Palazzo has put me in a pissy mood, now. He’s mentioned those pompous god-botherers at the Templeton Foundation, who awarded 1.4 million dollars to that credulous gasbag, John Barrow.
When Selfish Gene author Richard Dawkins challenged physicist John Barrow on his formulation of the constants of nature at last summer’s Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship lectures, Barrow laughed and said, “You have a problem with these ideas, Richard, because you’re not really a scientist. You’re a biologist.”
For Barrow, biology is little more than a branch of natural history. “Biologists have a limited, intuitive understanding of complexity. They’re stuck with an inherited conflict from the 19th century, and are only interested in outcomes, in what wins out over others,” he adds. “But outcomes tell you almost nothing about the laws that govern the universe.” For physicists it is the laws of nature themselves that capture and structure the universe–and put brakes on it as well.
Yeah, and some physicists are little more than glorified numerologists.
Barrow’s schtick is to go on and on about how fine-tuned the universe is, with every constant dead on exactly what it must be for life as we know it to exist. For this vacuous nonsense, the Templeton Foundation drops a million bucks on him. I think the Templeton should have just given all their money to Douglas Adams, for his elegant refutation of whole simple-minded game.
…imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’
That idea was worth a prize, and it was expressed far more clearly than the fuzzy excuses for superstition offered by a pretentious physicist.
Similarly aggravating are the babblings of progressive, left-wing Rabbi Michael Lerner. He’s trying to understand why some on the left are hostile to religion; he speculates that it’s a reaction to the use of religion to justify oppression (but rejects that because there are totalitarian regimes that do not support religion), or personal experience with oppressive religious communities (but also rejects that because, as we know, many progressive leaders were also religious). By an inadequate process of elimination, he comes to his conclusion.
So I am led to the conclusion that the main reason that underlies the left’s deep skepticism about religion is its members’ strong faith in a different kind of belief system. Even though many people on the left think of themselves as merely trying to hold on to a rational consciousness and resist the emotionalism that can contribute to fascistic movements, it’s not true that the left is without belief. The left is captivated by a belief that has been called scientism.
Umm, no…what a lack of imagination. He’s so steeped in his faith that he is unable to comprehend that people might lack it, so he invents one, and claims we’re believers in it. It’s pathetic.
Here’s a simpler explanation: many of us find his ancient tribal superstitions foolish, contradictory, irrelevant, and, well, stupid. We aren’t rejecting them because we have leapt onto some other bandwagon for the credulous, but because we don’t find him, or Jerry Falwell, or JZ Knight, or LDS President Thomas Monson, or Elizabeth Clare Prophet, or any of the endless chain of religious charlatans who have claimed divine insight, to be at all credible.
Scientism thus extends far beyond an understanding and appreciation of the role of science in society. It has become the religion of the secular consciousness. Why do I say it’s a religion? Because it is a belief system that has no more scientific foundation than any other belief system. The view that that which is real and knowable is that which can be empirically verified or measured is a view that itself cannot be empirically measured or verified and thus by its own criterion is unreal or unknowable. It is a religious belief system with powerful adherents. Spiritual progressives therefore insist on the importance of distinguishing between our strong support for science and our opposition to scientism.
Look. If I let go of a bowling ball, it falls down. If I pick it up and let go again, it falls down. It’s not a matter of “belief”, it’s an empirical matter that we can repeat over and over and we find that we get the same result. It’s purely pragmatic. I don’t have to possess any kind of belief in much of anything to find that F=G•m1•m2/d2 nicely describes the force between two masses, and science is accepted as a matter of testable utility (and if a scientific claim fails to be useful, it gets abandoned relatively readily). We get used to the fact that science is specific and testable and accomplishes things, and we get spoiled.
So when religion makes claims, such as that chopping bits of a baby’s penis off marks them as ‘special’ to god, or that there is one deity who is actually three and one part of him got killed but came back to life, you have to recognize that those kinds of things just don’t meet our standards anymore. It’s not a matter of having adopted silly new dogmas that displace the old ones…it’s that those ideas are absurd. They’re untestable. They have no point. And when religious people say inane things like this,
As a scientist, Barrow has some useful advice for religious believers: “Don’t be cowed because religious images are often naive or simple. They are merely a shadow of something far more sophisticated. And, as in science, as more knowledge accumulates, old ideas often turn out to be part of the deeper truth that eventually emerges.”
We see right through them. There’s nothing sophisticated about theology, except in the sense that they’ve managed to make astounding elaborate contortions in the struggle to rationalize the irrational.
Lerner goes on, and what he attempts to do is to make this an argument about meaning.
The secular left consistently disarms itself of what could be its most powerful weapon: a spiritual vision of the world. I’ve used the word “spiritual” as a label to identify a meaning-oriented approach to politics. Its focus is on the yearning of human beings for a world of love and caring, for genuine connection and mutual recognition, for kindness and generosity, for connection to the common good, to the sacred and to a transcendent purpose for our lives. Understand human history and contemporary society and individual psychology from the standpoint of these needs and the ways they have been frustrated, and then develop a strategy that addresses those needs, and we will be able to build a movement and a political party that will be in a position to bring about all the good things liberals and progressives have fought for with such limited success over the past 100 years.
No, no, no. The godless life does not mean we have a meaningless life, and is not the abandonment of purpose. We do not need religion or a belief in the unseen and unknowable and intangible and mystical to find value in the world and our lives. What kind of blind fool is this Lerner fellow to think that love and caring and connection and recognition and kindness and generosity are properties that require a belief in magic? Atheists embrace all of those virtues fully.
We are working for meaning in what actually exists. What we reject is meaning found in the lies of the religious—we are striving for truths, rather than affirmation of goofy superstitions.
If you want a solid progressive movement, build it on honesty and a steady willingness to test ideas against the real world. Don’t build it on false dogma and the hokum of the religious. I don’t care how well meaning or sensitive or kind to puppy dogs Lerner might be—he’s asking that our futures be built on the rotten framework of his personal delusions. No, thank you. Keep your spooks and cosmic boogeymen out of real world politics.
Fantastic use of Douglas Adams. What a loss he was.
My favorite chapter of THHGG is where the janitor figures out the secret to the Infinite Improbability Drive and then gets beaten up by physicists when he accepts his Nobel Prize “because they realized that the one thing they couldn’t stand was a smartass.”
What a bunch of crap! Reminds me of Judge Hand’s ruling (for which Mark Russel called him “Sleight of Hand”) that secular humanism represented “an atheistic religion”. Atheism is a religious belief, in that it answers religious questions. It is not a religion. There are no priests, sacred texts, sacred beliefs, etc. It’s as much another religion as baldness is another type of haircut.
Things which have no empirical content aren’t real. That’s what the word ‘real’ indicates. If I say that the Easter Bunny has no affect on anything in an even theoretical way, and then say that the Easter Bunny is not real, I quickly discover that there are no implications of the first statement that are not also implications of the second, and vice versa. They’re just different ways of stating the same thing. That’s not a “belief system” in any intelligible sense.
As for this:
So he wants us to produce a scientific foundation for rationality, which is itself the foundation for science? Gee, that’s not the slightest bit circular.
I blame all of the medieval “logic” Jewish theologians are exposed to in Torah studies.
Speaking of “outcomes that tell you almost nothing about the laws that govern the universe” , I was just noting how similar the fractal branching pattern in rangomorphs is to the branching patterns in crystals. Since I have noticed this and am interested in it, am I no longer a biologist?
May I quote Bertrand Russell, one of the best known atheist philosophers :
“Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have driven my life : the search for knowledge, the longing for love and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind”.
Doesn’t sound purposeless to me.
“You have a problem with these ideas, Richard, because you’re not really a scientist. You’re a biologist.”
Okay- after hearing yesterday (from my relative) that medicine and biology were NOT real sciences, I have to wonder why this idea is out there in any way shape or form. If biology is not a science, what is it??? A philosophy? Not so much- because most of medicine and biology are couched in questions like- if you do this to this part what will happen to the next part??? Am I, a layperson of the lowest order, completely on another planet?? Do they only list biology as a science in high school because they have no other category for it? AAARGH!!!
Creationists often insist that evolution is “just another religious belief” but I’ve never heard an evolutionary biologist suggest that creationism is “just another science.” From this I conclude that, abstract protestations aside, in practice most everyone agrees that science is a superior basis for belief than faith.
Dismissing a major discipline of the sciences wholesale like that is a sure sign that Barrow is a crank. What he said about biology was just so wrong, so ignorant, so plain stupid. We do measurements and experiments on real phenomena, we assemble testable hypotheses, we carry out legitimate experiments that are more clearly in the domain of the scientific method than, say, string theory work (I am not implying that string theory is not a science, either).
We also work on stuff that is far more complex than anything physicists do.
Yes, but you ignore that complexity to generate high-level principles that can be used for predictive purposes. This is not a bad thing — it’s like coming up with the Ideal Gas Law instead of trying to solve the wavefunctions of billions of gas molecules.
The study of string theory is scientific, but string theory itself is not.
he speculates that it’s a reaction to the use of religion to justify oppression (but rejects that because there are totalitarian regimes that do not support religion),
This is an extraordinary piece of bad reasoning. He is arguing that unless religion causes all oppression it cannot cause any.
‘You’re not a scientist, you’re a biologist.’
Once bitten by Darwin..
Yes, but you ignore that complexity to generate high-level principles that can be used for predictive purposes.
Ignore isn’t the right word; perhaps ‘temporarily set aside’. The way I see it, we take a system that’s a black box, and try to figure out how the inputs connect to the outputs, breaking it into many smaller black boxes. As we continue to experiment, and as technology improves, we can break the boxes down into ever-smaller parts, until eventually we can actually open them and see what’s inside.
Lerner says:
Main problem with that, as far as his thesis goes, is that the religious don’t actually want those things. They say they do, but they use their religion as a club, to keep “us” in and “them” out, and extend those wonderful things only to “us”.
Religion was a good way to make “us” bigger than the few we’re related to by blood, or could recognize face to face, but it’s in the way now. We have to junk it and move on to something that makes us all value everyone, regardless of whether they know the secret handshake.
“…you’re not really a scientist. You’re a biologist.”
“…the universe’s fine-tuned nature, with every constant dead on exactly what it must be for life as we know it to exist, is vacuous nonsense…”
Both comments are equally nonsensical, IMHO!
I suspect, however, that Barrow’s comment was more of a pithy, British-style joke than an actual accusation; he laces his books with similiar pithy quotes…
Interestingly, one could turn Barrow’s ideas about phyiscs’ superiority over biology, on its head: all these ideas about anthropic principles only exist because LIFE exists!
Anthropic principles are necessarily vacuous? The universe IS fine-tuned! If it weren’t, none of us would be here to argue the point one way or the other! That’s neither vacuous nor nonsense – it’s a fact! It’s s FACT that the masses of the proton and the electron, the strengths of the ‘constants of nature’ (or whatever you wish to call them) are very limited if life and consciousness are to evolve.
People interpret this stuff differently: some say “I knew it! God designed it all for us!” Very few scientists would be happy with that. Another response is to say “So what? If it wasn’t like that, we wouldn’t be here to make these silly arguments. Would a puddle think it’s amazing that it fits its hole ‘exactly’? I don’t care if you think it’s amazing. Why not just accept it as brute fact?” A third POV is to invoke the “many-worlds” idea, used by some interpretations of quantum theory: “What if there are zillions of universes, all budding off from each other from a “multiverse” or “brane world”, and this is one of the few ones that have just the right conditions for life and consciousness to evolve? After all, we obviously inhabit the ‘best’ planet in our solar system, so what if we could apply that logic to this?”
But Barrow’s big mistake is to believe that this somehow constitutes evidence for design. It’s just the old Argument From Design, albeit pushed into particle physics, where it thinks it’s immune from Darwinian attack!
Also interstingly, it’s ironic that physics is now being used to bolster ‘design arguments’, while the life sciences have abolished it altogether. A lot of biologists used to believe life was created, and are now hardcore materialists, like 19th century physicists were. Some physicists, meanwhile, have been drifting away from materialism and claiming to have evidence for design. It’s as if the two disciplines were on fast-moving trains, going in opposite directions, and not noticing what’s going on across the tracks.
Lerner says:
Main problem with that, as far as his thesis goes, is that the religious don’t actually want those things. They say they do, but they use their religion as a club, to keep “us” in and “them” out, and extend those wonderful things only to “us”.
Religion was a good way to make “us” bigger than the few we’re related to by blood, or could recognize face to face, but it’s in the way now. We have to junk it and move on to something that makes us all value everyone, regardless of whether they know the secret handshake.
So for those of us doing biophysics, if we’re not scientists or numerologists, what are we? I definitely know what John Barrow is though: an idiot.
If you take Barrow’s distinction between biology and physics seriously, it’s not biology that isn’t science. It’s physics.
A lot of physics-worshippers think that Physics is the queen of the sciences, and that things are scientific to the extent that they resemble physics.
Physics is unique among the sciences in that it studies the absolutely simplest, dumbest, most numerous and redundant things that exist. That is why it is “successful” in showing that things conform to very simple equations, to within many digits of precision—if they don’t, you don’t call it physics.
The defining characteristic of physics is that if you can’t describe it that way, it isn’t physics—it’s chemistry, or meteorology, or geology, or or biology or something.
If it isn’t incredibly simple, its not physics.
No other science can take this approach; only physics can. It’s staked out the high ground. Or the low ground, with the lowest-hanging fruit.
A huge part of the obvious success of physics comes from gerrymandering disciplinary boundaries and making the hard, messy problems somebody else’s problem.
I don’t say this to demean physics or physicists. Even the excruciatingly simple things physicists study generate a whole lot of complexity in a hurry, and are often mind-bendingly counterintuitive and difficult to analyze. Another huge part of the success of physics is that it has attracted a lot of very smart people, and a substantial number of undeniably absolutely brilliant ones. No getting around that.
But the idea that physics is science and biology isn’t is just ludicrous. The only way that distinction can be maintained is if nothing but physics counts as science.
If there’s a single good exemplar of science in general, I’d have to say it’s biology, not physics. Physics is the anomaly, and biology is the central exemplar.
Biology is the most successful science that fundamentally resembles other sciences, in ways that physics simply does not and cannot. And it is tremendously successful. Other sciences should aspire to the condition of biology, not physics. Aping physics is a recipe for bad science. (And I’ve seen the results over and over again in several sciences, including my own. Not pretty.)
When Darwin was in college, his friends advised him to give up on biology, which would never be much more than the “stamp collecting” of curiosities, without the kind of satisfying “deep” theory you get in physics. Physics was where the action was, they said.
But Darwin proved them wrong, and gave the best example of a scientific theory ever. Better than Newton’s, even, because he wasn’t gerrymandering away the incredible complexity of the natural world and focusing on the easiest problems. *(Deeper, too.)
Well medicine as such isn’t really science. It’s more of a black art at the GP level, with some skilled technician / engineer types and some craftsman / artisan surgeons. However, in order to work properly, modern medicine relies very heavily on real sciences – and biology is one of them (or several of them, since it is now much sub-divided through successful growth)! John Barrow would have to be stuck looking back at the stamp-collecting era of biology not to have noticed it’s a science. Physics is too – but apparently not the way JB does it if he really believes in the magic numbers version of it.
I had thought perhaps it was largely an accident the IDiots chose to give John Barrow a prize. But his own comments are far more damning of his lack of understanding than merely receiving the Templeton prize itself was. It’s the sort of thing a competent, honest and sane person ought to be profoundly embarrassed to have won.
For a rational response to Lerner’s perspective I’d hoped to find more assistance in Peter Singer’s A DARWINIAN LEFT (2000):
http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/darwinc/datlse1.htm
http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Debate/SingerPM.html
-but didn’t. It’s a decent effort but far from Singer’s usual standard. He does mention the broader uses of evolutionary game theory, and I think this and Brian Skyrm’s more sophisticated game-theory analyses of cooperation and justice have potential. Any other obvious candidates?
At least Singer’s little book did provoke a hornet’s nest of negative reviews from the usual religious/right suspects.
PeteK wrote:
“The universe IS fine-tuned! If it weren’t, none of us would be here to argue the point one way or the other! That’s neither vacuous nor nonsense – it’s a fact! It’s s FACT that the masses of the proton and the electron, the strengths of the ‘constants of nature’ (or whatever you wish to call them) are very limited if life and consciousness are to evolve.”
No, no, no! You’ve got it backwards. We are fine-tuned to the universe, not the other way around. It’s true that human life couldn’t exist if the universe were built differently, but that is not at all the same as saying that life and conciousness couldn’t exist at all. If protons and electrons all held together differently, everything would (of necessity) look so vastly different we probably can’t imagine it. But that doesn’t mean that the creation of concious life under such circumstances would be impossible — merely that life which looks like us would be.
Physics is the “queen of sciences” because it studies the most basic aspects of existence. Everything else can (in theory, at least) be derived from physics.
I think *someone* has physics envy. Certain principles hold true on every level of reality, Paul W. Claiming superiority because you study one level over another is just silly.
JBL: One could look at it either way, I guess. But the thing is, no-one even knows exactly what life IS yet, how to define it. Earthlife is the only unambiguous example of it we have right now, after all…
Of course we [biologists] do — by definition — physics is, as my physics professor defined it, “thinking very hard about the simplest things”. The problem is as the subject of study increases in complexity from physics to chemistry to biology to social science, the level of understanding decreases. Now, I don’t doubt that Barrow’s religion has something to do with his arrogance, (and certainly his dotty obsession with the anthrophic principle is), but his basic disdain for biology is something that even atheist physicists have (of course they are learning to hold their tongues as physics funding dries up and more and more of them are trying to reinvent themselves as “bioinformaticians” to get juicy bio grants)
Atheists embrace all of (these) virtues fully. . .love and caring and connection and recognition and kindness and generosity are properties that require a belief in magic?
Wonderful. And where exactly do these virtues emanate from? Scientifically now, what is their source? They had to have sprung from something, somewhere? What is that thing, please?
Of course, physicists have mathematics envy.
Nyah Nyah.
Then there is the curious fact that the Templeton Prize must be invalid in that they gave it to Darrow.
Gasbag?
Ah yes, that atheist “kindness”, “love”, “caring” and “generosity” showing itself again. How silly of me to forget.
Mightn’t “jealousy” fit better here?
The same place religionists get their virtues: the human imagination, the human ability to perceive the common predicament of humanity; i.e. with their brains.
Atheists are just more honest about it.
. . . because there are totalitarian regimes that do not support religion
Quel?
I am going out on a limb and speculate that the regimes the rabbi had in mind were Socialist / Communist?
Excuse Me? Where did he think the idea of the ‘Divine right of Kings’ came from? Not to mention that if he took a look at the Frence Revolution, he would notice the that anybody above the level of priest was up for the chop along with the rest of the aristo’s for a reason.
Plus there are plenty of people here in the Good Ol’ US of A just chomping at the bits to install a regime that recognizes religion, theirs.
Ah. Imagination. Of course. Awareness of “the predicament of humanity.”
Fine.
Exactly where does the “survival of the fittest” morph into awareness of the predicament of a greater humanity? How does that happen again? When does “root, hog or die” suddenly change into “love thy neighbor.”
No, wait! Sudden mutation, right?
Physics is the “queen of sciences”
Funny, William Durante called Philosophy the “Queen of the Sciences”, and was probabably more accurate (after all, it encompasses all of the “sciences” under “natural philosophy”, plus things like logic, semiotics, etc.)
As for what physics is:
-If it’s green or it wiggles, it’s biology
-If it smells bad or blows up, it’s chemistry
-If it doesn’t work, it’s physics.
Hmmm… Just guessing here, but it sounds like Swiftee has morphed into “compass”. Manage to get yourself banned again?
Many years ago, I had a conversation with a good friend, a practicing Catholic, about atheism. He said that without his faith in the hereafter, he would probably off himself, given he had nothing better to live for. I countered that, if you don’t believe in an afterlife, then it makes this life all the more valuable. For me, it simply made sense that if everyone treated each other decently, my life would certainly be a lot better. Ever heard of enlightened self-interest?
1) The constants of nature aren’t “fine tuned” they’re unexplained. This is just the usual “God of the gaps” argument.
2) Biology has achieved explanations that go all the way down to chemistry and physics. I don’t see what sense it makes to say that biology is more “general.” Biology is on a continuum with chemistry and physics. Barrow is an idiot.
That’s only true in a profoundly boring sense of “in theory.”
For example, the concepts of “metabolism” or “parasitism” or “love” or “money” don’t depend on the particular details of the underlying physics.
(For example, they don’t even depend on whether the underlying physics is fundamentally digital or analog, or whether space is Euclidean, much less which kinds of atoms can get plugged together to make which particular molecules, etc.)
Most interesting phenomena are all about higher-level relations among patterns. What’s at the bottom is relatively unimportant, so long as it supports the higher-level relations.
For the most part, the underlying physics constrains; it doesn’t explain.
Sure, physics is “fundamental” in the sense of being “at the bottom” in a certain sense. It’s not fundamental in the sense of providing the philosophical keys to everything else, as many people think.
(For example, my computer CPU is made mostly out of impure silicon, and some aluminum. Some of the impurities provide extra electrons. Others provide holes for electrons. What does all that tell me about what programs I’m running? Not much.)
Precisely my point.
Actually I find compass’s implication that all these virtues must come from God to be sort of amusing . . . i.e. without God, we would all be slavering bundles of pure id, sort of like larger versions of the creature from that old horror movie “It’s Alive”. Azathoth and Yog-sothoth dwelling within all of us, awaiting only the breaking of the soul-seal . . . .
Lerner:
What utter horseshit. Lerner needs to re-read his Torah, Bible, Q’uran.
The ultimate focus of most all religions, especially the tiresome western ones, is to properly worship God/Jehovah/Allah.
All that business about being kind and generous blah blah blah is nice but ultimately not necessary according to pretty much any religion I’ve read of.
God is a pretty selfish fellow and according to Jewish/Christian/Muslim myths, he’s pretty blunt about that.
How does (for example) “God is love” morph into eternal hellfire? I find such absurdities a lot harder to imagine than I do the evolution of consciousness. And given consciousness and the capacity for self-reflection, the evolution (yes, there’s that word again) of systems of morality seems to be a reasonable outcome — as does the evolution of using such systems to extend ones control over others. The latter is something I might suggest has had a hand in how you view morality and the fear you appear to have of a non-theistic basis for it.
Wonderful. And where exactly do these virtues emanate from? Scientifically now, what is their source? They had to have sprung from something, somewhere? What is that thing, please?
Are you trying to argue that the source of ethics is religion and/or spiritual belief?
bah. I would be very willing to debate that there is virtually no correlation between one’s professed religion and one’s ethics (or lack thereof).
In fact I could point to quite a few avowedly religious folk who have a demonstrated lack of ethics and morality.
Starting with Führer Bush.
I am inclined to agree that all sciences are related. All sciences study the exact same thing: the natural world. The different sciences merely study different levels of the same system: physics with its forces and elementary particles, chemistry with its elementary particles and molecules, biology with its molecules and organisms, and ecology and the social sciences with their organisms and their subsequent interactions. I would hesitate to call one more complex than the other, as they all tend to use theories that temporarily gloss over the tricky parts.
This infighting seems somewhat common to me and I would blame it on the fact that most scientists are hit with the arrogant stick during their schooling.
I personally try and look over the obvious fact that chemists are the best and take comfort in the fact that so many fellow human beings are as enamored with the natural world as I.
I was going to comment about “fine tuning” but it’s hard to top the Douglas Adams quote. I mean, fine tuning is a joke, right, everyone understands that the fine tuning “argument” is even sillier than “God planted the dinosaur bones” don’t they?
Self-organization has been observed in wildly different complex systems, so if the universe had different laws, it’s likely that it would exhibit many non-obvious structures analogous to ones we observe in our universe: the formation of galaxies, non-uniform distribution of elements, well-defined chemistries and so forth, though they might look very different from ours.
The reason I qualify the comment with “likely” is because some complex systems (e.g. some cellular automata) are so active that they might as well be uniform pseudorandom generators, and others are predictable and stabilize rapidly. But within a robust range of possible laws, a system as vast as the universe will exhibit well-defined structures that cannot be predicted easily by analyzing the laws and yet which recur throughout the system on a regular, reproducible basis. This might have been conjecture at one time, but now computers make it easy to demonstrate.
So the only possibly open issue in an abstract sense is whether the evolution of life and human-level intelligence and self-awareness are among the sort of self-organizing phenomena that we would expect to be ubiquitous over a robust class of massive complex systems. Unfortunately, it is infeasible to reproduce these phenonema in simulated systems. Fortunately, there is a preponderance of evidence that they happened in our universe. My working hypothesis is that they would happen elsewhere. I just don’t see any a priori reason to assume that our own physical laws are special. If the laws were changed, of course life as we know it could not exist, but there is no reason to rule out something analogous.
For the sake of argument, let’s imagine that the rules in our universe are special. If so, I cannot imagine how you’d prove it, but any argument based on the assumption that our physical laws are special is simply begging the question.
Shorter version of above: what Douglas Adams said.
The morphing is part of the primate social syndrome which includes sophisticated empathy, frequent sympathy, justice via coalitions versus dominant individuals, and much cooperation. Humans have identifiable continuities with other primates here (we added language, facial expressions and eye sclera for gaze following), as Darwin noted, and primatologists such as Frans De Waal and Chris Boehm have amply documented and elaborated: GOOD NATURED; HIERARCHY IN THE FOREST. Prolonged infant care seems part of the primate syndrome.
My experience from undergrad was that both the chemistry and physics professors looked down on the biology department as not real science. My org chem professor thought that biology was all just rote memorization, not real learning. I was always amused by that, considering I felt I really learned things in my bio classes and did nothing but rote memorization for org chem. To each what he enjoys more, I suppose.
I’ve noticed often that religious and spiritual people tend to look at science as just another facet of spiritualism. No wonder so many ID proponents fight so hard for access to school age kids; this is about the same time most people firm up what they actually believe in spiritually.
Of course, the other thing I remember from undergrad were the number of students who ‘believed’ in the science they were taught simply because it was what the professor told them; I saw very little critical thinking happening, even among fourth years. That bothered me a lot at the time, although it probably wasn’t as bad as I remember. I still wish students would be required to take some sort of critical thinking class, at least in college.
And, though I hate to take troll bait, I’ll point out that I got my sense of morals from my family and society around me. I’ve no doubt that there is a strong Judeao-Christian flavor to my morals because of this, but it doesn’t mean I have to believe in the assorted trappings of a faith to be a good person.
Have you ever noticed? Mass-murderers and sociopaths tend to not have lots of kids.
Funny, that.
(Too bad we can’t say the same for the religious zealots of the world.)
After reading Darksyde on dailykos, I just realized that from the point of creationists, biologists keep digging themselves into a deeper hole. That is, given fossils A and B, and the postulated relationship that B is descended from A. Then there is at least one missing link. Now, suppose C is found, that is intermediate between B and A.
Biologist says – aha, see, transitional form.
Creationist says – nyah, nyah – now two missing links, one between A and C and the second between C and B.
To be fair, all science is physics; everything else is just stamp collecting :p
I kid, I kid… I’m surprised an actually scientist used that seriously, as opposed to good-natured ribbing. Silly religious people.
Jason W:
I’m familiar with the snobbery of the “hard” sciences, but Barrow’s comment is staggering in its ignorance. It is true that we’re not likely to develop a concise mathematical theory of biology the way one seems in grasp for physics (that is not likely for chemistry either). The older I get the more I come to the view that this makes biology the most “real” science among the bunch. You can in principle still do Nobel-level physics using sheer mathematical virtuosity. You don’t really need to have a grasp of the observable universe at all. You can start with a theory and make subtle and deep deductions from it using pure logic. If the theory described our universe than so will your deductions. Biology, by contrast, really does require empirical data. Somebody without a grasp of the scientific method and an ability to develop a sound experimental protocol is unlikely to do ground-breaking work in the life sciences even if that person possesses the mathematical intellect of a Newton.
Well I believe that the laws of physics are fine tuned for my survival. That’s why after I get hit by a bus I pick myself up, dust myself off and continue on my merry way.
I also have a knack for surviving pianos falling on my head.
You are following your own advice, and the experiment turned out the way you predicted – see how many comments you got on this thread! Are you pandering?
As a physics grad student, comments like Barrow’s are really embarassing. I still can’t understand how this anthropic nonsense caught on.
About the biology comment, statements like that aren’t uncommon in jokes among physicists, but I didn’t think anyone took them seriously. Regardless, I think the butts of our jokes have shifted towards certain sections of our own department in the past few years…
I would like to know what Dawkin’s response was.
Kind like the old commercial question, “How many licks to the center of a Tootsie Pop?”… I want to ask, “How many years from now till history looks back at organized religion as a big collective brainfart, 500, 1000, 10000?”
Anyone stopped to think how sick it would be if this world was the ultimate product of a benevolent creator?
I shudder to think through even the most obvious implications – for a start, he really hates most of the worlds population, especially the under-fives. What a bastard.
Hmmm… Just guessing here, but it sounds like Swiftee has morphed into “compass”. Manage to get yourself banned again?.
Um, no. Truly. Ask PZ. The odds against this Swiftee person having the same IP as me must be in the neighborhood of 1/3,000,000
Actually I find compass’s implication that all these virtues must come from God to be sort of amusing . Fine. But you don’t answer the question.
How does (for example) “God is love” morph into eternal hellfire? Strawman, changing the topic. And an incorrect one at that.
The morphing is part of the primate social syndrome which includes sophisticated empathy, frequent sympathy, justice via coalitions versus dominant individuals, and much cooperation. Now HERE we have a reasonable response. My question: Do these sophisticated responses go beyond the immediate family group? And even then, the presence of same potentially begs the question.
Are you trying to argue that the source of ethics is religion and/or spiritual belief? bah. I would be very willing to debate that there is virtually no correlation between one’s professed religion and one’s ethics (or lack thereof). In fact I could point to quite a few avowedly religious folk who have a demonstrated lack of ethics and morality.
Sigh. Back to strawmen. Just because humans foul up application of concepts that may well emanate from beyond does not indicate that the beyond doesn’t exist/is flawed.
All it does is indicate that we don’t execute things very well.
To be fair, all science is physics; everything else is just stamp collecting
Frankly, I agree with this.
I shudder to think through even the most obvious implications – for a start, he really hates most of the worlds population, especially the under-fives. What a bastard.
FINALLY!! Someone who is applying at least real surface logic to the problem. The problem of evil!!
Well done, Ian. Go to the head of the class!
Maybe its because I’m coming from CS–which everyone knows is a glorified means to convert caffeine and sugar into bits–but I always thought that science was a way of learning about stuff, a method, almost an algorithm. And what you apply it to is just a question of what KIND of geek you are, not whether you are in fact, a geek.
To earn my erstwhile troll status, I have to say that I do occasionally view scientists taking non-scientific positions about their particular subject. Some people get weird about overpopulation, others get weird about fine tuning.
But in any case, somewhere in talkorigins is an article that puts the likelihood of a stable matter universe (and, by extension, living things) as something like 50%. That is, a randomly generated universe is stable enough for life for a large range of values, therefore the universe is not particularly fine tuned, it just landed heads.
I think the most important common thread between Barrow and Lerner is their narrow-minded self-righteousness: No position but their own is acceptable, and anyone who disagrees has to be diagnosed with some mental pathology– whether it’s having no values or being a biologist. Or both.
Lerner’s argument is a real howlder (he just assumes we all need some sort of religion and ignores the fact that there is a real difference between beliefs constrained by evidence and just making sh*t up– it’s familiar from common sense, and immensely more thorough and refined in science). And Barrow’s jibe so cheaply smug– good stuff in a public school dorm, but I thought the idea for the Templeton bunch was to honour truly exemplary people with an interest in religion and values…not just to find someone to grind their axe for them.
As for our smugly teasing troll(?)– The real teleology that we apply to understanding ourselves and other persons is a by-product of the non-teleology of natural selection (as it worked on our lineage), which is sensitive only to success at survival and reproduction. There is no need to imagine the whole universe is mysteriously teleological in order to be committed to values and purposes of our own. Neither do we need to look to the universe as a whole to tell us what really matters. If you care about something, surely it doesn’t matter whether the universe shares your goals or not.
Still, if you want to talk about evidence and you persist in personifying something that isn’t a person, I’d have to say that the universe is more like Rhett Butler (“Frankly, my dear…”) than the compassionate Buddha…
Physics is being abused, and not just by Paul W. You a biologist, Paul?
The whole anthropic principle espoused by Barrow and others to me, as a veteran physics teacher, seems to be a subtle variation on intelligent design. Both leave me cold. The anthropic principle is too human-centric. It implies that we as inhabitants of Earth hold some special place in the cosmos merely because we are here. Until we come across evidence of some other intelligent species (or any intelligent species — the verdict is still out on us), the anthropic principle will be a barnacle on the ship of physics. It borders on metaphysics.
I will avoid enumerating all the New Age misappropriations of physics concepts and terms. We’ll be here for hours.
So what constitutes a “science?” Is the exemplar of science one which concentrates on small, definible, quantifiable phenomena, which Paul W accuses physics of doing? (I would argue that quantum mechanics and relativity do not focus on the “absolutely simplest, dumbest, most numerous and redundant things that exist.”) Or is the examplar of science one which concentrates on the larger scheme of things, in which conclusions must sometimes be inferred from lack of quantifiable, definible evidence? And here I would myself place biology, anthropology, cosmology and paleontology as examples.
Is this discussion devolving into “my science can beat up your science?”
Thanks, compass. Since I’m now head of the class, why don’t you go and stand in the corner?
By the way, it’s not a ‘problem’ of evil – there can’t be any problems, since god is perfect. Therefore, if evil exists, it’s all part of the Plan.
Alternatively, what we perceive as ‘evil’ is in fact ‘good’ (see my above post).
Sounds like a real winner. “Science is a belief in hard evidence”…no F***ing Sh**. I guess since we must merely *believe* that things are facts, nothing is every REALLY fact.
Talk about one hell of a viral idea that will send any civilization into a tailspin permanently…
“I would like to know what Dawkin’s response was.” I hope it was the same as mine: Oh, ho-hum. “Laws of nature,” zzzzz. “Not a scientist,” yawn, what a joke! It seems that now that Dawkins’ seminal work has turned 30 years old, and that his “Root of All Evil?” is garnering praise in the UK (2 to 1 over the offended), and he’s a public figure, all the little celebrity wannabees like Barrow and Dembski, ad nauseum, are clutching at a little fame (the kind that doesn’t come from winning Templeton Foundation prizes or writing a crap ID blog) by attaching their names to attacks on Dawkins, and it’s really a compliment to Dawkins. Barrow can wheeze his worst, but he’s just an arrogant ding-dong who, like Dembski, goes through life pushing doors marked “Pull.”
I was using an old joke…
Look. If I let go of a bowling ball, it falls down. If I pick it up and let go again, it falls down. It’s not a matter of “belief”, it’s an empirical matter that we can repeat over and over and we find that we get the same result.
Yes, but your statement that, “If I pick it up and let go again, it falls down.” indicates that you have a belief that it falls down if you pick it up and let go again.
It’s purely pragmatic.
So then you do have a religion – the religion of pragmatism. It is a religion because it is a belief system that has no more scientific foundation than any other belief system, because there is no scientific foundation for the belief that the only things that are real or can be known are those that can be empirically observed and measured. So there!
Alternatively, what we perceive as ‘evil’ is in fact ‘good’ (see my above post).
Oops. Back to the back of the classroom, Ian. Idealism. Tsk tsk. “Evil doesn’t exist.” Um, that would seem to fly in the face of tremendous amounts of evidence against it.
So then you do have a religion – the religion of pragmatism. It is a religion because it is a belief system that has no more scientific foundation than any other belief system, because there is no scientific foundation for the belief that the only things that are real or can be known are those that can be empirically observed and measured. So there! save for one thing: This religion of pragmatism endures very well under the scrutiny of the third act of the mind; empiricism. And when you reduce all truths down to those empirically proven (in other words, set up the rules of playing the game so that you win), pragmatism looks very appealing.
As it does to most people in this place.
For what it is worth, 386, you’re dead on. It IS a religion.
I’d have to say that the universe is more like Rhett Butler (“Frankly, my dear…”)
Ah, a deist in the house. Or maybe a pantheist, if God (or whatever) is in Life, the Universe and Everything.
The real teleology that we apply to understanding ourselves and other persons is a by-product of the non-teleology of natural selection (as it worked on our lineage), which is sensitive only to success at survival and reproduction.
So, voila!! An idea of something transcendant, shared by thousands of cultures, still came about in the end, from nothing (or mechanistically oriented urgings, through chance, just as close to nothing).
Pardon my skepticism. But I find sometimes the tyranny of the living over the Democracy of the Dead (Chesterton) to be a bit. . .well. . .tyrannical at times.
“Oh, you 10 billions who went before us, you were benighted. Deluded. Demented. Misled. We now have the true knowledge.” Wonder where we’ve heard that sort of tune before?
And all this from a philosophy instructor (presumably). Disappointing.
Darn it! Why didn’t someone tell me Biology wasn’t a real science more than five weeks before graduation? Pffft. There’s four years down the tubes. Although, maybe this explains why the University of Colorado thinks Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology should be a BA instead of a BS.
The postmodernists and the theists join forces!
compass – what evidence do you have to share with the rest of the class about the existence of ‘evil’?
If a religious crusade results in tens of thousands of deaths, is this ‘evil’? Why?
All you’ve got to base a definition of ‘evil’ on are your preferred extracts of your preferred holy book – the important passages of which change as time goes on (I don’t know many Christians who still believe in burning witches).
How can your concept of ‘evil’ thus change over the years and yet still be considered absolute?
Is ‘evil’ whatever god says is evil, or is it independent of god (in which case, is god merely a referee in the matter of morality?)?
compass,
we know the ball will fall down if we pick it up again based on our previous empirical evidence. That’s not belief. That’s observation.
It is a religion because it is a belief system that has no more scientific foundation than any other belief system, because there is no scientific foundation for the belief that the only things that are real or can be known are those that can be empirically observed and measured.
The scientific foundation for the thinking that only things that are real or can be known are those that can be empirically observed and measured is mathematics. If it can measured or empirically observed, it’s probabilty can be evaluated. With anything possible, even if is not measureable, it can still be evaluated mathematically – very unlikely.
“Yes, but your statement that, “If I pick it up and let go again, it falls down.” indicates that you have a belief that it falls down if you pick it up and let go again.”
Douglas Adams had something to say about this too. He postulated that one can fly if they fall down and miss. The trick was that you couldn’t consciously or willingly cause it to happen. You had to be distracted before hitting the ground therefore you forget that gravity should have any affect on you and you miss and float off. Of course as soon as you remember gravity exists, you immediately fall to the ground. Now if you can demonstrate this principle then you might be right 386. Until then, I will consider gravity a fact.
Some commentary on the Templeton Foundation
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/horgan06/horgan06_index.html
I didn’t check to see if anyone else had used this recent piece by Robert Sapolsky to answer Compass’ challenge, so in case they didn’t, here’s your answer compass:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/printer_030406I.shtml
The whole article is good, but the relevant section is “Old primates and new tricks”. Note the liberal use of empirical data to justify the argument.
If a small troupe of baboons could figure out the benefits of treating each other nicely in the space of a few short years, don’t you think humans could have, given a few thousand years?
Treating your neighbors well benefits you. That’s the basic thrust of the argument for the evolutionary advantages of morality. If that behavioral tendency can be genetically specified in some degree, then it can be passed on, and if it offers reproductive advantages to individuals who possess it over those who don’t, those genes will eventually fill in to the entire population.
As usual, no need to presuppose a cosmic superman meting out eternal justice to motivate our being kind to others. We just do it because we like to. We like to because we have genetically directed mechanisms that wire our brains up to think that way, and well, the genes exist because somewhere along the line the right combination of genes occurred, yes through mutation, or more likely through recombination or by exaptation. Hope that’s simple enough for you.
Just want to say, on behalf of the social science students (yes, all of them: we meet every second Tuesday in a secret bunker underground and they told me to write this comment) thanks for acknowledging us. We often get left out, or vilified even, in these kind of discussions.
I really enjoy cosmological fuzz-talkers, of which Barrow is an ace example.
Not only does Barrow know what real science is, he also knows the limits of knowledge already. Read his Impossibility for one of the more diverting comic turns of the late 20th Century.
I’ve always liked the Douglas Adams bit from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe for cosmologist’s stuff:
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exacty what the universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
Yeah Kristine, who is John Barrow, anyway.
But Barrow’s not a fool. He’s not a fool by exactly one million in the kitty.
The alternative, that he is an honest public philosopher, is just Impossible. ::removes tongue from cheek::
Now if you can demonstrate this principle then you might be right 386. Until then, I will consider gravity a fact.
Oh I don’t have a problem with belief systems. Gravity sounds like a pretty good belief to me, so count me in on that one! I think (in spite of my goofing around up above in a previous comment, sorry) that certain people have a pretty loose definition of the term “religion” – especially those who are desperate to pretend that their supernatural beliefs are on a par with other beliefs that are more likely to keep people from fallin’ down and stuff.
Thanks boojieboy for locating that Sapolsky article – he’s another primatologist with a gift (and a cause) like De Waal and Boehm for re-popularizing Darwin’s original observation of emotional and ethical continuity among us great apes (and in part also with other primates, social carnivores and some marine mammals – parrots are a big unknown here).
And no, Compass, this rich sociality doesn’t reduce to kin selection (family groups). And since family groups are certainly part of the human syndrome also I don’t think their presence in non-humans begs the question as you seem to assert.
Reciprocal altruism (often with non-kin) has dynamics all its own, with even a few interspecies examples (“cleaner fish” come to mind), although primates are the specialists here as Sapolsky notes.
The two leap frogging threads here made me think of the Invisible Boy in the movie Mystery Men. “My power is that I can turn invisible…but only if no one is looking.”
What I’ve always wanted to know about the people who poo-poo on empiricism is what is the alternative? What is it that we leaving out of our worldview by only focusing on what can be independently observed and verified? Made-up stuff? That’s what it sounds like to me.
I’m surprised this hasn’t been picked up by any philosophers around here (I guess John’s still trying to get his spell checker to work properly). This argument relies on a belief that induction works, as Hume pointed out a long time ago, and was best illustrated by Bertrand Russell’s turkey.
Oh, and someone should tell Barrow that at least biology has a unified theory, and has had since 1859. And we don’t need bits of string to hold it together.
Bob
As a physicist/engineer by training I’m royally pissed with Barrow.
That level of arrogant stupidity can only be found in religious leaders, usually … Oh, erm, yes, well then …..
Yes, but your statement that, “If I pick it up and let go again, it falls down.” indicates that you have a belief that it falls down if you pick it up and let go again.
That is not a belief because we (the general public) know there are rules that govern a dropping ball, those rules are understood and tested by (multiple) scientists, and yes we believe those scientists because we know that if we would really want to we can (try to) educate ourselves to understand those rules. And if it is prove that those scientist were wrong on some rules they are very easily “converted” by the new tests (no wars necessary).
That is different from a belief system where every so often you could believe you got a result from it but there is no way to define “if you (for ex.) pray (offer/live/think/act) like this or that, the result will be this or that”
And there is no way to educate ourselves to understand anything of religion.
It’s true at my techie undergrad school we did call biology “our only humanity.” But we meant it with love. ;)
I’d seriously like this whole ‘morality must be from God’ thing explained. How is it morality if you’re just doing what god told you to do, under his threat of eternal torture, etc.?
We should be a little careful with Darwinian reasoning for morality. People are sentient, and they might very well do and think things that aren’t in their self-interest (or the interest of their cultural group). Just because there are survival advantages to morality doesn’t mean that’s why we do it.
See, I believe in scientism too, but I got there through a rather different chain of reasoning then most of you seem to have. I think it answers the objections of most people here, so let me walk you through it.
First, I start with the assumption that things exist.
Now, if things exist, we can divide them into two categories:
A. Things that have definite characteristics. For example, I have the characteristic of having two legs. I do not have three legs or one leg. I posses some characteristics and lack others.
B. Things that have no definite characteristics. These things can’t be talked about, because they can’t be defined.
Now, my next contention is that observation is possible; In other words, that we can acquire accurate information about the things in category A by using our senses.
With me so far?
Now when we observe a thing with characteristics, the observation, if it is accurate, ought to give us the same result every time. When I look at how many legs I have, I ought to see two, because having to legs is one of my characteristics.
If a method of observation yields the same results numerous times, we can be reasonably sure that it has discovered a characteristic of the object being observed.
But what of religious dogma? God and the soul and all that jazz?
Well, the techniques of science, which have demonstrated the ability to determine the characteristics of many things, find no evidence that god or the soul exist.
Other techniques, such as prayer, fasting, or hallucinogenic drugs, have yielded wildly contradictory results. Now, this might indicate numerous things; it may be that they aren’t reliable techniques for observation. It may be that they’re only getting part of the picture, like the blind philosophers contemplating an elephant. It may be that they are observing a thing that has no distinct characteristics. It may be that there is an as yet undiscovered flaw in technique that has made many people fast incorrectly and therefore get the wrong result.
Here’s the thing, though: Whatever the case, it means that religion as it currently stands is useless for describing things.
It seems to me that this is a fairly tight chain of reasoning. Feel free to rip it apart and show me the error of my ways.
Cambridge (UK) had all the real sciences as BA/MA. No singling out biology there. The only BSc awards were for newly introduced courses which, if anything, fell into the non-science category!
“”Evil doesn’t exist.” Um, that would seem to fly in the face of tremendous amounts of evidence against it.”
Of course evil exists. If evil couldn’t measured and quantified then smart bombs and tactical nukes wouldn’t be capable of only killing bad people.
“Look. If I let go of a bowling ball, it falls down. If I pick it up and let go again, it falls down. It’s not a matter of “belief”, it’s an empirical matter that we can repeat over and over and we find that we get the same result.”
Several comments assumes unwarranted that PZ suggests induction here. While induction is a tool to suggest hypotheses, it has nothing to do with how science concludes that a phenomena exists.
The key is the rest of that paragraf that is conveniently overlooked: “It’s purely pragmatic. I don’t have to possess any kind of belief in much of anything to find that F=Gâ¢m1â¢m2/d2 nicely describes the force between two masses, and science is accepted as a matter of testable utility (and if a scientific claim fails to be useful, it gets abandoned relatively readily).”
If we can only make observations, we test until *all reasonable doubt* is denied. To use this method you have to draw a line – physics has set 5 sigma confidence as a practical limit to conclude that a set of observations is looking at a real phenomena.
But usually the phenomena is explored until we have a good theory, that can be tested too. If it’s not falsified it is accepted as explaining facts. The observations and the theory support each other, and is usually supported by other theries and facts that they tie into.
“Yes, but your statement that, “If I pick it up and let go again, it falls down.” indicates that you have a belief that it falls down if you pick it up and let go again.”
The theory can be wrong, which we often find when we go outside its limits. But it can never be a belief – we have tested it beyond reasonable doubt, remember?
If you are not satisfied with the rather hard requirements science demands, you are free to continue testing for however long it takes you to personally accept that it’s not a belief but an established fact. If you don’t want to do that the burden of proof now lies on you – how do you show that what we other know is an established fact is a belief?
More word-slippage from the creationist corner. A belief is not the same as a belief system, and a belief system is not the same as a religion.
If I think the ball will fall, based on prior observation, that might well be a belief. If I evolve a theory of gravity, that might just count as a belief system, but to me, that jacket doesn’t quite fit. Belief in physics may use some of the same mental mechanisms as a belief in deities, but a belief in physics is a fairly plain and simple thing in comparison to the other. Beliefs in deities seem to lead to more and more baroque beliefs, over-complicated epicycles of prescribed behaviour, otherwise known as religion.
Compass, “survival of the fittest” isn’t a rule that we reason-based individuals have to follow, it’s an observation about how the universe works. Tch, it’s not even that, really. It’s an over-condensed version, stripped down to form a pithy one-liner, easily remembered and used to stand-in for hundreds of thousands of words. It has no more ethical and moral value than the observation “Bowling balls fall”. Knowing that bowling balls fall, one takes care not to release them above people’s heads. One makes an ethical decision based on one’s knowledge of how the world works and one’s own ethical make-up. You know how gravity works, Compass, and you know that nothing else you believe will change that. Knowledge of evolution doesn’t morph into consideration and compassion any more than a knowledge of gravity does, and there’s no reason to expect it to.
Leon writes: …that secular humanism represented “an atheistic religion”. Atheism is a religious belief, in that it answers religious questions. It is not a religion.
Secular humanism is not the same thing as atheism.
I don’t think you get it, man. Pragmatism isn’t the belief that things are real, its the observation that things consistently behave as if they are real. Science is a way to investigate that behavior and attempt to describe it. No beliefs required.
Altruism is so easy to explain, it makes me wonder if compass was ever magnetized.
compass writes: Exactly where does the “survival of the fittest” morph into awareness of the predicament of a greater humanity? How does that happen again? When does “root, hog or die” suddenly change into “love thy neighbor.”
I know you meant it rhetorically, but it is actually an interesting question. Here is my conjecture: the capacity for love evolved as a way to insure that parents care for their offspring. The general human capacity to care for others is, I believe, a generalization of the tender feelings that mothers have for their babies.
Things don’t behave “as if” they were real. They behave — therefore, they are real.
Arguing with the irrational is like giving medicine to dead people, preaching to the damned, or a smaller cuttlefish playmate to a cuttlefish. Nothing can be logically demonstrated to people who knowingly abandon the rules of logic in their argumentation.
To quote a previous poster:
Honestly, whenever I heard similar things from profs, it was always with a bit of a darkly humorous edge, the implication being that physicists and chemists were really quite jealous of the amazing vibrancy and success (and money) in the field of biology.
I’m inclined to read Barrows comment similarly. While it certainly is grounded in his religious faith, I think it was meant as a good-natured barb. And it doesn’t take too much armchair psychoanalyzing to guess that envy may have played a role. Not only is biology more vibrant right now, Dawkins is in many ways more renowned than Barrow.
I don’t agree with Barrow at all about the existence of god. But I have read some of his books and I find him to be very thoughtful and an interesting writer, addressing big questions like whether math is discovered or invented. (My view, by the way, is that it is invented.)
Physicist: A mechanic with a PHD.
Shorter John Barrow: “I’m too lazy to learn biology, and besides the real money’s in ectoplasm and spirit horns.”
Meanwhile, Canada’s new Tory PM, Stephen Harper, is aping Bush’s anti-science ways by muzzling scientists who speak out about climate change. Wonder what’s next, sending Canadian troops to Iraq?
Do you think maybe the persistent awarding of large cash prizes to people who promote the concept might have something to do with it? That, like biological ID, it is a self-created controversy? Take a gander at the list of Templeton awardees over the last several years, it’s thick with anthropoid cosmologists. What an honor it must be to share that status with Watergate convictee Charles Colson.
That was two awful pieces trying to push religion into science, the one with idolatry of Barrow and the one by Lerner raising idiotic strawmen.
Looking at science in an effort to cut down the length of this comment, Lerner’s strawman of “scientism” is trivial, as some have commented on. John Wilkins take is in http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/3/24/6322/99586 “Modern philosophy of science prefers to talk about “physicalism” than materialism. This is the view that all natural things can be described and explained by an ideal physics. I must add that physicalism doesn’t immediate translate to a denial of God – this is about the natural world, the world that can be investigated by science.”
I don’t know much of Barrow, finetuning or anthropic principles. He obviously denies knowing anything about biology or the general theories that emerges from it. He also wants to believe faith theories tells us something about reality.
But IIRC he has looked at questions such as finetuning and anthropic principles applied to physics. Both are related and confusing concepts with many uses. Physicists in general would like to replace them as much as possible.
Finetuning means that parameters of a model must be adjusted precisely in order to agree with observations. It can often be explained by physical theories – inflation, endless inflation and supersymmetry for example. But also by the anthropic principle. The usual view is that finetuning means the explanation isn’t complete.
The anthropic principle is ambigious.
There is the observational bias one – often people uses the fact that we exist here to make faulty hypotheses about the universe.
There is the tautological one – theories and parameter values must be consistent with our existence. That has somtimes been used to figure out parameter values, but they have later been replaced by calculations from theory.
There is the weak one – parameter values in some theories may be finetuned by being variable, with some values more likely. This is currently looked at in string theory as a feasible explanation for the value of some of its parameters.
String theory is currently a lot of mathematics and some theoretical physics. It has not been directly tested against experiments but makes contact with physics through its theoretical physics elements. This makes it more than prototheory IMO, contrary to what some says above it’s a theory in its own right.
That a theory has some unfalsifiable elements is perfectly all right, but it can’t rest primarily on unfalsifiable claims or it’s a faith. String theory has passed several tests against established theories. This makes the existence of the “landscape” of consistent string theories and their different parameter values perfectly all right, IMO.
The weak anthropic principle as applied to the landscape can explain and post- or predict several things at once. Polchinski http://www.arxiv.org/PS_cache/hep-th/pdf/0603/0603249.pdf exposes some current ideas.
For example, in an endless inflation cosmology the landscape will be populated and the parameter values that maximise universe production in the endless inflation multiverse will be most common. This combined with the weak anthropic principle explains much and is compatible with the current value of the cosmological constant. If it’s true it’s the most parsimonious explanation in a sense, so we may not need to look further.
“The anthropic argument is not without predictive power. We can identify a list of post- or pre-dictions, circa 1987:
1. The cosmological constant is not large.
2. The cosmological constant is not zero.
3. The cosmological constant is similar in order of magnitude to the matter density.
4. As the theory of quantum gravity is better understood, it will provide a microphysics in which the cosmological constant is not fixed but environmental; if this takes discrete values these must be extremely dense in Planck units.
5. Other constants of nature may show evidence of anthropic constraints.”
Much as I would prefer the anthropic principle to go away, Polchinski makes a strong argument for its usefulness at the current state of physics.
An analytical chemist is a mechanic with a PhD. A physicist is a mathematician with a wrench.
But pragmatism, as you call it (or empiricism) is the belief that what we observe today will remain so tomorrow. Science is a philosophy (not a religion); it’s an incredible successful philosophy that has held true throughout observed and inferred history, but I can only believe that it will be true tomorrow.
That’s not a belief, that’s an inference.
I should also add that I think one way the anthropic principle (AP) may go away is that maximising universe production in the endless inflation scenario should be very selective. The distribution around the best choice should be a Dirac impulse AFAIK so I can’t see why Polchinski feel the need to use AP here.
“Science is a philosophy”
Shygetz, do you really think philosophy or religion is what gives you your drugs? Science has welltested methods, it has tested observations and it has theories tested against observations. None of which a philosophy has.
Hum. So much to respond to.
In reverse order: I know you meant it rhetorically, but it is actually an interesting question. Actually no. I was being quite serious.
The general human capacity to care for others is, I believe, a generalization of the tender feelings that mothers have for their babies. I suspect this is rather oversimplified.
In response to the link: Here we show experimentally that the altruistic punishment of defectors is a key motive for the explanation of cooperation. Altruistic punishment means that individuals punish, although the punishment is costly for them and yields no material gain. We show that cooperation flourishes if altruistic punishment is possible, and breaks down if it is ruled out. The evidence indicates that negative emotions towards defectors are the proximate mechanism behind altruistic punishment. These results suggest that future study of the evolution of human cooperation should include a strong focus on explaining altruistic punishment.
Punishment? The urge to put pain upon others? This is an evolutionary explanation for punishment, not moral development. THis does not in any way describe why people will help others even when there is no payoff at all.
Knowledge of evolution doesn’t morph into consideration and compassion any more than a knowledge of gravity does, and there’s no reason to expect it to. IT appears that you are being deliberately obtuse. The mechanistic nature of survival of the fittest does not explain moral development.
And no, Compass, this rich sociality doesn’t reduce to kin selection (family groups). And since family groups are certainly part of the human syndrome also I don’t think their presence in non-humans begs the question as you seem to assert. References, please.
How can your concept of ‘evil’ thus change over the years and yet still be considered absolute?
The concept has never changed. Has the Church engaged in evil actions? Surely. I never claimed otherwise. You appear to be making the contention that I am saying that the Church is free from evil, otherwise why would I be endorsing it?
Horsefeathers. If we make freedom from evil the standard by which the purity of an organization of humans is judged, then every human organization from the time of Adam and Eve (or Linus and Lucy, if you like)is invalid.
Come on, now.
There is so much more to respond to. . .but I have to get back to my life now.
Things which have no empirical content aren’t real.
So what is the empirical content of the statement “Things which have no empirical content aren’t real.”
I don’t say this to be a smart ass. It looks like you are falling into the same trap that snared the logical positiist movement in the early 20th century. They claimed that statements that could not be empirically confirmed were meaningless, and were annoyed to find that by this standard the statement “statements that cannot be empirically confirmed are meaningless” is meaningless.
Right on, wamba, money is the real religion here. Even those who would claim that bowling balls dropping is only a theory ascribe an almighty empiricism to the cash prize.
“We also work on stuff that is far more complex than anything physicists do.”
cough quantum mechanics cough
Development. Neurobiology. cough cough.
about Barrow: As if there couldn’t be laws at other levels of nature. Mind you, the view is sufficiently common amongst physicists that I bought the arguments they use for a long time myself, until I started actually thinking about laws …
PZ has also illustrated quite clearly how biologists look for (and find) provisional law statements, too. In fact, I have often heard it said that embryology and genetics are good for illustrating the lawfulness of biology. The philosophers who poo-poo this seem to (if I recall correctly) run roughshod between laws and law statements anyway.
thwaite: What precisely are you looking for in Skyrms and Singer’s works that you’re not finding? A general philosophy? An ethics or political philosophy that seems to be biologically aware? Let me know and maybe I can suggest something.
phoenix woman: uh oh. This is distressing …
Torbjörn Larsson: FYI – Wilkins may be right terminologically, but realistically we need two words – because there are “nonreductive” positions too, and “physicalism” sounds like it means the reductive one. (This is why I adopt “materialism” to mean the thesis that everything real is changable.)
And, everyone, it can be pretty confusing if one thinks of science as being empiricist – it isn’t anymore that than rationalist, since a large portion of science is invention of hypotheses and the like. Moreover traditional empiricism is phenomenalist, and science clearly is not that. By contrast, I don’t know what to say about pragmatism. This is such an ambiguous word … Some of what Peirce says about it seems to be correct, less James and certainly not Rorty, so …
Weird does not always equal complex… come back when you’ve identified over 1 million species of particles :)
Meanwhile, Canada’s new Tory PM, Stephen Harper, is aping Bush’s anti-science ways by muzzling scientists who speak out about climate change. Wonder what’s next, sending Canadian troops to Iraq?
Let me begin by saying that I can’t think of anything good to say about Harper, and I will happily agree with anyone who says that Harper is a GWB wannabe, and also wonder what’s next, what with the Justice Minister suggesting that Canada should take a more American-style approach to crime-fighting (since, as we all know, the crime rates are so much lower in the US)
Having said that, I think that Tushingham (and/or his publisher) made a tactical error (or perhaps a cynical ploy for getting extra publicity) by citing his position as a scientist in the Ministry of the Environment, when the purpose of his talk was to launch a work of science fiction.
Still, Harper’s comment is both scary and clueless:
…measures we’re going to develop over the next year or so to deal with both pollution and greenhouse gases, and I obviously not only hope but expect that all elements of the bureaucracy will be working with us to achieve those objectives.
“come back when you’ve identified over 1 million species of particles”
Having a large reservoir of catalogued organisms does not mean complex either. What really is so hard about cataloging anyway? JCPenny and Sears does it with ease. ;)
The point that I was trying to make was just because one physicist has some strange ideas on philosophy and religion, does not mean that all physicists should be considered “simpletom scientists” or biologists corner the market on complexity or something to that extent (don’t want to dismiss whole branches of science wholesale, now). I am sure that there are equally complex matters in both biology and physics.
Hey, speaking of ignorant god-botherers railing against science, looks like Pope Brownshirt I is busy denouncing geneticists for “playing God”:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2134140,00.html
Lousy scientists; if God wants children to have cystic fibrosis, then who are you to deny his plan? Those children totally deserve it because of sin and stuff.
Also you’re just making God look bad by implying he’s not too good at the genetics. His feelings might be hurt!
Yes, it does, but complex does not always mean interesting. Organisms are “interestingly” complex, however. And Barrow brought up complexity, so perhaps we are allowed to throw the ball back at him.
Do the Sears people have to fetch some of their gadgets from the bottom of the Mariana trench and determine how the hell they work, before they can put them in the catalogue? ;)
No, I’m not. I’m a computer scientist whose background is largely in cognitive science.
I don’t mean to abuse physics; just certain kinds of physics-worship. A lot of computer scientists have physics envy and/or math envy; I think that sometimes messes up their scientific taste and judgement. I’ve seen it in other fields, like psychology.
I think physics is peachy, and obviously a great and tremendously successful science. (Many physicists are obviously brilliant, and hey, “some of my best friends are physicists…” :-) ) I just think biology provides better examples of the kinds of reasoning needed in most sciences.
BTW, I wouldn’t be surprised if Barrow was sorta-joking about biologists not being scientists. But the dismissive bit about an “inherited conflict from the 19th century” is serious crap—at best, a genetic fallacy that precisely evades a very interesting question.
It’s interesting to me that physics seems to have sorta hit a wall with certain kinds of previously-successful simply-reductionist explanations of some important things, and many physicists are now thinking “more like biologists” than they used to—e.g., using quasi-selectionist arguments to explain apparent “fine tuning” via enless inflation. (Or Smolin’s theory of literal natural selection of universes that are the insides of black holes that fall out of other universes, and more generally, various kinds of critical systems theory and emergent complexity.)
Barrow seems to be evading this issue by dissing biology. Even many physicists are now using biological exemplars, as needed, when traditional-style physical explanations don’t seem to work.
The deep issue he’s evading is that these explanations that resemble Darwinism are attractive in 21st-century physics for the very same, very good reasons they were attractive in 19th-century biology—they actually explain interesting things, rather than just accepting them or mostly punting to some intelligent designer who’s at least as hard to explain.
I’d also like to remind Barrow of what happened with Kelvin and Darwin in the 19th century. Kelvin dissed Darwin’s theory by proving that the sun couldn’t have been burning for more than 100 million years, without some farfetched, unsuspected form of energy that could provide vast amounts of power for billions of years. Therefore Darwin, a mere biologist and geologist, must be wrong about the age of the earth, and likely about evolution by natural selection.
Who’s a biologist to predict the discovery of nuclear power, after all?
That’s still the best example to date of the (weak) anthropic principle, if you ask me, but you’re unlikely to hear much about it from the Templeton foundation.
The law of conservation of energy was first spelt out by a biologist.
If the physicists hadn’t figured out X-ray diffraction, we wouldn’t know the structure of DNA.
Precious few experiments in any modern, active field could be conducted without electricity. Mathematics is necessary for all data analysis.
The boundaries between sciences are fluid, cultural and often illusory. Squeegee your third frickin’ eye. . . .
Also:
“But outcomes tell you almost nothing about the laws that govern the universe,” says Barrow. Remind me never to look at the results of a particle collision again. Hooray, we don’t need accelerators anymore!
Goddamn Platonist windbag.
I would agree with this physicist, if someone can assure me that his brain was not biological in origin.
“Do the Sears people have to fetch some of their gadgets from the bottom of the Mariana trench and determine how the hell they work”
Some of the ladies underwear in Sears catalogues look like they could protect people from the preasures of the Mariana trench…does that count? ;)
“Organisms are “interestingly” complex, however. And Barrow brought up complexity, so perhaps we are allowed to throw the ball back at him.”
Go for it. Just don’t, as I said before, paint all physicists with the same brush.
Pope Benedictator is one real nut job. I love the part about warning against an “inane apologia of evil that is in danger of destroying humanity.” And this would be global warming? Oil consumption? The war on science? Prohibitions against stem cell research? Loss of top American scientists to Singapore? The war of words with Iran? Nah. What could be more important than preserving the mini-authoritarian state of the artificial nuclear family?
I was thinking about Torbjörn’s comment on the usefulness and predictive power of the anthropic principle, and it seems to me that the problem here is that there are really multiple different versions of the anthropic principle. The one I’d subscribe to is pretty simply descriptive: we know humans exist, therefore any physical theory of the universe we construct is only sensible if said theory allows us to exist. This has the predictive power Torbjörn mentioned.
Other anthropic principles go further out on a limb, saying that the universe must have been somehow required to form this way, or must have been much more probably formed this way than some other way. I’m not sure these are even entirely coherent viewpoints, but they seem to be what Barrow was espousing. That man’s apparently unscientific views and careless dismissal of other branches of science really make him sound like an embarrassment to physics, and I’d like to hope that nobody here thinks we’re all, or even mostly, like that.
As for Rabbi Lerner, well, I can only sigh and observe that I had to explain to my own advisor why science isn’t a religion a few weeks ago. I think there are an awful lot of people even in the sciences who haven’t thought hard enough about the philosophical underpinnings of their worldview to understand this issue. So, frustrating as this kind of conflation is, it doesn’t really surprise me.
The really key difference is that science itself is a method for learning about the world, not a set of statements about the world that must be dogmatically believed. Science says, to learn about the world, go and look and make inferences and then test them and modify your inferences based on the results and rinse and repeat. In science, the test is always the fundamental feature, and if the test disagrees with your ideas, then your ideas ultimately must give way.
Religion, in abstract, is a method for learning about the world too. It says that the world comes with an instruction set (written, orally transmitted, derived from prayer and meditation, etc.) and that the most important information about the world comes from those instructions. For religion, it’s the instructions that are fundamental. — if the instructions and the world seem to conflict, then it’s the world or the observer that is wrong, not the instructions.
In other words, science, as an abstract, is the exact opposite of religion, as an abstract. Science allows newly-gathered information to modify factual beliefs, religion does not. (Observe that a fully religious take on life would therefore be completely insane and probably quickly fatal.) On the other hand, any particular belief about a set of facts can be held as a scientific belief or as a religious belief. There’s certainly no reason why people couldn’t hold, say, the notion that humans arose through evolution by natural selection across random mutations as a fundamental tenet of their worldview, to the degree that they would be completely incapable of acknowledging a hypothetical preponderance of evidence in favor of the notion that humans and other earth creatures were intelligently designed by aliens. And, conversely, if some hippy calling himself Jesus was wandering around performing apparently magical healings under repeatable, testable conditions, then the notion that he was the envoy of some extremely powerful alien entity sent to convey a message to humanity would be a possibly reasonable scientific theory.
Granted, it just so happens that the current preponderance of evidence, um, points the other way entirely. But the point here is, it’s not our beliefs about what the facts are that make us scientists, it’s our attitude towards those beliefs. From a scientific standpoint, every belief is provisional and open to modification by evidence. From a religious standpoint, some beliefs can never, ever be called into question.
Also, about that “tyranny of the living” vs. “democracy of the dead” Chesterton crap… compass, are you seriously suggesting that we don’t know anything at all now that our ancestors didn’t know? They sure-as-hell didn’t used to have any of the fancy high tech that we have now. Perchance in addition to our technological achievements we may have made some beneficial innovations in our social structures as well?
I’m hardly saying we know the full story just yet scientifically, or that we’ve achieved some kind of social perfection, ’cause, well, we surely don’t and we surely haven’t. I’m just thinking that we probably do know a few things now that the people two thousand years ago didn’t. Chesterton was an enaging writer. It’s a shame he put his talent to use in the defense of such a worthless institution as religion in general, and Christian religion in particular.
It’s a shame he put his talent to use in the defense of such a worthless institution as religion in general, and Christian religion in particular.
Well, tell us how you really feel. Argument is pointless here.
Barrow to Dawkins: “You have a problem with these ideas, Richard, because you’re not really a scientist. You’re a biologist.”
Sounds tongue in cheek to me. Anytime I disagree with another philosopher I say: “You’re not doing REAL philosophy!”
‘For example, the concepts of “metabolism” or “parasitism” or “love” or “money” don’t depend on the particular details of the underlying physics. (For example, they don’t even depend on whether the underlying physics is fundamentally digital or analog, or whether space is Euclidean, much less which kinds of atoms can get plugged together to make which particular molecules, etc.)’
One thing I think some people are missing in this discussion is the fact that physics isn’t all about subatomic particles. Quite a lot of physics deals with macroscopic objects like rocks, trees, apes, and fish. In fact, biophysics is a large and widely recognized field. If you’re thinking about how fast a T. rex could run, how viruses inject DNA into their victims, how animals regulate their body temperatures, or how energy costs influence natural selection, you’re using physics.
And you know, even biologists need a little quantum mechanics now and then.
Damn, late to the party. So the Winner of the Templeton Prize was just kidding (he’s a kidder; those physical constants and all)…but a Biologists vs. Physicists pissing contest? Must join that fray.
The physicist shows up armed (heh) with equations that will accurately predict pissing distance given the pressure gradient (P-sub-bladder minus P-sub-atmospheric), cross-sectional urethral radius, and angle of urethral inclination.
The biologist arrives with all that physical knowledge integrated with all of the properties that emerge at higher organizational levels: biochemistry, yes, but then detailed understanding of smooth-muscle cell function (actin/myosin interactions; regulatory phosphorylation of myosin light chains, stretch activation etc.), smooth-muscle tissue function (single-unit potential propagation through gap junctions, etc.), bladder function at the organ level (sphincter function, force production and mechanical constraints), physiological features of the rest of the urinary system (urethral smooth muscle, urine production by the kidney), integration with other organ systems at the organismal level (endocrine control of kidney function, autonomic nervous control of bladder function, voluntary skeletal muscle control of abdominal pressure, water absorption by the digestive system and delivery by the cardiovascular system, effects of diuretics, etc. etc.) PLUS the ultimate emergent property of organisms: behavior, and a taste for beer.
My money’s on the biologist. Of course, I are one.
It’s all about levels of analysis. In the scientific study of life, physicists can only inform about the very tiniest levels of the organizational hierarchy. Next biochemistry, on up the various levels of physiology detailed above, then ecology. As George Bartholomew taught, Phenomena at each level of the hierarchy find their causal explanations in lower levels (i.e. reductionism), and their significance in higher levels (holism and emergence).
-Captain Comparative Physiology
Compass, you really need to learn a thing or two– here you are, on a biology-oriented site, equating natural selection with ‘chance’ (and then, in an act of astounding metaphysical legerdemain, reducing that to ‘nothing’):
“An idea of something transcendant, shared by thousands of cultures, still came about in the end, from nothing (or mechanistically oriented urgings, through chance, just as close to nothing).”
What a tired, hackneyed, ignorant trope. There’s no magic here, just the development of a bunch of social primates who have found a way of life that includes real sociality (along with a lot of stuff that isn’t so nice). Why the delusional fixation on the idea that the stuff you see as good has to come from the magical never-never land of the great sky-fairy?
Oh, you biologists, you are so ultra-sensitive!
Everyone can agree, I’m sure, that you are real scientists and not “girly-men”!
compass :
[ My sympathies on needing to get back to your life – this blog can be challenging just from volume of messages, often with leap-frogging threads (nice image, ChetBob) and especially when there are 4-8 new topics daily ]
The unintuitive result of fair cooperation emerging from the innate urge to painfully punish cheaters is more fully and well summarized by Sapolsky in the 6/02 Natural History, which I happen to have posted on my campus web site:
http://online.sfsu.edu/~thwaite/Darwin/subSapolskyRevenge.html
Excerpt: …game theory shows that at least three things facilitate the emergence of cooperation: playing with relatives or pseudorelatives, repeated rounds with the same individual, and open-book play. In [open-book], the same individuals needn’t play against each other repeatedly in order to produce cooperation. Instead, in what game theorists call sequential altruism, cooperation comes from the introduction of reputation.
Thus this does explain “why people will help others even when there is no payoff at all” – since we’re dealing with social species, reputation is a (proximal) payoff with repercussions for reproductive success. Note that no kin selection need be involved (I’m not sure I understand your assertion that this all reduces to kin selection). Related ideas are seductively explored (along with many others) in Geoffrey Miller’s excellent and very readable THE MATING MIND (2000).
Sapolsky’s essays are periodically collated into books, e.g. the recent MONKEYLUV (2005) which also includes this essay.
And fairness is very much an issue even among Capuchin monkeys:
Brosnan, S.F., and F.B.M. de Waal. 2003. Monkeys reject unequal pay. Nature 425(Sept. 18):297-299. Abstract available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature01963. (And nicely summarized in Science News, week of Sept. 20, 2003; Vol. 164, No. 12 , p. 181)
Reminds me of some nutbar who published a “proof of God” book that involved an equation where you plugged in your own arbitrary units of goodness and evil. Of course, even if you did come up with a net “good” result, it wouldn’t mean God exists.
compass :
[ My sympathies on needing to get back to your life – this blog can be challenging just from volume of messages, often with leap-frogging threads (nice image, ChetBob) and especially when there are 4-8 new topics daily ]
The unintuitive result of fair cooperation emerging from the innate urge to painfully punish cheaters is more fully and well summarized by Sapolsky in the 6/02 Natural History, which I happen to have posted on my campus web site:
online.sfsu.edu/~thwaite/Darwin/subSapolskyRevenge.html
Excerpt: …game theory shows that at least three things facilitate the emergence of cooperation: playing with relatives or pseudorelatives, repeated rounds with the same individual, and open-book play. In [open-book], the same individuals needn’t play against each other repeatedly in order to produce cooperation. Instead, in what game theorists call sequential altruism, cooperation comes from the introduction of reputation.
Thus this does explain “why people will help others even when there is no payoff at all” – since we’re dealing with social species, reputation is a (proximal) payoff with repercussions for reproductive success. Note that no kin selection need be involved (I’m not sure I understand your assertion that this all reduces to kin selection). Related ideas are seductively explored (along with many others) in Geoffrey Miller’s excellent and very readable THE MATING MIND (2000).
Sapolsky’s essays are periodically collated into books, e.g. the recent MONKEYLUV (2005) which also includes this essay.
And fairness is very much an issue even among Capuchin monkeys:
Brosnan, S.F., and F.B.M. de Waal. 2003. Monkeys reject unequal pay. Nature 425(Sept. 18):297-299. Abstract available at
dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature01963
and article nicely summarized in Science News, week of Sept. 20, 2003; Vol. 164, No. 12 , p. 181.
I think people get hung up on the erroneous phrase “survival of the fittest” (which is not Darwin’s). One, it’s not a scientific term, and two, in evolution, my understanding is that it’s not actually “survival of the fittest,” but “survival of the just-fit-enough-for-now.”
I would like to say in his defense (not that he needs me to defend him) that Sir Templeton is completely sincere in his search to find proof of God.
Whether this makes him appear the fool or not is a matter of opinion.
He is sincere, however, without an agenda towards forcing his beliefs on other people. He also puts his money where his passion is.
Who’s a biologist to predict the discovery of nuclear power, after all?
And who’s a thermodynamicist to realize such an unsuspected form of energy existed? Lord Kelvin was brilliant in his field, but brilliance does not always extend to other fields. (Bo knows quantum physics?) In fact, Kelvin and his peers were pretty defensive at this point, since the geologists and Darwin had by then surmised the earth was quite older than just a few thousand years. Physics in the 1850s was still an infant science, after all.
As for Barrow, he seems to have the naive view that “real” science is done in the lab, an image of science that many AIDS dissidents and IDists also seem to have. The only “real” sciences are those that can verify hypotheses with laboratory work, preferably involving numbers and equations. That is too narrow a definition. By that standard, we might as well toss out paleontology and astronomy, as well as bio, from the world’s science departments. Ridiculous.
Compass said:
Well, arguments of your authority-quoting, biology-distorting caliber are certainly pointless, at any rate. I’ve pretty much been there, seen that, and torn the T-shirt up for rags. You have to realize that the reason that almost no-one here is bothering to respond to your arguments seriously and in detail is not because we can’t. Instead it’s because these arguments are so completely unoriginal and so clearly presented from pigheaded belligerence instead of honest openness to debate that it’s just not worth it. So we’re mostly just sitting here kind of laughing at you behind your back in front of your face, because it’s very pleasant to feel superior to other people, even if it’s not very nice.
Of course, you’re still welcome to compose a sensible response to the question I asked. Instead of, you know, making whining noises about how I’m supposedly immune to rational argument simply because I’m willing to state baldly that my lifetime of interest in the subject has brought me to the conclusion that religion is pretty much crap. And that Christianity is extra-crap. But, you never know. Maybe my years of struggle to throw off the mental shackles my parents unwittingly imposed upon me were all foolishness and error, and your amazing and cogent argument will set me straight. If you save just one soul, isn’t it all worthwhile?
‘I think people get hung up on the erroneous phrase “survival of the fittest” (which is not Darwin’s). One, it’s not a scientific term, and two, in evolution, my understanding is that it’s not actually “survival of the fittest,” but “survival of the just-fit-enough-for-now.””
well yeah, there’s that, but it’s yet more subtle: “survival” alone means nothing, as a promiscuous 2-year-old rabbit (say) will contribute more genes to future generations of the population than a celibate nonagerian.
I ask my students to completely erase “SotF” from their brains and replace it with what natural selection REALLY is:
nonrandom differential reproduction
Compass, I am not the one being obtuse. If I misunderstood your argument, it was in part because it was badly presented, and abandoned as soon as you’d typed it. One day, I shall recognise these verbal caltrops for what they are.
Survival of the fittest… replace it with Reproduction of the Least Unfit, I think.
I’d be more impressed if the award were given for progress on the question of science & religion, not just for work done in one direction. When they give an award to Dawkins of Steven Pinker or Michael Persinger, for example.
As it is, it appears that they have to pay physicists not to abandon their religion.
Ha! Ha!
It bugs the crap out of PZ that someone dare say to Dawkins what he loves saying to others. The No True Scottsman fallacy works in reverse too, PZ. Didn’t you know that?
Of course what does PZ know? He’s never won the Templeton Prize and therefore isn’t qualified to determine who’s a credulous gasbag and who’s not. Maybe PZ’s the real gasbag here, I dunno.
I just checked an on-line dictionary. A scientist is someone knowledgable about the natural sciences, which include (per the dictionary) biology, chemistry, physics and so on. Therefore, a biologist is by definition a scientist. I also checked John Barrow, who is listed as a mathematician and cosmologist. Is math a science? Is cosmology a science? I mean, there is a lot of cosmology that is hard to test…
If I were a puddle
‘Whoa, if it weren’t for that hole… I wouldn’t be here.
But look at the way that any disturbance causes me to wear down the uneven sides of the hole, and take note that this effect gets compounded when I am puddled up.
Wow!… even my chemical composition serves to more-uniformly enhance this entropic process… so…
…I wonder if that’s my purpose in a near-flat, yet barely-expanding, universe?
One of these days you popular science readers are going to realize that physicists can’t and won’t categorically discount the physics that led highly respected scientists, like Paul Adrian Maurice Dirac to the anthropic “numerology” that PZ so openly scoffs at.
How clueless are those that think that infinities, uncertainty, and multiverse rationale is more scientific than honest efforts by otherwise respectable scientists to explain fine tuning from first principles?
I guess that they think that it’s more scientific to worship rationale that defends the biggest cop-out on first principle in the history of science.
One day when the good physical reson why the number of particles in the universe is disproportionally equal to its size in astronomical units becomes clear to scientists… not fanatics that prefer a cop-out on science over people that are honestly trying to derive the structure of our universe from first principles.
One day antifanaticism will prove all to be the fools that they are…
The strongest implication for an anthropic cosmological principle is through evolutionary theory, because an anthropic constraint on the forces of our universe necessarily predicts a mechanism that enables the universe to ((convolve)) it traits or characteristics forward…
This obvious connection cannot be ignored because the Theory OF Evolution becomes the Theory of Everything when the anthropic principle explains “WHY” the forces cannot be unified.
Only totally antifanatical fools would automatically discount that an anthropically constrained universe might be *necessarily* connected to the human evolutionary process.
Nah. The trick to the anthropological argument is that you only get to change one parameter. What if you could change several at once? The possibilities are endless.
We may be at a multidimensional saddle point for evolvability of brainiacs like us.
Now that you know there is no evidence that this is best of all possible universes, is it plausible that this is the best omnipotence can do? Nah. Think of all the things that could happen. Asteroid collision, gamma ray burst, bacterial wipeout,…. And it took life such a long time to reach us, its obvious pinnacle. You could even write a satirical novel about the “best of all possible worlds” claim. Oh wait – it’s been done.
What boggles my mind about the set of arguments presented by Compass and others on this thread is that, in their dismissal of science as just-another-belief-system-on-par-with-religious-belief systems, they fail to account for people whose totality of not-(or not yet-) scientifically verified assumptions about everything don’t include God or anything else caricaturistically supernatural.
I mean, to me, even–no especially–on a bluntly intuitive, non-rigorous level, altruism is directly connected to self-interest. Hidden, superpowerful agencies are the last thing I think of when I try to understand why I give change to a homeless person, send money to Drs. w/o borders, fail to lapse into hysterical kleptomania, or whatever.
My mind just turns to oatmeal when I try to imagine a world where even my most cherished emotions–love of other human beings, my family, generosity–are rooted in something like a religious person’s god. To me, as beautiful and real as those emotions are, I can’t imagine them as in any way transcending the physical, biological existence I perceive via my senses, even without being convinced logically by scientific arguments about the issue (although I am so convinced, more or less).
Compass, if you’re still paying attention, try reading The Origins of Virtue, just for starters. (I know there are a lot of other choices, but that one was the first that came to mind.) You’re not coming up with a new fabulous argument no one’s ever thought of before, and it’s too tedious for any of us to give you a complete series of lectures on ideas on the probable development of non-kin altruism just because you spouted off that you don’t know where morals come from. Go read up on it a little, then try back again.
SEF
Medicine had better be a bit more than magic. How do antibiotics work? Oh yeah- an experiment can show us. How do X Rays work- oh yeah- an experiment can show us. How do MRIs work- well I think there is some physics in there along with a bit of an understanding of biology. Chemistry helps us understand drugs….I think that is why they used to call pharmacists chemists.
Where is the stomach? What does the pancreas do? How does the brain think- ALL FREAKING SCIENCE.
Yes- there is a bit of interpretation….Well a lot if you are a psychologist, which is maybe why you think of science like voodoo……but pretty much if you take out any organ in the body and see what happens next-the result will not change. Take the heart out- oh yeah you die. Take the liver out- oh yeah you die. Mees upt he immune system like they did in England and you turn into elephant guy…….. ETC…..
So if you take the attitude that medicine is an ART and parlay that to med students, rather than show them how knowledge and understanding and experimentation build upon each other to provide a scientific rationale for doing A B or C…you are going to end up with a bunch of idiots who prescribe prayer and positive thinking and magnets rather than look for CURES or REAL things that can manage diseases. So why don’t we forget med school and send everyone to flippin church. Seriously.
PZ- Is medicine based on science and scientific principles??????
Emperor Popeatine’s also come out against the Harry Potter books — barely four years after his saner predecessor gave HP his seal of approval.
The dude really seems intent on jettisoning North America. Trouble is, the US Catholics are the ones subsidizing the whole shebang.
It seems Barrow may have a tendency to avoid “proper science” (falsifiable theories).
“If one regards the development of falsifiable hypotheses to be a characteristic of science, then John was obviously being self-referential in his quip to Dawkins; though John has on occasion done some proper science (for example, his work on anisotropies in the microwave background) Disclaimer: I am a former graduate student of John.” (From a comment on http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2006/04/and_the_problem_is_what_exactl.php .)
Keith,
Correct, I (and perhaps Wilkins) missed that. I’m not sure what category Wilkins adheres to since he uses the term “ideal physics”; he may mean that nonreduction is the realistic category.
Paul W,
I don’t think physics has hit a wall for reductionism. The interplay between reductionism and AP seems to be cyclic. However, the increasing difficulty to make high energy observations puts a damper on things.
Blake,
I’m curious; which biologist proposed conservation of energy?
Anne,
Yes, I left out the preposterous versions of AP, especially since I’m not familiar with them. Wikipedia mentions at leats a “strong” AP.
CCP,
“It’s all about levels of analysis. In the scientific study of life, physicists can only inform about the very tiniest levels of the organizational hierarchy.”
You are forgetting cosmology and astronomy.
Which unfortunately is exactly what you do get from many doctors! So evidently their current training and qualification filtering isn’t good enough. I’m on the side of pointing out to doctors just where they are being insufficiently scientific (and therefore sometimes grossly incompetent and damaging to patients as a result) and not on the side advocating that it’s OK for them to ignore science.
Those who claim “best of all possible universes because we’re here” aren’t even at the level of Leibniz, who came to the conclusion that the universe must be the result of the optimization of two functions …
impatientpatient, sure much of medicine is based on science. However, I’m not that convinced that all of it ever will be, as medicine of its very nature has to apply to individuals, and science can often only tell us what applies to populations. Therefore diagnosis often has a sizeable “non-scientific” (or intuitive) component (even in these days of tests for everything) and treatment similarly has some, albeit probably less.
As a separate point, not all doctors understand scientific method or statistics nearly as well as they should do. Especially independent probabilities.
Compass, someone above has made the point I wanted to make, that you need to go away and read some evolutionary psychology, which addresses your questions. On the flip side, perhaps you could recommend a suitable religious source which deals with the problem of evil? The best (most closely argued) I have read so far is Swinburne, but I do not find him very convincing.
Yes SEF- I have been in that very spot myself, questioning why spinal scar tissue is being treated with relaxation therapy and meditation. Which is why I am so freaking angry.
And Potentilla- I am so very and painfully aware of the deficiencies in math in regards to most physicians AND their patients. As a stupid stupid math student, who struggled mightily, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that I could, with much more struggle, 20 years later, decode the merits of studies based on population samples and how they interpreted results. I started with an insurance company study a few years ago. It did not make sense- and I was incensed.
Because most people that I know do not question a lot of the “wisdom” they are hearing these days from so called experts, and because most insurance company employess talk out of their butts, I have learned a lot.
I still think that medicine is based on science, but some people interpret it as a healing art. That is stupid and false. There is a movement out there that hearkens back to the old way of doing things- when the doctor patient relationship was king- and I know for a fact that that is false. Yes there were doctors who served a family for years and travelled in rural areas dispensing advice and medicine. There were death mills in cities too- where a doctor was just as culpable for the patient dying because they did not keep conditions sanitary, and disease was rampant because it wasn’t a big deal to have poor people croak. There were charlatans and faith healers everywhere.
We want to return to THAT? WTF??? Stupid and dumb and sad and all that.
So when I hear people tell me that medicine is not scientific, and biology is not a science in my real life, I have to say that I am shocked to see that this is repeated in any way in my internet life.
Well, no, I certainly don’t think we want to back-track on evidence-based medicine. However, at the point of diagnosis, however much the doctor knows about the probablilities of particular arrays of symptoms leading to particular diagnoses, and however many tests she’s done, it seems to me that she has to make a (temporary, perhaps) decision about which particular statistical box her patient falls into; and I’m not sure whether at that point, in the hard cases, science can help her.
The core of the argument by the godful that “belief in science” is just like religious faith can be summed up in one word: truthiness.
Potentilla
Yes- correct- at the point of diagnosis.
My point is that unfortunately this is being carried throughout the whole illness- CAM medicine is being touted as JUST AS VALID as conventional medicine, and people being sheep are looking to this stuff as a saviour. Coretta Scott King anyone?? Or Dana Reeves and the PBS New Medicine show.
I have to go to an Easter supper so I cannot snark any more, but that was my point.
Have a fab day!
With all due respect, do you REALLY want to call Barrow a crank? You can sure disagree with him, but he seems like a very mainstream, reputable physicist. His CV certainly dwarfs any other scientist I know—perhaps you are different, sir.
I cannot blame a person who studies cosmology to look down on biology a little, but you are sure insulting him in turn.
I wish you could just leave it as you disagree strongly, without all the personal attacks. Barrow is NOT “stupid,” nor is he a “gasbag,” and so on.
Your blog, your choice. But the goal, I thought, was to win “hearts and minds” over to evolutionary thought…not engage in insults and personal attacks.
In my opinion, Mr Barrow is a genius, only in the field of physics.
As for biology, I’ll bet donuts to dinars that he can’t tell a watermelon from a quadruple bypass if his miserable life depended on it.
Wot PaulC sed (April 13, 9:11PM). And many others.
I recognise that some people gain immense comfort and benefit from religious belief and practice, and as long as they do so peacefully and legally, and don’t shove down anyone else’s throat, then I don’t have a problem with that.
But religion or religious belief does nothing for me personally, and I have never had any time for anyone’s attempts to use science to justify religious belief. Barrow is no exception, even if he is a good physicist. Such (pseudo-)justifications are nothing more than ad hoc causal attributions to make themselves feel better about the (often very real and scary) gaps in our knowledge and understanding about the world and our place in it.
And I reject utterly the arrogant condescending notion that meaning can only come from religious belief, and that atheists (or agnostics) cannot have profoundly meaningful lives. You can shove that drivel right up your cloaca.
OK, a number of people are arguing about the philosophical basis for science: the reason why beliefs gained through scientific methods is in fact privileged (more reliable) over beliefs obtained in other ways.
To answer this question, we should note what the features of scientific methods are. First of all, a respect for the evidence: you must accept the evidence you see as the primary, most reliable information you have. This is empricism. Secondly, use of provisional beliefs which are logically consistent with the evidence (and not of those which aren’t). This is rationalism. Thirdly, willingness to test these beliefs by deliberately gathering more evidence in an atttmpt to disprove them. This is skepticism. Fourthly, the use of the simplest possible explanation out of those explanations which satisfy the prior requirements. This is Occam’s Razor.
Additional unproven assumptions will come into play. However, every effort is made to minimize them. Assumptions such as “If the sun rose every morning every day of my life so far, it will most likely rise next morning too” — the assumption of continuity unless you have evidence to the contrary — remain. These assumptions have a special feature: they are unavoidable. You couldn’t get through a single day of your life without using such assumptions. You don’t wake up in the morning and wonder “Hmm, when I try to move my leg, will it move? I don’t know!” You assume it will until you get evidence to the contrary. You have to; there is no other way to function.
So why are beliefs derived through scientific methods more reliable — more likely to be true — than other beliefs? Because the assumptions used are minimal and unavoidable. Assuming that logic works (rationalism) is minimal and unavoidable. Assuming that the evidence of your eyes is generally to be believed (empiricism) is minimal and unavoidable. Skepticism adds substantial additional reliability because it is designed specifically to weed out incorrect beliefs. (Occam’s Razor is more of a convenience than anything else, and is not significant to this argument.)
Interestingly, all scientific knowledge is provisional. It is simply our “best guess” — it may well be replaced by a better guess later, as when quantum mechanics and relativity theory supplanted Newtonian mechanics. However, these guesses have proved to be far more reliable than anything claimed to be “authoritatively true” (usually by religion), and the reason for this is the minimization of assumptions, the respect for the evidence, and the skeptical criticism of any such guess.
“I also checked John Barrow, who is listed as a mathematician and cosmologist. Is math a science? Is cosmology a science?”
Mathematics is not a science in the way the other sciences are. It does not use the scientific method. It is not a “natural science”. It is sometimes called a “pure science”.
Math is a bit of a special case. The reason math is a special case is that mathematicians define their own universes. The only assumption common to all of mathematics is the very, very basic assumption that basic logic works. Beyond that, all mathematical statements are really of the form “*If* we define the following things as follows, *and* these axioms are true, *then* these conclusions are true.”
You get to pick your own definitions and your own axioms! If the axioms are contradictory, then you get some very boring results, because in a contradictory system, you can prove anything (you can prove P, you can prove not-P, you can prove P-and-not-P, etc.) Otherwise, you can get very complex and interesting results. None of it is about the real world: it’s about the world you defined.
Now, *applications* of mathematics are another matter: these constitute a claim that a mathematical system provides a model for some part of the real world. These may be scientific theories.
For a simple (but actually very deep and subtle) example, consider the pile of pens on my desk. I believe that the mathematical system called “arithmetic of non-negative integers” makes an effective scientific model for this pile. By counting the pens, I associate a number with the pile — the “number of pens in the pile”. Suppose I remove some pens from the pile. By counting them, I associate a number with them — the “number of pens removed from the pile”. I claim that if I use “arithmetic” to “subtract” the “number of pens removed from the pile” from the old “number of pens in the pile”, I will get the new “number of pens in the pile”. I can then test this theory by counting the pile afterwards.
This theory has proven extremely reliable. If some of the pens were self-destructing pens, I would have to revise my scientific theory; I would probably still use the mathematical system of “arithmetic”, but I’d have to make the correspondences between the measurable real-world quantities and the mathematical system more complicated.
Socially speaking, the fact that mathematics is not a natural science and does not use the scientific method means that mathematicians frequently have a very poor understanding of the scientific method, unless they also have background in the natural sciences. The same is true of computer scientists (computer science is also not a natural science, with the possible exception of a few very-low-level parts which are generally considered electrical engineering).
I say this, in case anyone was wondering, as a mathematician and computer scientist who *does* have a half-decent background in the natural sciences.
Supposing for the sake of argument that a godless life is a meaningless life, completely devoid of any meaning — if that were the case, well, so what?
How would that be an argument against atheism or for theism?
It is just complaining. “Oh, boo hoo, if there is no God then life is meaningless.” It does not bear on the truth of theism or atheism.
To complain about the meaninglessness of a godless life is like looking at your bank statement, and on seeing the balance is only $200.00, saying, “This can’t be right! If this is right, then I’m not a millionaire! And I so want to be a millionaire. I have to be a millionaire. I’m just going to throw this bank statement in the trash and ignore it.”
I think most theists, when they think of a “meaning of life” are imagining that their deity has looked around and thought, “hmm, I need X to be done for me. I think I’ll create a human to do X for me.” And the theist supposes that they are doing X, whether conscious of it or not.
In that sense, the theist is correct in his assertion that there is no meaning of life for the atheist. Of course the atheist doesn’t have any such ridiculous notion of a meaning of life.
But my main point is whether there is a meaning of life is completely irrelevant to the truth or falsehood of theism, so when “meaning of life” is raised in theism’s defense, it ought to be shot down immediately as being completely irrelevant.
“So why are beliefs derived through scientific methods more reliable — more likely to be true — than other beliefs? Because the assumptions used are minimal and unavoidable.”
Interesting, but I don’t think that is the whole picture.
The reason observed facts and verified theories are reliable is because they are well tested, not the method per se. The reason the methods work is because they too are well tested, however here I think your arguments explain why that should be.
And I would not equate falsifiable knowledge such as facts and theories with “reliable belief”.
“The reason math is a special case is that mathematicians define their own universes.”
Again interesting but perhaps not the whole picture. Both logic, definitions, eventual axioms and statements are mostly modeled on the existing world since it is hard to imagine the alternatives. Things such as theoretical physics provides further interactions. (Influx, but also tests of models.) Which is why I prefer to place math and logic closer to the observational sciences than a “pure” science.