Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Attempts to formulate a naturalistic epistemology are often anchored by the notion that undirected evolution would lead us naturally to have accurate beliefs. Some people have doubted this approach works, but let's say it does. It basically says that we perceive, say, tigers and lions as a threat to us because, well, they are a threat to us, and heights make us cautious because falling from a great height will kill us, we think sex is good because sex propagates the species, we seek out food because we really do need food, and so on. Isn't it odd, then, that went evidence turns up for an evolutionary basis for religion, this approach is thrown right out the window, and the ubiquity of religion in human societies is explained by everything other than evolution leading us to accurately perceive a spiritual dimension to life? It is almost as though these researchers had had their minds made up about religion in advance!

Just to be clear, when I write a post like this one , I am in no way disparaging actual attempts to think about the impact our biological history has had on our present-day state. For instance, Thorstein Veblen speculated that perhaps we find the grounds of an English nanor house, with its scattered trees set in huge swathes of grass, so appealing because it evokes our past as a savanna ape. Now, that was sheer speculation on his part, and a lot of work would need to be done to confirm his guess, but it is at least a serious hypothesis that could be confirmed or not. Unlike, say, invoking "poor monkey brains" whenever someone has trouble sorting out a sentence.

Once again, someone at Language Log pulls out the above phrase to explain some logic problem that people have a hard time solving. I draw your attention to it because it is an important phenomena, a sign that one is in the presence of the ideology of evolutionism *: not a mere belief that Darwin and his successors have a pretty darned good theory in hand (a proposition with which I heartily concur), but the belief that the theory is a talisman, a guide to explaining all of human experience. Because really, what does invoking "monkey brains" have to do with explaining why humans have a hard time with multiple negations? Do rhesus monkeys and howlers have a similarly hard time, while turtles and sloths handle multiple negations quite nicely? Of course not: the more significant empirical fact** here is that not one of these animals even has the notion of a negation, and that that is pretty darned good evidence that we humans possess something somewhat different than t...

Here : “It is a great irony but evolution appears to discriminate against atheists and favour those with religious beliefs,” said Michael Blume, a researcher at the University of Jena in Germany who carried out the study. “Most societies or communities that have espoused atheistic beliefs have not survived more than a century.”

E. O. Wilson once said of Marxism, "Nice theory, wrong species," by which he was indicating that communism was appropriate for ants, but not for humans. But ants, like human actors, face optimization problems, so how do these get solved, in a complex society, without market prices? Of course, we do not expect ants to have to deal with changing tastes or technological innovations, which human actors must. But they still face environmental changes: a rainy or dry season, an anteater moving into the neighborhood, an invading foreign colony, and so on. It occurs to me that for ants evolutionary pressures, over millions of years, have done what we expect markets to do for humans: adjusted the actions of the agents in the system to, if not optimize their efficacy, at least make it usually adequate to the challenges the agents face. (And remember, there are a lot more ants than humans on the planet , so they have done OK.) This suggests an interesting question: to what exten...

Or, at least, not so wrong.* It seems offspring can indeed inherit acquired traits : for instance, male mice were taught to associate the smell of orange blossoms with an electric shock. Their sperm was then used to fertilize in vitro , and it was found that even their grandchildren were startled upon smelling orange blossoms. And there are many, many other cases were it has been shown that this type of inheritance is real. Which is why I get a kick out of people who learned their biology decades ago, and sternly lecture people on the Internet as to how acquired traits cannot be inherited. * There is some debate about whether this sort of inheritance is really "Lamarckian."

"'Pilgrimage' implies piety and reverence. I have not had occasion here to mention my impatience with traditional piety, and my disdain for reverence where the object is supernatural... It is not because I wish to limit or circumscribe; not because I want to reduce or downgrade the true reverence with which we are moved to celebrate the universe, once we understand it properly... My objection to supernatural beliefs is precisely that they miserably fail to do justice to the grandeur of the real world." -- Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale , pp. 613-614 So, the "real world," not any theory about the real world, is, for Dawkins, the object of a "pilgrimage," worthy of "piety" and "reverence," and praised for its "grandeur." But I predict this attitude would immediately disappear if someone notes how grand this indicates its source must be: "What?! Can't you see how wasteful evolution is?! Red in tooth...

Imagine some guy describing how beautiful his sister is... Until he notices some fellow whom he does not want interested in his sister listening in. Suddenly the description changes completely: now she is just hideous. We see something similar from the new atheists talking about evolution, don't we? It is a beautiful process, one that should fill us with mystery and awe, that contains all the wonder one should ever need out of life. Unless one says, "Yes, and that is just the sort of marvelous process by which God brought about human beings." Then suddenly, evolution is described as mindless, and wasteful, and ugly, and obvious disproof of the existence of a supreme being.

Nothing, of course,  but some people seem desperately to want to believe otherwise. The theory of evolution is a fine scientific theory. It is a very good explanation of the historical process by which the current diversity of species came to exist on the earth. But, of course, as a scientific theory, it addresses the phenomenal level of existence; it has nothing to say about the substantial level whatsoever. What Bob rightly objects to in this post  is people who want to take a valid scientific theory and extend it to realms in which it has no applicability, such as metaphysics or ethics. It is as though, upon seeing a wonderful new plumbing fixture, someone concludes, "You see! I told you homosexuality is a sin!" Or encountering an innovative lightbulb, they exclaim, "It is as I thought: the universe is an indifferent place, devoid of meaning." A particularly startling claim was made in the comment thread to Bob's post, and found some backing there. ...

Typically, when someone is pointing to "the evolutionary roots of religion," they are doing so to dismiss it. (Note: I said "typically.") What a curious line of thinking! Our feeling a desire to eat no doubt evolved as well: Does that mean we should dismiss that desire also?

The very attractiveness of Darwinian and NeoDarwinian theories of evolution was that they show how mechanisms can reproduce with alterations that continually fit them to the environment. The process was posited to take place without any design, and with no conscious intention on the part of the mechanisms to survive or to modify themselves. All teleology is forbidden. It should be obvious that while such a theory might account wonderfully for the appearance of ever more sophisticated and complex mechanisms, it is logically, not empirically, incapable of explaining why any of those mechanisms should ever become self-aware. All of the action in the theory is in the mechanisms: self-awareness cannot possibly make any difference to the fitness of these mechanisms, by the very postulates that made the theory attractive in the first place. At best, consciousness is some sort of accidental, weird by-product of mechanistic evolution, something totally useless with which we are nonetheless s...

As Andrew Sullivan notes , quoting Rep. Broun: ""All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell." A real conservative respects traditions, including our scientific tradition. A real conservative might take notice of the fact that the Big Bang theory was first developed by a Catholic priest. He might recognize that modern science is a uniquely western enterprise, a crucial component of our cultural legacy. People like Broun are radicals, intent on stripping our civilization of all its inheritance that does not fit in with their own, idiosyncratic interpretation of a single book.

designed to spawn off multiple varieties of stock-trading programs, which master program would then evaluate which spawned programs performed best in a market test. My master program would allow, say, the top-performing 50% of round-one programs to create slight variations of themselves, and cull out the bottom-performing 50% of round-one programs. Round two would begin with the top-50% programs and their spawned variants, and would repeat the market test. After that, the master program would repeat the spawning-and-culling process. And so on. After fifty rounds of this, let's say that I have at hand a suite of programs that perform very well at trading stocks. Would it make any sense to say, "Well, obviously no one intended this, since these programs were selected by a blind evolutionary process?" The point of this example is not to claim that the fact of evolution (which I accept) proves that a designer does exist, but merely to note that surely the fact of evolut...

Some people are fond of calling humans a "highly evolved ape." But in terms of materialist evolution, this makes no sense: "Biological evolution has no privileged line of descent and no designated end. Evolution has reached many millions of interim ends (the number of surviving species at the time of observation), and there is no reason other vanity -- human vanity as it happens, since we are doing the talking -- to designate any one as more privileged or climactic than any other." -- Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale , p. 4 In purely materialist terms, we have on earth today some tens of millions of species that are all equally evolved, since every single one of them has been evolving for four billion years.

I think Danny Shahar and I have actually gotten somewhere, which may be a first for a Facebook discussion. I see I should make a concession, and perhaps Kevin Vallier should modify his original hypothesis: If one's design argument for God was a god-of-the-gaps type of argument, then Darwinism significantly weakens that argument. So, here is the Shane Battier analogy: I say, "Battier must be some kind of wizard, who willed that ball into the hoop, because that shot defied the laws of physics!" If you then show me that, no, the shot obeyed those laws in all respects, my case is significantly weakened, if not wiped out. So if someone is forwarding a design argument that runs, "These creatures we see around us are such that only miracles could have created them," then, yes, that design argument is wrecked by Darwinism. I had just never thought of the argument from design in that way myself, although I now see that there surely are people who do. (But any major t...

On Facebook, Danny Shahar continues to query me about my contention that acceptance of Darwinian evolution ought to have no impact, positive or negative, on an argument from design for the existence of God. I have devised this second example to try to explain things to the lad. I make a trip to Arizona. When I get there, Danny asks me, "Gene what are you doing here?" I say, "Well, it was my plan [design] to spend a month in the desert as a cure for my respiratory problems." A eliminative materialist in his department overhears this and says, "Plan? Bah! Every single instant of Callahan's trip can be perfectly well explained by the laws of physics." Would you agree that that is not a defeater for my claim that I planned to go to Arizona? My plan is not some miracle inserted at the start that then set everything else going: my plan was operative at every single turn I made, etc. As were the laws of physics. Looking at this in terms of my plan is not...

Kevin Vallier generated a hailstorm of comments by posting the following on Facebook: "Hypothesis: Darwinism does not significantly alter the force of the design argument for God's existence. If it was weak before Darwin, it was weak after Darwin. If it was strong before Darwin, it was strong after Darwin." Kevin is surely correct here. One way to see this is to reverse the situation: If we tomorrow were to see animals simply popping into existence out of nowhere, would (and should) this convince any atheists that God exists? No: it would simply be held that somehow nature is such that animals pop into existence out of nowhere, and a "naturalistic" theory of how they do so would be developed. Or think of this: If you believe Rembrandt painted a particular picture hanging in your hallway, would this belief be weakened if someone told you, "No, the reason that paint clings to that canvas can easily be explained by the chemical properties of the canvas...

"Like most summer activities, the frogs' vocal signaling requires an impressive expenditure of energy, and therefore presumably has an advantage." -- Bernd Heinrich, Summer World , p. 40 So, here is a prominent biologist stating a general rule for evaluating traits: if the trait is expensive in terms of energy required, by default we should assume it provides something important to the species in question. And, of course, the more widespread the trait is, the more we should suspect it is adaptive. So, someone who believes evolutionary biology is the cat's meow, and finds a widespread human practice, so widespread that we have never encountered a single culture where it is absent, and one into which a huge amount of energy is poured, would have to say it is most likely adaptive, right? Wrong! Not if the practice is religion! Then this universal, high-energy consuming activity turns out to be a social pathology ! Everyone does it not because it has helped us to s...

One response from some commentators who want to reject moral realism but still hold that, say, the view "slavery is A-OK" is wrong and our current view is correct is to say something like, "Well, this is part of an evolutionary process." If what they mean by this is, "This shift is part of a spiritual learning process by which humanity comes closer to understanding objective moral reality," well, that concedes my point. On the other hand, if they are thinking in terms of Darwinian evolution, the argument goes nowhere. It embodies the vulgar Darwinism that equates "evolution" with "progress," a mapping Darwinism properly understood forbids. It recalls that Darwinian evolution involves "survival of the fittest," but forgets that it also involves "wiping out of the not fittest." The species living on earth today represent perhaps .1% of all species that have ever existed. So, 99.9% of what evolved "failed...

Tyler Cowen notes research showing that belief in completely contradictory conspiracy theories is positively correlated. Grist for this mill: how about a web site that holds both that: 1) The theory of evolution is a bunch of rubbish being pawned off on us by our statist masters? and 2) The paleo diet is a vital breakthrough, based on the theory of evolution, being hidden from us by our statist masters? I bet you can find one if you google for a minute or two.