibility, that benign ideologies can take a darker form. Garton Ash, Coyne, PZ Myers, Ophelia Benson, among so many others are writing, in effect, "a dark side to atheism? Don't make me laugh." But none of us are completely immune to the totalitarian impulse. (That includes myself, and my gentle readers.) The first warning of such an impulse, historically, is the reassurance that one's ideology has a failsafe against it, which usually means the opposite.

Isaac Chotiner has a revealing response to Gray in TNR, in which he writes

Whether or not Lenin and Mao were "avowed" disciples of an Enlightenment ideology is beside the point. The real question is whether they practiced what Gray calls "Enlightenment values." And the clear answer to that question is no. But Gray makes the leap from one to the other--while admitting that perhaps they "misapplied" the values of the Enlightenment--without seeming to realize that this renders his argument moot.

Chotiner seems to be making a distinction between the stated values of an ideology (in this case the Enlightenment) and its potential for corruption. Fair enough, but isn't this the exact claim directed against religion by the neo-atheists? Christianity may preach love and forgiveness, but all too often it succumbs to tribalism and intolerance. Islam may call itself a religion of peace, but all too often it is an instrument of intolerance. Chotiner is correct to level the playing field here and note that theistic and atheistic ideologies are equally susceptible to regression away from their best ideals, though he seems unaware in doing so he is arguing Gray's case. Such a susceptibility is a human failing that no ideology can completely overcome. Vigilance against it is required of each of us, eternally.

To Coyne a Fray

When I was 7 or 8 years old, the preferred expression of schadenfreude in my corner of the globe was "Snag!" or sometimes, "Snag, you're busted." It might have been a fishing metaphor; I"m not sure. I've never heard it anywhere, or anywhen, else. But it was always on our tongues at that age, ready to pounce on the smallest deviation from the ever-important ideal of coolness.

The tone of this expression pops readily to mind when I consider the surprising glee taken by Jerry Coyne and his coterie over having come up with the (admittedly clever) cudgel-word "Faitheist" (faith + atheist) to denote those unbelievers who are, apparently, "soft on faith."

To Coyne, I imagine, I'm a faitheist (though I don't feel "soft" on anything.) That's fine; it's just a word, and I'm not concerned about having to ride the back of the bus anytime soon, even if it has one of those new "There's probably no god" ads on the side.

But it is nonetheless a term of derision, a dismissal of a point of view by means of an ad-hom, and I'm surprised to see its hearty endorsement by people who are supposed to eschew playground taunts for rational and thoughtful conversation, like (among others) philosopher Russell Blackford, who calls the term "neat." Blackford admits that the term has a mocking quality, and is relatively candid about the frustration that has led him to embrace it, when he writes, in comments:

It would be nice to live in a world where no one is ever called names, no one is ever sarcastic or nasty, nobody ever gets exasperated, all argument is totally civil and reasoned, all points are engaged rather than evaded, etc. But we don't live in that world, and I'm sick of the idea that it's okay for our opponents, such as these faithiests (not to mention the religious themselves) to be very nasty indeed, while a double standard applies requiring us so-called "New Atheists" to bend over backwards to be nice and not make the slightest fun of anyone else.

Frustration, hurt feelings, and emotional excitement are common human failings, and they are eminenently forgivable. But Blackford seems here to be trying to rationalize his defense of playground terms by appealing to a sense of fairness that should have been left behind with the jacks and swing sets long ago.

All adult, grownup behavior is subject to a double standard. That is the definition of adulthood in the post-Vendetta phase of human civilization. The values of the enlightenment (which Blackford so passionately defends) are subject to a double standard. They are superior to the illiberality which preceded them even when all parties to a dispute do not employ them. Jurisprudence is subject to a double standard, as we are tragically aware in the wake of the Bush administration. Though our enemies may engage in torture, we may not retaliate in kind, because we believe in something more important than vengeance.

Blackford continues "There is room in this world for words and arguments that make fun of opponents." And indeed there is. But I find it difficult to square the active carving out of this room with the kind of vision for humanity his philosophy suggests (one that I share in many particulars).

And so I want to ask Russell (with whom I've had several civil disagreements), directly, do you really stand behind Coyne's bringing into the world (already so full of fractiousness) more terms of dismissal and derision? Quite apart from the matter of civility, there is the very practical complication of words like this obstructing understanding between ideological groups that have so much in common. Is this really a needful instrument in the Enlightenment enterprise? Has such an enterprise now shrunk to exclude all but your closest and most stout allies? I am finding it hard to understand how a post about name-calling is even worth the time it took you to type it.

Posting will resume on a regularish schedule on Tuesday or thereabouts. Please click on one of the fine links in the right nav bar in the meanwhile, and tell 'em underverse sent ya.

Nullity

Richard Dawkins' continued status as the "the most formidable intellect in our public discourse" notwithstanding, I'm becoming concerned that neo-atheism is a mind-softening ideology. On July 7th, Andrew Brown recounted, at his blog, a chance meeting with Daniel Dennett, who is conducting a pilot study [scroll down] on atheist members of the clergy (Or is he? I've provided a hyperlink to the google cache page, captured on June 15th; Dennett's study does not presently appear on the list of research abstracts on the Tufts University Research News page, though all the other abstracts are the same). These clerics Dennett characterized as "brave" for speaking out, though according to the research abstract, as well as Brown's report they will remain "in the closet" throughout and following their interviews.

We can see the first glimmers of this project, perhaps, in Dennett's remark in the Guardian last year that "The seminaries and churches are full of atheist clergy" who only persist in the charade to keep the masses down. It's a compelling tale; are the only sincerely religious people these days the suckers, after all? Is the robustness of religious adherence today really the result of a Straussian conspiracy to keep Joe and Martha Six-Pack from being more Freethinking?

Much hinges on the meaning of the word "atheist" here, and I fear that Dennett is being somewhat Jesuitical in his usage. The other day I quoted his definition of religion from "Breaking the Spell." Here it is again:

If what [some believers] call God is really not an agent in their eyes, a being that can answer prayers, approve and disapprove, receive sacrifices, or mete out punishment or forgiveness, then, although they may call this being God, and even stand in awe of it, their creed ... is not really religion in my definition.

That such a definition would exclude entire congregations (butts-in-pews, not theologians) who self-report as Christians indicates to me it lacks a certain precision. Last week, reporting from a series of faith symposia at Cambridge's Darwin celebration, Dennett expanded [via Jerry Coyne] on this idiosyncratic notion of what religious "belief" really is, writing that Claremont Theologian Phillip Clayton

astonished me by listing God’s attributes: according to his handsomely naturalistic theology, God is not omnipotent, not even supernatural, and . . . . in short Clayton is an atheist who won’t admit it.

The jig is up, Clayton! Wait... Just what ideology is he not admitting to? Dennett's depiction of "closeted atheist clergy" describes ministers and priests who publicly transmit religious beliefs they do not privately hold. And certainly such clerics exist; Mother Theresa may have been one at points in her life (though we should be careful not to reduce her anguished doubt to simple subterfuge.) But Dennett did not get Clayton to disclose his views at a secret meeting of the Illuminati; they conversed freely at a high-profile event at a major university, covered by the press, and self-reported by both Dennett (at Coyne's blog) and Clayton (at his own). If that's closeted, I can't wait to see his coming out party.

Clayton has also posted to his website the paper that so astonished Dan Dennett, in which he denies anything essentially Christian (or Judaic) in the fundamentalist doctrines of biblical inerrance and literalism, intelligent design, the uniqueness of humanity (that is requiring a supernatural cause), and the direct intervention of a "agent" God. (Dennett might have been less astonished at these assertions if he'd shown more interest in actual theology when writing his "empirical" study of religion rather than relying on his own unsubstantiated folk beliefs).

The part that really makes me worry for Dan's mental acumen, though, comes later in the report, in a swipe at biologist Michael Ruse:

Ruse declared that while he is an atheist, he wishes that those wanting to explain religion wouldn’t start with the assumption that religious beliefs are false. He doesn’t seem to appreciate the role of the null hypothesis or the presumption of innocence in trials.

The null hypothesis is a methodological tool designed to check one's own confirmation bias and other errors in defining the terms of a problem. It has little to do with what working hypothesis a scientist begins with. Whether we begin with the proposition that there are fairies in the garden, or that there are no fairies in the garden, we can temporarily nullify our proposition to see if the data might be consistent with multiple claims.

If we think, for example, that we've verified our hypothesis that there are fairies in the garden because we laid out Turkish delight (their favorite food) at night and found it gone in the morning, we might then test our results against the null hypothesis (that there are no fairies in the garden) by remembering that other entities might also like to eat Turkish delight in the garden at night. On the other hand if we think we've verified our hypothesis that there are no fairies in the garden by setting up surveillance cameras, we would want to allow that the fairies may be away at a fairy convention for the weekend. In each case the null hypothesis helps us clarify the terms of our proposition so that we can draw more valid conclusions.

For Dennett to declare that the null hypothesis would help determine which assumptions we begin with on any particular question makes me wonder if he is just phoning it in these days, or, to borrow a classic Dennettian trope, "playing tennis without a net."

The full text of his abstract follows.

***

PI: Dennett, Daniel
Title: Qualitative Pilot Study - Closeted Non-Believing Clergy
Abstract: The objective of this study is to explore possibilities for a larger study on the disconnect between what closeted atheist clergy believe and what they preach, and the impact it has on their personal lives, their congregations and society. This small pilot study will include three to five respondents, all mainstream Christian clergy, who receive scholarly information about biblical and Christian history during seminary training. A series of individual interviews (IDIs) will be conducted - three 90 or 60 minute interviews with each respondent. These will be strictly confidential, and great care will be taken to ensure the anonymity of respondents in any sharing or publication of the data gathered. The first interview and preferably all interviews will be in person, but for logistical or cost reasons, some may be conducted over the phone.

Initial recruiting attempts will be via personal contacts (e.g., clergy and seminary acquaintances, non-believing clergy who have already made contact). If that is not successful, more public methods will be attempted (e.g., advertising in a clergy-related magazine or journal, mentioning the study during conferences and public talks). Prospective respondents will be asked if they would be willing to be contacted about participating in a study on skeptical clergy (or another benign, non-threatening euphemism), assuring them of confidentiality, etc. Then, they will be asked a few screening questions (based on criteria such as type of academic degree, length of parish experience, denomination) to get some background and make sure they qualify. Typically, a professional recruiter would do this — to keep the researcher from forming a relationship with the respondent before the interviewing begins. However, this is unfeasible in the pilot phase, when we are not completely sure of what we are looking for or will accept, and do not want to dissuade potential respondents by involving additional people in the interviewing process.

Topia

John Pieret has been doing an excellent series at Thoughts in a Haystack on the philosophical over-reaches of (some) incompatibalists, with especial attention on Jerry Coyne, who appears to be stepping up his bid to be the Morton Downey Jr. of the neo-atheists. Over and over again Coyne affirms that he knows the difference between methodological naturalism and metaphysical naturalism (the former a working practice that can be set aside at one's lunch break, the latter a totalizing ideology about what is and is not real in the world), and again and again proceeds do violence to this distinction by calling science a "world view." He has made this mistake so often that even the Discovery Institute has noticed, and it is to the shame of the atheiosphere in general that they have offered one of the most lucid critiques of Coyne's argument.

The whole series is worth reading at your leisure; no post is more than a few paragraphs. The most recent one deals again with the problematic blurring of science as a method and as a metaphysical dispositon, this time as propounded by NYU Professor of "New Media" Clay Shirky. Shirky is arguing against the "Doctrine of Joint Belief" (what divinity school is that from?) and on his way to a head of steam he states:

The Doctrine of Joint Belief isn't evidence of harmony between two systems of thought. It simply offers permission to ignore the clash between them.

"Permission to ignore the clash" is an odd way to single out what is perhaps the most important function of the rational mind. As a good computer scientist like Shirky knows, reasoning is esentially a process of modeling, by which we code our experience according to symbolic categories. It seeks meaning through that symbolic assonance we call harmony. There will always be spoilsport data to remind us that this harmony is symbolic, and not actual, at which point we have two choices: we can revise the model to accomodate the new facts, or we can say good enough; it works. The lunar module lands safely, the medicine works with tolerable side effects, the butterfly-wing crypsis evades predators (differentially). The critic who objects that the models are not perfect in these cases is rightly dismissed as either a wet blanket or an idealist; someone who can't see the pragmatic side of scientific reasoning. (On the other hand, sometimes this wet blanket turns out to be a Copernicus, or an Einstein.)

In either case it is inherent to rationality that it "ignore the clash" (which is always waiting to be discovered by the next spoilsport) at least long enough for us to judge the value of the model. The philosophical model which alleges "compatibilty" between science and religion is in this way an emblem of all rational thought when it "offers permission to ignore the clash" between each party to the agreement. To imply otherwise is to promote very misleading ideas about the function of rational discourse that will only deepen an enchantment we are already too reliant upon.

This is not to argue that there are no valid grounds for judging religion and science "incompatible." But I think it's time for the incompatibalists and other neo-atheist evangelists put whatever pragmatic concerns they have about a future where religon and science co-exist on a level playing field, and contrast them with realistic--that is imperfect--counterfactual futures, rather than idealized fantasies drawn from John Lennon songs.

On Imprecision

Through imprecision, I think I gave the impression, in this recent post, that I believe that Jerry Coyne (or anyone) should respect various religious doctrines. (The ones he itemized were "the theologies of Catholicism, Judaism, or Islam.") I don't believe this. Jerry should respect what he does respect, and nothing more. I'm not his schoolmarm, and even if I wanted to proscribe what he (or anyone) should respect, it would not be respect that filled the empty space, but something much paler, and more rote.

I myself don't respect, in passing, many, or even most forms of the Abrahamic religions. I don't respect, as such, dullness, cravenness, obsequience, and appeals to authority that offer nothing other than security or relief from agency.

What I reject is the idea, so often presented by the neo-atheists, that religous observance is reducible, without closer inspection, to mere superstition, that belief in divinity must be an expression of cowardice, and that someone like Daniel Dennett can, from a distance, liken a believer--on the basis of belief alone--to a frightened cat who needs to be talked down from a tree, when he writes:

Like a revivalist preacher I say unto you, O religious folks who fear to break the taboo, Let go! Let go! You'll hardly notice the drop!

Some religious observance has this quality of grasping and white-knuckling against the breaking of a taboo; perhaps most of it. Freud believed that religion was an infantile projection of our wish for an omnipotent parent who would ensure our safety, in the next world if not in this one, and who can deny that a great bulk of adherence to religious doctrine has something like this within it? But we must oppose the insistence that adherence to religion can serve as a marker for this attitude, that affirmation of doctrine is itself enough information for us to judge an infantile cast of mind. We may disagree with the details of Kierkegaard's ontology, but his expression of faith was manifestly not a reaching out for comfort and security. Nor was Chesterson's or Lewis's.

Dennett writes (this and the former quote are from Breaking the Spell):

If what [some believers] call God is really not an agent in their eyes, a being that can answer prayers, approve and disapprove, receive sacrifices, or mete out punishment or forgiveness, then, although they may call this being God, and even stand in awe of it, their creed ... is not really religion in my definition.

Fair enough; we all reserve the right to fine-tune and negotiate our language for the sake of clarity. But it follows from this that many self-defined religious people are not only excluded from Dennett's definition, but also from the opprobium he automatically attaches to the phenomenon. Is Dennett aware that most Judaic creeds, for example, neither promote nor permit petitional prayer? This obviates, even among deeply pious Jews, a significant part of Dennett's defintion of what true religion is. Similarly, whatever may go on in the Christian megachurches, there are substantial numbers of everyday Christians (not just "theologians") who worship a God who bears few of the traits that Dennett--or Freud--or Coyne or Dawkins, itemize as characteristic.

This wouldn't be a problem if the neo-atheists took more care to (consistently) specify what they were speaking against. Unfortunately it is sufficient only that a person declaim a religious belief, of whatever stripe, to fall under the rubric of "deluded," or "under a spell." Dawkins, in The God Delusion and elsewhere makes some half hearted exceptions for "Deists" but takes no more pains than any of the others to ask what a person might mean that, for example, Christ is his or her savior. There are, after all, mulitple interpretations on offer, and more surely to follow.

All of which is to say that I don't argue that respect is intrinsic to any religious doctrine specifically, or to the religious impulse generally. Rather I reject as sloppy and imprecise (unscientific, one might say) the notion that religion as self-reported is deserving of disrespect, and of disdain. Far from the stereotype of the cowering, sheeplike supplicant, religious adherence can be, and often is, an expression of (among other things) openness, vulnerability, and acceptance of the unknown, all of which indicate to me a courageousness that exceeds the so-called bravery of putting a red "A for atheist" on a blog splash page.

Charles and Percy

Josef Johann takes issue with my recent post asserting that it is some other cultural element, and not science (as we commonly use that term), that orients our interest in, and search for, truth and truths. We might capsulize this view with the line from Shelley that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." Johann is not happy with the diminished role this reserves for science, responding that such an impoverished definition omits, for example, "the science that communicates the profound massiveness of Arcturus":

It's not the science that's sensitive to the onslaught of sensory information you experience in a kiss. It's not even the science that elegantly traces the simple net of balancing forces and frictions that somehow hold my stack of books together in my under-shelved room

I sympathize with the sentiment that applied science need not be sterile, and that in practice it must be integrated with the world we are moved by, not just the one we dispassionately observe. It is a kind of apologia one finds in much of Richard Dawkins' writing, most notably Unweaving the Rainbow, and may be summarized in the famous quotation by Charles Darwin that "there is grandeur in this view of life."

This would be an unobjectionable response to a criticism such as Iris Murdoch's, (quoted in my original post) that science must defer to the cultural forms that determine our ethics and metaphysics (namely, philosophy and art). After all, science contributes to our ethical and ontological pictures of the world. The two can hardly be separated. What makes the matter more complicated, however, is that there are two implicit definitions of "science" in play here, and by privately attenuating between them an argument like Johann's tries to have it both ways.

Science, considered correctly, most absolutely has a creative, visionary function. Innovative and revolutionary hypotheses appear to have the same wellspring as poetry and drama (not to mention myth and religion), from which new pictures of reality leap into place of a piece: the Ouroboros of Kekule's benzene rings, the spiral staircase of Crick and Watson's double helix, the critical role of husbandry to Darwin's thought on selection. Though these and other scientific models would later become refined and legitimated through measurement and observation, there is nothing evidentiary within hypothesizing itself. The creation of models in science it itself a poetic function.

The obvious and critical distinction between the visions and metaphors employed by science, and those employed by art or religion is that the former undergo a merciless process of testing that the latter do not. We call the ring structure of benzene a description and not a story. We call the myth of Ouroboros a story and not a description. (It is a matter of debate whether the pre-Christian ontologies which employed the Ouroboros and similar myths such as the Greeks or Norse also literally believed in a giant snake who ate its own tail; if any did, to them it would be both a story and a description). But in each case they are, in the first place, visualizations. This then is the broader definition of science, which shares significant commonality with the realms of poetry and mythography before departing on its own unique excursion of quantification (without which no experiment is possible) and verification.

(If we replace the words description and story, above, with logos and mythos, we have a good case study in the contrast between literal and metaphorical understanding, but the point to remember for this discusson is that an idea must originate as a story before it can become a description).

There is a deep strain of rationalism in the sciences which is more than a little bit sheepish about this poetic element of scientific understanding. Reason does not--cannot--produce the initial visionary flash that generates scientific ideas. It can only take these ideas as given and evaluate them methodologically. The ideas themselves come from elsewhere; from the imagination. (In this sense all great scientists are, we are tempted to say, also great poets. But this conclusion tends to give short shrift to those scientists whose real talents were strictly methodological, like Francis Bacon, who made no real theoretical contributions to our understanding of the world).

This leaves us with a difficulty when talking about the vitally important creative function of scientific discovery. Who gets to claim Einstein, Maxwell, Darwin, or Harvey at that moment when they were revolutionizing the way we picture reality: the scientists, or the poets?

It need not be a zero-sum problem, of course. We only create the dilemma by insisting that poets and scientists are two separate and non-overlapping social roles, or that they call upon separate and non-overlapping forms of cognition. This is, as Johann rightly indicates, a myth:

This is the popular myth that Schoen is invoking- that there is a mutual exclusivity between our sense of humanity and the perspective we obtain by being scientific, and that therefore we must perform a balancing act that involves appreciating religious, poetic, artistic contributions to understanding, as though they presided over ontologically distinct realms.

But to the extent I "invoke" this myth, I only do so to describe it as the natural consequence of pitting science and poetry oppositionally, rather than as different locations on a continuum we all navigate the full length of: When we describe the massiveness of Arcturus as "profound," we have left the language of facts for the language of judgment; of quantity for quality. It's necessary that all of us, scientists included, should do this in the course of our thought and speech. To say, with Murdoch, that quality must precede quantity does not indicate, as Johann takes it to, that they are at odds ("juxtaposed against" each other, in his words)--unless we find ourselves so over-identified with the quantificational aspect of science that the very notion of qualities seems hostile. I think Johann would agree with me that this description paints a Vulcan-like parody of the scientific stance that very few people actually try to occupy (though there are extreme examples like Peter Atkins who deny poetry any valuable function whatsoever).

Scientists are, in other words, as welcome as anyone to make judgments, to speak of qualities, and to offer imaginative visions of how the world might be. They do not, however, have a special right to privilege these kinds of statements on the strict and sole justification that they are scientists. If they want to join the poets as "unacknowledged legislators of the world," they may do so, fraternally, as equals, but certainly not as interlopers.

***

[For a more substantial and lucid examination of the role of science in culture I can't recommend more highly Science and Poetry (2003) by Iris Murdoch's colleague and friend, the philosopher Mary Midgley.]

The Me Delusion

The above ad for Richard Dawkins' upcoming book has not been photoshopped. You can check for yourself by scrolling down on the splash page at his website.

I realize that authors do not generally write their own marketing copy. But they are given a chance to vet it, and perhaps request that a line like "from the most formidable intellect in public discourse" be toned down just a hair. It's one thing to believe you are the smartest person in all the world, quite another to shout this belief from the parapets.

It would be easy

As a break from my criticism of Jerry Coyne here and in comments at his place, I do want to commend him for two posts he's done recently against genetic determinism, here (on the false promises of pinpointing specific genes for complex patterns of behavior like schizophrenia or alcholism) and here (on the false promises of evolutionary psychology.)

Avast!

It's theoretically possible, of course, that Ophelia Benson is making a self-deprecating joke when she calls Chris Mooney her white whale, perhaps even confessing to a kind of humorless monomania that sneaks into her writing from time to (all the) time. But the best I can tell from the piece is that her casting herself as Ahab is just more evidence that our unconsciouses are much, much smarter than we are.

Hang in there, Ophelia!

A simple point

I don't know for certain what Chris Mooney means when he says that "faith and science are perfectly compatible," but when I say a thing like this I mean (and am usually careful to emphasize) that they are compatible all things being equal. Or, more precisely, that they are not intrinsically incompatible, and that nothing in any specific case of incompatibility can be reduced to religion or science generally. (Sean Carroll admitted as much a few weeks back, but then tried to sneak in the same argument in disguise, contending that, while not a priori incompatible, science and religion are actually incompatible in practice because "in the real world, they reach incompatible conclusions." I have already discussed why even this is a massive and misleading over-generalization.)

So it is not clear to me what Ophelia Benson thinks she is refuting when she cites, via Austin Cline, the 2006 Pew Center report which found that 42% of Americans reject evolution, even though they know that it is universally accepted by biologists. This is a well publicized study, and it's central to the compatibility debate. Mooney himself is obviously aware of its findings, since he discusses them in his book. Does Benson think Mooney (or any other "accomodationist") is trying to argue that science is always compatible with religion, or that the exceptions are necessarily insignificant? Or that we shouldn't care that just under half of all Americans report that they disbelieve in evolution?

I wonder how Benson or Cline would respond to the assertion that democracy and equal rights are compatible. Certainly the statistics show that there are huge disparities of wealth and opportunity in this country, and anyone who cares to drive through our cities can see the stark, largely racial, contrasts in less time than it would take to look these statistics up. Women still make 75 cents for every dollar earned by men (and the gap is getting worse), although they constitute a slight demographic majority. Does this falsify our thesis? Or is the compatibility between democracy and equality likely to be an incomplete truth, like the one between religion and science--like most interesting truths are? There are, after all, ways in which democracy exacerbates social ills, since it tends to promote (in Sean Carroll's "real world") short term self-interest. This is something with which we all have to contend.

What Benson, Cline, Carroll, or Coyne cannot show is that the fundamentalist rejection of evolution is an essential expression of religion, any more than East St. Louis is an essential expression of racial harmony in a democratic society. Specific conflicts such as these are enormous problems in our culture. They will be difficult to surmount. Drawing sweeping and simplistic conclusions about which social forces are the positive ones, and which the negative, is not likely to be a very successful method of addressing these problems, though it is no doubt satisfying to people who prefer being right to being engaged.

Sock it to me

Jerry Coyne asks a question that deserves a serious answer.

He begins by pulling some Scientologist mythology off of Wikipedia, having to do with the galactic ruler Xenu, who purportedly vanquished, 58 million years ago, some unfortunates called the Thetans, who were then banished to a death camp planet called Teegeeack (our Earth) and ultimately brainwashed and "disembodied." What few bodies were left were colonized by clusters of these brainwashed souls, and we humans are, according to the lore, their descendants, in need of the clarifying power of Scientology to erade the false beliefs of those poor deluded thetan souls who still adhere to our thoughts.

Having recounted this tale, Coyne asks: how does it "materially" differ from the equally untrue narratives of the world religions? Given that religious doctrines are all equally untrue, why are the theologies of Catholicism, Judaism, or Islam deserving of any more respect than the hackneyed sci-fi cosmology of L. Ron Hubbard?

The easy answer is that they are not; that truth is the great equalizer, and that any one falsehood or fantasy is as needless and deluded as another. But I think a thoughtful answer to Coyne's question has to dig a little deeper than this. I won't be able to totally exhume this more thoughtful answer in a single post, but I'll try to at least raise some of the relevant ideas needed in such a reply.

My first response to Coyne would require putting aside, for the moment, the question of veridical truth claims, knowing that we will return to it before we are through. We first must turn to narrative generally--to literature and related forms--and establish right away that in terms of narrative content alone there is an immense difference in "respectability" between great works and doggerel. Even granting "guilty pleasures" (like summer blockbusters, for example) a potentially important role in our culture, most of us are able to make a distinction between art that gratifies our fantasies, and art that communicates some kind of deeper truth about the world that transcends our need for our personal desires to be met.

I lately wonder if the neo-atheist sensibility, with its restricted and constrained sense of what "truth" is, can allow such a statement to pass unchallenged, and perhaps I'll have the pleasure of finding out. Perhaps we will find there is not even a small island of agreement upon which we can say together that Shakespeare (to choose an uncontroversial example) is great at least in part because he portrays the human condition and predicament as it is, without regard to consolation. It's possible this position could be seen as a threat to the notion (approaching a sacred, talismanic status) that science is the only discipline that can reveal anything that would properly go by the name of "truth."

Such a view has come to be common-sensical, and it is instructive to revisit the vigorous and heretical challenge by Iris Murdoch, who wrote in 1962, in a push-back against C. P. Snow,

It is totally misleading to speak of two cultures, one literary-humane and the other scientific, as if these were of equal status. There is only one culture, of which science, so interesting and so dangerous, now plays important part. But the most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education on how to picture and understand human situations. We are men and we are moral agents before we are scientists, anf the place of science in life must be discussed in words. This is why it is and always will be more important to know about Shakespeare than to know about any scientist and if there is a Shakeseare of science, his name is Aristotle.

Put in these terms, we must grant poetry a truth function. If poetry were merely beautiful, it would be of interest only to hedonists. It's trivially true that poems are, veridically speaking, "just" stories, but I think we have to doubt whether without these untrue truths we'd even have a culture to conduct science within in the first place. We respect great writers and artists in part because of their considerable technical skill and aesthetic sensibility, but also significantly because they do not shrink from portraying a truthful vision whose price is paid in the personal experience of pain.

(This speaks, incidentally, to another of Coyne's questions: "I am still waiting patiently for someone to tell me one thing that religious people know is true, and that the knowledge whereof came uniquely from faith." One important thing that most major religions can make us know (though they don't always succeed) is that we are all connected. This may sound like an imprecise or wishy washy thing to say, but if we reflect on it it has huge implications for how we think about our lives. Buddhism and Hinduism both teach that we are literally each other, and that our apparent separateness is just an illusion. Certain things follow from this regarding our pursuit of personal gratification. Christianity and the other Abrahamic religions don't make this quite as central, but it's a big part of the Christ myth, for example, which is a paradigmatic example of transcending the self, of being liberated from the neurosis of egoism.)

Against all of this, the patient objection may now be made that whatever meaning a theological doctrine may contain, it is nevertheless not truthful the way physics and biology are truthful. Two rhetorical paths follow from this observation, and only one will be useful here. (The other is the "postmodern" examination of scientific semotics, going back to Heinrich Hertz's discussion of mass and force as "fictions," but this discussion is far too liable to degrade into a referendum on the correspondence theory of truth, of which the ability of a jet airliner to safely fly (and land!) or of some other modern marvel is said to constitute irrefutable proof.) Here the concession must be made that a number of people, possibly a majority of "religious" people generally, do literally hold that the acts of god as revealed in scripture are as true (or more so) as the data in any common science textbook. Is it perhaps not too credulous for a modern mind in this day and age to believe that a shrub "burned" but consumed no fuel, that a man lived inside a fish for 10 days without suffocating or being digested, or that all breeding pairs of all known heterozygous species were able to harmoniously share space on a single ship built according to the technological limitations of the 10th c. BCE? Is there anything inherently respectable in such a belief?

My best answer to this question would probably be that it was still far too generally expressed. It would be easy to conjure in our minds a hypothetical example of an unschooled rube, possibly bigoted, possibly lacking in self knowledge, and shielded from empathizing with his fellow humans by the comforting certainty of his dogma. To Coyne, or Dawkins, or Sam Harris, all literal religious belief is of this stripe. But we also have the benefit of calling to mind the writings of Kierkegaard, who brilliantly anticipated the quandary we find ourselves in now, by reversing the question: what's so respectable, so free-thinking, of believing something simply because it's patently true?

That will sound like a joke to a certain cast of mind; it's not. Whether or not we come away from Fear and Trembling any more convinced that there is a god, or that his will should be obeyed, there is no confusing Kierkegaard's "knight of faith" with the hypothetical rube I just described. Kierkegaard managed to make even an absurdly literal theology something more than a laughing stock, by un-yoking faith from sheep-like authority, and counterbalancing it with a rational faculty that cannot guarantee that even a divine universe is not absurd. We are welcome to disagree with Kierkegaard, but, I would argue, not to sneer down at him.

However, let us recall, here, that Coyne does not stipulate that the religious doctrine in question be taken literally (though that it "typically" is so taken in practice is an article of faith for Coyne, notwithstanding any systematic evidence):

If you respect the theologies of Catholicism, Judaism, or Islam more, or give their adherents more credibility than you do Scientologists, why?

Our burden would seem, then, to be much lighter than Kierkegaard's. By respectable, we need only signify that the theology is meaningful, not that it is "true." We are inclined to say that religion is something much more serious than mere literature, but how much of this is due to its centrality, rather than some intrinsic claim to veridical truth? Even professors of literature encounter writings much more casually than the average Christian encounters his myth, scripture and ritual. A Tolstoy scholar doesn't read from War and Peace at the same time each week, or select different passages to focus on depending on the time of year. To a Joyce scholar, Bloomsday is not the same kind of holiday as Easter is even for the near-atheist member of a Unitarian or United Church of Christ congregation. Perhaps it is not the level of truth-content after all, that separates art and religion, but the systematic and ritual way the latter is observed?

This certainly is what seems to have happened to the "content" (such as it is) of Scientology. L. Ron Hubbard was, famously, a writer of pulp science fiction. He wrote Dianetics in the 1930s and 40s entirely without reference to supernatural content. The "theology" of Scientology (which Hubbard showed no signs of literally believing, or believing "in," came later. It is unknown to me how much new Scientology recruits are encouraged to literally believe the story of Xenu. But I am far less concerned (though not unconcerned) with the fact that many Scientologists may literally believe it, as I am with the fact that it is third rate, hack mythography. My lack of respect for it derives from its utter lack of a sublime quality, whether as sci fi or scripture.

I imagine this line of approach will be less than fully persuasive for readers who are thoroughly committed to a bright line between falsehood and truth, and to science's unique ability to divine the latter. As I've written elsewhere, I think this is itself an unempirical mode of thought, and bears more resemblance to a type of mythography (cf The Ionian Enchantment) than to anything truly scientific. But I nonetheless hope I have begun what may be a necessary challenge to the idea that belief in empirical truth is any more inherently respectable than subscribing to the truth of great art and literature. On what grounds would it be so, that are not self-establishing? Perhaps this question will help to reinforce Murdoch's insistence that "we are moral agents before we are scientists," and that "how to picture and understand human situations" must always precede descriptions from a more putatively objective perspective.

Bug Juice

Via Quodlibeta, Richard Dawkins and A.C. Grayling are currently subsidizing an atheist children's camp, Camp Quest UK, in Somerset, England. "That's fine by me," writes James Hannam, and it's fine by me too. But I thought it was cute that the £10 note awarded to the camp-goer who can prove there are no unicorns in the tents will be autographed by Dawkins himself. Every little boy's and girl's dream! (The director of this particular camp, self-declared "geek" Samantha Stein, has her own blog, on which she casually muses that she can't fathom how any of her friends could fail to adore the affable professor, and how such "Dawkins-hatred" even reduces her formerly high esteem of said friends. But, but: it would be irresponsible to read into these observations that a culture of personality or appeal to authority has anything to do with the type of instruction the camp-goers will receive at Camp Quest UK).

Camp Quest, is not new, though this is the first time a location has been offered in the UK. It was founded in 1996, in Cincinatti, as "the first summer camp in US History for the children of the children of ... those who hold to a naturalistic, not supernatural world view." This is a strange way of putting it, since there are literally thousands of summer camps which not only permit and encourage attendance of children of parents of all creeds, but which entirely refrain from instruction in any faith, or indeed reference to any faith. Perhaps what the marketing department meant to write was that Camp Quest was the first camp exclusively for the children of atheists.

That too, is fine by me. I suppose it keeps out the riff raff (and these days, the problem of fundamentalist gad-flies is a real one). But it leads me to wonder, if the camp is designed to encourage free-thinking and rational inquiry, why need it concern itself to teach "that religious belief and doctrines can prevent ethical and moral behaviour"? This is not a matter of skeptical inquiry and rational thought, but of moral and philosophical disposition, and it bears a passing resemblence to the sort of tribalism that neo-atheists like Dawkins claim not to indulge in. Children who attend these camps are apparently being taught that religious ethics are inferior to secular ones, which is a far different thing than being told that secular ones are as good as religious ones.

The Telegraph article notes that one of the camp activities will be to sing John Lennon's "Imagine." I think it's worth asking how the dream of "sharing all the world," and living "as one" is furthered by a programme which focuses on diferences, rather than similarities, and encourages the view, already far too widespread, that there are manifold ways to be wrong, but only one way to be right. (That this is true for math problems does not make it so for ethics or metaethics). One "imagines" Lennon himself, as a boy, finding such a camp a little too constraining for comfort.

Nervous laughter

This is PZ Myers, not long after the cracker incident, counseling his readers to be more freethinking. I've archaicized some of the language, but changed none of the meaning:

Nothing must be held sacred. Question everything. God is not great, Jesus is not thy lord, thou art not disciples of any charismatic prophet. Thou art all human beings who must make thy way through life by thinking and learning, and thou hast the job of advancing humanities' knowledge by winnowing out the errors of generations past and finding a deeper understanding of reality. Thou wilt not find wisdom in rituals and sacraments and dogma, which build only self-satisfied ignorance, but ye can find truth by looking at thy world with fresh eyes and a questioning mind.

(And here's Steve Martin, back when he was funny.

STEVE MARTIN: I promise to be different.
AUDIENCE: I promise to be different.
STEVE MARTIN: I promise to be unique.
AUDIENCE: I promise to be unique.
STEVE MARTIN: I promise not to repeat things other people say.
AUDIENCE: I promise … [Dissolves into nervous laughter.])

Carroll Prevaricates, Kinda

Sean Carroll notices some people arguing in comments at Chris Mooney's blog, as I did here, that not all of what constitutes religion can be typified by the dominant variant of Christianity that commonly surrounds us, or seems to. He replies:

If someone doesn’t believe in the supernatural in any form, including an afterlife or a creator God or any such thing, yet nevertheless prefers to describe themselves as “religious,” there’s nothing I can do to stop them. Such a belief system seems compatible with science, as far as I can tell.

So: Buddhists, Unitarians, and "spiritual" atheists, good news! You've been let into the tent.

But it seems completely crazy to equate “religion” with that kind of worldview as a general principle. It’s not what people think when they hear the word, and it’s not the worldview of the overwhelming majority of people who call themselves “religious.” The vast majority of Christians think that Jesus was standing right there in the room the Sunday after he died; they don’t think it’s an allegory.

I am glad to see that Carroll has replaced his earlier" word "typical with "vast majority." But I'm still not seeing any data here to back it up. That is, how vast does vast need to be before the outliers become statistically insignificant--and--does the set he calls "the overwhelming majority of people who call themselves religious" meet that statistical standard? How atypical, for that matter, is my own anecdotal, personal experience, in which a substantial percentage of my "religious" friends and acquaintances do believe the ascension and resurrection are allegorical events. Well, maybe looking into this problem is just too annoying for science to bother itself with:

Debating about definitions is tiresome. The relevant point is: belief in the supernatural in all its forms, from life after death to the necessity of God to understand the origin of the universe or the special nature of the human soul, is incompatible with what science has taught us about the world. (my emphasis)

Yes, defining one's terms is tiresome. Scientific experiment is tiresome; thankless, in fact! It's much easier to assert things one believes to be true without substantiation, like Aristotle did when he reported that women have fewer teeth than men, or that one can cure insomnia in elephants by rubbing their shoulders with olive oil (actually, maybe that one is true).

But this is not the time or place to resort to an incurious or dogmatic position. We're talking about culture war, after all. Far better, as recent events remind us, to get good solid intelligence on one's supposed enemies before the battles begin, than to have to issue one's half-apology/half apologia over the wreckage, and plead "How could we have known we were wrong? Everyone thought that religion and science were incompatible back then. It was common knowledge!"

Whatever Chris Mooney's shortcomings, he is helping to undermine the kind of plausible deniability that comes from not having asked enough probing questions about a serious matter while one still had the chance.

Is Neo-Atheism a Pseudo Science?

Having argued earlier this week in comments that my main contention with the neo-atheists is not over style (e.g. that they are strident or "shrill,") but over content (they advocate and believe things that seem to me to be not true), I'm going to partially contradict myself here and point to a huge stylistic concern, and that is the tendency for so many neo-atheists to go off half-cocked; how unempirical their claims so often are are. Here, for example, is Sean Carroll, as quoted on Jerry Coyne's blog:

The reason why science and religion are actually incompatible is that, in the real world, they reach incompatible conclusions. It’s worth noting that this incompatibility is perfectly evident to any fair-minded person who cares to look. Different religions make very different claims, but they typically end up saying things like “God made the universe in six days” or “Jesus died and was resurrected” or “Moses parted the red sea” or “dead souls are reincarnated in accordance with their karmic burden.” And science says: none of that is true. So there you go, incompatibility. [my emphasis]

It is striking right off the bat, how loosely these supposed "typical" religious claims are related, and how Carroll fails to tie them to any specific, reducible, religious trait.

Two of Carroll's examples are Judeo-Christian, one is specifically Christian, and the last can be found in a number of the "advaita" (non-dualist) family of religions that includes Buddhism and Hinduism. In the "real world," all four are differently interpreted by adherents to those religions. Does Carroll provide statistics on how many Christians or Jews literally believe the Genesis myth? Does he suggest a certain ratio above above which we can accurately call the literal interpretation of these beliefs "typical" or below which we can say that the minority of non-literal believers are not actually religious? Is there in fact anything scientific about Carroll's statement at all, beyond a broad and vaguely defined hypothesis of religion as a source of unscientific truth claims?

These kind of assertions about the self-evidence of religious incompatibility with science remind me of the pre-renaissance belief that heavier objects fall to earth faster than lighter ones. A casual, unexamined type of empiricism had "confirmed" this suspicion for centuries: just look at how much more leisurely leaves and feathers and snowflakes fall, compared to stones and cannonballs. It took a Galileo to look more closely at the factors involved, to isolate and differentiate mass, acceleration, and resistance from one another to derive a more complex explanation of the factors at work.

To the extent this kind of work is done at all it tends not to support the "incompatibilist" position. Anthropologist Scott Atran has tried to look empirically, scientifically, at the phenomena we lump together under the rubric of "religion." His field study of jihadi suicide bombers, for example, has cast serious doubt on many of the causal factors that supposedly link religious fervor and piety to violence and other social evils. On the other hand I have not seen Carroll, Coyne, Dawkins, Hitchens, Weinberg, or any of the others who make these kind of claims make any appeals to science whatsoever, and I suspect it is because there is no science that confirms the kind of folk wisdom that says it's "perfectly evident" that religion is intrinsically antagonistic to reason and human rights.

Here's Coyne from the same blog post I cited Carroll:

It continually amazes me that theologians like John Haught or scientists like Francis Collins can get away with a definition of “religion” that is completely at odds with how most real non-Ph.D-holding humans practice their faith in the real world. To enforce a compatibility between faith and science, you have to water down “faith” until it becomes a vague deism that doesn’t permit its god to interfere in the working of the universe. And that’s simply not the way that most people construe their faith. Note to accommodationists: religion is NOT NECESSARILY the form of faith practiced by university theologians or academic scientists.

To the extent this is true (note again how vague and un-quantified the claims are) it cuts both ways. Not all religion that deviates from the literalist, fundamentalist view is confined to the ivory tower. There are entire sects of the main world religions that adhere, in part or in whole, to what Coyne dismisses as "watered down" religious belief. Religious branches claiming hundreds of millions of participants who do not believe in "Sky Father" gods, or life after death, or creation myths, or any number of the things that religion is supposed to in Carroll's view, in Coyne's view, "typically" engender.

In order to dismiss this contradictory evidence as just "watered down" religion, we need a confirmation bias. We would have to establish that the cruder, more fundamentalist strains are more "essential" somehow. But what is this "essence" of religion? Is it "blind faith"? Then where are the studies that quantify it, and demonstrate some kind of power law distribution that correlates with the social evils Coyne et al (rightly) deride? Where is the science? Why should I believe any of the vague and fuzzy claims about the ills of this ill-defined thing called "religion?

My skepticism, here, is fueled by an awareness of anomalies too numerous and significant to ignore. If "blind" faith is a "typical" component of religion, why is the Dalai Lama publicly announcing that where science contradicts religious claims, those claims should yield? Is Tibetan Buddhism not a "real" religion? If literal understanding of scripture is more authentic than metaphorical understanding, are the Sufis not an authentic sect of Islam? Is the Catholic Church (or any of the mainline Protestant branches) inauthentically religious because it accepts scientific evolution and not scriptural creation as the literal truth? This is the sort of jumble of terms and propositions we normally have when no one has bothered to make a truly scientific inquiry into the problem.

Too, too many scientists are making too, too many unsubstantiated claims about what religion is and how it functions in our culture for this conversation to be fruitful and increase our understanding of how faith and reason interact. My question to them is this: if the most vociferous defenders of the scientific method won't bother themselves to use it in this passionate defense, then who will?

The Sound of One Meme Clapping

Andrew Brown makes the interesting observation that in the American legal system, the government cannot, constitutionally, privilege the truth.

If the government of some hick state were to decide to teach children that Sweden has the highest suicide rate of anywhere in the world or that America fought alongside Britain throughout the second world war (as Tony Blair suggested in his speech to congress) that would be amazingly stupid, but it would not be unconstitutional. If a democratic majority wanted their children taught these things, there would be nothing for the dissenting minority to do but emigrate. They couldn’t claim that the constitution prohibits the teaching of falsehood in schools.

I'm not entirely convinced by this, since there would presumably be some ideological reason for teaching these things, upon which a constitutional challenge could get some purchase. Nevertheless I think Brown gets at something central--though generally occluded--in the science and religion "compatibility" debate currently scorching hillsides throughout the blogosphere.

Scientific naturalism, almost by definition, valorizes truth above all other virtues. Freedom, equality, justice, and democracy cannot be set in place in a naturalist metaphysics until everything in the ledger of True and False has been properly arrayed. This schema is sensible, not least because these other virtues would have questionable value if they were grounded in lies and delusions. It also, as Brown observes, comprises the structure of a particular metaphysical picture, where reason alone has the power to accurately and intelligibly assemble the world. (The fact that this myth may be true doesn't render it any less metaphysical).

However, the Enlightenment values on which the United States was formed take great pains (and I do mean pains--we all feel them) to balance the ethical primacy of accurate knowledge with the universal right to personal belief and to membership in a minority community, even if those beliefs are in contention, or outright false. This is the function of the establishment clause, a very radical protection (for its day) against the kind of monopoly of belief posed by a national religion such as the Church of England.

Because of this function it is not enough to interpret the establishment clause, as a number of neo-atheists have recently advocated, as strictly prohibiting the establishment of a national religion, and no more. To be consistent and effective it must also prohibit any state actor--such as a public school science teacher--from denigrating or delegitimizing active religious belief systems, because such statements amount to a form of state-sanctioned religious persecution.

James Corbett was one such state actor, who was successfully sued by one of his students for teaching that creationism was "superstitious nonsense," and that (among other things) "when you put on your Jesus glasses, you can't see the truth." The accuracy of these statements is not a defense, under the law, and for good reason. It is one thing to speak truth to power, quite another for power to speak truth back. (As The Friendly Atheist writes, a teacher explicitly linking atheism to genocide would be quickly and roundly condemned by everyone now coming to Corbett's defense.) It would not have been actionable if Corbett had restricted himself to denying specific creationist truth claims, such as regard the age of the earth, or if he had vituperated creationism generally outside the classroom. But he spoke, in his capacity as an agent of the state, against the validity or integrity of a protected belief system, and in our system this is not permitted.

This understandably sticks in the craw of anti-religious writers such as Myers, and Brown's post gets at the reason why. This particular battle in the culture wars is over the relative weight of truth and knowledge in relation to other virtues. In his (rhetorical, not legal) defense of his position, Corbett grandiosely invokes Mr. "Know Thyself" himself:

The only virtue for Socrates was “knowledge.” He reached it by questioning the most deeply held beliefs of his students by which I mean all of Athens and ultimately all of us. What troubled the Athenians about Socrates, however, was not listed in the charges. His crime was that he prompted people to think. [my emphasis]

It is a noble and commendable tale, but it does not, and cannot, exist in isolation. A lot has happened in 2,500 years to change the way we organize civilized society, including the nurture and development of a concept of universal rights that neither the mythical nor historical Socrates would have been likely to embrace, if Plato is any kind of an authority. Corbett is free to live out his Socratic fantasies in private life, but he is not free to impose his notion of a unitary virtue of knowledge upon his students as a state agent. (The common objection that questioning authority and received wisdom is not an imposition of values is philosophically bankrupt, since such a process requires sanctifying knowledge and truth in the first place.)

Mythbusters and gadflies are welcome and valuable roles, but it is important to remember that they introduce powerful new myths and ideas in place of the ones they mean to upturn. If we are explicit about this process it can be a very productive enterprise, but if we deny it we run the risk of falling for the very tricky Myth of No Myth, which is, the evidence is plain, one of the most difficult ones to counter.

Myers, Coyne and the other neo-atheists are welcome to frame the "accomodationist" question as a simple story of truth against falsehood, and science against superstition, but if they continue on this line of argument they are going to need better philosophical justifications for installing knowledge alone as the organizing principle of their worldview, especially within a legal and ethical system which for two centuries has been consistent and clear in its demand for equal protection under the law. Let them explicitly argue against the provisions of the First Amendment, and offer their vision of a republic that manages to be just and equitable without these protections. Appeals to truth as though it were self-evidently the highest Good have long ceased to be persuasive.

Easy Answers and their discontents

If I had time to blog today I'd direct you to these two thoughtful posts at Thoughts in a Haystack. I've written earlier about biologist Jerry Coyne's recent campaign to establish that religious beliefs are, by definition, completely incompatible with the scientific method. As Chris Mooney writes, this is a confusion of "methodological naturalism" (the exclusion of all unempirical facts from scientific inquiry) and "philosophical naturalism" which excludes such facts from reality altogether. (I've had things to say about this doctrine in the recent past).

Pieret notes that if Science is to be considered a worldview, rather than a technique, then teaching it to schoolchildren will amount to government endorsement of a philosophy, which is unconstitutional (to which Larry Moran replies, in comments, "change the constitution!" To my mind this betrays a totalitarian sentiment that has run just under the surface of neo-atheism all along.) Pragmatically, this will reduce evolutionary biology to the status of "just another theory" which is what the Creationists have wanted all along.

The physicist Steven Weinberg has more than once issued the famous aphorism that religion causes "good people to do bad things." It's a specious remark, not least because it assumes we have epistemic access to who the really "good" people are, apart from their actions. At best it is a half truth (as Freeman Dyson observed), unless we can rule out the possibility that religion has ever inspired "bad people" to do good things (or that nothing else save religion has ever corrupted an otherwise pure heart). To the great list of dumb statements by smart people (Weinberg is a Nobel laureate), this must be added at high rank. And yet you will see Weinberg's comment approvingly quoted almost universally among neo-atheists, which makes me wonder if it's not true that Smart People will say Smart Things, and Dumb People will say Dumb Things, but for Smart People to Say Dumb Things: that takes bigotry.

Case Study: The Law of the Jungle

I hope that John Pieret will forgive me for making use, again, of home blog advantage to elevate our conversation in comments into a new post.

My sense, though I am not sure, is that John and I agree on the question of "transcendent" versus "non-transcendent" ethics, and are just talking past each other. Though I have been using the word "transcendent" in a very specific sense, we are all a little bit touchy about ideologues using similar language to smuggle a theophany into ethical conversations, and I don't blame John for being on his guard about this. Very briefly I want to try to re-clarify what I mean by the word, and then move on to a famous case study showing the hazards of ignoring it.

In working toward a definition of human nature and intelligence, Kant drew a distinction between the actual and the potential -- that is, the world as it is, and the world as it might be. Even allowing for some porosity between humanity and the "lower" species, it is not controversial to suggest that such a distinction does not exist in any developed form in non-human intelligences. To whatever extent non-human organisms choose their behavior, they do not so do by reasoning among choices, for this would require a symbolic thought process they do not possess. (An exception may be the cetaceans, but we'll leave that aside for now).

The appearance of humanity's faculty to envision potential alternatives to "what is" marks the origin of (among other things) morality, of "ought." Without a system to order our possible choices as preferences, we would be reduced to paralysis.

So far, so good? What is "transcendent" about this state of affairs is that the world of actuality (as described by biology, for example) is now transected by a realm of thought that isn't confined to its borders, and is often in opposition to it. Highly ordered metaphysical schemes like those of Plato or of Christian theology are specific manifestations of this kind of transcendence, but no system of thought is completely free of it. Even supposedly amoral "anything goes" philosophies, like Nietzsche's or Sartre's, stand in opposition to an "actual" state of affairs they wish to disparage, such as traditional Christianity, or "bourgeois" values.

The question that emerges for an ethical system that purports to be "naturalistic" (that is, "non-transcendent"), is this (very old) one: Given our ability to imagine multiple possible worlds (if not, in fact, our inability to refrain from imagining them), what is to be our rationale for choosing among them? Any answer that appeals to biology alone is an abdication of moral reasoning (if not to culture altogether) since it rejects the world of the possible in favor of the world of the actual.

Before it is objected that no moral philosophy would try to explicate an ethical argument in strictly biological terms, let's look at a famous article by the Australian philosopher J.L. Mackie (1917-1981), titled "The Law of the Jungle," and published in Philosophy in 1978.

This paper was one of the first philosophical responses to Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. Dawkins himself was careful in that book not to imply that biological "selfishness" (that is, the persistence of successful traits throughout time) justified psychological egoism. Mackie's take was far less cautious.

The main body of "Law of the Jungle" is a fairly innocuous exploration of a type of group selection that Dawkins overlooked in TSG. But he closes with a palpably ethical conclusion:

What implications for human morality have such biological facts about selfishness and altruism? One is that the possibility that morality is itself a product of natural selection is not ruled out, but care would be needed in formulating a plausible speculative account of how it might have been favoured. Another is that the notion of an ESS may be a useful one for discussing questions of practical morality.

ESS, as readers of TSG know, stands for "Evolutionarily Stable Strategy," which is a type of biological homeostasis worked out by game theorists. ESS theory is called upon to demonstrate why "reciprocal" altruism exists in populations where me might expect a brute selfishness to prevail: since a pugilistic stance is thought to require a huge outlay of energy (having constantly to defend oneself in fights), the smart strategy is suggested to be to lay low and live in harmony until that harmony is disrupted by another member of the population.

Following Dawkins, Mackie cites the example of bird grooming behavior, which ESS theory divides into three types: Sucker, Cheat, and Grudger. The Sucker represents the extreme of complete altruism, removing ticks from other birds without reservation. The Cheat represents pure selfishness, allowing other birds to remove its ticks but never going out of its way to return the favor. The Grudger bridges the difference, grooming other birds with the exception of those who don't reciprocate, who are left out.

Game theory predicts that the Grudger "strategy" of reciprocal altruism will spread through a population, displacing the less sophisticated strategies of pure selfishness or pure altruism. And so it may. And we might pause to notice, as Mackie does, that there is an echo in this strategy of our own concept of fairness.

This is not a problem as far as it goes. Birds have been employed as symbols of justice and wisdom as at least as far back as Athena's owl. We find the flock-as-jury in Farid Ud-Din Attar's allegorical poem "The Conference of the Birds" from the 12th century, and Chaucer's "Parlement of Fowles" 200 years later.

But this is a far different thing than asserting, as Mackie does, that because some birds have evolutionarily developed behaviors which are "healthy in the long run" (whatever that means)and which resemble our own notion of fairness, our notions of fairness are thereby justified. Other far less savory bird behaviors, such as eating the young in a neighboring nest, are apparently just as "Stable" as the grooming example. are they, too, to be adopted? It's not clear why Mackie would single out reciprocal altruism for being stable, when myriad behaviors all across the "selfishness" spectrum persist throughout the biosphere.

After the usual disclaimer that "there is no simple transition from ‘is’ to ‘ought’, no direct argument from what goes on in the natural world and among non-human animals to what human beings ought to do," Mackie goes on to promote exactly that. After linking reciprocal altruism to our modern common sense notions of fairness (although it bears a much closer resemblance to vendetta or blood feud--"An eye for an eye"), he equates the "Sucker" strategy with the philosophy of Jesus, and Socrates, who advocating "repayment of evil with good." Then, switching back to ESS theory, he writes

[A]s Dawkins points out, the presence of suckers endangers the healthy Grudger strategy. It allows cheats to prosper [shades of the "Churchillian atheist" paranoia, here], and could make them multiply to the point where they would wipe out the grudgers, and ultimately bring about the extinction of the whole population. This seems to provide fresh support for Nietzsche’s view of the deplorable influence of moralities of the Christian type.

This attenuation between discussions of biological stability and moral programs happens so quickly it's easy to miss Mackie's move, in this paragraph, of using the "is" of biology to justify ("provide fresh support for") the "ought" of the Nietzschean moral structure. But it's there, in very clear terms.

Mary Midgley, in her famous response to Mackie, which kicked off her ongoing feud with Richard Dawkins (a case study of a "Grudger," in temperament, if there ever was one), points out the fairly obvious shortcomings of such a linkage between evolutionary stability and ethics. Like the birds in the game theorists' model, we appear to be congenitally poised to retaliate against transgressions against us. We need no special help from the world of ideas--the realm of the possible--to remember to do harm to our enemies. As Midgley puts it, "The option of jumping on one’s enemies’ faces whenever possible has always been popular." (We can take "always," here, to mean long before the development of language and reason). She does not, however, suggest we make a wholesale replacement of a strategy of retaliation with a strategy of saintly restraint. She suggests that the ethos of the paying good to evil arose as an intelligent--not dogmatic--response to the limitations of our emotional makeup:

This disregard of the essential emotional context reappears in Mackie’s idea that the undiscriminating ‘sucker’ behaviour is one recommended by Socrates and Christ. Neither sage is recorded to have said ‘be ye equally helpful to everybody’. Both, in the passages he means, were talking about behaviour to one narrow class of people, with whom we are already linked, namely our enemies, and were talking about it because it really does present appalling problems.

She goes on:

Of course charity and forgiveness have their drawbacks too, especially if they are unintelligently practised. As Mackie rightly says, there are problems about reconciling them with justice, and justice too has its roots in our emotional nature. There are real conflicts here as both Socrates and Christ realized. (My emphasis)

The issue becomes one of flexibility and versatility, which are dramatically multiplied in the human capacity to represent things symbolically. Putting this faculty aside in favor of the "wisdom" of our genes seems to me as much a step backward as putting aside Darwinian evolutionary theory in favor of Lamarckianism. Darwin's theory "transcended" the limits of the best explanations of his day, among both proto-evolutionists like Lamarck (and Darwin's own grandfather Erasmus), and theologians, neither of which were adequate to describe the processes he wished to understand. My use of the word "transcendent" in this discussion is not intended to be any more grandiose than that.

Beast and God

In comments, John Pieret of Thoughts in a Haystack writes that our moral systems must derive from empirical sources (such as biology) since we can no longer maintain the illusion of a "transcendent non-empirical framework," (the words are Iris Murdoch's) such as traditional religion.

History has shown that we have never been able to agree on which god [there] might be or what the moral code might look like and that has, as often as not, been the problem, rather than a potential solution. If we can culturally evolve a morality that will let us both deal with our greater abilities to destroy and with each other, so much the better (for us).

A consensus on *a* god -- on *a* "transcendent non-empirical framework" for morality -- is (highly) unlikely to be the solution. [Moral reasoning] has to be a process that looks to reason and our nature as animals as well and evolves toward a consensus -- as we have evolved toward a consensus on, say, the nature of science and the benefits of political freedom. (my emphasis)

I agree with John that a huge problem in ethics is its long standing contamination with the idea that our animal nature is evil--for which we can thank the Gnostic strain in Christianity, as well as the rationalist thinkers of the Enlightenment, who could be very squeamish about the passions. (Midgley's Beast and Man offers a great analysis of this problem.) Ethology has shown us just how many of our ideas about primates and other animals were largely just projections of our own psychological fears and drives, and that to be a primate can really be a noble and gentle thing.

But look where this road leads when you take it to its extreme. No philosopher better exemplified human "naturalness" than Diogenes, who taught that civilization itself was irredeemably corrupt. Who among us would want to live in a world proscribed by his philosophy? Our species has taken the path of civilization, which is different from animal sociality not just in the degree of its complexity, but in kind. We are symbol users who live (and die) by and for ideas, not genetic laws.

This brings us to John's other moral indicator, that highly formalized use of symbols we call "Reason." If we are going to declare that we are abandoning "transcendent non-empirical frameworks," then how are we to decide which ideas to serve with this rational faculty? If "The Good" were self evident, or derivable from scientific experiment, we could replace philosophy with an "ethical science"and be done with it (which, one gets the feeling, a number of scientists, especially cognitive scientists, would prefer we do without delay).

Most contemporary moral philosophers in the analytic tradition tip-toe around this problem in two ways:

1). By surreptitiously referencing non-empirical foundational concepts (such as the Social Contract of Liberal political philosophy or the "total freedom" of the Nietzschean/Existentialist persuasion--each of which rest on a type of social atomism that is purely metaphysical), or

2). By invoking a Millsian utilitarianism, where "The Good" is presumed to be whatever people most desire. (Today that often means health and wealth, though neither presents any inherent ethical superiority over its alternative--which is a point made long ago by both the Cynics and the Stoics. As Murdoch asks, why should we think that what people desire by default is necessarily what they ought to desire? If that sounds moralistic or elitist in your ears, travel back in history until you come across a mass movement that you feel comfortable standing in judgment of. You shouldn't have to go too far.)

Neither response sincerely owns up to the problem posed by a post-Theistic world. If it's true that there is no God to instruct us, and we cannot derive ought from is (that is, we can't use science to elucidate our morality), then where do moral systems come from? The answer is complex, but I think a large part of it must include a recognition that we threw out the baby with the bathwater some time in the last couple of centuries. We thought the death of God also indicated the death of Metaphysics--that is, of imaginative world pictures that define the relations of the observable world. A truly honest inquiry has to admit that as long as we trade in ideas and symbols we cannot do without these world pictures, and if we don't consciously examine them, they will continue to operate upon us unconsciously.

That leaves the enormous problem of which metaphysical structures to support, and which to reject--and on what grounds? (The very question sends me to take refuge in the Vedic cosmology, where the world is a drama, with all parts played by the same Godhead). But nobody said that killing god would make life any easier for us.

To be, or

My friend, the writer and seafood-taster Yosephus, objects to my slander of existentialism, which I declared in a recent post incapable of an altruistic impulse. He suggests that what I meant to say was that what he calls "narcissistic materialists" might be guilty of an anti-altruism stance, but that existentialists are not. (We might list a number of related outlooks that are similarly worshipful of selfishness: Objectivists, Spencerians, National Socialists, Straussians, and certain daft Nietzscheans).

I think we need to pause to make a distinction between what a person is capable of, and what is predicated by that person's philosophy. Even Richard Nixon has got soul, as Neil. Young once sang. No one is a perfect egoist, regardless of the perfection of one's egoism. In that sense I was wrong to imply that existentialism, or any philosophy, precluded the performance of unselfish acts. The question that remains to be answered is: to what extend does existentialism, or any philosophy, encourage egoism?

Let me make further use of this pause to note that I don't particularly like the terms in which this matter is cast when we commit to words like "selfishness" or "selflessness." Orienting a moral discussion around the notion of a self bypasses the question of what this self's nature is, and what its metaphysical relations are to other "selves," to non-human organisms, and so-called inanimate objects. The Hobbesean self, ultimately divisible from all other souls, but not divisible in itself, is a very different thing than the Vedic self (Atman) whose true nature is not individuation but unity with the world soul, or Brahman. And these two are both different from the notion of the self described by cognitive scientists and philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett, for whom the self is a convenient but misleading name for the synergistic activity of mental modules, each of which is composed of submodules, all the way down to the "stupid homunculi" we call neurons.

My objections lie mainly with the work of Sartre, of whom I'm no kind of scholar, and I'll refine my comments here to his exposition. (Yosephus: if there's another writer who better conveys your understanding of existentialism, please let me know). Sartre wrote, nobly enough, in order to to oppose docility and apathy, which he considered the result of external, "deterministic" influences like duty and social order. He might have enjoined his readers to keep their own counsel, or know their own minds, but by invoking what he calls "total freedom," Sartre goes far beyond this type of corrective. Total freedom involves making moral decisions based only upon the self's power to bind itself to the truth, which to Sartre was a vast one.

It is in this vision of the self as morally and epistemologically complete, without need for other minds (living selves, or ideas bequeathed from dead ones) that I see the seeds of egoism. It contributes to an illusory and puffed up sense of our own personal power and abilities, and, conversely, an atrophied conception of our needs. After we exclude God, Sartre writes, "there must be somebody to invent values." And this is true, but we want to resist the temptation to make ourselves in God's image. Fictional though he may have been, he had the advantage of being able to work truly ex nihilo. We will never have this opportunity, since we live in a world populated by other people, each of whom were taught language and meaning by the generation before. There's no way out of this conundrum. Being human means accepting some degree of indoctrination. Some tinkering is always desirable, of course, but this is a far cry from "total freedom." The death of God is not an opportunity for the kind of advancement Sartre has in mind.

It is worth observing that from his position of total freedom, Sartre takes time to reconsider some things (Bourgeous social values and obsolete moral codes) but lets others stand unchallenged--for example the Social Contract theory of Enlightenment philosophers such as Hobbes and Locke, upon which his notion of total freedom is grounded. This speaks partly to the intellectual blind spots we all struggle with; but apart from this, even a mind of unsullied perception would require many lifetimes to evaluate all the pertinent propositions that affect our decision making. Myths which overlook this limitation are not helpful if we have any interest in participating in the ongoing conversation over what is Good, and in living our lives as though this conversation matters.

To take responsibility for ourselves while admitting our (intrinsic, intractable) debt to others seems like a paradox only under a certain restrictive defintition of who "we" are; of what a self is. That's a topic for another day. Suffice it to say that it is in any event a balancing act. To the extent that Sartre and other postwar existentialists conveyed a greater need for this type of balance, I think they made a positive contribution to Western philosophy. To the extent they swung the pendulum away from our relation as parts of a social and biological unity, I think they sadly contributed to the ever-present and all-too-seductive cause of our own self aggrandizement under the cover of the romantic (and Romantic) myth of the hero.

Strauss at Midnight

If you live in or near Chicago, or could be induced to drive or be otherwise conveyed to Chicago for a weekend, let me tell you about this amazing Theater Oobleck play by Jeff Dorchen (his first since The Problematic Cartoonist in 1998) that opens on Thursday at the Chicago DCA Theater.

It is titled Strauss at Midnight. That's Leo, not Richard or Johann. It's a black comedy, naturally. Or charcoal comedy, anyway, with a dystopian sci fi streak. Besides Leo Strauss (and his protege Allan Bloom), the play concerns the tribulations of Saul Bellow (like Strauss and Bloom, he is dead, but what that indicates for his dramatic arc is not entirely clear), Niccolo Machiavelli, and a handful of fictional characters, mostly from the Neil Simon play "The Odd Couple." It's almost as absurdist as it sounds, but not quite; there are some very resonant explorations of, well, I won't give it away, but it's all connected, man!

The sound design is by yours truly, but that's the least reason you should see it. The script is crackling and improbable, the cast is superb, and the set and design are gorgeous and inspired. A bunch of really, really talented people have been dedicating themselves (I'd say tirelessly, but they're actually all really really tired right now) to realizing this play, for basically no money, which is inspiring in itself.

Jeff has written a series of pieces that discuss the thematic underpinnings of the play, for those that go for that sort of thing. But nothing can prepare you for the fresh orthogonality of his dialogue, or the unlikely places he discovers and unearths patterns and archetypes. Come and see and hear it for yourself. Details here, at the Theater Oobleck website (20 years without a director, and always free if you're broke).

Also, my coffee table and ice bucket play minor roles.