Dawkins on morality and responsibility

Richard Dawkins on morality and responsibility:

Retribution as a moral principle is incompatible with a scientific view of human behaviour. As scientists, we believe that human brains, though they may not work in the same way as man-made computers, are as surely governed by the laws of physics. When a computer malfunctions, we do not punish it. We track down the problem and fix it...

Why don't we laugh at a judge who punishes a criminal, just as heartily as we laugh at Basil Fawlty? ... Isn't the murderer or the rapist just a machine with a defective component? Or a defective upbringing? Defective education? Defective genes?

Concepts like blame and responsibility are bandied about freely where human wrongdoers are concerned. ... But doesn't a truly scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system make nonsense of the very idea of responsibility, whether diminished or not? Any crime, however heinous, is in principle to be blamed on antecedent conditions acting through the accused's physiology, heredity and environment. Don't judicial hearings to decide questions of blame or diminished responsibility make as little sense for a faulty man as for a Fawlty car?

Why is it that we humans find it almost impossible to accept such conclusions? Why do we vent such visceral hatred on child murderers, or on thuggish vandals, when we should simply regard them as faulty units that need fixing or replacing? Presumably because mental constructs like blame and responsibility, indeed evil and good, are built into our brains by millennia of Darwinian evolution. Assigning blame and responsibility is an aspect of the useful fiction of intentional agents that we construct in our brains as a means of short-cutting a truer analysis of what is going on in the world in which we have to live. My dangerous idea is that we shall eventually grow out of all this and even learn to laugh at it, just as we laugh at Basil Fawlty when he beats his car. But I fear it is unlikely that I shall ever reach that level of enlightenment.

Permalink | 5 Comments | Tags: Evolution | id 7838

13:24 (utc-5)

 

Clayton Cramer on ID

Clayton Cramer on ID:

Look, being persecuted and retaliated against isn't proof that Intelligent Design is correct, but the evolutionary establishment's foaming at the mouth suggests that ID has hit a nerve that "Creation science" never did. That's because Intelligent Design has a few proponents who are legitimate scientists, working in the fields of biochemistry and microbiology--and some of its criticisms are very powerful.

"... some of its criticisms are very powerful". That's all I've been saying. You fundamentally can't answer the question of origins scientifically. It's an historical question. However, the range of scientific disciplines can be queried for what they have to say about the subject. Evolution's proponents look for what they'd consider evidence of some species having their origin in the mutations of other species, while ID's proponents look for what they'd consider evidence for an intelligence having to be behind what we see in biology and other areas of science.

It's obviously going to be a judgement call of what you'd accept as evidence one way or the other, and that judgement will be determined by your prior philosophical commitments. If you have a prior commitment to a naturalistic explanation of our origins, you'll buy into evolution. If you don't, you might be willing to accept a supernatural explanation of our origins. But the important point to understand is that the ID scientists and the evolutionary scientists are on the exact same plane as far as evidence is concerned.

For instance, if the fossil record clearly showed very gradual changes in species over time from the simplest organisms to, say, humans, that'd be pretty compelling evidence that there was such an evolution. But, that's not what we find in the fossil record. On the other hand, if Behe is correct that certain structures we find in biology truly are irreducibly complex, that's pretty compelling evidence that they had to have been designed.

Permalink | 1 Comment | Tags: Evolution | id 7575

14:33 (utc-5)
edited: 14:57 (utc-5)

 

Exciting evolution discoveries

Startling plant discovery presents problems for evolution:

...a paper in Nature describes a plant that can fix its own mutations, apparently without using DNA as a template.4 The plant, Arabidopsis thaliana, is able to revert from a homozygous recessive mutant form, known as Hothead, to a heterozygous normal form by altering the DNA base sequence on one of the homologous recessive genes. Such a mechanism allows a “revert to saved” function not unlike that in Microsoft Office®. The plant is able to revert to a previous copy of the gene just as an author can revert to a previously saved copy of a document if undesirable changes were made. Another parallel is the “Edit-undo” function. Both of these significantly benefit computer users, however it is stunning to see such a phenomenon in living things.

(to finish reading). Also, they have an article on the recent amazing find of soft tisse in dinosaur bones:

Not only have more blood cells been found, but also soft, fibrous tissue, and complete blood vessels. The fact that this really is unfossilized soft tissue from a dinosaur is in this instance so obvious to the naked eye that any scepticism directed at the previous discovery is completely “history”... It beggars belief that elastic tissue like this could have lasted for 65 million years.

They have pictures, which I hadn't seen before.

Permalink | 16 Comments | Tags: Evolution | id 6822

17:14 (utc-4)

 

RATE

Answers in Genesis: RATE group reveals exciting breakthroughs!

Basically, the RATE project (Radioactivity and the Age of The Earth) has completed some of its studies, and has come back with some interesting findings. Here's their paper (PDF), much of which is far beyond my comprehension, but the Answers in Genesis article summarizes it as follows:

* When uranium decays to lead, a by-product of this process is the formation of helium, a very light, inert gas which readily escapes from rock.
* Certain crystals called zircons, obtained from drilling into very deep granites, contain uranium which has partly decayed into lead.
* By measuring the amount of uranium and ‘radiogenic lead’ in these crystals, one can calculate that, if the decay rate has been constant, about 1.5 billion years must have passed. (This is consistent with the geologic ‘age’ assigned to the granites in which these zircons are found.)
* There is a significant amount of helium from that ‘1.5 billion years of decay’ still inside the zircons. This is at first glance surprising for long-agers, because of the ease with which one would expect helium (with its tiny, light, unreactive atoms) to escape from the spaces within the crystal structure. There should surely be hardly any left, because with such a slow buildup, it should be seeping out continually and not accumulating.
* Drawing any conclusions from the above depends, of course, on actually measuring the rate at which helium leaks out of zircons. This is what one of the RATE papers reports on. The samples were sent (without any hint that it was a creationist project) to a world-class expert to measure these rates. The consistent answer: the helium does indeed seep out quickly over a wide range of temperatures. In fact, the results show that because of all the helium still in the zircons, these crystals (and since this is Precambrian basement granite, by implication the whole earth) could not be older than between 4,000 and 14,000 years. In other words, in only a few thousand years, 1.5 billion years’ worth (at today’s rates) of radioactive decay has taken place. Interestingly, the data have since been refined and updated to give a date of 5680 (+/- 2000) years.

Interestingly, they also found that C-14 is present in diamonds, when given how old diamonds are supposed to be there shouldn't have been any C-14 left. No one's ever dated diamonds before? Could these be "recently formed" diamonds? How long are diamonds supposed to take to form in nature?

Oh, the diamonds they tested were pre-cambrian, therefore they couldn't have been recently formed according to evolutionary theory. I guess I didn't read carefully enough:

This latter suggestion about primordial C-14 appears to have been somewhat spectacularly supported when Dr Baumgardner sent a diamond for C-14 dating. It was the first time this had been attempted, and the answer came back positive—i.e. the diamond, formed deep inside the earth in a ‘Precambrian’ layer, nevertheless contained radioactive carbon, even though it ‘shouldn’t have’.

This is exceptionally striking evidence, because a diamond has remarkably powerful lattice bonds, so there is no way that subsequent biological contamination can be expected to find its way into the interior.

The diamond’s carbon-dated ‘age’ of <58,000 years is thus an upper limit for the age of the whole earth. And this age is brought down still further now that the helium diffusion results have so strongly affirmed dramatic past acceleration of radioactive decay.

Permalink | Comments? | Tags: Evolution | id 4198

23:49 (utc-4)
edited: 2003-08-22 00:00 (utc-4)

 

Professing Creation Science

Over at AnswersInGenesis.org (great site, by the way), there's an interview with Dr. Walter Veith, who holds the chair of zoology at a university in South Africa. The interview is excellent, and this quote jumped out at me, because it emphasizes exactly what I've always said. That it takes a lot of faith to believe in evolution.

'The very name "selection" implies that you're choosing between two or more variants. So that means that the end result is extinction of one in favour of the other. Natural selection never increases the number of variants; it only decreases them. So my problem with it was, "how does a mechanism that makes less and less end up making more and more"?

'The answer obviously is, it doesn't. That leaves chance mutations as the only source of the new information. You have to have all these new genes coding for new features, all interacting precisely with one another, continually arising as animals get more complex, by chance. To believe that, you have to have a lot of faith. It's certainly not something I see in my work as a zoologist.'

He also talks about lots of other neat things, like "latent DNA" (all the neat stuff that's in there that people think is left-over "junk" DNA), the fossil record, animal physiology and eating habits, and genetic engineering. Good read.

Permalink | 3 Comments | Tags: Evolution | id 3749

09:54 (utc-4)

 

Holy crap, Greg Bahnsen was so awesome. I just started on Side B of one of his tapes in his History of Western Philosophy: Modern series. The side started basically at the end of one of his arguments (since it's side B), but it stands on its own. I'll reproduce it here because it's so awesome:

"Alright, so survival of the fittest suffers from a similar defect, in that it proves not to be a testable hypothesis at all. Because it's just an outlook that says, "Well, the survivors must have been the fittest ones". Oh, and how do you know that? "Well, because they survived". So the circle's complete. It's nothing but an ideological tautology. It's a vision of the world. Alright? It's a certain conception of how the world works. But it's not a conception that's been built up from factual analysis, and it's not a conception that can be tested by empirical facts. And this is the philosophical refutation of evolution as a scientific view."

Keep in mind that he is not necessarily saying that natural selection doesn't happen. He is saying that evolutionary theory can't be claimed to be supported on a purely scientific basis.

Permalink | Comments? | Tags: Evolution, Philosophy | id 952

00:37 (utc-5)

 

Alan Keys on Evolution

Below is a really long excerpt from the Skeptic Mag Hotline newsletter from March 6th.

5. Alan Keyes on Evolution

Thanks to Dave Buckner: Republican presidential candidate Alan Keyes' remarks on evolution were made at Hylton High school in Virginia on 2/27/00. You can listen to his speech on C-SPAN's RealPlayer at

http://www.c-span.org/Campaign2000/keyesspeeches.asp

The remarks on evolution begin about 27:00, which you can zoom to on Real Player using the slide-bar.

Here's a rough transcript made by a netfriend in which Keyes contrasts the philosophy in the Declaration of Independence with the philosophy that
grows out of evolution:

********************KEYES on EVOLUTION*******************
But now in our schools there is a different ideology. It isn't
taught in the civics courses (I don't know what we do teach in the civics
courses), but we teach it in the science classes. it masquerades as science though it is taught as indoctrination. Last time I looked science you can question it; there is no scientific theory that you're not allowed to question. The questions aren't likely to work in some cases, but in other cases the fact that you were willing to question certain basic assumptions, I mean the questions that Einstein was willing to raise about Newtonian physics created the world in which we live.

Skepticism is the hallmark of the scientist's mind; always question
the theory in light of the facts. There is only one so-called scientific
theory where you are not allowed to do that, and where our children are not
to be exposed to any alternative except the one that has been placed before
them in this dogmatic fashion. And that is the ideology of evolution. Why
would they insist upon it in this way? Because it represents the total
subversion of the premise of our way of life. What would we have to do to
the declaration of independence if we were to revise it to reflect the dogma that is now quite seriously taught to our young people and which shapes their consciousness. This is, by virtue of the claims of science, what they now believe about themselves. You do realize that, don't you. What would we have to do to the declaration to make it conform?

First we'd have to take out that inconvenient reference to truth,
since it's obvious that the purpose of evolution is to explain away the
appearance that an intelligent being created it in such a way as to dispense with any need to any reference to such an intelligent cause. But I've often wondered, why do we go to all that trouble? Do we go to all that trouble in the rest of science to look for a cause that is not commensurate with the effect? Usually you look for a commensurate cause. But this is the one area of so-called science where we don't look for a commensurate cause. We actually want to look for a cause that is not commensurate with the effect. That's amazing.

But having dispensed with the possibility of an intelligent creator,
that does raise serious questions about the possibility of truth, doesn't
it, since truth does imply a kind of intelligent cohesion that could
ultimately be known and understood. If we discard that idea, then we're
left with something like this: "We hold these ideas to be more or less
familiar to everybody though no longer necessarily accepted by everybody,
that all of us have more or less evolved to about the same point, and that
as a consequence of this evolutionary process we all of us are equally
inclined to whine a lot about our rights."

Sad to say, even if one could state the sort of evolutionary
declaration principles with somewhat greater respect, there would still be a problem. What authority does the evolution process have? Why should one
care about its results? Is there any particular reason to respect those
results? If evolution says we've more or less reached the same point, but I say, no we haven't, because you reached the point without the gun and I
reached the point with the gun, doesn't that put us in a position where the
whole evolution thing doesn't matter, where equality is no longer of any
importance, and isn't it a point that the underlying premise of evolution -- crudely stated, I know, but still I think reasonably accurate -- is the
survival of the fittest. And what is the survival of the fittest? It is
the domination of the stronger over the weaker in terms of the ircumstances
in which both find themselves. Do we experience any regret in terms of
evolutionary science for those weaklings that are now extinguished? No we
don't. They were extinguished because they were not able to cope, and not
being able to cope, why should we shed any tears over them? We may look at
them with curiosity and interest, but beyond that, why do we care?

The interesting thing about that doctrine is that, actually, dressed
up in fancy scientific duds, it turns out to be for human affairs the same
brutal, ugly principle that governed all along: that might makes right, and we needn't shed a tear of concern for the hindmost, for justice cares only for the strong. I point all this out not just because it's interesting theory, but because this is what our children learn. And if we don't understand what we're doing, let me put it clearly, we have thrown out the principle of justice on which our nation was founded, that promises justice to the weak as well as the strong, and we have substitute for it an ideology that offers no sympathy for the weak and confirms the domination of the strong. We have destroyed in our schools and therefore in the hearts and consciousness of our children already the principles without which our whole way of life is a meaningless sham. And don't think this is just an academic treatise -- what on earth is a politician doing talking about this stuff. I'll tell you why. The major issue we face as a moral challenge in this country today is a direct reflection of the same abandonment of principle of the same surrender to the age-old lie that might makes right. For we see there clear as day in the arguments that are made by the proponents of abortion, who tell us that that child in the womb is rightly subject to his mother's choice because it is not viable apart from her body, because it is wholly dependent upon her physically, because she has it absolutely within her power. What are we looking at there, if not the claim that absolute power means the absolute right to dispose of the being in your power in any way you choose. It is the same awful ugly premise of despotism and tyranny and slavery and conquest and oppression that has sadly consigned so many human beings to oppression, to death, through the centuries of mankind's existence.

Yet here we are, a people supposedly governed by a principle that
respects all, regardless of their weakness or strength, embracing now the
lie that in fact once again surrenders the very heart of our civilization to the principle that might makes right, that the one who has the power has the power to destroy the lives of those that are within its power.

Permalink | Comments? | Tags: Evolution, Religion, Science | id 101

00:00 (utc-5)

 

Awwwww... look at the cute monkey! You know, we used to look like that! HAHAHA.

Permalink | Comments? | Tags: Cute, Evolution, Pictures | id 30

00:00 (utc-5)