Secular Philosophy

Alive Mind Releases Pledge of Allegiance Blues for the 4th of July

elizabeth@alivemindmedia.com, jay@lorberhtdigital.com, rita@lorberhtdigital.com — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 20:53:08 GMT

Pledge of Allegiance Blues documents the journey of Rev. Dr. Michael Newdow, the blues-singing California physician and his battle to protect the separation between church and state, a battle that took him all the way to the United States Supreme Court where he defended the landmark "under God" lawsuit. From the controversy over the Ten Commandments monument in the Alabama State Courthouse to a historical analysis about the intertwining of religion and government in American history, Pledge of Allegiance Blues is a smart and funny examination of the often tense relationship between church and state. With toe-tapping musical numbers by Newdow, a cast of characters including attorney Alan Dershowitz, publisher Larry Flynt, and radio talk-show host Sandy Rios, this critically acclaimed documentary provides a contemporary and provocative look at one man’s campaign to defend his constitutional rights.

“Both as a lesson in law and as an entertaining personality profile, Pledge of Allegiance Blues is highly recommended. Three and a half stars”
-Video Librarian

Is there fundamental scientific disagreement about evolutionary theory?

elizabeth@alivemindmedia.com, jay@lorberhtdigital.com, rita@lorberhtdigital.com — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 19:27:42 GMT

Creationists and their intellectual cousins, intelligent design proponents, keep saying that scientists disagree as to “the truth” of evolution, and that the field is therefore in crisis, despite official attempts by scientists to deny any problem and unite under the evil cause of fighting “the truth” about Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior. As is common in these circumstances, some creationist claims are in fact correct, but trivially so, while the use that creationists attempt to make of the claims themselves is highly (and possibly willfully) misleading. As a case in point, I am about to leave the United States for a trip to Vienna where I will be chairing a workshop on the status and future of evolutionary theory, the anticipation of which has been providing delight to creationists for the past several months.

The so-called “Woodstock of evolution” (not my term, and a pretty bad one for sure) will see a group of scientists, by now known as “the Altenberg 16” (because there are sixteen of us, and we’ll meet at theKonrad Lorenz Institute for theoretical biology in Altenberg, near Vienna) has been featured on blogs by a variety of nutcases, as well as the quintessential ID “think” tank, the Discovery Institute of Seattle. They have presented the workshop that I am organizing in collaboration with my colleague Gerd Müller, and the proceedings of which will be published next year by MIT Press, as an almost conspiratorial, quasi-secret cabala, brought to the light of day by the brave work of independent journalists and “scholars” bent on getting the truth out about evolution. Of course, nothing could be further from the (actual) truth.

The workshop is part of a regular series organized by the KLI (they do a couple of these a year), that has been going on for years now. Each workshop is limited to a small number of participants, both for logistical reasons (the Institute is small, and they have to budget the costs of paying for travel and lodging for all scientists involved) and because the idea is to get people to focus on discussing, rather than lecturing (hard to do with large groups). Articles and commentaries on the web have also made much of the fact that the meeting is “private,” meaning that the public and journalists are not invited. This is completely normal for small science workshops all over the world, and I was genuinely puzzled by the charge until I realized (it took me a while) that a sense of conspiracy increases the likelihood that people will read journalistic internet articles and ID sympathetic blogs. You’ve got to sell the product, even at the cost of, shall we say, bending, the reality.

So, what are the Altenberg 16 going to do in Altenberg next week? (We are so amused by the nickname that one of us has made buttons that say “I was one of the Altenberg 16. Look for merchandising links soon -- no, just kidding.) The agenda is to discuss the current status of evolutionary theory, with a particular emphasis on developments -- some of them under intense debate -- that have occurred since the last version of it has been in put in place back in the 1930s and ‘40s. See, current evolutionary theory is not “Darwinism,” pace creationists and IDers. Darwinism refers to the original ideas published by Chuck in The Origin of Species (look for many celebrations of it next year, its 150th anniversary), that organic diversity is due to a process of common descent largely influenced by natural selection. But scientific theories never stay the same for long, because scientists discover new facts about the natural world, and they consequently update their theories. No physicist today would refer to Newton’s Principia as thephysical theory of motion and gravity.

In the 1930s and ‘40s it became clear that one had to integrate the original Darwinism with the new disciplines of Mendelian and statistical genetics. Such integration occurred through a series of meetings where scientists discussed the status of evolutionary theory, and through the publication of a number of books by people like Theodosius Dobzhansky, Ernst Mayr, George Gaylor Simpson, George Ledyard Stebbins and others. The result was an updated theoretical framework known as the Modern Synthesis (MS). But of course evolutionary biology has further progressed during the last eight decades (unlike, one cannot help but notice, creationism). So for a few years now several evolutionary biologists have suggested that it may be time for another update, call it evolutionary theory 3.0 or, as many of us have begun to refer to it, the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES).

A number of authors, including Stephen Gould, Mary Jane West-Eberhard, Eva Jablonka, Stuart Kauffman, Stuart Newman, the above mentioned Gerd Müller, and myself, have published papers and books recently attempting to articulate what an EES might look like, and which elements of the MS will need to be retained, modified or discarded (just like the MS had retained, modified or discarded individual components of the original Darwinism). The goal of the Altenberg workshop is to get some of these people around the same table for three days and trade ideas about these sorts of questions (while also enjoying some excellent Austrian Riesling, of course).

What exactly is it that the MS does not incorporate and may require an Extended Synthesis? Ah, this brings us back to why creationists, IDers and others who have been writing about this over the past few months are either misunderstanding the issue or (surely in the case of the Discovery Institute) are deliberately distorting it to serve their inane agenda.

The basic idea is that there have been some interesting empirical discoveries, as well as the articulation of some new concepts, subsequently to the Modern Synthesis, that one needs to explicitly integrate with the standard ideas about natural selection, common descent, population genetics and statistical genetics (nowadays known as evolutionary quantitative genetics). Some of these empirical discoveries include (but are not limited to) the existence of molecular buffering systems (like the so-called “heat shock response”) that may act as “capacitors” (i.e., facilitators) of bursts of phenotypic evolution, and the increasing evidence of the role of epigenetic (i.e., non-genetic) inheritance systems (this has nothing to do with Lamarckism, by the way). Some of the new concepts that have arisen since the MS include (but again are not limited to) the idea of “evolvability” (that different lineages have different propensities to evolve novel structures or functions), complexity theory (which opens the possibility of natural sources of organic complexity other than natural selection), and “accommodation” (a developmental process that may facilitate the coordinated appearance of complex traits in short evolutionary periods).

Now, did you see anything in the above that suggests that evolution is “a theory in crisis”? Did I say anything about intelligent designers, or the rejection of Darwinism, or any of the other nonsense that has filled the various uninformed and sometimes downright ridiculous commentaries that have appeared on the web about the Altenberg meeting? Didn’t think so. If next week’s workshop succeeds, what we will achieve is taking one more step in an ongoing discussion among scientists about how our theories account for biological phenomena, and how the discovery of new phenomena is to be matched by the elaboration of new theoretical constructs. This is how science works, folks, not a sign of “crisis.”

I’ll tell you what does constitute a crisis, though: the fact that creationists have been on the retreat ever since the Scopes trial, having to invent increasingly vacuous versions of their attacks on science education in order to keep pestering the Courts of this country with their demands that religious nonsense be taught side by side with solid science. You want serious disagreement? How about several orders of magnitude difference in the estimate of the age of the earth among creationists: some of them still cling to the primitive idea that our planet is only a few thousand years old, their only “evidence” a circular argument from authority -- that’s two logical fallacies at once! (The Bible says so; how do you know the Bible is right? Because it’s the word of God; how do you know it’s the word of God? The Bible says so...) Other creationists, particularly many in the ID movement, concede that the science of geology and physics is a bit too well established to throw it out of the window, so they accept the figure of about four billion years for the age of the earth. Now, if any scientific theory were to make statements that varied by six (I repeat: six!) orders of magnitude about a basic aspect of reality, that would really mean that the theory in question is in deep trouble. C’mon, guys, fix your own house first, then start knocking at our door if you must.

Oh, by the way, here is the complete list of the Altenberg 16, together with the topics about which they will be talking at the workshop (in alphabetical order): John Beatty (University of British Columbia) on neutral evolution; Werner Callebaut (University of Hasselt) on the non-centrality of genes as causal factors in evolution; Sergey Gavrilets (University of Tennessee) on the idea of adaptive landscapes; Eva Jablonka (Tel Aviv University) on epigenetic inheritance systems; David Jablonski (University of Chicago) on macroevolution; Marc Kirschner (Harvard University) on systems biology; Alan Love (University of Minnesota) on the philosophy of evolutionary theory; Gerd Müller (KLI) and phenotypic innovation; Stuart Newman (New York Medical College) on complexity theory; John Odling-Smee (Oxford University) on niche construction theory in ecology; Massimo Pigliucci (Stony Brook University) on the role of phenotypic plasticity in macroevolution; Michael Purugganan (New York University) on evolutionary genomics; Eors Szathmary (Collegium of Budapest) on major evolutionary transitions; Gunter Wagner (Yale University) on the concept of evolvability; David Sloan Wilson (Binghamton University) on the idea of group selection; and Greg Wray (Duke University) on gene regulation networks. It ought to be almost as much fun as the just-finished European soccer tournament (which also took place in Austria)...

Irrationality

elizabeth@alivemindmedia.com, jay@lorberhtdigital.com, rita@lorberhtdigital.com — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 22:26:18 GMT

I recall reading somewhere that Keynes criticized Russell for saying that the problem with the world is that people are irrational and that the solution is that they should become rational. It seems a fair comment on Russell--but why is it a criticism? Because Russell's observation is a datum not an explanation: we want to know why people are irrational and how to improve their rationality. It's obvious what the problem is and also what the solution would be--but we need to know what causes irrationality and what we can do to fix it. Freud had a kind of theory of this but nowadays it looks pretty wacky. There seems to be a big theoretical gap here, urgently needing to be filled. (Of course, we won't recognize it if we start doubting that rationality is a robust matter.) I don't have a theory myself--human irrationality can seem the oddest and least adaptive trait of the species--but I do think we need to work on it. Why do people go around believing silly things and acting idiotically?

Another scientist getting silly about religion

elizabeth@alivemindmedia.com, jay@lorberhtdigital.com, rita@lorberhtdigital.com — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 11:55:19 GMT

Here we go again, this time it is Stuart Kauffman’s turn to write silly things about science and religion. Kauffman is a serious and brilliant scientist, best known for his work on complexity theory and its application to evolutionary biology. But he has now joined an increasingly long and embarrassing list of scientists who write really silly things about religion and how it relates to science.

Kauffman’s latest book is entitled Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion. It is a view that is bound to fail on a variety of levels, but I think it is instructive to see why. Let’s start with the good news: Kauffman, unlike, say, authors like Paul Davies (author of questionably ambiguous stuff like Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life) or -- worse -- Frank Tipler (author of the downright nonsensical The Physics of Christianity) -- is pretty clear that there is no way to recover any classical version of god, not even the deist one. For Kauffman, for instance, morality emerged out of the biological and cultural evolution of humanity. Still, Kauffman seeks to “find common ground between science and religion so that we might collectively reinvent the sacred.”

Now why would any rational individual wish to propagate the whole idea of “the sacred” to begin with? For something to be sacred, according to the Merriam-Webster, means to be “dedicated or set apart for the service or worship of a deity,” or alternatively to be “worthy of religious veneration.” This is not what Kauffman means by the term, but the whole idea of “sacredness” seems to me to be the sort of baggage that humanity ought to do without by now.

At any rate, Kauffman wants to “use the God word, for my hope is to honorably steal its aura to authorize the sacredness of the creativity in nature.” Wow. First off, the concept of “honorably stealing” is something that is rather questionable, especially when what one is attempting to steal is nothing less than god’s aura. Second, nature is not creative, it just is. Creativity is something that conscious beings do, and to use the term in association with nature is misleading to say the least, and invites of course precisely the sort of quasi-mystical thinking that science is supposed to discourage. Third, there is nothing sacred about nature, either. Again, nature is what it is, and while Kauffman is tapping into the sense of awe shared by so many scientists when we approach the natural world, there is nothing to be worshipped, as worshipping is antithetical to understanding and appreciating, which is what science is about.

Kauffman’s reinvention of the sacred is nothing new, as what he is proposing is very much akin to non-religious Buddhism, or to what a number of other scientists, from Einstein to Sagan, have written about before. Such a project is bound to fail in a cultural environment dominated by the Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions, where people stubbornly refuse to give up the childish but apparently comforting idea of a personal god that actually cares about how they have sex and with whom. Thinking of god as the sacred in nature (including, one presumes, tsunamis, earthquakes, cancer, planetary impacts, black holes and dying stars) just isn’t going to cut it for most people. Way too esoteric, and very much unsatisfactory in terms of providing reward and punishment for people’s actions, and especially the promise of an afterlife.

Moreover, Kauffman’s project, like that of so many other scientists before him, smells terribly of being intellectually disingenuous. I don’t know if Kauffman is after the hefty Templeton Prize “for progress toward research or discoveries about spiritual realities” (whatever that means). Scientists like John Barrow (who wrote about the so-called “anthropic principle”), Freeman Dyson, Paul Davies and others had no trouble accepting the prize, despite the fact that it is based on a fundamental betrayal of the ideal of science as a rational inquiry into the natural world. Regardless, Kauffman is not doing science or humanity any favor by joining a questionable tradition of artificial “reconciliation” between science and religion.

Perhaps people will always need what Marx famously referred to as the opium of the masses, too bad for humanity. But scientists are supposed to hold themselves and the public to higher standards of rationality, and attempting to reinvent the sacred is clearly a step in the wrong direction. As Richard Feynman once aptly put it: “I do believe that there is a conflict between science and religion ... the spirit or attitude toward the facts is different in religion from what it is in science. The uncertainty that is necessary in order to appreciate nature is not easily correlated with the feeling of certainty in faith” (from: The Meaning of It All). Amen.

Point of Inquiry with PZ Myers

elizabeth@alivemindmedia.com, jay@lorberhtdigital.com, rita@lorberhtdigital.com — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 21:14:32 GMT

Listen to PZ Myers on the Point of Inquiry here.

Creationists push for critical thinking (no joke)

elizabeth@alivemindmedia.com, jay@lorberhtdigital.com, rita@lorberhtdigital.com — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 15:02:22 GMT

Creationists and intelligent design proponents have scored an important victory in Louisiana this week, at least for now. In its appalling lack of wisdom, that State’s legislature overwhelmingly approved a bill that requires teachers to introduce to their students material that “promotes critical thinking skills.” The Republican Governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal, predictably said that he will sign the bill into law because “the way we are going to have smart and intelligent kids is exposing them to the very best science,” according to an article in (real) Science magazine.

What’s wrong with that?, the naive reader may reasonably ask. Surely the main point of education is in fact to instill critical thinking skills into students, just like the bill says. Precisely, and since this is what every teacher in the country is already striving to do, do we need a law for it? It would be like passing a law directing all physicians to do their best to save people’s lives, or mechanics to repair cars. Duh. No, the new bill is the handiwork of the infamous Discovery Institute, the Seattle so-called Think Tank that has been pushing intelligent design creationism for more than a decade now (and who suffered a spectacular defeat two years ago in the Dover, PA case).

The new strategy is to cry out for “academic freedom,” which is then interpreted as the freedom to teach nonsense about the history of life on earth. Imagine if astrologers were to invoke academic freedom so that astronomy classes would include the preparation of horoscopes and the “critical” assessment of the Copernican theory. That’s just about what is going to happen in Louisiana, and probably in several other states, unless there is a successful legal challenge or grassroots movement like the one being currently attempted by the Louisiana Coalition for Science under the guidance of philosopher-activistBarbara Forrest.

One way to smell the rat here is to look at the specific language of the bill, which says in part that educators are encouraged to hold “an open and objective discussion of scientific theories being studied, including but not limited to evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning.” If you think this is not a (maliciously) intelligently designed list you are far too optimistic about human nature and the current Republican war against science. (Notice, too, that “human cloning” isn’t a theory, but a technological possibility with obvious ethical implications. But there is no point in being too subtle here.)

Despite the dismay at how easily such a gross manipulation of the concept of academic freedom can pass muster, or at how willfully and disingenuously a large number of politicians keep pandering to the minimum common denominators of the American public, there is some silver lining in this story. It comes from taking the relatively long view on the issue of the evolution wars. Less than a century ago, the battle in Dayton, TN was about prohibiting the teaching of evolution altogether, and the forces of obscurantism won. They have been on the retreat ever since, first having to accept the teaching of evolution in public schools as the default position, then having to invent a series of ever more esoteric and vague versions of their “ideas” to keep fighting on the legal front (equal time for creation “science,” disclaimers about evolution on textbooks, intelligent design admitting that god might not be the designer, and so on). Now they have been pushed so far into the corner that they can only resort to generic appeals to critical thinking and academic freedom, the very same concepts that are daily rejected by right wing religionists.

Want some real critical thinking? How about critically reading the Bible as just one of many “sacred” books written by perfectly human beings, the product of an ignorant and bigoted era? Or perhaps we should ask our students to critically think about the efficacy of “abstinence only” sexual programs that the current Administration keeps pushing on the basis of its misguided ide-theology? Or maybe critical thinking exercises in our classrooms should include a study of how it happened that the United States went to war on false premises, is wasting hundreds of thousands of lives (I’m counting the Iraqis here) and trillions of dollars, all in the name of greed and national pride? Now, that is a critical thinking curriculum I can get behind. Any chance it will pass in Louisiana?

Is religion the greatest threat to rationality and scientific progress?

elizabeth@alivemindmedia.com, jay@lorberhtdigital.com, rita@lorberhtdigital.com — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 14:21:55 GMT

by Daniel Dennett

A few months ago, I was invited by The Guardian to debate Lord Robert Winston in London on the question:

Is religion the greatest threat to rationality and scientific progress?

The debate was supposed to be videotaped for later webcast, but their technical folks let them down, and even the audio recording was, I am told, botched, so the actual debate will have to live as best it can in the memories of the two or three hundred people in attendance. Not a particularly insightful occasion in any case, but my opening salvo made a few points that I think deserve a wider audience:

If religion isn't the greatest threat to rationality and scientific progress, what is? Perhaps alcohol, or television, or addictive video games. But although each of these scourges - mixed blessings, in fact - has the power to overwhelm our best judgment and cloud our critical faculties, religion has a feature of that none of them can boast: it doesn't just disable, it honours the disability. People are revered for their capacity to live in a dream world, to shield their minds from factual knowledge and make the major decisions of their lives by consulting voices in their heads that they call forth by rituals designed to intoxicate them.

It used to be the case that we tended to excuse drunk drivers when they crashed because they weren't entirely in control of their faculties at the time, but now we have wisely inverted that judgment, holding drunk drivers doubly culpable for putting themselves in that irresponsible position in the first place. It is high time we inverted the public attitude about religion as well, finding all socially destructive acts of religious passion shameful, not honourable, and holding those who abet them - the preachers and other apologists for religious zeal - as culpable as the bartenders and negligent hosts who usher dangerous drivers on to the highways. Our motto should be: Friends don't let friends steer their lives by religion.

Right now, Sayed Parwez Kambakhsh, a young student, resides on death row in Afghanistan, sentenced to execution for committing blasphemy. Imagine! We're living in the 21st century, and in "liberated" Afghanistan (not Taliban Afghanistan) blasphemy is still a capital crime. Most of the rest of the world is tongue-tied, unwilling to tell those bent on carrying out this barbaric sentence that they are simply wrong, and should not thus humiliate themselves and their traditions. Where are the peaceful demonstrations of protest? Are people unwilling to hurt the feelings of Muslims? We are quick to condemn other outrages, but religious passion, genuine or feigned, shields people from the moral judgments of their fellow human beings, judgments to which we should all alike be subject.

There is an unbalance in the framing of this resolution, and Robert Winston has the worst of it. He must try to allay a host of concerns, an unending task, while - as everyone knows all too well - in a single cataclysmic day my side could be proven by one fanatical act, not that anyone would be left to cheer my victory. Not just rationality and scientific progress, but just about everything else we hold dear could be laid waste by a single massively deluded "sacramental" act. True, you don't have to be religious to be crazy, but it helps. Indeed, if you are religious, you don't have to be crazy in the medically certifiable sense in order to do massively crazy things. And - this is the worst of it - religious faith can give people a sort of hyperbolic confidence, an utter unconcern about whether they might be making a mistake, that enables acts of inhumanity that would otherwise be unthinkable.

This imperviousness to reason is, I think, the property that we should most fear in religion. Other institutions or traditions may encourage a certain amount of irrationality - think of the wild abandon that is often appreciated in sports or art - but only religion demands it as a sacred duty. This might not matter if the activities that composed religion were somewhat insulated from the rest of the world the way they are in sports and art. Then we could treat religious allegiances the way we treat differences in taste: if you have a taste for kick boxing or heavy metal bands, that's your business. Knock yourself out, as we say, it's only a game. Not so with religion. Its arena includes not just the participants but all of life on the planet. Given that, it's troubling to note how avidly some people engage in deliberate make-believe in order to execute the prescribed duties.

The better is enemy of the best: religion may make many people better, but it is preventing them from being as good as they could be. If only we could transfer all that respect, loyalty and intense devotion from an imaginary being - God - to something real: the wonderful world of goodness we and our ancestors have made, and of which we are now the stewards.

God tells Midwest to approve gay marriage

elizabeth@alivemindmedia.com, jay@lorberhtdigital.com, rita@lorberhtdigital.com — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 15:31:24 GMT

No, I haven’t suddenly lost my mind and turned this blog into the Onion. But it seems to me that the “logical” consequence of a certain kind of “reasoning” common within fundamentalist religious circles would have to be that this past week’s floods in the American Midwest carry one clear message from the Almighty: the locals better shape up and approve gay marriage.

You see, as soon as California finally allowed gays to marry, and even went as far as extending the right to people who are not state residents (unlike Massachusetts, the only other state in the Union to allow gay marriages) a number of nuts from the religious right warned of dire consequences. According to the LA Times, “a smattering of protesters” at one ceremony were carrying signs like “Homo Sex Is Sin!” and warnings have been flying around the internet that God will punish the entire state of California for this unspeakable crime against Him (as usual, this raises the obvious question of how moral God really is for meeting out collective punishment to begin with, but that’s another story).

Well, so far nothing has happened to California, but the Midwest has been hit by some of the worst flooding since records have been kept. And we all remember how many fundamentalist preachers interpreted Katrina has God’s punishment against the Big Easy. So, logic demands that those same preachers put two and two together and accept that God has apparently changed His mind about gay marriage. Here is the reasoning, spelled out for those who might not have taken logic 101:

P1: If God doesn’t like X, then God sends natural disaster

against the community that has done X.

P2: California has done X, and no disaster has ensued.
_______________________________

C: Therefore, God approves of X.

(P here stands for Premise, C for Conclusion.) This is known in logic as modus tollens, and it’s pretty hard to argue against. But of course I’m kidding, since I am actually assuming that religious zealots are interested at all (or familiar with) logic. A bad assumption if there ever was one.

More broadly, what is it about fundamentalists thinking that God is so darn concerned with their petty affairs? I mean, atheists are usually accused of arrogance for rejecting God, but listen to what one Rocky Twyman, from Washington DC, had to say recently as reported by theChicago Tribune, referring to the ongoing problem of high gas prices: “Our pockets are empty, but we're going to hold on to God!” And he means that literally. See, Mr. Twyman started a group called Pray at the Pump, which is bent on continuing to pray for lower gasoline prices “until God tells us to stop.” (How exactly such command would be issued is not specified in the interview.) Twyman’s group, in its astoundingly narrow minded view of the world, managed to (unwittingly, one hopes) insult the civil liberties movement by modifying one of their historical phrases: “We Shall Overcome, We'll have lower gas prices.”

Do I need to add that, as usual, nothing fails like prayer? When the movement started, gas prices were at an average of $3.53 per gallon. At the time Mr. Twyman was interviewed the price had gone up to $3.97. This has not deterred Mirrine Thorne of Northwest Washington, who according to the same article said “Nobody else is doing anything, God is going to do something.”

The point is that even if there is a God (and that makes just about as much sense as saying “if there is a Santa Clause...”), it is unbelievably self-centered and arrogant of some people to think that the Creator of the Universe (which is a big, big place to take care of) has nothing better to do than worry about gas prices or gay marriages. But of course that is much of the point of believing in God to begin with: if there is no Big Guy in the sky looking out for us, then we are really responsible for our own actions, and that’s one of the scariest thoughts that ever crossed the human mind.

Point of Inquiry with PZ Myers

elizabeth@alivemindmedia.com, jay@lorberhtdigital.com, rita@lorberhtdigital.com — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 22:38:17 GMT

Listen to PZ Myers on the Point of Inquiry here.

Philosophers don't just make it up as they go

elizabeth@alivemindmedia.com, jay@lorberhtdigital.com, rita@lorberhtdigital.com — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 15:23:03 GMT

Yesterday I was facilitating a philosophy discussion at the New York Society for Ethical Culture when I found myself all of a sudden defending philosophy from the accusation that it’s all made up stuff. Two of the participants raised the objection from different perspectives, both representing persistent misconceptions concerning how philosophers go about doing their business.

The first criticism is that philosophy can never settle anything because, unlike science, it does not rely on experimental evidence. Granted, philosophers don’t do experiments (other than the very inexpensive thought variety), but then again philosophy isn’t science, so it seems odd to accuse philosophers of not doing what scientists do. (Then again, check out the experimental philosophy web site!)

Philosophers have other ways of settling disputes and advancing their discipline, and these ways make use of the rules of rational discourse and logic. For instance, just like no self-respecting scientist would be caught dead conducting an experiment with a statistically flawed design (say, the lack of a control), so no professional philosopher wants to be found engaging in a logical fallacy. And logical fallacies are even more clearly defined and understood than most experimental protocols.

Moreover, philosophers are not in the business of studying the natural world, so “experiments” in the standard scientific sense would simply be inappropriate. The domain of philosophy ranges over issues concerning the nature of reality (metaphysics), of values (ethics), of knowledge (epistemology), and of art (aesthetics), to name a few. Now, what sort of experiment could possibly be illuminating questions of metaphysics? How would you settle, on scientific grounds, the question of whether there is a real physical world out there, as opposed to all of us being part of the thoughts of a cosmic being, or perhaps simply the holograms of a simulation that someone is playing as a video game? This is not to say that philosophers should ignore scientific findings (e.g., on how human brains make moral decisions), and in fact they do not. But philosophical inquiry has a different enough nature from scientific inquiry that there is no common methodological standard of progress, one cannot be said to be “better” than the other any more than soccer can be said to be better than baseball. They are just different sorts of games.

Now to the second criticism: philosophers cannot be objective or detached from the issues they debate, and besides they have to build their arguments on the basis of one assumption or another, so the exercise amounts to just telling whatever story one prefers. Again, the analysis, I think, misses the mark. There is no question that philosophers are human beings, and as such they tend to seek the same golden trio that most other people (including scientists, by the way) go after: glory, money, and sex, not necessarily in that order.

But philosophical discourse is founded on the same attitude that scientists have of valuing reciprocal criticism and opening one’s arguments to rebuttal and possible refutation. Unlike the case of religion, for instance, philosophers can’t say “I’m right because God told me so,” or “I’m right because it’s written in a book,” regardless of who the author of that book happens to be (that, incidentally, would be a logical fallacy, known as an argument from authority). No, philosophers have to say “I think I am right because...” and carefully fill the blanks with cogent logic, a logic that is mercilessly put under the microscope by their colleagues, because that’s how one gets to publish and obtain tenure (some glory, though usually little money and perfectly ordinary amounts of sex).

As for making assumptions, those can, again, be explored and justified by reason. Besides, scientists have to make a lot of assumptions before proceeding with their work as well, and ironically some of those assumptions are inherently philosophical in nature (like the empirically unverifiable idea that the world is real).

The fact that philosophers continually have to explain and justify themselves, while scientists usually don’t, is a peculiar result of the all-American anti-intellectualism that is so prominent on this side of the pond (in Europe philosophers pack bookstores for readings and discussions, and they regularly appear on or host talk shows -- can you imagine a philosopher on The View? or Regis and Kelly?). Of course, science itself sometimes does not escape anti-intellectual reactions (think of the never ending “controversy” about evolution), but at least science is generally granted the attribute of useful and therefore tolerated as a (rather expensive) academic exercise.

But a society that does not value critical thinking, the laying out of rational arguments, and the use of logic in debating its issues, is a society in decline and risking a return to obscurantism. The irony here is that the most important documents regulating American life, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, were in fact a direct product of the philosophy of the Enlightenment, and were drafted by people like Thomas Jefferson, with a very keen interest in philosophy and rational discourse. Of course, the Constitution has been under constant assault over the past few decades, in synch with the rising tide of religious fundamentalism and irrationalism. Appreciating what philosophy is about and how it works may make a significant contribution toward reversing that tide.

Shermer Responds to Pigliucci

elizabeth@alivemindmedia.com, jay@lorberhtdigital.com, rita@lorberhtdigital.com — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 16:15:43 GMT

My friend Massimo Pigliucci has penned a thoughtful critique of my book, The Mind of the Market, which I appreciate because this is how science progresses—through vigorous analysis and debate. The Mind of the Market operates at two levels: descriptive and prescriptive. Descriptively, I am integrating the research from three relatively new fields of study: behavioral economics, neuroeconomics, and evolutionary economics, to debunk the myth of Homo economicus: that humans are free, selfish, and rational calculators making the best financial decisions. This is an extension of my work in other fields of human endeavor that show just how irrational, unfree, and often unselfish we can be. Since I have a commitment to following the data wherever they may lead, this descriptive part of the book has led me to modify my prescriptive libertarianism to the extent that this political philosophy is often based on the Homo economicus myth.

To this extent, Massimo has correctly surmised that I don’t seem to be a hard-core libertarian. The reason is twofold: one, we evolved in an environment radically different from the one in which we evolved, which was in Paleolithic hunter-gatherer bands and tribes of a few dozen to a few hundred individuals that were largely egalitarian. Once these bands and tribes began to coalesce into chiefdoms and states, economics shifted from egalitarian to hierarchical, allowing a few at the top to succeed through gains usually ill-gotten, while the vast majority of everyone else remained impoverished. Without a strict set of rules, well-defined and vigorously enforced, people will try to game the system. My analogy here is sports. As I demonstrated in the March issue of (Scientific American), in an extensive research article on why athletes dope (focusing on cycling, track-and-field, and baseball), once athletes begin to cheat the system, or think that others are cheating the system, it will quickly break down. Thus, athletic organizations and sporting sanctioning bodies, need a clearly defined set of rules that are rigorously enforced. When that is in place, athletes are best left free to compete, and from that excellence will emerge.

Analogously, individuals, businesses, and corporations must be free to compete in a free market that is situated within a clearly defined set of rules that are enforced. Most generally, I demonstrate in The Mind of the Market that we need political states based on the rule of law, with property rights, a secure and trustworthy banking and monetary system, economic stability, a reliable infrastructure and the freedom to move about the country, freedom of the press, freedom of association, education, protection of civil liberties, and a clean and safe environment. We need a robust military for protection of our liberties from attacks by other states. We need a potent police force for protection of our freedoms from attacks by other people within the state. We need a viable legislative system for establishing fair and just laws. We need an effective judicial system for the equitable enforcement of those fair and just laws.

The best politico-economic system to date is a liberal democracy and free market capitalism, or democratic-capitalism. In a system of democratic-capitalism, social liberalism and fiscal conservatism is a synergistic marriage that leads to the greatest prosperity, the greatest liberty, and the greatest happiness for the greatest number.

—Michael Shermer, Altadena, California, June 16, 2008

Point of Inquiry with Susan Jacoby

elizabeth@alivemindmedia.com, jay@lorberhtdigital.com, rita@lorberhtdigital.com — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 15:15:32 GMT

Listen to Susan Jacoby on the Point of Inquiry here.

Michael Shermer's libertarianism

elizabeth@alivemindmedia.com, jay@lorberhtdigital.com, rita@lorberhtdigital.com — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 14:24:23 GMT

Michael Shermer (the well known author and publisher of Skeptic magazine) and I usually see eye to eye on all things skeptical. On matters of economics, however, we seem to depart rather sharply. He is a former Randian (as in Ayn Rand) and current moderate libertarian. I am an unmitigated progressive liberal (yup, I like very progressive taxes -- that is, steep on the rich -- welfare, universal health care, free education -- including college -- and a tiny military).

During the summer my lab at Stony Brook University reads a couple of books for fun and intellectual enrichment. One of them this year is Shermer’s The Mind of the Market. I will take issue here with the arguments he deploys in chapter 3 in particular, entitled “Bottom-up capitalism.”

One of the central ideas of the book is to build a parallel between Darwin’s natural selection and Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.” It isn’t that Shermer is trying to go back to so-called social Darwinism (which Darwin himself vehemently rejected), but rather to make the case that both biological systems and economies are “complex adaptive systems with emergent properties.” The conclusion to be drawn from this is that, just like natural selection yields results without the intervention of an intelligent designer, so we should let markets work their magic without government tampering (I simplify somewhat, you should read the book if you want the full treatment).

There are problems with the natural selection-economic markets analogy, of course. To begin with, it is not clear what markets maximize, if anything. Natural selection maximizes local fitness (of a particular population in response to a specific set of environmental circumstances). Free markets may maximize trade volume, for instance; or perhaps they minimize prices; or they augment per capita income, but it is hard to see why exactly any of these things would be necessarily good, since according to several studies published over the last few years they are all only loosely correlated with quality of life, or with other important priorities, like justice, equality, or environmental preservation.

Even assuming that letting markets operate on their own is a good idea in terms of the goals to be accomplished, the parallel with natural selection is rather apt in a way that libertarians won’t like: not only does natural selection not yield optimal outcomes (just whatever happens to work well enough), but it is extremely and painfully wasteful. Let us not forget that the overwhelming majority of species that ever existed went extinct, and that any improvement in the adaptation of a population of organisms happens at the cost of countless deaths and suffering among the less fortunate members of that population. Just like unbridled capitalism, essentially a pyramid scheme, makes a very small number of people very rich, but is built on the sweat and lack of a social net for the majority.

Even Michael, however, has limits (unlike many libertarians I know). After having extolled the virtues of Microsoft’s quasi-monopoly and having told us that Walmart is the best thing that could happen to small America and the world at large, he ends the chapter on a more moderate note. “There are extremists,” Shermer writes on p. 42 of the book, “who embrace the ideology of anarcho-capitalism. ... [But] in order to keep the free market both free and fair, we need political states based on the rule of law, with property rights, a secure and trustworthy banking and monetary system, economic stability, a reliable infrastructure, protection of civil liberties, a clean and safe environment, and various freedoms of movement, of the press, of association, and of education. We need a robust military for protection of our liberties from attacks by other states. We need a potent police force for protection of our freedoms from attacks by other people within the state. We need a viable legislative system for establishing fair and just laws. We need an effective judicial system for the equitable enforcement of those fair and just laws.”

In other words, we need a pretty pervasive government to both facilitate and control social activities, including economic ones! This is the classic libertarian version of wanting the cake and trying to eat it too. Whatever happened to leaving the markets alone to do their magic (something, incidentally, that Smith himself never advocated, aware as he was of human wickedness and crookery, well before Exxon Valdez and Enron)? Natural selection doesn’t require our or anyone else’s intervention to work, it truly does function “from the bottom up.” Not so economies, even by Shermer’s own account. Natural selection does work without the need for an intelligent designer, but it just seems perverse to ask human beings not to use their intelligence to improve on the workings of whatever invisible hand may blindly guide the markets.

Point of Inquiry with Taner Edis

elizabeth@alivemindmedia.com, jay@lorberhtdigital.com, rita@lorberhtdigital.com — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 16:01:09 GMT

Listen to Taner Edis on the Point of Inquiry here.

A conversation with Dan Dennett

elizabeth@alivemindmedia.com, jay@lorberhtdigital.com, rita@lorberhtdigital.com — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 17:26:34 GMT

A few days ago I had the opportunity of moderating a conversation with philosopher Daniel Dennett, hosted by the New York Society for Ethical Culture as part of their presentation of two of the “Atheists Tapes” produced by Alive Mind. It was a pleasant and intellectually stimulating afternoon, which reminded me both of why I admire Dennett, and also of the points of disagreement we have on substantial issues in philosophy and humanism.

For instance, we certainly agree that religion is, as Dennett puts it in his book, a natural phenomenon. How exactly it came about, and what the relative contribution of biological and cultural evolution was to its shaping remains a matter of debate and a fertile field of inquiry, but religion in that respect is no different from other peculiar human habits, such as producing music, or engaging in team sports (or war, for that matter).

Dennett is also right on target, I think, on the idea that so-called “free will” is a rather fuzzy concept, and that it certainly does not imply any threat to a mechanistic view of the world. Neither he nor I are in the least impressed by quantum mechanical “explanations” of free will, which don’t explain anything, and which at best would gain us random, not free, will. I highly recommend his Elbow Room for a serious treatment of the matter.

Dan and I begin to diverge on how we see evolutionary theory. HisDarwin’s Dangerous Idea is one of the best and most provocative books on the subject, and a must read. But it does give a rather too harsh treatment to the ideas of Stephen Jay Gould and his insistence that natural selection is not the only major mechanism in evolution. Indeed, Dennett from this perspective appears to be a strict classical Darwinist, downplaying or dismissing also some ideas about group selection as proposed most recently by David Sloan Wilson. I tend to be more of a pluralist on both enlarging the scope of selection at multiple levels of biological organization, and in welcoming multiple causal explanations, including non-selective ones, for the bewildering variety of biological phenomena.

Another point of disagreement that emerged during our discussion at the Ethical Culture concerns the so-called New Atheism, which I welcome as a needed vehicle for bringing atheism back to the center of social discourse, but which I also find has a tendency of being a bit too abrasive -- especially in the versions of the British New Atheists Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens (the very fact that these two, plus Dennett and Sam Harris, welcome the label “the Four Horsemen” is a sign of how openly confrontational their attitude is).

In response to a direct question I posed about the New Atheism, Dennett said that he used to think that Dawkins was too far out in his positions, but that recently he (Dennett) has begun to come around to the need for a more aggressive and militant atheism. I don’t buy it, which is why -- again contrary to both Dennett and Dawkins -- I changed my mind about, for example, the wisdom of calling myself a “Bright.” It isn’t that I’m afraid of confrontations (if you have ever seen me debating a creationist, in person or on YouTube, you know what I mean). And I do think that one needs to be, as Dawkins often puts it, intellectually honest and call a spade a spade. But there are different ways of doing it, as a matter of style, not content. In this respect, I think the gentleness of a Carl Sagan, or the empathic frankness of a Robert Ingersoll, are far more effective than the direct charge of stupidity that Dawkins hurls at 90% of the planet.

Regardless, as the public chat with Dennett clearly showed the other day, we all need and can nicely enjoy a conversation on philosophy, science and religion, possibly followed by a good dinner and decent wine. What better way to spend a rainy afternoon in New York City?

Why I am not a Humanist, Part 2

elizabeth@alivemindmedia.com, jay@lorberhtdigital.com, rita@lorberhtdigital.com — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 14:12:30 GMT

By Mark Rowland

The article of faith in humanism is this: humans are the most important thing in the universe - at least the known universe. This is an article of faith because there is no possible evidence that could support it. I learned this lesson from living with a wolf.

I am reasonably good at working my way through complex logical problems, at least after my morning infusion of caffeine. A wolf is good at running for miles without tiring. Which ability is better? If we are going to decide this, we are going to have to work out what ‘better' means. Indeed, if we are to evaluate whether the ability to reason in the way humans do is better than the ability to run in the way wolves do, then we are going to need some common standard of evaluation that gives sense to the word ‘better'. But not only is there no such standard, it is difficult to imagine what this standard could possibly be.

What could ‘better' mean in this context? More useful? It is more useful for a wolf to be able to run for miles without tiring than it is for me, and it is more useful for me to be able to work my way through complex logical problems than it is for him. There is no common standard of usefulness in terms of which we could say that my skill is more useful than his. What is more useful is species relative.

The same is true of we try to understand better in terms of the idea of excellence. According to a long tradition of thought, instigated by Plato, rationality is the distinctively human excellence. But this just reiterates that the idea of excellence is also relative to an animal's form of life. Excellence for a wolf consists, among other things, in a certain sort of endurance that sees it able to run for twenty miles in pursuit of its prey. What is excellent depends on what you are.

But, we find ourselves tempted to say, rationality is better than endurance. But on what basis could we justify this claim? There is no objective sense of ‘better' that would allow us to do so. Once we say this, the word ‘better' loses its meaning. There is simply what is better for a human and what is better for a wolf. There is no common standard in terms of which the different senses of better may be judged.

The guiding assumption of humanism is, therefore, an article of faith. As such, humanism is built on the model of religion and, indeed, arguably contains, in tacit, suppressed, form, the central tenet of theistic religions: the belief in God. If we are looking for a common standard to justify the idea that humans are more important than wolves, what could this standard be other than the belief that we are made in the image of God and they are not?