Our baby is gone!

We just moved the last of Skatje’s stuff out of our house and into her dorm room. No more kids at home! We’ve come full circle now to 1983, back when we were a couple living in a studio apartment, living on Mac&Cheez and free government cheese food, scraping by on minimal grad student stipends. Now we’re in a big old empty house that we got because it was a perfect family home, but otherwise, we’re still getting by on the cheap, since we still have two kids off at college.

Oh, and we’re also left holding the bag on two cats.

Krazy Kansas Kook wants to eliminate all biologists

When last we heard from Tom Willis, big-wig in the Creation Science Association for Mid-America, he was pondering whether evolutionists should be allowed to vote. Since Tom Willis is batshit insane, he decided that no, they should not, because they’re wicked godless atheists with no moral sense (you theistic evolutionists aren’t spared — you’re even worse).

Now he has upped the ante and is wondering,
Should Evolutionists Be Allowed to Roam Free in the Land?. I wonder what his answer will be?

After declaring evolutionists incompetent, unproductive, dangerous, at war with Christianity, and to have demanded the elimination of Christians (what powers of projection he has!), Willis finally explains what must be done with us.

Clearly then, “evolutionists should not be allowed to
roam free in the land.” All that remains for us to discuss is
“What should be done with evolutionists?” For the purposes
of this essay, I will ignore the minor issue of Western-style jurisprudence and merely mention possible solutions to the
“evolutionism problem,” leaving the legal details to others:

  • Labor camps. Their fellow believers were high on these.
    But, my position would be that most of them have lived
    their lives at, or near the public trough. So, after their own
    beliefs, their life should continue only as long as they can
    support themselves in the camps.

  • Require them to wear placards around their neck, or perhaps large medallions which prominently announce “Warning: Evolutionist! Mentally Incompetent – Potentially
    Dangerous.” I consider this option too dangerous.

  • Since evolutionists are liars and most do not really believe
    evolution we could employ truth serum or water-boarding
    to obtain confessions of evolution rejection. But, this
    should, at most, result in parole, because, like Muslims,
    evolutionist religion permits them to lie if there is any benefit to them.

  • An Evolutionist Colony in Antarctica could be a promising
    option. Of course inspections would be required to prevent
    too much progress. They might invent gunpowder.
    A colony on Mars would prevent gunpowder from harming
    anyone but their own kind, in the unlikely event they turned
    out to be intelligent enough to invent it.

  • All options should include 24-hour sound system playing
    Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris
    reading Darwin’s Origin of Species, or the preservation of
    Favored Races by Means of Natural Selection    . Of course
    some will consider this cruel & unusual, especially since
    they will undoubtedly have that treatment for eternity.

Kansas breeds attracts the most amazing kooks. (I have been informed that quite a few of the looniest creationists in Kansas come from elsewhere.)

We don’t need teleology — so why bother?

Tony Sidaway discusses a unifying property of theistic evolutionists: the desire or need for there to be some kind of universal plan for their existence. It’s not an attitude I understand very well; I don’t think it makes life better to believe that there is some ineffable teleological intent behind the events in your life, and no one ever bothers to explain why it would be preferable to be a pawn to a cosmic puppetmaster. Their reasoning also tends to be incredibly bad, as can be seen in the article by Mark Vernon that inspired Tony’s musings.

The work of Conway Morris, and now many others, is showing that evolution keeps coming up with the same solutions to natural problems. One of the better-known examples is that sabre-toothed cats. They evolved on at least three different occasions along independent Darwinian paths. And yet they look almost exactly the same. Dozens of examples of convergence have now been documented across a wide variety of biological phenomena, from animal and plant physiology to molecular biology.

Convergence raises the possibility of directionality in evolution. This is anathema to the old school. Strictly speaking, even to talk of adaptations being advantageous is to risk a false sense of teleology. The sense of “advantage” only comes because we have hindsight. As Stephen Jay Gould put it: according to this interpretation of evolution, if you re-ran the “tape of life”, life would look very different.

Convergence challenges this, because in a way, evolution has already re-run the tape of life several times, and it looks strikingly similar.

The argument from convergence is wrong and makes no sense, yet somehow it appeals to smart people like Simon Conway Morris and Ken Miller, who have both made it themes in their books. Convergence occurs, of course, but “dozens of examples” is not very impressive and does not imply that this is a dominant mode of evolution. The examples also exhibit the constraints of contingency; yes, several mammals have evolved saber teeth, which seem to be tools for a particular kind of predation that involves deep tearing to induce bleeding in prey. If we get away from mammals, though, it doesn’t appear very often, if at all. Raptors, for instance, probably used an overdeveloped claw in the same way. Convergence is often a consequence of limitations in anatomy and physiology that make a narrower range of solutions to common problems available.

Another good example is the eye. Eyes have independently evolved multiple times, and we do see examples of convergence — molluscs and vertebrates have simple camera eyes that are not related by ancestry. It’s not because of some master plan, however, but because using a lens to focus light on a sheet of photoreceptive cells is a simple, easily evolved strategy for putting an image on a neuronal array. This is a case where physics itself imposes some limitations on how a receptor organ can function. At the same time, though, life explores a wider set of solutions than we can imagine. Mollusc and vertebrate eyes differ in all the details of their development and anatomy, and obviously enough, other organisms, such as arthropods, have put together radically different solutions with compound eyes. Did a god have a plan that involved eyes forming as orbs with single lenses? Why? And does that make dragonflies satanic, for defying the plan?

Vernon is also completely wrong. The tape of life has not been replayed, except in a small scale and with historical limitations. You could argue, I suppose, that the Permian and Cretaceous extinctions represented a catastrophic rewinding of life’s tape for large terrestrial animals, but do note that each produced different solutions. Dinosaurs became ascendant (in a megafauna sense) after the Permian, but very different vertebrates took over after the Cretaceous.

It’s all very peculiar. This particular breed of teleologist seizes upon small functional similarities in organisms, tooth size or body shape or color pattern, and declares that because two species independently generate similar solutions to common problems, it must be because there is a guiding force producing these solutions. They want the guiding force to be a deity, but unfortunately, Darwin long ago identified the force as short-term local adaptation to environmental forces, nothing more, no grand planner, no deep purpose, and these instances of convergence provide no evidence otherwise.

There must be some psychological need in the teleologists that I lack. I don’t feel any a priori requirement that complexity and adaptation and similar solutions must be driven by any kind of master blueprint, and I find any kind of deterministic explanation for earth’s history to be personally horrifying (not that that is an obstacle to such explanations being true, but it does confuse me that some people think such an answer to be desirable).

We are each our own individual engines of purpose, operating in a hostile universe where randomness can shape our fates. There is no grand scheme behind our existence, other than the same function that all our ancestors had: to order our local environment to allow each to survive and to make the world a little better for our progeny. And that’s enough — that’s all that is needed to make a rich, diverse, living planet, and it’s all I need to live a satisfying life.

Godless Coloradans, rise up!

Since the DNC has chosen to not only ignore but outright spurn and reject the significant bloc of voters in their ranks who are not irrational people of faith, a demonstration is planned for 24 August at the Colorado Convention Center — you can RSVP if you want, but I’m sure you won’t be turned away if you just show up. The Coalition of Secular Voters has also put together an open letter to the Democrats, and I’ve heard that the Boulder Atheists will be turning out, too.

Let your displeasure be known. The DNC has to be shown that they’ve made a great mistake by alienating an important part of their base.

Edger, and a warning for Toronto

The Center for Inquiry has sponsored a new student-run initiative, Edger, a kind of group blog for young secularists.

Edger presents hard-hitting and reasoned news, views, and event promotion on issues pertaining to secularism, atheism, science, humanism, and the cosmos, and actively promotes and celebrates international freethought activism. Written in a youthful tone, but mature in content, Edger is sure to be a driving force in the new intellectual enlightenment.

MISSION
To create an outlet for prominent young freethought leaders to express their views and get them heard. Blogs are becoming very commonplace, and alone many blogs fail, but together, with the proper direction and an engaging and professional site, these blogging leaders can come together to make an impact far beyond what they could have achieved on their own.

It sounds interesting, check it out.

By the way, the Center for Inquiry is also sponsoring me for a talk. I’ll be in Toronto on Halloween this year, speaking on “Science Education: Caught in the Middle in the War Between Science and Religion” (you can guess which side I take). Nobody will want to hear that, though — the real treat is that they also invited Skatje to speak at a panel discussion the day afterwards. I’ve already told her that if she wants to use her time to critique my talk, that’s OK, so there is a potential for fireworks.

Matt Dillahunty, that’s no Poe

This clip is of a caller to the Atheist Experience who makes a series of assertions common among creationists.

Matt Dillahunty answers her well, but at the end he doubts that the caller was for real. Sorry, guy, I’ve heard those arguments a thousand times — they represent a kind of universal creationist ground state. It’s why we have Poe’s Law: because there are sincere people who actually promote this nonsense.