And Slaters Go Plop

On Saturday I trundled along to Academy Cinemas in Auckland to watch a documentary on the life and achievements of Allan Wilson, a NZ-born molecular evolutionary biologist.

Allan Wilson was born in Ngaruawahia in 1934 and died of leukaemia in 1991. He spent most of his life in the United States where he formed the Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology and Evolution at Berkeley.

So what was so special about Allan Wilson that a documentary was made about him?

At the time that Wilson was studying, the theory of evolution didn’t really have much objective data to go on regarding the differences between species. People could look at the size and shape of a bone and compare it with other species (across the outside of the tree of life) and they could see back down inside the branches by digging up old bones to see if modern species might share common ancestors. Going by morphology (i.e. how things look) is a fairly inexact science and while it might point you in the right direction it would have been nicer to be able to use numbers to be able to make mathematical and statistical predictions.

We take DNA for granted these days but in Wilson’s time very little was known about these building blocks of life.

Wilson straddled a path between zoology and molecular chemistry which were both tackling the problem of evolution from quite different angles. He caught a bit of flak for his attempts to marry the two but he drew the most fire from creationists - surprise, surprise - when some of his later experiments began to show the true, measurable relationships between humans and other species, namely the great apes.

He was heavily involved in the concept of the molecular clock, which is a way of finding how closely related one species is to another at the genetic level without necessarily being able to read the genes themselves. You may have also heard of the Mitochondrial Eve hypothesis - that’s his too.

Since his death both the human and the chimpanzee genomes have been read and have further bolstered the conclusions he was able to make by merging two seemingly disparate sciences. And also, sadly, since his death advances in diagnosis as well as treatment of leukaemia have been made due to the methods he and his team pioneered.

The film-maker went so far as to say that in the years to come Allan Wilson’s name will become synonymous with some of the other pioneers in the theory of evolution by natural selection. And everyone seems to agree; just about everything that present-day evolutionary biologists are working on stems from the advancements of this one bloke from Ngaruawahia.

Please note: Spoilers in the comments section.

Brian Dunning of Skeptoid and the upcoming The Skeptologists has just released a short film that serves as an introduction to critical thinking. He’s made it freely available in a number of formats including DVD. If you are a teacher looking to fill in an hour or two at the same time as giving your students a good grounding in critical thinking this might be just the ticket.

Today I was asked by Rhett, a Christian pastor-to-be,

“Where would you say your concern for human suffering comes from in that you are an Atheist evolutionists. Forgive me for simplifying things terribly here, but do you see the moral compass as having evolved? And isn’t evolution all about survival of the fittest, might is right etc? How does concern for others suffering coming into you worldview?”

Evolution is a scientific observation about how life works. How living organisms change through the generations and the mechanisms that cause those changes. Many people see evolution as anti-Christian because the evidence claimed by the theory of evolution by natural selection (the proper name for the theory) flies in the face of a literal interpretation of the creation story in the Bible. Evolution is only anti-Christian if you define Christianity in such a way that it relies on an explanation that contradicts the scientific findings - in the same way that the theory of gravity would be anti-Christian if one of the core tenets of Christianity was that the spirit of God is what keeps planets in their orbits.

Many Christians have no issue with evolution and any controversy about the fundamentals of the theory is within Christianity itself and stems from a multitude of interpretations of scripture.

Atheists are people who don’t believe that there is a God. I’m the kind of atheist who thinks that the question “Is there a God” is one that is as unprovable as the question “Is there an invisible pink unicorn” because most people’s definition of a God seems to entail the same, non-observable or non-testable properties. On the question of whether it’s possible to prove God exists or not I’m an agnostic but my conclusion after looking at the arguments and the evidence is that there is none.

This is not necessarily what an atheist wants however. I would personally like to carry on after I die and the thought of bad people getting their comeuppance in the end is pretty appealing.

The link between atheists and evolution only really exists because there really is no other plausible explanation for how life develops. Evolutionists are not necessarily atheists but atheists are unlikely to be anything but evolutionists because of the lack of rival explanations that don’t include a god.

The theory of evolution by natural selection makes the observation that the offspring that are best suited for the environment they find themselves in are going to be more likely to have more offspring themselves and this will cause more of the population of their species to have similar traits because children inherit many of their parent’s genes.

This is sometimes termed as “survival of the fittest” which some people take to mean that “only the bullies win”. But to be successful as a species it’s not necessarily the strongest and most aggressive that do well. Being small and agile is a popular survival mechanism. So is being good in the dark or being camouflaged or being able to fly or being able to eat lots of grass or plankton and so on and so on. Another trait that has proved extremely useful is the ability to cooperate with other members of your species and this leads me to the core of Rhett’s question; Morality.

Altruism is defined as looking after the interests of others over your own. Reciprocal altruism is looking after the interests of others with the expectation that they will repay the favour. Reciprocal altruism has always been easily explained in evolution; if a species develops a trait that will allow individuals to help each other out not only will those members of the species do better than their siblings but the species as a whole is likely to do well as a result. At a simple level genuine altruism is also easily explained because a species that develops the tendency to be willing to die to help the survival of your direct offspring or of members of your family group is going to be more likely to pass that tendency on. Your children who survive because of your altruism will more than likely carry the same genes and close relatives have a higher chance of carrying that same trait. For an excellent discussion of this topic read Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene.

So, self-sacrificing behaviour is very much a part of evolution and easily explained in even relatively simple creatures. Where it gets really complicated is with the likes of humans who not only inherit genes but have the hardware (brains and language) to spread memes (ideas).

We get much of our morality from our culture. Memes are spread around from person to person and from culture to culture. Some memes are bad, some good, others neutral - just like genes. Some people think our morality comes from God and struggle to understand how someone who doesn’t believe in a God (or, specifically, their God) can have morals. But morals are really just memes for how to best live in a society. Some morals are built into us at the level of our genes (a parent who will fight to the death for their child) and some are developed by trial and error or even by reason and passed from person to person as a meme (washing your hands after defecating - a reasonably recent meme). Often morals are encapsulated in the form of a religion and passed from person to person that way, perhaps because religion has been an excellent medium for spreading memes with its use of repetition, documentation, authority and so on.

“Do you see the moral compass as having evolved?”
Yes, absolutely. Most of the core behaviours of morality can be explained by way of genes (especially if we can observe them in species that don’t spread memes - i.e. ‘learn’) and the rest in humans have been able to be propagated due to the fact that we have the hardware which allows us to be really good at spreading memes. And even memetic morality evolves, just not by the same mechanism as genes. In our current society it’s immoral to prohibit a woman from voting but our ancestors thought it perfectly reasonable.

“Isn’t evolution all about survival of the fittest, might is right etc?”
Nope. It’s all about how well suited you are to the environment you find yourself in. Also, please notice the difference between observing the process and mechanisms of evolution and believing in evolution (as if it were some kind of ideology).

“How does concern for others suffering coming into you worldview?”
Like most people I inherited my morality from my family and from the culture I was brought up in. I’ve also read a lot of literature on different people’s opinions on how to best live as a society since then.

Morality is a game we all play and it’s a function of society. Pretending that morality comes to us by divine revelation is a form of exclusivism and I would have thought that in this day and age we’d be smart enough to see beyond that. 

“I have considered the impudent accusations of Mr Dawkins with exasperation at his lack of serious scholarship. He has apparently not read the detailed discourses of Count Roderigo of Seville on the exquisite and exotic leathers of the Emperor’s boots, nor does he give a moment’s consideration to Bellini’s masterwork, On the Luminescence of the Emperor’s Feathered Hat. We have entire schools dedicated to writing learned treatises on the beauty of the Emperor’s raiment, and every major newspaper runs a section dedicated to imperial fashion; Dawkins cavalierly dismisses them all. He even laughs at the highly popular and most persuasive arguments of his fellow countryman, Lord D. T. Mawkscribbler, who famously pointed out that the Emperor would not wear common cotton, nor uncomfortable polyester, but must, I say must, wear undergarments of the finest silk. Dawkins arrogantly ignores all these deep philosophical ponderings to crudely accuse the Emperor of nudity.”

(Link)

[Update]
And prompted by a commenter’s mention of Dawkins’ “hysterical arguments” here is a recent lecture of his on the topic of religion. A comment which (if you watch the video) amply demonstrates Blake’s Law in action. Blake’s Law follows The Courtier’s Reply in the article linked to above. A coincidence or delicious irony?

[Update #2]

The Cosmological Argument has a number of variations but I will only deal with the one employed by William Lane Craig in his recent debate with Bill Cooke.

Here is a transcript of Craig’s version of the cosmological argument:

So, why does the universe exist instead of just nothing? Where did it come from? There must have been a cause which brought the universe into being.

We can summarise our argument thus far as follows:

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause
2. The universe began to exist
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause

Now, as the cause of time and space, this being must be an uncaused, timeless, spaceless, immaterial being of unfathomable power.

Moreover, it must be personal as well.

Why? Because this cause must be beyond space and time therefore it cannot be physical or material.

Now there are only two kinds of things that fit that description; either abstract objects like numbers or else an intelligent, un-bodied mind.

But abstract objects can’t cause anything and therefore it follows that the cause of the universe is a transcendent, personal mind.

The big bang is based on the observation that we can see that everything in the observable universe is moving away from everything else which would lead to the conclusion that, if you wound the clock back, things would inevitably be closer together. A lot closer together. With this hypothesis in mind many different disciplines in science attempted to see if the predictions formed by this hypothesis would turn out to be true. And so far they’ve found overwhelming evidence to support the claim.

Clever people in clever coats are able to model the initial conditions of the universe and show that specific transformations probably happened at specific times and that, to the best of our knowledge, the universe as we know it is 13.73 billion years old give or take about 130 million years. So far no one has found a way to gather any information beyond this point and so questions as to what happened before then (which might actually be a non-valid question as we established in the post on infinity) are speculative at best. No one knows.

Now let’s address Craig’s main arguments.

He uses a simple logical proposition-proposition-conclusion to show that the universe must be caused and then, on that conclusion, goes on to show that this cause-er must be God.

Logical conclusions work when the preceding propositions are sound. And it’s the propositions that cause Craig’s argument to fall short. Without sound propositions your conclusion - no matter how appealing it sounds - has no foundation.

We know that the universe does some very strange things at the scale of the very big and the very small. Quantum physics has taught us that things can be in two places at once. No one understands why or how but we can observe it time and time again. I can imagine a similar argument to Craig’s one here where one of the propositions is “1. Nothing can be in two places at once.”. This would have been a perfectly common sense argument only a few years ago but now we have to take a step back and concede that not everything in the universe conforms to the everyday properties we observe as humans.

We live in a “middle earth” where we have a fairly good grasp on how things interact with each other at our level but we lack the ability to make head or tail of what happens outside of the zone we’ve evolved to understand. At the moment, at least.

In short, the answer to Craig’s first two propositions is “we don’t know” and that appealing to common sense at the same time as positing a supernatural and outside-of-space-and-time cause seems to be a bit of a double-standard. If God is allowed to be an uncaused-cause then why not just move the peg back one step and posit that the universe is allowed to be an uncaused-cause? At least we can observe that the universe exists.

As discussed in my previous post there are lots of interesting explanations for how the universe may have possibly come about and for the properties of time (and therefore causality) but no one knows yet what really happened. And it’s quite possible that we may never know.

The rest of Craig’s arguments shouldn’t need to be discussed because his propositions have already been shown to have fallen short of establishing a need for a God as an ultimate cause but they’re quite funny so I’ll briefly cover them.

He then goes on to make some crazy leaps and hops to try to give this ultimate cause a God-like personality. “Moreover, it must be personal as well”, what? I can see what he’s trying to do here by tying forcing a false dichotomy on us of having to choose between numbers or a mind but he’s either woefully behind on his understanding of developments in neuroscience or he’s being deliberately disingenuous.

One of the last bastions of dualism is in the question of the mind. And this is kind of understandable because it certainly feels like “we” are somehow disembodied. That our essence is somehow more than can be cooked up using meat and chemicals alone. But the more we learn about the workings of the mind in humans and observe traits we thought were unique to humans in other species the more it’s looking like dualism is to neuroscience as Thor is to thunder; a shortcut and an economical way of explaining things but not to be taken seriously.

Even assuming that there must be a cause and forcing us to choose between numbers or a mind as the cause I’d have to contend that there is more compelling arguments currently for numbers (i.e. mathematics) as the driving force behind the universe than of a disembodied mind.

Craig’s goal was to show that the concept of God is not a delusion and the cosmological argument doesn’t add any weight (either for or against) here. If you are already convinced that God exists you’ll like the grand-sounding scientific words and the nice 1, 2, 3 steps but you’ll be no nearer the truth with this argument. It’s built on false propositions, gives you false choices, is inconsistent in its appeals for common sense and ignores just about all recent scientific discoveries.

If God doesn’t exist then belief in God is a delusion and if God exists then belief is not a delusion. Craig’s argument adds nothing to this question and if Cooke had bothered to engage at all neither would his. I suspect that the answer to the moot is the same as “Is the invisible pink unicorn a delusion?”. You can’t prove it either way and it’s one of a billion possible but meaningless questions.

God seems to exist only where evidence is hard to find. When a naturalistic explanation is found the next generation of believers will take the science on board and scoff at their ignorant predecessors for believing that God was explanation for lightening, conception, creation (and, now, evolution) or our minds. Perhaps one day God will need to be moved on from his current position at the start of the universe but I think it’s a pretty safe place for him in the meantime. If you are happy to live with that then good for you but stop just making stuff up and pretending it’s real. I’ll await more evidence.

(For another take on Craig’s arguments take a look at Ian’s blog).

While I’m waiting for the YouTube videos to be posted so I can get my facts straight with regard to the debate between William Lane Craig and Bill Cooke I thought I might address the issue of the concept of infinity.

Craig introduced the cosmological argument with the notion of infinity and the fact that atheists will argue that the universe is infinite. I’d just like to put my atheistic hand up at this point and say that I’d tend to go with the ‘finite universe’ personally at this stage. I know people (both theists and atheists) who fall on either side of this argument and so this assertion was a little disappointing. This was posited right before he moved on to the Big Bang so perhaps it was an attempt to portray atheists as non-scientific.

The fact of the matter is no one knows whether the universe is infinite or not. Get used to this phrase because I’m probably going to use it a few times over the next few entries. There is stuff we don’t know; the more we find out the more we realise just how little we really do know. Making up explanations may feel satisfying but it’s not going to get us any closer to the truth.

Back to the issue of infinity. Craig argues that the concept of infinity is an absurdity in terms of logic because, for example, if you minus four from infinity you are left with infinity. And I tend to agree in principle. But there is a problem with how he’s come to this conclusion because he’s used a finite number in relation to an infinite one.

Because whenever we talk about infinity we refer to it in finite units (like time or numbers or oranges) we think that because we can just add or subtract one more as we might do in the real world that it logically follows that we could continue to do so if we had unlimited time, numbers or oranges. Which might be a bit of a circular reasoning because we’re giving ourselves infinity to prove that infinity exists.

Another angle is that if infinity in relation to time is defined as “for the full extent of time” and time can in fact be created then it would also be reasonable to define infinity as from the creation of time to its destruction.

Einstein came up with some theories where mass is equivalent to energy (and vice-versa… I can cope with this one) and - head-hurtingly - where time is equivalent to space (and vice-versa… aaaarrgh! What?!). I don’t even know what to make of this so if anyone has a succinct way of explaining the concept of “spacetime” please feel free to enlighten me.

Hawking has a nice little analogy about the limits of a dimension which I’ll see if I can completely mungle:

If a two-dimensional critter were sliding around on the face of our planet and were asked what’s south of New Zealand it would list Stewart Island (technically incorrect but we’ll leave it be because it’s just a two-dimensional critter) and then Antarctica and, finally, the South Pole. We can almost sense its outrage and confusion when we tell them they can’t go any further south than the South Pole but the fact is, within these dimensions there really is no “South of the South Pole”. Now shift the question up a dimension or two. When I ask you what happened before World War 2 you will list a number of events that occur back in time along the time axis (i.e. just like the “south” axis) until you get to a point where time starts or comes into being. Yes, we are outraged and confused when we are told that there is no such thing as “before time” because everywhere we look we can see a before, a cause. But the truth is that you can’t continue to use the word “before” once we’ve hit this point.

I don’t know if analogies that include the concept of dimensions are any more valid than the keep-adding-an-orange ones. Perhaps our concept of “dimensions” are just another way our minds have to package information about the real world in an attempt to comprehend it.

I don’t know if time unfolded out of the beginning of the universe but as incomprehensible as it seems to me I can see from the example of my two-dimensional critter that my incomprehension doesn’t necessarily make the idea wrong.

For me, the concept of infinity is either:

• A trick of the mind that doesn’t ever map against reality. Perhaps our mind can conceive of infinity because our mind is self-referencing.
• A way of describing the extent of a dimension (like “south” or “before”) that can actually have a start and an end.
• That the universe is, in fact, infinite and that my mind is incapable of comprehending it beyond describing it in terms of finite units.
• Something else altogether… [insert your reasoning here].

For the sake of argument I’m more than happy to go with Craig on this one; the universe is finite. (Until I see further evidence - always a good disclaimer to add to questions of this nature).

Last night Dale and I went to see a debate between Bill Cooke and William Lane Craig. The moot was “Is God A Delusion?”.

Craig (arguing the negative) was given the first 20 minutes in which to make his case. Cooke followed but didn’t engage any of the points that Craig raised and, while entertaining at times, didn’t really do a very good job of it from a debating sense. I’m no expert mind you. But without challenging Craig’s assertions he allowed them to stand and I felt that Craig’s performance as a debater far exceeded that of Bill Cooke’s.

Over the last few years I’ve become reasonably familiar with the arguments Craig used in his opening and have decided to give them the respect they deserve by going over them one by one in the next few entries. Below is a summary of Craig’s arguments:

1. The Cosmological Argument
   This is the argument that everything that begins must have a cause. The universe began so it must have a cause and that cause is God.
2. The Teleological Argument
   This is the argument that God must exist because the universe is fine-tuned for the existence of life. A slight change in some of the constants in nature would mean that the universe wouldn’t sustain life.
3. The Argument from Moral Objectivity
   Here it is argued that objective morals are impossible without the existence of a God. If a moral can be shown to be objective rather than subjective then the best explanation is that of a moral law-giver outside of nature. We all agree that raping children is objectively wrong => God exists.
4. The teachings and miracles of Jesus Christ The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ
5. God can be immediately known and experienced
   These last two are the weaker of his arguments but they go towards strengthening the first three arguments which, if proven, would suggest that the God of Christianity is in fact the God of the universe.

I hope I’ve done justice to Craig’s five main points by way of overview. I’ll go into each one in more detail in future entries and introduce Craig’s propositions and conclusions at the same time. In the meantime you can see a good overview of these and some of the other arguments for the existence of God over on that fount of all infallible knowledge; Wikipedia.

(Also, I’m only going by memory here and waiting for the videos to become available on YouTube so I can properly represent William Lane Craig’s arguments before going into them further. If I’ve remembered incorrectly please feel free to chime in.)

Now THAT has style written all over it. I’m going to have to buy lots for my family and friends. And a wardrobe full of them for when I meet with clients. Get yours now at Amazon!