And Slaters Go Plop

In celebration of the World Youth Day in Sydney and of the recent “Academic Freedom” law changes in Louisiana I’d like to present Galileo Galilei’s confession for the “absurd and philosophically false” notion that “the earth is not the center of the world, nor immovable, but that it moves”:

I, Galileo Galilei, son of the late Vincenzio Galilei of Florence, aged 70 years, tried personally by this court, and kneeling before You, the most Eminent and Reverend Lord Cardinals, Inquisitors-General throughout the Christian Republic against heretical depravity, having before my eyes the Most Holy Gospels, and laying on them my own hands; I swear that I have always believed, I believe now, and with God’s help I will in future believe all which the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church doth hold, preach, and teach.

But since I, after having been admonished by this Holy Office entirely to abandon the false opinion that the Sun was the centre of the universe and immoveable, and that the Earth was not the centre of the same and that it moved, and that I was neither to hold, defend, nor teach in any manner whatever, either orally or in writing, the said false doctrine; and after having received a notification that the said doctrine is contrary to Holy Writ, I did write and cause to be printed a book in which I treat of the said already condemned doctrine, and bring forward arguments of much efficacy in its favour, without arriving at any solution: I have been judged vehemently suspected of heresy, that is, of having held and believed that the Sun is the centre of the universe and immoveable, and that the Earth is not the centre of the same, and that it does move.

Nevertheless, wishing to remove from the minds of your Eminences and all faithful Christians this vehement suspicion reasonably conceived against me, I abjure with sincere heart and unfeigned faith, I curse and detest the said errors and heresies, and generally all and every error and sect contrary to the Holy Catholic Church. And I swear that for the future I will neither say nor assert in speaking or writing such things as may bring upon me similar suspicion; and if I know any heretic, or one suspected of heresy, I will denounce him to this Holy Office, or to the Inquisitor and Ordinary of the place in which I may be.

I also swear and promise to adopt and observe entirely all the penances which have been or may be by this Holy Office imposed on me. And if I contravene any of these said promises, protests, or oaths, (which God forbid!) I submit myself to all the pains and penalties which by the Sacred Canons and other Decrees general and particular are against such offenders imposed and promulgated. So help me God and the Holy Gospels, which I touch with my own hands.

I Galileo Galilei aforesaid have abjured, sworn, and promised, and hold myself bound as above; and in token of the truth, with my own hand have subscribed the present schedule of my abjuration, and have recited it word by word. In Rome, at the Convent della Minerva, this 22nd day of June, 1633.

I, GALILEO GALILEI, have abjured as above, with my own hand.

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.

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. 

Last month I signed up with New Scientist and ended up automatically sponsoring an orangutan in Borneo. We received the pack with photos of “Roy” (who’s very cute and undoubtedly adorning the fridges of many other people) and I never thought all that much else about it.

For my last post I was scavenging around for photos of apes and came across this and thought it worthy of a post of its own:

Most of us will have heard of vitamin C. It’s in oranges and tablets that taste like oranges right? But what is it? And what’s it got to do with orangutans, the Royal Navy and rose hips?

Well, I’m glad you asked; grab a coffee and come on in…
(more…)

(From chick.com)

Last year a study was performed by Sam Harris, Sameer A. Sheth and Mark S. Cohen where they used fMRI to observe the physical responses of the brain when a person was provided with statements that were taken to be true, false or otherwise. They found that different areas of the brain showed activity depending on how the subject perceived the statement.

Here is the abstract of the original study:

Objective: The difference between believing and disbelieving a proposition is one of the most potent regulators of human behavior and emotion. When one accepts a statement as true, it becomes the basis for further thought and action; rejected as false, it remains a string of words. The purpose of this study was to differentiate belief, disbelief, and uncertainty at the level of the brain.
Methods: We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the brains of 14 adults while they judged written statements to be “true” (belief), “false” (disbelief), or “undecidable” (uncertainty). To characterize belief, disbelief, and uncertainty in a content-independent manner, we included statements from a wide range of categories: autobiographical, mathematical, geographical, religious, ethical, semantic, and factual.
Results: The states of belief, disbelief, and uncertainty differentially activated distinct regions of the prefrontal and parietal cortices, as well as the basal ganglia.
Interpretation: Belief and disbelief differ from uncertainty in that both provide information that can subsequently inform behavior and emotion. The mechanism underlying this difference appears to involve the anterior cingulate cortex and the caudate. Although many areas of higher cognition are likely involved in assessing the truth-value of linguistic propositions, the final acceptance of a statement as “true” or its rejection as “false” appears to rely on more primitive, hedonic processing in the medial prefrontal cortex and the anterior insula. Truth may be beauty, and beauty truth, in more than a metaphorical sense, and false propositions may actually disgust us.

Oliver Sacks, in a review of the study said,

Harris et al. note that reactions of assent are significantly prompter than those of dissent or uncertainty. This they take to support “Spinoza’s conjecture that the mere comprehension of a statement entails the tacit acceptance of its being true,” an almost reflexive, if provisional, assent, to be followed by a more deliberate weighing and assessment. Human beings, in other words, are wired to “accept appearances as reality until they prove otherwise.” This seems to us to ring true.
The most provocative suggestion made by Harris et al. relates to their finding that all reactions of assent or acceptance (or belief, if one prefers) are neurophysiologically identical, whether propositional judgments are made in the highly charged realm of ethical or religious issues or the seemingly neutral realm of arithmetical statements. If such results can be duplicated, Harris et al. will have made a fascinating discovery.

The results of this original study have led to questions of whether religious faith ‘looks’ different than belief at the level of the brain and Harris is preparing for another study that will also use fMRI to observe the physical aspects of belief and faith.

In an attempt to find questions that will best suit the upcomming study Harris has set up four surveys and is looking for people who have opinions either way regarding Christianity to participate. If you are a Christian or an atheist/agnostic and you want to help them identify the most appropriate stimuli for the study you can complete one or more of the following surveys:

• Belief Survey A
• Belief Survey B
• Belief Survey C
• Belief Survey D

Each one has around 100 questions. I did C and it didn’t take too long.

A couple of weeks ago I purchased Carl Sagan’s 1979 TV series, Cosmos on DVD. Actually, it aired in 1980 but was filmed in 1979 and 1979 sounds way cooler than 1980.

It totally rocks!

Sure, he’s wearing beige and, sure, there has been progress in astronomy since the series was produced but I found myself learning plenty of new stuff with every episode. (Did you know that Eratosthenes calculated the earth’s circumference to within a margin of 5-10% back in 240BCE?).

What I love about the scientific method is that when done properly you present the facts as best you know them but remain open to future discoveries and you also disclose known weaknesses. In this series at the end of many of the episodes Sagan appears (looking greyer) with a “10 years later update” and very little of the original content needed revision. The only bit that stands out is that in one of the episodes he presents some of the experiments showing the creation of organic molecules in the laboratory and 10 years later added that they now believe it’s likely that the organic molecules may have formed in the icy bodies of comets.

Also, this was produced at a very uncertain time when the threat of all-out nuclear war seemed quite possible and many of his comments about the future of the human race are bracketed with “if we don’t destroy ourselves first”.

This series is a brilliant way to get an excellent perspective on our place in history and in the universe. It’s factual, balanced and remarkably well-produced. They even managed to avoid the temptation to use the snazzy synthesised music of the era (or is that ‘error’?) and instead opted for tasteful classical music.

Sagan had a very broad understanding of our universe and had a knack for presenting it in an extremely digestible way. With that understanding came an enthusiasm that remains contagious even after his death.

If you come across this series in your video store or for sale in a shop I’d encourage you to do yourself a favour and pick it up. And if you know me (this includes Dale, Ken, Frank and Jack), give me a yell if you want to borrow it and I’ll get it to you.

Recently Michael Shermer received an angry letter from a Jew who’d seen the film Expelled. He discussed the issue with Richard Dawkins and they decided to write an open letter in the hopes of setting the record straight for anyone else misled by Ben Stein and the deceptive film makers. Read on.

Dear Mr J

Michael Shermer forwarded me a letter from you which suggests that you have unfortunately been taken in by Ben Stein’s mendacious and/or ignorant suggestion that Darwin is somehow to blame for Hitler. I hope you will not mind if I write to you and try to undo this grievous error.

1. I deeply sympathize with you for the loss of your relatives in the Holocaust. Nevertheless, I don’t think that could really be said to justify the tone of your letter to Michael Shermer, who is a kind and decent man, as even you seemed to concede in your second letter to him, and the very antithesis of a Nazi sympathizer.

Now I truly understand who you atheists and darwinists really are! You people believe that it was okay for my great-grandparents to die in the Holocaust! How disgusting. Your past article about the Holocaust was just window dressing. We Jews will fight to keep people like you out of the United States!

Just look at those words of yours. Probably you regret them by now. I certainly hope so, but I’ll continue to write my letter to you, on the assumption that you still feel at least a part of what you wrote.

(more…)

I have a theory based on a number of observations and I want to give it a name. My observations are that there are things that lifeforms do to their environments that leave traces that wouldn’t otherwise naturally occur. I propose that we might be able to detect similar effects on other planets and deduce that there are lifeforms at work and that we might, if we are careful and/or very lucky, find evidence of previously unknown lifeforms here on our planet.

I’ve come up with a name for this theory. I’m calling it Intelligent Design.

We can define what ID is and what it isn’t. We can come up with ways we can test hypotheses. If we find evidence that points towards (or away from) an example of intelligent design we can publish papers in reputable scientific journals. When we find gaps in scientific knowledge in other areas we won’t even think about using this as an argument for Intelligent Design – we’ll have to come up with evidence that points toward our theories and not just away from others.

Unfortunately there are some people who are currently misusing the label of Intelligent Design and they will have to go back to using the old term for their beliefs: creationism. If they have some useful contributions to make they’re more than welcome to join in as they are for any of the other sciences but, just like in the other sciences, they are going to have to leave their non-science behind at the door.

Right, now that that’s dealt with. Onwards and upwards!

[edit: Over at NeuroLogicia, Dr Steven Novella clearly hasn't been informed of the recent changes I've made to the term 'Intelligent Design' but he provides a fairly lucid account of why the proponents of the old term weren't being particularly scientific in their approach that's well worth a read.]