Dawkins’ series The Genius of Charles Darwin is currently showing on the History Channel on Sky here in NZ. Omitted from the series was this insightful interview with Father George Coyne on the subjects of evolution, cosmology, science and faith.
I’ve heard that snails and slugs will avoid broken egg shells and therefore that they (the egg shells) can be used to protect seedlings. I tested this claim by putting a snail out on the dirt and in the sun surrounded by broken egg shells. As you can see by the image the shells didn’t work.
I’ll run this test again once I get more shells with which I’ll make a more robust barrier.
(I wonder if snails would be similarly deterred by a ring of crushed snail shells?)
Nihil est agricultura melius nihil uberius
Nihil dulcius nihil homine libero dignius.“Nothing is better, more fruitful, more pleasant
and more worthy of a free man, than agriculture”.- Cicero (106BCE-43BCE)
(Today I completed my new vegetable garden. I’m exhausted but happier and more fulfilled than I’ve been in a long time.)
If you have a moment and you feel so inclined, please take a minute to fill out a survey on the public understanding of evolution which is being run by Michael Shermer & co. I’m not sure what data they hope to garner or for what purpose but they provide you with the opportunity to be emailed the results once they’ve finished.
In recent conversations with theists I’ve come across a common objection to the possibility of free will if there be no supernatural dimension to the world in which we live. The argument goes along the lines of:
P1. Materialism assumes we consist of only matter (i.e. atoms)
P2. Atoms don’t have free will
C. We experience free will so there must be more to this world than just matter
an alternative is:
P1. Materialism assumes we consist of only matter (i.e. atoms)
P2. Atoms don’t have free will
C. Under the materialistic worldview we can’t ultimately have free will
I’ve heard this argument couched in numerous ways but the essence of it is that if our smallest bits don’t have free will then we can’t explain the freedom we appear to experience.
I can think of two answers to this.
The first (which I’m not personally convinced of) would be that we only have the appearance of freedom and that, as participants, we are able to fool ourselves into thinking we have control over what we do. My analogy for this is where the desperate dog-owner repeatedly tries to tell their disobedient dog to sit and when they finally notice that the dog is about to sit of its own accord, quickly say “sit!” in order to give themselves the feeling of being in control. This would make what we experience as free will a kind of a self-deception and, like I said, I’m not convinced this is the case but it is a valid answer to the first problem pointed out above. (Although, I must say that I think there is some truth to this at times, especially when it comes to self-justification).
The second, and far more powerful, option is to look at the analogy of music. Take a CD of your favourite musician and if we look closely we’ll see that the ‘music’ is made of only on or off states. 0s or 1s. When we play a CD we experience music but when we look at what this music (on a CD) is made of we can see that it’s just binary bits. And as we all know, a 0 or a 1 is not in itself music. This second argument would suggest that both free will and music are the emergent properties of their component parts doing something.
In the second set of arguments above I italicised the word ultimately. My analogy of music also helps to address the logical fallacy of the usage of this word. I don’t believe there is such a thing as ultimate music. Nor do I believe there is such a thing as ultimate free will. I believe that both are subjectively experienced and are results of non-free and non-musical atoms and bits doing something. We experience free will just as we experience music.
The use of the word ‘ultimate’ in this argument tries to imply that there are only two kinds of free will; ultimate free will or no free will at all. This is a false dichotomy. I would argue that there is at least another type of free will and that is the kind that is experienced subjectively and is only explainable at the macro level of bundles of atoms that are doing something. A world within a world. And using the music analogy once again, you can see how silly this argument is when I say “There is only either ultimate music or no music at all”.
“Free will” is a word that we’ve made up to describe an aspect we observe of the world around us. We have a tendency to want our words and categories to clearly demarcate things we observe into black/white, on/off, etc. But sometimes the words we invent fail at a point when the thing we are describing is a gradient, like ‘red’ (when does red become orange?) or ‘alive’ (are viruses alive? is fire alive?) or ‘music’ (is a ‘chirp’ music? what about a vibration on a violin string? or wind in the trees?). Free will is one of these words. We can observe a gradient of organisms with various abilities to do things. Free will is a gradual and emergent process and to treat it as a binary state is to become a slave to a simplistic understanding of the world and to imperfect vocabulary.
Yesterday, after eight weeks of training, I ran in the Auckland Half Marathon. When I started I wasn’t able to run for more than 20 minutes without having to stop. Within just six weeks I had already managed to complete a full training run of the 21km required for the half marathon non-stop and without having to be taken away in an ambulance.
I have to say it’s quite liberating getting over that initial hurdle of becoming fit enough to run continuously (within limits!) and was surprised at how little time it took.
The secret to my couch potato success was to invest in good running gear and to follow a training regime (note: this book is by the same author and mine seemed to cater for a more diverse number of styles) specifically designed for someone of my fitness to get up to speed.
The regime essentially consists of running three days a week with fairly easy runs on Tuesday and Thursday followed by a more challenging one on Sunday. It starts you off easy and gradually builds you up in waves in order to give your muscles time to repair in between runs.
So, if you are a bit of a couch potato like me, I fully recommend signing up for an event like this as it gives you the motivation to get off your arse on a regular basis. And get yourself a good training regime as well as some good running gear! It is well worth it.
[edit: also, if you are a chap, I recommend tape on your nipples for runs over one hour.]
These are fairly old but I only just stumbled upon them. Some good insights from David Attenborough, Richard Dawkins, Richard Leakey and Jane Goodall on the environment and the future of our planet.
I’ve observed conversations between theists and non-theists in which the theist will state that the non-theist doesn’t have a leg to stand on with regard to morality because if you don’t believe in a God then you can have no objective basis for your morals and so no moral belief can be better or worse than the other.
And I’ve watch many non-theists scramble to try to show that they do, in fact, have a basis for objective morality but I have to admit that I get a bit lost in the arguments. It’s likely that I don’t understand the finer details of what people mean by “objective” and “subjective”.
Every time I see such a conversation I think to myself that I’m quite happy to believe that there is no great measuring rod in the sky and that all such morals are evolved and subjective. To me, it seems to make sense that stealing can be both beneficial and detrimental depending on the circumstances (i.e. subjective) and that child rape is 99.9999999% detrimental (I always allow for those make-believe scenarios where you have to choose between, say, child rape and killing 1,000,000 people with a lawnmower).
I also think that when people use “wrong” and “right” as opposed to “detrimental” and “beneficial” it actually creates a circular argument for a kind of objective morality because the word “wrong” can be used in both an objective and a subjective sense (i.e. I hit the wrong key on the keyboard vs. abortion is wrong) whereas the word “detrimental” demands that you at least define a goal or framework that is being worked against.
So, theists and non-theists, is there really such a thing as objective morality? And what’s your definition of it? I’ve got no answers, only questions.
Yesterday an ordinary husband and father of three was leaving work for the day in downtown Auckland. As he headed home to his family he spotted a woman being punched by a man and did what any ordinary person would (and should) do; he intervened. The man attacking the woman then turned on him and stabbed him to death.
I’ve never met Austin Hemmings before and I can’t possibly begin to imagine what his friends and family are going through right now. But I count it as a great honour to live in the same city, country and world he lived in.
There are people who act to our detriment and there are those, like Austin, who, just by being themselves — by being ordinary — benefit us all. There will likely always be people who act to our detriment and there will likely always be terrible things that happen to good people for absolutely no reason at all but there will also likely be many good, ordinary people who we don’t notice on a day-to-day basis but who hold the very fabric of our society together by just being themselves.
So, Austin, I’m sorry I wasn’t able to recognise and appreciate you while you were living but I will try to make up for that by appreciating more the people who continue to go unnoticed everyday who carry on the valueable job of acting to the benefit of society. You are honoured. And you are extraordinary.
I’ve just become aware of some research being done at Auckland University in the area of tool use in New Caledonian crows. I know next to nothing about animal cognition but the fact that there is a non-primate species that makes use of tools raises a lot of interesting questions. A while ago the ability to make use of tools was touted as one of the defining characteristics of humans but it wasn’t long before other primates were found to be able to use tools. What makes these particular crows interesting is 1. the fact that they are so far removed from primates, 2. they don’t have the “kind of brain” you’d expect for tool use (which means our expectations are wrong), and 3. they are (as far as anyone knows) alone among not only crows but all other birds in their ability to use tools in this way.
Russell Gray on the New Caledonian crows:
Russell Gray on metatool use:
Alex Taylor on the trap-tube experiment:
