evolution - Jeremy Price on Diigo

24 Sep 09

23 Sep 09

Sympathy for Creationists « Neuroanthropology

the difficulty of really seeing the world through an evolutionary lens
Creationism adheres to patterns of error in thought: belief that our intellectual categories are reflected in reality; attribution of purpose and direction to the unfolding of events; and a firm conviction that we are both distinctive and fundamentally important to reality.

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a basic disagreement about the concept of ‘belief’ or ‘faith.’
simply assumptions about how things work that are, mostly, consistent with the evidence, my own observations, what reasonable people tend to say, and the like. I don’t subject the existence of atoms or the location of my car to constant scrutiny; to do so would probably be the slippery slope to a kind of existential obsessive-compulsive disorder
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- When people of faith say that they ‘believe’ something, I suspect that they are describing a very different sort of feeling
- faith makes the faithful feel happy; they prize having belief; and some seem to be worried about losing it
- if I could come up with a convincing mathematical proof of God, I’d negate the whole need for faith, thus debasing the very attainment and maintenance of faith, the key to salvation, in a manner of speaking
- In contrast, most scientists don’t lose their faith in atoms, nor do they fear losing their belief that atoms exist.
- religious faith seems to be simultaneously more anxious and more precious than other sorts of mundane beliefs, such as confidence in the predictability of the material world
- If we look across the human species, believing in the supernatural is the statistically dominant human condition, even if belief in a particular act of ‘creation’ is less dominant.
- I suggested that some evolutionary theorists don’t really do the cause a favour when dealing with this hardened core of resistance to accepting evolution as the basic mechanism of species development and change. That is, some of the arguments that extrapolate from evolutionary theory undermine the credibility of evolution in the eyes of a wider public.
- those who put forward ‘evolutionary’ accounts to justify present patterns of human behaviour, which often turn out to be intentionally scandalizing or factually challenged on various levels
- One of the key issues for me is the whole notion of ‘human nature,’ and the degree to which behaviour is determined by selective mechanisms. Ironically, I think that the notion of ‘human nature’ sometimes employed in evolutionary psychology is a kind of essentializing error that also comes up in Creationist thought.
- Teleologic error: Evolution ‘designs’
- One reason that Darwin himself did not like the word ‘evolution’ (he preferred ‘transformation’ and didn’t use ‘evolution’ until the sixth edition of The Origin of Species) was that he thought it suggested improvement or progress or some sort of directionality to changes in species.
- I think both Creationists and many evolution proponents resist the implications of the utter directionless-ness of evolutionary development, either recoiling from the recognition that this is a completely rudderless existence or simply not being able to comprehend what non-intended, design-less development might look like.
- Some accounts of evolutionary change or trait emergence seem to me to exacerbate this tendency toward teleology by carelessly arguing that physiological changes are ‘for’ a particular function or fitness-related purpose.
- Essentializing error: species as ‘type’
- the essentializing error, the assumption that all individuals in a species are members of a type or category. To me, one of the implications of The Origin of Species is that species are unstable, constantly changing, and precariously balanced populations of individuals that might, at almost any time, split into multiple species or change into other sorts of individuals, were there not very active processes stabilizing them.
- the human brain, especially with the use of language, seems to function much better with types than with pools of variation
- we shouldn’t then let the assumption be that there is a ‘type-ness,’ a shared essence in a species which is really a population with inherent variation.
- For this reason, even though I may use the term ‘human nature’ myself at times, I think it’s an erroneous concept, even before we start talking about specific behaviours that allegedly make up that ‘nature’ because ‘nature’ gives too much credence to the existence of the type.
- One of the consequences of the essentializing error, in my opinion, is that we may be led to ignore both variation and future change
- Darwin wrote himself a marginal note to himself, ‘Never say higher or lower in referring to organisms.’ Most of us, even biologists, have a hard time sticking to this scrupulousness, and we tend to project value judgments onto even more neutral-sounding language (like my use of the terms ‘complex’ and ‘simple’ or ‘multi-cellular’ and ‘single-celled’).
- Biologists and Creationists alike tend to share a bias towards the multicellular freak show, if I might be so rude.
- we, as a species, are pretty self-centred, believing that, even if the universe does not revolve around us, at least we’re typical of life.
- We are exceptional, but not in the sense that we are fundamentally different from other animals; we, like our large-bodied evolutionary close relations, are odd and unusual in the grand circus of life. I think that Creationism turns this oddity into a kind of Divine License, a Adamic Stewardship, an assumption that humans are God’s special favourite creatures and Creation was given to us. Even many biologists and environmentalists focus on humans and large multicellular organisms disproportionately. An evolutionary framework, in contrast, is a more sobering assessment of our peculiarity, a sense for our fragility and dependence on all these other ‘simpler’ organisms.
- This piece is more about the difficulty of really seeing the world through an evolutionary lens.
- although natural selection may be simple in axiomatic terms, it is a real challenge to integrate it into everyday thought. Even our ways of speaking tend to reintroduce errors of teleology, essentialism and complexity bias, leading us to use terms like ‘design,’ a species’ ‘nature,’ and ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ organisms without considering much their implications.
- Global statistics tell us that Creationism must have some sort of consistency with observable facts
- Creationism adheres to patterns of error in thought: belief that our intellectual categories are reflected in reality; attribution of purpose and direction to the unfolding of events; and a firm conviction that we are both distinctive and fundamentally important to reality.
- I still don’t think Creationists are right, but I do feel like I know where they’re coming from.

21 Sep 09

Stephen Jay Gould, "Evolution as Fact and Theory" 1994

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06 Sep 09

the preservation of favoured traces | ben fry

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24 Aug 09

Op-Ed Contributor - A Grand Bargain Over Evolution - NYTimes.com

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an underestimation of natural selection’s creative power clouds the vision not just of the intensely religious but also of the militantly atheistic
human moral sense — the sense that there is such a thing as right and wrong
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- evolutionary psychologists have developed a plausible account of the moral sense. They say it is in large part natural selection’s way of equipping people to play non-zero-sum games — games that can be win-win if the players cooperate or lose-lose if they don’t.
- But they may not have to stray quite as far from that scenario as they fear. Maybe they can accept this evolutionary account, and be strict Darwinians, yet hang on to notions of divinely imparted moral purpose.
- The first step toward this more modern theology is for them to bite the bullet and accept that God did his work remotely — that his role in the creative process ended when he unleashed the algorithm of natural selection
- Mr. Pinker has noted how the interplay of evolved intuition and the dynamics of discourse tends to forge agreement on something like the golden rule — that you should treat people as you expect to be treated.
- these speculations are compatible with the standard scientific theory of human creation
- If believers accepted them, that would, among other things, end any conflict between religion and the teaching of evolutionary biology. And theology would have done what it’s done before: evolve — adapt its conception of God to advancing knowledge and to sheer logic.
- If there is to be peace between religion and science, some of the more strident atheists will need to make their own concessions to logic.
- They could acknowledge, first of all, that any god whose creative role ends with the beginning of natural selection is, strictly speaking, logically compatible with Darwinism.
- natural selection’s intrinsic creative power — something they’ve been known to stress in other contexts — adds at least an iota of plausibility to this remotely creative god
- these atheist biologists could try to appreciate something they still seem not to get: talk of “higher purpose” is not just compatible with science, but engrained in it
- The complex functionality of an organism does demand a special kind of explanation.
- even once you accept that natural selection, not God, is the “designer” — the blind watchmaker, as Mr. Dawkins put it — there is a sense in which these organs do have purposes, purposes that serve the organism’s larger purpose of surviving and spreading its genes
- There are two morals to the story. One is that it is indeed legitimate, and not at all unscientific, to do what Paley did: inspect a physical system for evidence that it was given some purpose by some higher-order creative process. If scientifically minded theologians want to apply that inspection to the entire system of evolution, they’re free to do so.
  The second moral of the story is that, even if evolution does have a “purpose,” imparted by some higher-order creative process, that doesn’t mean there’s anything mystical or immaterial going on. And it doesn’t mean there’s a god. For all we know, there’s some “meta-natural-selection” process — playing out over eons and perhaps over multiple universes — that spawned the algorithm of natural selection, somewhat as natural selection spawned the algorithm contained in genomes.

23 Aug 09

Thoughts in a Haystack: Checking Reality

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evolution science religion dialogue

Eugenie Scott (of the NCSC) says to Ben Stein: "The most important group we work with is members of the faith community because the best kept secret in this controversy is that Catholics and mainstream Protestants are okay on evolution."

06 Jun 09

Civility and the New Atheists | The Intersection | Discover Magazine

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01 May 09

Books to Read Now § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM

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gould politics evolution

Stephen Jay Gould and the Politics of Evolution

David F. Prindle (Prometheus Books)

Genius, Marxist, sage, ideologue: the legacy of Stephen Jay Gould is nothing if not controversial. David F. Prindle, a professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin, provides an absorbing account of the biologist’s scientific work, viewed through the lens of his explicitly political writing. Aided by the intrinsic charm of Gould’s public persona, Prindle brings an otherwise dry textual analysis to life. Besides providing a deeper understanding of the concepts that propelled Gould to the forefront of his field, he puts the Kuhnian question underpinning that work into stark relief: not whether science should be isolated from the politics of the time and place in which it is created, but whether such a thing is possible.

May 26 | Buy

26 Apr 09

Thoughts in a Haystack: We the People

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science religion evolution darwin

stand up for REAL science

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22 Apr 09

Texas rabbis speak out on evolution | JTA - Jewish & Israel News

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CNS NEWS BRIEFS Mar-4-2009

Organisms' common ancestry aids medical research, says biologist

ROME (CNS) -- Charles Darwin's theory that all living organisms have descended from one common biological species is a scientific fact that has tremendously aided medical research, said an evolutionary biologist attending a Vatican-sponsored conference. A common biological ancestry is the basis upon which all scientific research is conducted, said Douglas Futuyma, a professor of ecology and evolution at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. For example, using mice, monkeys and other nonhuman species to research diseases and possible new cures gives data that is valuable and pertinent to promoting medical advancements for humans because of the similar genetic heritage of different species, he said. Futuyma was one of dozens of scientists, theologians and philosophers invited to speak at a conference in Rome March 3-7 marking the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's "Origin of Species" in which he put forth his theory on evolution. The conference, titled "Biological Evolution: Facts and Theories," was sponsored and organized by the Pontifical Council for Culture's Science, Technology and the Ontological Quest project, the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, and several of Rome's pontifical universities.

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CNS STORY: Say never again to Holocaust, Holocaust denial, Cardinal Kasper urges

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18 Apr 09

16 Apr 09

In Full Interview, John Holdren Eschews New Nukes, Hints at Space Flight Delays : ScienceInsider

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science evolution controversy policy politics interview

ScienceInsider: Staying with education, do you think that the Texas state school board's recent decision to add a skeptical view of the study of evolution and the fossil record weaken the state's science standards and weaken national efforts to improve science education?
Holdren: Well, I have not reviewed that decision carefully. But my impression from reading about it is that it was not a step forward but rather a step backward. Of course, all science needs to be skeptical. It's hard to be against skepticism. But when you get into the domain of promoting particular views about the basis for skepticism of evolution, and those views are not really valid, then I think we have a problem. I think we need to be giving our kids a modern education in biology, and the underpinning of modern biology is evolution. And countervailing views that are not really science, if they are taught at all, should be taught in some other part of the curriculum.

Teaching Evolution: Do State Science Standards Matter? | NCSE

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12 Apr 09

Science Friday Archives: Texas Schools and Evolution

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11 Apr 09

Looking Ahead to the Science Textbook Battle « Texas Freedom Network

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Jeremy Price's Library tagged evolution → View Popular

Science Musings Blog

Sympathy for Creationists « Neuroanthropology

Stephen Jay Gould, "Evolution as Fact and Theory" 1994

the preservation of favoured traces | ben fry

Op-Ed Contributor - A Grand Bargain Over Evolution - NYTimes.com

Thoughts in a Haystack: Checking Reality

Civility and the New Atheists | The Intersection | Discover Magazine

Books to Read Now § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM

Thoughts in a Haystack: We the People

stand up for REAL science

Texas rabbis speak out on evolution | JTA - Jewish & Israel News

CNS NEWS BRIEFS Mar-4-2009

CNS STORY: Say never again to Holocaust, Holocaust denial, Cardinal Kasper urges

State education panel hears evolution debate | News for Dallas, Texas | Dallas Morning News | Texas Regional News

Evolution Challenged in “Textbook” Case: As Goes Texas, So Goes the Nation | Religious Right | ReligionDispatches

McLeroy: Enlisting in the culture war

In Full Interview, John Holdren Eschews New Nukes, Hints at Space Flight Delays : ScienceInsider

Teaching Evolution: Do State Science Standards Matter? | NCSE

Science Friday Archives: Texas Schools and Evolution

Looking Ahead to the Science Textbook Battle « Texas Freedom Network

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