Morality: Philosophy vs Biology

This semester I’m taking an introductory course through the Philosophy department called Biomedical ethics. After four classes, I’m convinced I’m insane for taking this class “for fun.” So far we’ve just been learning about ethics in general, and my brain is already melting. Somehow my mind manages to agree and disagree with about every topic we’re presented, no matter how contradictory they are. I admit I’m totally unfamiliar with philosophy, but right now it just seems like a whole lot of bullshit that grad students pull out of their ass while at the pub.

I’m fine on understanding sound and valid arguments – those are based on logic, which I understand – but my mind explodes when we start talking about various moral theories. I think my problem is that I view things as a scientist and a biologist, and I have a really hard time getting into the mindset of a philosopher.

For example, our professor has spent the last two classes talking about how moral subjectivism (moral statements are true and false, but their truth is determined by the attitudes and beliefs of society and culture) and emotivism (moral statements are neither true nor false) are piles of crap. I don’t know if this is the common opinion of the philosophical community, but it doesn’t sit well with me.

As an atheist, I don’t think moral codes were carved into stone or written in a book. Rather, evolutionary biology and instincts explain most of our moral behavior (I recommend Marc Hauser’s book Moral Minds). We automatically and rapidly come up with moral decisions based on instincts and emotions, and then after the fact we come up with reasoning to support our opinion. So are we really all just emotivists, but trick ourselves into thinking we’re being rational?

I also don’t understand how you can prove something to be morally right or wrong without invoking evolved behavior/emotion/instinct. Let’s say my professor is right and moral subjectivism and emotivism are totally and utterly wrong, and we’re just little logical machines. Whether you subscribe to consequentialist or deontological moral theories (or other ones, I have no idea what I’m talking about), it still doesn’t seem right to me. Let me play the annoying child for a bit:

Philosopher: Stabbing a child in the face is morally wrong.
Me: Why?
Philosopher: Because it lowers the happiness of others/causes harm to others, and that is morally wrong.
Me: Why?
Philosopher: Because that’s the moral theory we’re using.
Me: Why?
Philosopher: *fails Jen*

Alright, yes, I think stabbing a child in the face is morally wrong. And if you asked me to outline the certain moral “rules” I follow, they would generally be to reduce harm to others. But why should that be my rule? Why do we label reducing harm as good? The way this class is teaching it, it seems like right and wrong are some sort of voodoo mysterious universal constants that simply are.

But the way I see it, morality evolved. We want to reduce harm to others because we evolved in a group situation, and the only way we could survive is if we stopped killing our family and tribe members long enough for us to all cooperate. If we evolved in a more independent environment, we may have a totally different moral system. Maybe the moral rule that would have evolved would have been caring only about your own children, and killing other children would be seen as a moral act.

Of course, maybe I’m totally wrong. I’m not familiar with philosophy, and it’s quite possible that I’m over thinking it by wondering where morals even came from to begin with. But that seems like a really important point to me. If instinct decides what’s morally right and wrong, what value do all of these various theories have? They’re not merely trying to predict what humans do do, because we don’t always act morally – they’re trying to say what we should do. I have a hard time accepting that my professor 100% rejects emotivism when everything seems to start there, and then get tweaked by a cognitive theory.

Aannddd I’ve gotten to the point where I think I’m self contradictory and my brain has oozed onto the floor. I really don’t know what I’m talking about and none of this stuff makes sense to me. As this is an atheist blog, I have a good feeling that I have a fair number of philosophers (amateur or otherwise) in my readership. Maybe you all can help explain this to me, because I’m not even making sense to myself.

Ray Comfort Tampon Case

Usually I wouldn’t want to associate Ray Comfort with things that go in my vagina, but this was too cute to not share:Need something to hide your tampons in? Look no further than the Banana Man himself. I know if I saw a Ray Comfort shaped container lying around, I’d be too afraid to open it lest ignorance spill out ala Pandora’s box.

If you’re not sold, the profit goes to a program supporting young female paleontologists. Definitely a good cause!

(Thanks to Jason for the tip!)

The joys of parents learning science

We’re always hearing stories about kids making skeptical insights or getting interested in science. They’re exciting because these kids are our future, and maybe we see a bit of our nerdy selves in them. I don’t have kids, but I still get excited about something similar – parents learning science.

My parents have always been very pro-science. They always encouraged me in my science classes and Science Olympiad, and were elated when I decided to major in genetics. However, they’re not particularly science oriented. My dad was a history and special ed teacher, and my mom was an art teacher. My dad is into politics and sports, and my mom is obsessed with decorating and traveling. They treat science how rational people should – scientists are experts in a certain area, and even though my parents don’t personally understand the topics, they put their faith in scientists. It’s no different than putting faith in a mechanic or a pilot – everyone has their specialty, and we can’t know everything. They don’t believe that evolution and global warming are just giant conspiracies precisely orchestrated by hundreds and hundreds of evil scientists. Just because they personally don’t have the background to interpret the data doesn’t render it false (if only creationists could understand this simple concept).

We’re all intelligent, but in different areas – and sometimes that causes problems. The more I study biology, the less in common we have to talk about when I come home. Usually conversations consist of my dad rambling about some history book he’s reading and me trying to keep my eyes from glazing over. But this time I had a plan. I brought home Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne (who also has an excellent blog). My dad will read science books if given them (he loved Guns, Germs, and Steel and Hot, Flat, and Crowded), and I figured this time I can kill two birds with one stone: Get my dad to learn more about my interests, and get him to ramble about something I’m actually interested in.

Success!

It’s only been a day and he’s halfway done. He says he loves it and that it does a great job of explaining concepts to a non-scientist. He’s keeping a little notepad nearby so he can write down especially awesome facts to share with me, or questions to ask me so I can clarify. There’s just something really cool about my dad running up and ranting, suddenly realizing the frustrating creationist logic I have to constantly deal with.

Dad: How do people deal with the fact that 99% of all species that have existed are extinct? Why would God design things to all die? That doesn’t seem very intelligent to me.
Me: God works in mysterious ways *wink*

Dad: We have fossils! What more proof do they need?
Me: Satan buried them there to test your faith. That or the scientists made it all up.

Dad: Now he’s talking about examples of unintelligent design. Did you know women have painful childbirth because we evolved from four legged ancestors?
Me: I thought it was because God was punishing Eve.

Playing the devil’s advocate is fun. My dad knows I’m an atheist, and he’s not religious at all either, so it’s all for laughs. But it’s great seeing him react to all the religious “arguments” that I have heard people seriously make. Not only that, but it mirrors how my dad instilled good skeptical thinking in me. I’d often ask questions (How did they get the squirrels to talk in that commercial? It has to be a computer) and he would reply with a ridiculous answer (Squirrels just talk when you’re not looking). I would then go about explaining why that was silly, and logical thinking was developed!

I look forward to his future comments and questions as he finishes the book. Then my mom is going to take a crack at it! Soon the whole family will be well-read evolutionists, mwahaha!

A blast from the past: my high school paper on intelligent design

Oral Roberts died, etc. It’s already been covered by other blogs (My favorite title being “Oral Roberts has finally been killed by God for not raising enough money.”), and no matter how many horrible things I think a person did while they were alive, I just don’t feel right talking bad about someone when they’re dead. So I’ll leave it at that.

Why mention it, then? Well, it reminded me of a girl I went to high school with who now attends Oral Roberts University. We were sort of friends – the kind that talk a lot in class, but don’t really do anything outside of school. She was super nice and a brilliant student, and always outshone everyone in our honors english, history, and math classes. So when I found out she was going to Oral Roberts, it felt like a step down. This is the kind of person who could go anywhere on scholarship, and she was going there?

But it didn’t really surprise me, because I found out how religious she was that semester. We were in AP Composition together the spring of our senior year (one of the most hellish, ridiculous classes I had to take at my high school – that’s a rant of its own) and our next assignment was a debate paper. One person had to be pro, the other con on a topic of our choice. We were partnered together by the sheer luck of sitting near each other, and started brainstorming topic ideas.

I had been reading a lot about evolution lately, so I suggested “How about whether or not Intelligent Design should be taught in school?”

“Oh, that’s a great idea!” she said. I smiled. “My father has his PhD in theology, so he’ll be able to help me a lot.” And smile gone.

I shouldn’t say my smile was gone – rather it was likely replaced by the smug grin of an 18 year old who knew she had this debate in her pocket. After devouring information about evolution and the ID debates for the last four years, this paper was going to be easy to write. The hardest part was shoving it all into a 4 page limit in the constraints of the formal thesis-3 supporting paragraphs-conclusion format. And fulfilling all of the random requirements our teacher created, like interviewing people, using a certain number of magazine articles versus books, yadda yadda.

I found that paper now (pdf here). I have to say, it’s fairly good for an 18 year old who self-taught herself evolution – still more intelligent than most of the creationist bull crap you hear today. I’m actually more impressed by my writing style, which has apparently totally deteriorated after being subjected to nothing but science classes at Purdue (which pretty much never write anything, least of all essays).

But that’s not the fun paper.

The fun paper is my rebuttal. We got to read each other’s papers* and write a 1000 word rebuttal, which would factor into our overall grade. She didn’t seem too unnerved by my initial paper. But I still remember that day when we were sitting in the library and swapped our rebuttals.

I made her cry.

Oh, those big bad evolutionary biologists. Keep in mind I was a extraordinarily passive agnostic who was just coming out of deism at this point. Making her cry was not my goal – winning this debate, sure, but not tears. Thinking about this experience now, I can’t imagine what I said that could have upset her that much. That is, until I went back and read my rebuttal (pdf here).

Oh my god. Hilarious.

Not only did I call her paper a “futile attempt” with “claims [that] hardly contain even a modicum of truth,” but I invoked Hitler at the end. Yes, I failed Godwin’s law, but at least I did it spectacularly (in my unbiased opinion).

Even Behe’s book Darwin’s Black Box inclusion as “one of the most important books of the twentieth century” speaks little: Mein Kampf is considered one of the most influential books ever, but that hardly makes its message true (Sobilo).

I wasn’t trying to be mean. I think I just really, really wanted to win that debate – especially since, if I remember correctly, our teacher had some inane grading system where the better paper of the two got an automatic 100%. Niceties were not getting in the way of a grade boost I desperately wanted.

Needless to say, I got the 100%. Oh, she’s a far superior writer than I am – it’s just hard winning a debate when you have zero logical points to make (don’t worry, she still got an A for the writing). I remember I even showed all of the papers to my AP Biology teacher at the time. He just blinked slowly and said “You destroyed her.”

Of course, did I do anything to help the cause of evolution? Probably not. I guess this illustrates the fine line we have to walk between opening up dialog, or letting our frustrations win and calling people names. Do the big names of ID who are spreading lies deserve ridicule? I’m in the camp that says “sure.” Do 18 year olds who don’t really understand the topic? Probably not.

Ah, young Jen fail. Though on an interesting note, I had just started reading Pharyngula while writing that paper. Coincidence, or contagious crankiness – I’ll let you decide.

*I don’t have a copy of her paper or rebuttal. Well, a hard copy is probably buried somewhere back home, but I still wouldn’t want to post it since it’s her intellectual property. You can pretty much imagine what she said by reading any creationist argument on the internet, since they just parrot each other anyway.

Erotic pottery, sleeping around, and the gaydar

Okay, now that I have your attention…

Today was just full of sexual news! Usually each of these stories would win their own post, but I guess I’ll just make one super sexy entry. Try not to get too hot and bothered.

1. A new exhibit has opened featuring the erotic artwork of ancient Greece and Rome. Ah, I’m so proud of my ancestors. I can’t imagine having the dishes in my apartment covered in drawings of gay sex. …Well, okay, I can, but some of my guests probably wouldn’t want to eat off of them. …Who am I kidding, my friends are all strange like me. They’d love it. That being said, I love their description of the prostitutes kiosk, with the walls covered with illustrations on what’s on the menu. “Eh, you like the retrograde wheelbarrow over there? That’s two chickens and a loaf of bread.” (Via Boing Boing)

2. A new study from University of Minnesota researchers has found that casual sex does not have a negative psychological impact on those that practice it. So to all of those people out there who say sex without love is evil or imply that something is wrong with people who enjoy sex for the sake of sex – HA!

3. Oh, the inner workings of the Gaydar. Not only do people fair better than random guessing when it comes to speculation on a stranger’s sexual orientation, but they can make that decision in under a second. Original article talks about the evolutionary implications and some of the studies flaws, though it left out my major criticism – how do fag hags do compared to the general public?!? I’m pretty sure I would have been an outlier if you threw me in that study.

New Merch: Evolution of Christmas

There’s new a new design up at Blag Hag Swag, titled the Evolution of Christmas (click for larger image):Who can deny the resemblance between Darwin and Santa Claus? Except his sleigh is a bit different. I need to include stuff like this in my grad school apps to show how passionate/geeky I am about evolutionary biology.

You can buy it on t-shirts, mousepads, coffee mugs, greeting cards, and postcards. I think the coffee mugs look especially nice, since the design wraps around the whole mug:And this is a bit late, but you can get 50% off if you buy 10+ greeting cards or post cards if you enter the code 12DEALSCARDS at checkout before 11:59 pm PT tonight! Even better, you can customize the text of the cards however you want. Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Happy Monkey, witty evolution pun – whatever your heart desires. Go spread some nerdy love for the holidays!

If you’d like this available on any other sort of merchandise over at Zazzle, let me know and it shall be done.

DarwinTunes: Hands-on evolution of music

Being on nerdy professional ecology listservs has its perks: I get to find out about fun projects like DarwinTunes:

The organic world – animals, plants, viruses – is the product of Darwinian evolution by natural selection. Natural selection expresses the idea that organisms (more accurately their genes) vary and that variability has consequences. Some variants are bad and go extinct; others are good and do exceptionally well. This process, repeated for two billion years, has given us the splendours of life on earth.

It has also given us the splendours of human culture. This may seem like a bold claim, but it is self-evidently true. People copy cultural artefacts – words, songs, images, ideas – all the time from other people. Copying is imperfect: there is “mutation”. Some cultural mutants do better than others: most die but some are immensely successful; they catch on; they become hits. This process, repeated for fifty thousand years, has given us all that we make, say and do; it is the process of “cultural evolution”.

However, the underlying mechanisms are poorly understood. For example, how important is human creative input compared to audience selection? Is progress smooth and continuous or step-like? We set up DarwinTunes as a test-bed for the evolution of music, the oldest and most widespread form of culture; and, thanks to your participation, these questions will soon be answered.

You can participate in the experiment by clicking here! Pretty neat stuff.

Some delicious evolutionary facts for Thanksgiving

There’s a cool post over at the Axis of Evo highlighting some fun, Thanksgiving-themed evolution facts. Here’s one of my favorites (had to pick the one that talked about sex, of course):

2. That turkey on the table, unless you got one of those expensive, frou frou free range ones, will probably be a Double Breasted. They get as big as 86 lbs. That’s 1 lb heavier than Nicole Richie was in 2006, by the way. They can’t fly, and they can barely run. Males are so supersized, in fact, that they are physically unable to impregnate the females anymore, and thus humans must intervene in the sex act with some rather simple equipment (if you are brave, you can watch some clips from Dirty Jobs: part 1, part 2; don’t). Compare this size to the maximum size of a wild turkey, its ancestor: 38 lbs. Artificial selection for bigger and and bigger turkeys has thus been hugely successful, and is a great table side demonstration of descent with modification. And there’s still room for growth…the elephant bird of Madagascar weighed 1100 lbs (can you image Mike Rowe wrestling one of them?).

Mmmm, I’m thankful for evolution, or we wouldn’t have such delicious food to eat!

Was Kirk Cameron at Purdue for the Origin project?

My friend just alerted me to this article over at DailyTech that claims Kirk Cameron was physically at Purdue University on Thursday handing out Ray Comfort’s creationism-sullied Origin. My initial reaction was something along the lines of “Wait. What? WHAT? AAHHHH! HOW DID WE MISS HIM?! ARRGHHABBABBLL!” Then I actually took the time to slowly read the article. It didn’t include much more information, other than this picture with the following caption:

Kirk Cameron poses with students at Purdue University, holding copies of “On The Origin of Species”, containing a controversial intro he helped pen. (Source: Living Waters)

If you remember my post about our counter-protest, Thursday was cold, rainy, and miserable. You would be hard pressed to find any student not bundled up in multiple, water-proof layers and clinging to their umbrella…or to find a single spot on campus sunny and dry enough for this photo. Either God sent down a ray of brilliant sunlight just for Cameron’s photo op, or this article is full of crap.

I’m going with my “full of crap” theory. The article also claims “Scientists on campus rallied against the handout with a handout of their own…” when it was actually the Society of Non-Theists who were performing the counter-protest. I checked the article they linked to over at NBC Chicago, and it only mentions that Cameron was behind the movement, not physically at Purdue. They also failed to mention the Non-Theists, but we got a plug in the Chicago Tribune!

So has anyone else heard anything about this? I’m pretty certain he wasn’t here – can’t imagine the local news places wouldn’t pick up on that.

Ray Comfort’s Origin meets counter-protests at Purdue

Yesterday I commented that Ray Comfort didn’t stop by Purdue to hand out his sullied version of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Since Ray changed the release date to the 18th to screw up secular counter-protesters, I thought that would be the last we saw of him. Well, I was wrong. Around 11:30 I started receiving a flood of text messages, IMs, and emails, all saying the same thing – the books were being passed out at the Engineering fountain at Purdue!

I alerted the masses via my own flurry of texts, tweets, and Facebook status updates, printed off a bunch of flyers from Don’t Diss Darwin (thankfully I was in a computer lab at the time), and ran off. I also had the foresight this morning to bring the batch of “I Support Science” Darwin Fish stickers we had been sent for free, and I’m glad I had them.Oh, and did I mention it was raining all day today? Kind of sucked.

Right after I got outside of I saw someone passing out books in front of LILY – the biology building where I live, sort of extra insulting – which showed me that they were all around campus, not just by the Engineering fountain. After politely receiving a book, I set up camp next to him handing out flyers and stickers to anyone who took a book.

Soon he ran out of books, and I was about to leave when I was approached by two biology professors I know.
Prof 1: Thank you so much for doing this!
Me: Oh, no problem.
Prof 2: Can we give you some money to reimburse you?
Me: Huh? For what?
Prof 1: For printing off all of those books. It must have cost a lot of money.
Me: Ooohhh, the Origin? Nooo, those are creationists handing it out. They added an anti-evolution introduction linking evolutionary biology to Nazism. We’re counter-protesting them.
Prof 1: I knew something smelled fishy!! Now I’ll definitely have to go read it, hahaha!

After that I ran to the Engineering fountain and found three different people widely spaces out and passing out books. A friend of mine tackled two of them who were closer together, and I focused on one (after getting another book, gotta catch ’em all!). Very quickly he figured out what I was doing, and probably wasn’t too happy. I felt a bit bad since he was apparently a high school student roped into this, while everyone else were 40 year old white males. But I continued to hand out flyers and stickers, and more non-theists came to join me and take photos.

Lurk lurk lurk.

One of our members started talking to the people handing out books and asked if they had permission to be here. They skirted around the issue and just said they were with Living Waters Ministries. Purdue’s policy states that you can’t hand out anything on campus unless you’re specifically sponsored by a student group and a member of that organization is there with you – which was clearly not happening. However, we didn’t try to get them kicked off since 1) they were almost done passing out things anyway and 2) if they want to spread their stupidity, go ahead. We’ll just show how they’re wrong.
I then explained to this guy what the book was all about, and he heartily laughed.

Soon they were out of books, and congregated around where I was passing out flyers…and then they tried to debate me. They asked me about proof for evolution, and I started rattling of patterns in DNA, transitional fossils – but then I made the mistake of saying I was studying evolutionary biology. Immediately after that, they changed the topic to the Bible and how awesome it is because they knew they had no chance in debating me in biology.

I’ve stated this before, but I reeeaaallly hate debating people, especially about the Bible. One, I’m not good at thinking on my feet – I like having a keyboard and three seconds of thought. Two, I’m not a Bible scholar, so I especially hate Biblical debates. And three, I don’t freaking care. Their reasoning is so circular that it’s maddening, and I hate repeating the same arguments over and over again knowing that it is completely pointless and that I’m not going to change anyone’s minds. Thankfully Bryan (the guy I’m dating) appeared, and he was a great help since he’s currently reading the Bible and commenting on it daily over at his own blog. Still, after going through Pascal’s wager, the inerrancy of the Bible, the circular logic of God’s word making the Bible true, the “faith” of science, the God of the Gaps, God being infinite but the beginning of the universe needing a cause, atheists not trying to look for God, and morality as proof of God, I kind of wanted to die a little. Or punch babies, but that probably wouldn’t have reflected very well on me.

Eventually I had to escape because I was planning to meet someone for lunch. I later found out they were passing out the books not just in front of LILY and the Engineering fountain, but in front of the Stewart Center Wetheril, Ford dining court, Armstrong…and who knows where else. Unfortunately, we only reached a small group of people who received books since we didn’t exactly know what was going on, but something is better than nothing. We’ve alerted all the local media, so hopefully someone will pick up on it.

But you know what? It doesn’t really matter. The most common responses I saw from people who took the book were, “Awesome, I’ve always wanted a copy!” The most common response from people rejecting the book were, “Ugh, no, I don’t believe in evolution.” You know what that means?

The only people who took Ray Comfort’s bastardized Origin were people who already accept evolution and are most likely to see through his deceitful bullshit. Them, and atheists who were gobbling them up like collector’s items. I got two, and other non-theist members were racing to grab one. I know when I’m teaching evolutionary biology at a university many years from now, I’ll be happy to wave this in front of my class and talk about the scary past where evolution actually had silly people fighting against it. At least, hopefully I’ll be able to say that.

These are going on the book shelf next to the Professor and the Dominatrix and Ken Ham’s Evolution: The Lie.