Mutant Motors

Different Summers

2010-06-25T12:17:00.000-06:00

Large difference in variability, with a small mean temperature difference.

Vague Statistical Correlations?

2010-03-20T11:33:00.000-06:00

iPhoto organizes and automatically recognizes faces, which is great for tracking people in your photos, but it is *really* great for humor when it suggests faces who may be certain people.

Here it thinks Liam may be me.

And with 20 to 40 pictures of Reid it seems to thing that Reid is very similar to Liam when he was a baby, or baby Tim. The most enjoyable part of that whole miss-recognition process is just seeing these baby faces from different generations all compared presented ensemble.

Cultural Evolution in the Times

2010-03-08T16:25:00.000-06:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/02/science/02evo.html

Photo Salvage

2010-01-10T23:43:00.000-06:00

more photos...

Hard not to be excited

2009-12-07T13:32:00.000-06:00

I know. Excited about something GM is doing? But it's true. They are betting the farm on the Volt, and you know what? I hope it works.

Atheism 10 - Word Cloud

2009-10-16T07:27:00.004-06:00

One Katie to Bind them

2009-09-07T09:20:00.007-06:00

Five Tims for Katie in her Davis home,
Five Tims that all about her lie,
Five Tims for her, so she is not alone,
In the Land of Davis where the birds fly.
One Katie to rule them all, One Katie to find them,
One Katie to bring them all and in the sunshine bind them
In the Land of Davis where the birds fly.

So, I was trying to make that sound sinister even though I used the most flowery, happy imagery I could conjure. Does it work?

Atheism 10: Away from fundamentalism

2009-09-06T15:18:00.005-06:00

Let me start with this:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/atheism.html

The above links to a piece published in Wired on the "New" Atheists, and it is a good review. As always, because we are so under-exposed to atheistic thought in America, it is refreshing to read. I'm not going to analyze this article, but below I offer my own thoughts on atheism. The "new" atheists of the title are the standard crew; Dawkins, Dennett, and a few other less well known folks. I'm sharing it with you because it gives a fair hearing to the atheist message (which is exceedingly rare), and contrasts the new atheism with the new fundamentalisms - a comparison whose time is ripe.

Of course comparing nearly anything with the new fundamentalisms (think the Jesus Camp documentary) puts that thing in a good light. The author makes the case the "new" atheism suggests that it's not just that belief in god is wrong, but that tolerance for belief in god is wrong, and therefore religion is not just incorrect, but evil. The argument is that because faith is the soil in which fundamentalism grows, the only way to solve the problem of fundamentalism is to eliminate the cause of faith. There is logic here, but also a seeming lack of awareness about human evolutionary psychology.

As you would guess, I agree intellectually with their critique of religious belief, although not their solution. Dawkins and others seek an end to false faith, and a beautiful day when everyone is intentionally careful about their beliefs and only accept those ideas that have the most evidence. This is a rosy picture of homo sapien decision-making if I've even seen one (and I've seen a few). Of the bunch, Dennett has the most even-keeled response to faith, recognizing some of the cognitive function of such an institution. The rest would have religion and superstition eliminated entirely. This is the author's gloss of their solution, and I'm disappointed.

Now, these atheists are nice people and have noble goals. They want more truth and less suffering. They've got the upper hand in providing the former by a considerable margin (read the article), but can't touch the church-delivered securities in the latter. And therein lies the reason why their quests are misguided. Below, I hope to explain what I see as the greatest error of such fundamentalist atheism, and to offer a more sensible solution to the same problem they identify, namely religious beliefs' capacity for harm.

* * * * *

PART I
What's Wrong with Fundamentalist Atheism
A Radical Atheist's Perspective

The fundamentalist atheism of the article suggests that we rid ourselves of false beliefs. That sounds like a great idea - we should all struggle to do that. It also suggests that organized religion is more bad than good, and that we should have less tolerance for faith and supernatural explanations. Finally, the proposed solution is to achieve a world without such frivolous beliefs. Let's take these one at a time.

First, is religion bad? Yes, but it's also good. Does the amount of destruction and pain caused by the false beliefs of organized religion outweigh the peace and comfort it can also bestow? In my opinion, it does. But there has been no tally. We need a historical record keeping for each of the major faiths to determine the bloodshed-to-beneficence ratio for each. I think the tally will be negative, (keep in mind even Buddhism has been pretty nasty) but the data just are not collected. Besides, let's say that we had the definitive data in hand, and that the report card was very bad. We would then make the comparison to other human institutions such as liberal democracies and atheist communisms, and make a tally for each of them. Among these peers organized religion blends right in. So saying religion is bad doesn't make much of a point because so are many of humanities largest institutions.

Let's follow their solution - the elimination of faith - through. Obvisously it is 1) impossible, and 2) massively unethical. But this is not a call to arms, but an appeal to the mind. These atheists want people to re-evaluate their own beliefs, not forcibly change those of others. At least that is a refreshing difference between fundamental Atheists and religious fundamentalists. Because this is a thought experiment, one problem with eliminating the institutions of false faith is finding something to supplant it with. One of the biggest critiques of religion is it's capacity for polarization. Humans take to institutions that accentuate in-group solidarity at the expense of between-group connections like a swarm of bees to a hive. Call those institutions whatever you want. Some are religions with wacky beliefs, others are computer platforms, some a nations, others are sports teams. We love our us-vs-them groups. If religions magically disappeared, other social groupings would rise to the ethnocidal challenge (nation-states anyone?). Eliminating religion is not therefore a very worthwhile goal, considering the replacements are just as likely to be destructive. There will always be "religions" in the sense that we will consistently form groups with rituals, beliefs, status, mob-like decision-making, the whole shebang.

If we eliminate "faith" we are left with the psychological realities of the human organism and its population level consequences. Namely group-ism, (racism, sexism, agism) us-vs-them-ism, to name just the most damaging of our inbuilt tendencies. As the author discovers, even if faith could be eliminated, there is little psychological cushioning from the harsh realities of the cold universe. You're born, with defects, and you die. The logic that there is no magical connection to something greater can be hard to handle, and worse yet, the road to economic rationality and hedonism. While these atheists don't seek that goal, others do, and I strongly object. Before we go eliminating faith we need suitable alternatives that will A) keep people happy, and B) keep them contributing to the common good. So eliminating faith is not a useful solution, even in theory.

Now for me, as an evolutionary scholar of human nature and human behavior, the quest of eliminating faith is riddled with theoretical problems. First, faith cannot be eliminated given our understanding of human nature for the simple reason that we like forming clubs, and that our logic is error prone. That's all you need. Preheat to 350˚ and bake for a millennium. Serve your new religious zealotry with a side of ethnic violence, or garnish with a dash of discrimination.

What these atheists are missing is the crucial difference between the medium and the message. When talking about faith, the message, is the faith itself, the erroneous beliefs. But what makes those beliefs circulate in the population causing so much harm? What is the medium? The medium is our evolved cognitive capacities that are designed not just to make sense of the world, but to find both ecological and social benefits, and (here's the evolutionary kicker) do so at low cost. Enter our imitative psychology - our inbuilt gullibility. We are gullible because being gullible makes us more flexible, adaptable, and perhaps, makes the world easier to handle, and because, honestly, being gullible is cheap, especially if you live in a group of like minded people. The message being transmitted over the wires of imitative-psychology is that of a costly, false belief. The fundamental atheists seek an end to damaging belief, but their ideas are built on the assumption that the false nature of these beliefs stems from the beliefs themselves, rather than from the the framework that brought them into existence. They fail to recognize that erroneous belief is a product of the cognitive infrastructure that undergirds all our beliefs.

On a basic level faith is necessary for social function. Faith is acceptance of socially acquired information without fact checking. We trust each other, we accept food without checking if it's poisoned, code with out checking if it contains viruses, rides without knowing the motives of the driver, and most importantly we accept facts and ideas from others without doing the research ourselves in order to verify them. We can't. We don't have the time. It's too expensive. But being gullible is cheap, and so long as you are in a group of people in similar situations, you can trust their advice. And, this is the reason why we prefer creating groups of people like us. Our gullibility is what distinguishes us from other animals, and it is literally the foundation of all culture.

So, for an non-fundamentalist atheist like me, if "faith" so defined is not the enemy, what is? The author (whose name I forget) makes the distinction between naturalism and supernaturalism, which is, I think a useful one to use in dissecting the nature of our own beliefs. It also gives me a new, better label for my own beliefs: I'm a naturalist.

PART II
How to Make a Reasonable Atheist Platform

So, we can't criticize religion for harboring erroneous ideas, because they are ubiquitous. However, these atheists suggest we should not let religious belief off the hook, because it is responsible for so much bloodshed. So, can we then criticize major world religions for causing such injustice? I think in part we can, but doing so misses describing the real dynamics that drive group-based hate. Fundamentally it is human group tendencies that cause some of the problems attributed to religions, and that doesn't just go away - it's a part of us.

So should an atheist have any complaint against religion or religious belief? Yes. Religions are institutions just as much as the state of Oklahoma, the DMV, NBC or McDonalds are. They are party arbitrarily defined human entities that constrain action and affect the belief of the individuals they influence. Religions are some of the oldest and most powerful institutions around. As a category they are perhaps second only to the state in power, yet unlike a state many modern religions do not have to make provisions for the survival and health of their members. In fact many religions are able to sustain themselves on the generosity of their members. This would be fine, if it didn't rest on our gullibility.

If there is one good thing about capitalism, it is that a capitalist society becomes used to the idea of choosing how institutions should behave. We tell our companies: Don't pollute. Treat workers well. A little insider trading is okay, as long as we don't catch you. I would argue that it is very healthy for any society to collectively exert control over the structure of their institutions. Of course, in a capitalist system, we only control businesses, and often only weakly. Take pyramid schemes for instance, or predatory lending, or credit card companies that make it easy for you to default. In my view when an institution becomes predatory (and *any* institution can) we should reform it.

Furthermore, institutions should be measured by the extent to which they engender inter-group cooperation and respect. Ecumenical work does this between Christian faiths, and beyond. Now that's my kind of religion - bringing people together. But so much of religious belief is structured to separate people. Of course this is not intentional, there is no conspiracy theory here, but rather things evolve this way naturally. So, we should try to build institutions that wear away those boundaries, and discourage the creation of new ones. No small feat.

The problem with religion, is therefore, two problems: the problem of false belief (a minor and ubiquitous problem), and the problem of institutional structure. Ultimately there is no solution to problem of false belief. However we can fashion institutions to improve the veracity of belief over time. See science for our best version of such an institution. Science is a unique institution because it divorces its function from the beliefs of it's practitioners (to a decent degree). Science is not-centralized but distributed. It's structure allows beliefs, "theories" rise and fall, and re-emerge changed in light of new evidence, but the institution remains largely unchanged. The basic structure is that of the collaborative project: have and idea, share it with others, everyone test it, make revisions, and bring it back to the table. Interestingly, this is very analogous to another institution that has evolved to design software: the open-source movement. The open-source practitioners design some code, share it around, everyone is welcome to re-use or incorporate it in anyway they like (save for commercial benefit), so long as they share what they've done. It works well too. You know the Web? 80% hosted on the open-source web-server Apache.

The second, and more difficult problem with religion, is the problem of institutional structure, and is by no means unique to religion. To the extent that a given religion promotes us-versus-them mentality, it is evil. Of course, these religions often do well for obvious evolutionary reasons. (Take quakerism as the antithesis of this type of religion. It's shrinking because it doesn't make that distinction, and doesn't proselytize.) And to the extent that a religion uses the cheap spread of erroneous belief to extract support from individuals while that support is simply put to the purpose of furthering the institutional machine itself, it is a waste of resources. To the extent that religion is spirituality, it is healthy.

A healthy society would attempt to configure itself in such a way so as to reduce the effect of everything from pyramid schemes to predatory religious institutions to run-away governmental bureaucracies. Imagine if we could make our institutions like the open-source folks make software, and bat around different theological ideas they way scientists debate theory. A healthy society, might a more benign form of capitalism, where citizens control not only businesses but all institutions. Everyone would be allowed to apply for temporary funding to create a new institution, a new revision to the way society functions. At the end of every year, the populace would vote on the most innovative institutions to incorporate into the government. Thus, the government itself would be and open source, collaborative project. New institutional mechanisms (like a new welfare system) could then be evaluated on their ability to provide social benefits. This way society would evolve to be harmonious with itself.

We will always be susceptible to institutions that only use support dollars to further their own propaganda. But I believe that an open-source society would be a make us a little more immune.

The "end to faith" logic is not the solution, but I do think it is a healthy thought. Specifically to question one's belief, and the beliefs of others is healthy for individuals, but more importantly, for society, and democracy. We need more of such skepticism in our public discourse, especially these days.

Tim M. Waring, 2009

Word Art with Wordle!

2008-12-03T08:32:00.004-06:00

So worlde.com is fun. Here's what it gave me after I fed it the URL of this blog:

If you want to try it yourself just go to Wordle.net.

Big Research

2008-09-30T11:21:00.001-06:00

Okay. Big news.
Back in February, I applied for a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant under the NSF's cultural anthropology program. It's a thing that we have to do as scientists, you know. Apply, get rejected. We wouldn't quite feel right if we weren't rejected from at least one application a year.

But uh oh.

This time, the NSF has decided to accept my proposal for quantitative ethnographic research on Indian caste. They'll fund the budget. This is great, but it means that I have to actually accomplish the ambitious goals I set for my self when the project was just a gleam in my eye. I suppose this is where the proverbial 'rubber' meets the metaphorical 'road.'

gulp.

2008-08-28T01:06:00.006-06:00

Serious Back Up

Click! The power goes out. It happens all the time here. Kodaikanal has an awfully irregular power grid. Often down for an hour or two a day, Kodai sometimes has scheduled outages, and during the monsoon, it gets even worse. This is maddening, especially if most of your work is on the computer.

Enter our Back Up system! A Micotek 850EB ("Technology we live," figure that slogan out!) Long Back Up UPS.

It's 850 VA, and I bought a huge 160 Amp Hour 12 V inverter battery to go with it. They both sit on top of the fridge.

With this we should be able to run a number of lights, the DSL modem, the two laptops, the WiFi router, andt the Satellite radio when the power goes down, for many hours. We connected the backup to the one of Shelton's 3 circuits which carries the one computer system in the main bedroom, and added to it the entire second bedroom. We swapped out all the lights for Warm White CFLs, and will soon remove the second bedroom water heater from the backup circuit. This might seem rather mundane, but trust me, when your sanity (not to mention productivity) depends on it, it's a really big deal to have not just power, but also internet connectivity when the rest of town goes down...

As one friend said, though, couldn't we all just invest the same amount that you've spent for your house in the grid, and have a reliable grid instead? Don't I wish!

Any way, at least Shelton is ready for the monsoon.

All four pictures:

From Mutant Motors

2008-06-22T23:02:00.001-06:00

Are 'reproductive markets' a fair and effective means of population control?
By Tim Waring

Imagine a world overpopulated by humans (shouldn't be hard), and in which nations or groups of nations have decided to attempt to regulate human population growth, but are committed to doing it equitably. How should it be done?

China, of course, gives us the first starting point. The One-Child policy. While setting a limit such as this may seem draconian to some, at least the limit is (in theory) equal for all citizens. No one gets to have more than one child, and if they do, they are penalized. But such a ceiling on reproduction is inefficient (some say unjust). What if one family desires nothing more that to have four children, and three other families are perfectly happy having none at all. Under the One-Child policy the latter three families happily obtain their reproductive desires - no children, while the first family may never be allowed to have 4 kids. This inefficiency is made even more sore when one realizes that the government, and societal goal is not to limit individuals from having more than a set number of offspring, but rather attempting to regulate the reproduction of the population as a whole.

Enter the concept of the reproductive market. Lets say a society wants to maintain the current population size. There could be many reasons, economic - in order to achieve a good balance of resources to people, environmental - avoiding over consumption and crowding, justice - to reduce regional or global population pressure and avoid conflict over resource and war. The government therefore allots each individual 2 reproductive credits (more if the goal is growth, less if the goal is contraction). A credit is used when you have a child, as is one of your partner's credits. Because two credits equal one child, each person gets two in a society at the population "sweet-spot" - just enough to replace themselves. By regulating the number of credits per person a society can effectively engineer a "soft landing" on the best population size without the foreseeable-but-currently-unavoidable overshoots, or declines.

Before we explore the details and societal ramifications of such a policy, let's just take the objective - making population a rationally controllable aspect of society. Such a power is sorely needed in many countries today. Many African and some Asian nations are today in a period of population explosion which is likely only to be curtailed by the sharp limitations of food, drinking water and health care. Clearly arriving at a sustainable population size through famine, disease and starvation has no benefits. Reproductive markets could, potentially, eliminate this problem. Despite common wisdom, it's not just certain non-industrial nations that are having population problems. 'Developed' countries like Italy and Japan are experiencing unplanned and unwanted population declines that are not only economically damaging but are also changing society and the ratio of elderly people to young families. In fact this trend is heavily affecting large swaths of Europe (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/magazine/29Birth-t.html). Some such countries have attempted to fight population decline by offering incentives to new families. Such efforts have been only mildly successful so far. Reproductive markets, in theory, offer perhaps the most effective means of avoiding both problems, because they allow the society to take conscious control of how populated it wants to be, without a placing a strict limit on anyone's ultimate ability to reproduce.

Back to our imaginary society with a reproductive market which desires to stay at the same size. Here if we examine four families like those the China example, the outcome is different. The families that don't want to have children may now meet the family that does and exchange credits. The exchange could be credits-for-money, credits-for-free, or credits-for-anything as they are individual property. Such exchange allows both types of families to achieve their reproductive goals, and allows society to meet its population goal in a way that is agnostic about the number of children any one person or family might have. That is the basic concept of the reproductive market.

The important part is that despite the seemingly 'big brother' feel of a regulated market for reproduction, such markets promise much more individual reproductive freedom than system such as China's. There are complexities, however, that are worth spelling out. Different versions of the reproductive market depend on how societies decide to set it up, and how much flexibility and accountability is built in to the system. The issues range from genetic parentage testing, medical means of ensuring reproductive control, and issues of economic inequalities causing reproductive injustice to issues such as what happens if you get twins. There are many different approaches to each issue, and different societies might well choose very different systems.

Biology & Individual Rights

The very concept of a reproductive market entails a particular answer to an important moral question: "Is having children an exclusively personal matter?" The answer that a society must arrive at before reproductive markets become a possibility is "No". Although it may seem strange, and people might cry "big brother," in actuality we are increasingly living in a world where other peoples choices influence our quality of life. The global population is growing ever closer to "filling up" the planet, but we are doing so in an unplanned and dangerous fashion that seems bound to shoot past a comfortable ratio of people to resources - a scenario with which we are all becoming more familiar as resource conflicts engulf larger portions of the globe. Some environmentalists like to point out that resource conflicts are linked with resource over-consumption. While this is true, the largest determinant of consumption will always be the number of people consuming. It is not a stretch to see that more Nigerians are not good for Nigeria, or other Nigerians. Nor is it wrong to say that Japan (and much of Europe) would benefit economically, and most citizens of Japan would like to see more young Japanese families. The social equation already exists, it's simply a matter of recognizing: my children influence your quality of life, and vice versa. And that's true no matter where you live.

If reproductive markets are to be used, how do we actually control reproduction? Of course, individually, we already exercise an awful lot of reproductive control in many countries today. With contraception and planned conception, on one hand, and fertility enhancements and abortion on the other, individual reproductive control techniques run the gamut from simple precautions to dangerous remedial procedures. Of course, our societies and culture already shape the our individual reproductive choices. People typically adopt the common reproductive choices of the social groups in which they are embedded. Different groups carry different cultures of reproduction, some more likely to use birth control, others are more likely to have many children. Our reproductive choices are already influenced by our society. A country that adopts a reproductive market differs in the sense that its citizens have allowed for society to influence their reproductive decisions in a more explicit and formal way - through the use and exchange of credits.

In the universe of all possible reproductive market programs there are potential systems that are more trusting and sloppy and others that are more control oriented. The latter, it would seem are the ones that are best as achieving timely population objectives. The basic requirement to enable exchange is that reproductive credits are a fixed and countable resource. Each individual has a credit account. Beyond that the options explode. How does one ensure that a birth results in the credit deduction from the true parents? What happens when you've had all the kids you would like to have? What happens if you get twins, or marry a foreign national, or your baby dies early in life? There seem to be sensible, and generous answers to all of these questions, so we'll start with the first.

"How do you ensure the true parents pay the credit bill for a new child?"

Obviously, identifying the mother is easy, and would be done in the hospital before or after birth - it's missing fathers that pose a problem (in more ways than one). Perhaps the simplest system for quickly and accurately identifying the father would be to conduct genetic parentage testing. But since the man is not available, it would be handy to collect genetic data on all men (and perhaps all individuals) early in life. This genetic information could be stored in a secure national database used exclusively for the purpose of parentage assessments. This way every kid born will result in the correct subtraction of credits from the correct parents. Such genetic identity data - while potentially very harmful to individuals, and lucrative to corporations, could be held exclusively within some health & reproductive arm of the government, to obviate such fears. Another such potential fear might arise when people ask the question:

What if I have used all my "credits," what happens to me then?"

The most draconian and scary option would be sterilization to ensure that your reproductive career is finished. But what if people keep reproducing after having used all of their credits? It wrecks the system. One of the best ways to handle this might be to provide incentives for sterilization once the an individual throws in the towel on more kids. On the other side of same coin, the government could levy fines for having more children than you've allowed. The fines could, in fact be equal to the going rate for a credit. But naturally many people will live out reproductive lives without taking the bait to get sterilized because it's the opportunity is comforting.

In designing a credit system a government would have to account for many possibilities and reproductive complications. However it seems that no possibility is too odd to be dealt with in a generous way. Twins could unexpectedly cost more credits than a couple was ready to spend - no problem, charge twins at a reduced rate. If a surrogate mother is used to bring an embryo to term, a flexible system could let those involved determine who pays which credits. If a child dies under the age of 1 year, perhaps special consideration could be given to bereaved parents and their credits restored, in case they wanted to try again. The key seems to be allowing individuals the right to have a hand in their own reproductive destiny.

The most reassuring aspect about a reproductive market as a government means of population control is that it rests on allowing individuals to determine their own lives, in negotiation with others. But when the market is at play, there is reason to worry about equity.

Social Justice & The Market

Markets don't guarantee equity or justice, and laissé-faire capitalism is not economic democracy. So the central ethical issue of reproductive markets becomes the relationship between wealth and reproductive options. In such a society would the rich and poor switch places, with the poor selling their credits for money and the rich collecting credits for kids as an expensive show of wealth? Perhaps, if it was a poorly organized market. But if intelligent principles are built into the system, such injustices could be avoided. The obvious solution is to make the market value a reproductive credit proportional to income. Thus, buying a third child, say, would be a roughly equivalent financial set-back for millionaires and store clerks. Since the exchange is regulated by the government already, it is little extra difficulty to proportionalize the credit value. This way credit exchanges do not favor the build up of population in one sector of the populace over another.

One perhaps subtle aspect of a reproductive market is the idea of fractional credits. Since not all babies survive, the actual replacement birth rate is greater than 2, it's often around 2.1 in developed countries. Therefore, if the society deemed it was at the right size, individuals would be given 2.1 credits. This fractional credit could be sold to the government who would redistribute them to those who wanted more kids. Many people could therefore sell unused fractional credits without any effect on their desired number of children.

Finally, to illustrate the potential flexibility of a reproductive credit market, consider how it might be employed to the decline now affecting Europe. Credits could be made negative in value so that when they were used, parents would receive money from the government.

At the very least, it makes a good science fiction plot.

Atheism: 9 - The Nature of Atheistic Belief

2007-12-10T23:42:00.000-06:00

Let me start with a new phrase: "Atheistic Belief."

By this I mean a belief, such as my own, in the non-existence of supernatural entities. (Of course, we all have lots of beliefs about natural entities, but that's another discussion.) Atheistic belief is similar in nature to theistic belief - a deeply held personal opinion which need not be verified or validated. The nature of one's belief, be it atheist, theist, monotheist, polytheist, or apatheist is philosophically unassailable. Although people quite often do assail each others beliefs with all sorts of philosophy and rhetoric to great effect, no one need defend their beliefs because beliefs need no defense - each is a preference as particular as ones favorite color. Theistic beliefs is utterly subjective - relative to the believer - contextual. In turn, each of these beliefs about the theistic state of the universe fit into various cosmologies. What makes atheism distinct from the other types of theistic belief is that the cosmology that it fits best with is that of logic and empiricism. This is not to say that the atheist belief is proven. Obviously, there can be no measurement, estimation or proof of supernatural phenomena. Rather, atheistic belief is simply most consistent with empirical methods because logic dictates that the simplest definition is the most prudent - there are no supernatural phenomena. This holds true whether you have data or not.

Actually, if one takes the belief in supernatural phenomena seriously, and allows for the possibility that such extra-real forces affect our reality, and at that point science becomes difficult. But science is always difficult, and there are ways of being careful about explanations. In this muddle, like so many others, the need for parsimonious explanations becomes tantamount, and it is here that William of Occam comes into play. The use of parsimonious theories almost as much as empiricism itself distinguish science from non-science.

A self-defined atheist starts at a disadvantage by virtue of taking a negative definition as central.

Untrue, patently. We know that the language is arbitrary. From any point of analysis no one starts at a disadvantage by claiming the opposite, but rather that for which evidence is lacking. It is untenable to suggest otherwise, and thus the atheist starts from the logical high-ground. Politics and power is something else, however. When ones belief is the opposite of a majority opinion, one starts with a political handicap. In most countries around the world, atheists are thus encumbered.

In fact, of course, the burden of proof lies with the theorist, not the skeptic. So, with any consistent logic the atheist starts at an advantage, not a disadvantage, by having a more parsimonious theory. I do not suggest that atheistic belief is "better," necessarily, but rather that it is logically sound, being the most concise explanation of events. Theistic belief need not be logically sound, but atheistic belief is, and scientific belief must be. These are different creatures, and their difference causes them to be subjected to different forces. And here I do follow the late Stephen J Gould, and his concept of religion and science as "non-overlapping magisteria." If we are interested in how the world works or what it is made of, we should use science, and if we are interested in ethically engaging with the world, most prefer stances that arise from stories, myths, superstition, religion and spiritual traditions.

However, Holmes Ralston III and I go one step further than most and suggest that one can derive ethical principles for the construction of society and individual action from the observation of nature. I also suggest that we must get to know nature (both "Nature" and our own nature) in order to build durable, equitable, and sustainable institutions and societies.

One is an a-theist who asserts "There is no god," immediately opening oneself to the question, "Well, what is there and how do you know that?"

Everyone is always open to the question "What is there, and how do you know it?" It is the fundamental philosophical question on the nature of existence. Furthermore, it is one that atheistic belief performs well under, while religious conviction does not. Atheists can supply the probability argument (Since by definition supernatural phenomena are unobservable, there is no evidence for them. Thus while they may be attractive theories, they cannot be supported as they are not the most parsimonious explanation of the natural phenomena that we DO observe.) Religious convictions, however, founder on this same task of answering "What exists and how do you know?" because of the subjective nature of individual (and group) theistic belief. But no matter. Again, religious conviction need not perform well under such interrogation - that's not what it's for. It serves a social function, not an empirical one.

Then the atheist proceeds to assert things like "What there is is whatever we can observe or measure or provide some proof for; all else does not exist as far as we can know." Etc. Not very satisfying.

To say such things would be dumb. The world is larger than we are. Atheists recognize this, too, and love it. But it's also a truism to state that we only know what we have been exposed to, and only believe what people tell us to believe. Lots of people have been exposed to the idea of God, so lots of people hold that belief, they haven't made a "leap of faith" so much as a "leap of conformism." Skipping merrily over evidence on the way.

Atheists are just careful about the ascription of agency. Instead positing the existence of a supernatural entity is an act of intellectual hubris. To do so is to take all beautiful unknown complexity of the universe and ascribing it to a single thing. The universe is unfathomably complex. Simplifying it all to "God" is not just sloppy thinking, it's intellectually cowardly.

But, that said, I can understand if an atheist turns out to be a decent person, even a moral one. But how does she turn out to be "spiritual"? Sure, "I'm spiritual but not religious" is the cliche of our era, but "I'm spiritual but an atheist"? Hmmmm. I need some time with that one.

And what is wrong with being spiritual but not religious? What is wrong with being cliché, or not being Politically Correct? I think such a stance, when honestly held, is same one that Christ held. A personal conviction that defies the institutions of the day. I am spiritual AND an atheist - you bet! Yoda was spiritual but not religious, so certainly was Buddha.

Tim has persuasively argued the power of human communities to draw boundaries around themselves in the service of self-definition--for better and often worse. Makes good sense for someone trying to figure out how cultures "evolve." You also need to focus on how cultures maintain their equilibrium. One of the big questions, I should think, is "what evolves and what stays the same and why?" Boundaries are a pretty central construct for a study of any kind of system, human or otherwise.

Oooh, oh! Don't get me started on equilibria, dynamics, and change over time in regards to cultures. There would be too much to say. Let me just mention that the population-genetics style models that we use to explain cultural evolution are often focused on calculating equilibria, or at least the dynamics that take the system towards or away from equilibria. Oh, and a neat feature of the methods that we use to test those models: they've got a built-in Occam's Razor. Seriously! We use the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) and it's derivatives, in which competing models (explanations) are punished based on their complexity and rewarded according to their descriptive success. The AIC truly makes for clean science.

Anyone who learned in late secondary school and college to "think critically"--has developed a second loop of consciousness that can get outside of the tribe and imaging a world from the perspective of an outsider. If you never leave your village, that's tough to do, but one of the great contributions of a good liberal education is to spring you loose from there.

Fascinating! But I would want to specify the mechanism of this "second loop" more. A good liberal education can deliver people from a more "tribal" perspective in certain cases, instances, and realms. But the tribal orientation doesn't go away. Our tribal social instincts are hardwired parts of our psychology. A good liberal education bestows the conceptual tools to recognize that feature of their own thoughts and to overcome it, to varying degrees. A good liberal education provides a work-around to the tribalism we all share. However the mental (memetic, if you will) structures are housed in the human head, a notoriously dangerous place for ideas to reside (in print on paper is often much safer). These conceptual escape tools can deteriorate from lack of use, be overwhelmed, or forgotten, and as soon as they are the underlying tribalism is right there, ready to make both friends and enemies.

In a real way we never escape our tribal psychology. We just learn to live with it, like Frodo with the Ring. Managing that beast requires constant upkeep, in my experience at least. Here mental gardening practices like Quaker meetings are very useful.

Some cultures are better than others at creating the conditions that foster this critical thought, this capacity to escape our conditioning to some degree or other.

Now this is an interesting topic. What are the features of those cultures or institutions which install this cognitive escape-mechanism? I'd love to know. I imagine all sorts of institutions are capable of this at different levels. Christianity (in its true form) for one. I would reiterate that no matter what institution does the indoctrination, it can never be irrevocable, and the tribalism is always just under the surface. And tribalism is hard-wired - it doesn't go away. How do different types of institutions handle this powerful tribal force in human nature? That's a whole new topic.

Atheism: 8 - Atheists aren't Evil

2007-12-09T23:42:00.000-06:00

Although many seem to think that atheists are evil, being an atheist is no more likely to make one bad than being of any other conviction. Lets look at this through the lens of definitions.

I can work with any definition of "god" that is all inclusive. God is everything, everywhere, everyone, everytime. God is the universe. This is the concept that I use when translating, and it's very helpful. Religious folk often suggest that their belief in god gives them a deep sense of peace, and of purpose. I can understand that. For me the concept of universal unity - one which physicists have long used and tried to understand - also brings a kind of peace and acceptance. For me this belief is related to devaluing of the particulars of life, a kind of trust in the nature of fellow humans, other creatures, and the worth and profundity of each and all of them. So being an atheist --that is NOT USING THEISTIC TERMS-- doesn't "mean that I have chosen to cut off any rich and vital part of my human capacity" any more than using the word "God" stifles and constrains ones human capacity to know the true fullness of reality.

Atheism, like any religion, is a belief. Since the god-question is fundamentally unanswerable, the best we will have on it will be opinions, each equally substantiated or unsubstantiated. Each only a piece of the puzzle.

It doesn't matter what you believe, the issue is whether you can ADMIT that people from the opposite side of the tracks, those who use different terms like allah, buddha, christ, or evolution, the universe, or reality, have just as much of a claim on human experience, and the wonder, depth and meaning of it all as do you. That is my belief.

My fear, not my belief, is in the nature of humanities evolved psychological mechanisms, where lies a deep but ever-present capacity for "us-vs-them" thought. I think one can truly move beyond the theism-atheism debate when one realizes that the statement "There is no God," is as equally profound and deeply as the statement "There is a God."

Atheism - 7: Atheism & Agnosticism Unite!

2007-04-19T13:20:00.000-06:00

[Here follows a series of inline reflections on Larry's email, phrased as a response to him. So pardon the use of "you."]

"Is or was religion adaptive?"

Hell yes. But, as has been argued, so is rape. So too are harems, for the males that benefit from them. Just because we now have an idea of the evolutionary beginnings of belief systems (which you rightly ascribe to more population level phenomenon), doesn't mean it's necessarily good, anymore than knowing that our upright gait, or opposable thumbs helped us to dominate the ecosystem makes those things "good." They are, however, all powerful, especially our "faith". I really like the idea that the way you use the term faith describes what I call our evolved psychological gullibility (among other things). Both terms are useful ways of discussing the matter, for sure.

"I, myself, tend to limit the semantic field of "atheism" to those who believe they actually can know for certain that what we can know is all there is to life."

Well, that would be an odd definition, for sure. I think people who harbor such delusions should be called foolishly optimistic about the nature of human intelligence, not "atheist". I'm going to get more into my conception of Atheism below.

"Second, your argument would be stronger if you were to distinguish between "faith" and "belief." ... it allows you to understand how individuals, communities, and the larger context interact and co-evolve together. "

Exactly! So defined, faith and belief have been co-evoloving for some time. This is a fun way of restating the rather cumbersome "gene-culture-environmental coevolution" phrase which is my field of study. The really cool questions my generation of scientists won't be able to answer, or even ask, such as: "How have mountainous environments effected the selection of certain strains of Buddhism?" and the like.

"Third, I am in full agreement with your basic stance; indeed, if I understand you aright, I share it in essence. That is, human beings need what religions offer."

Um, kinda, but see the rape comment above. Strictly speaking we do not need religion, or any given belief. But we DO have faith, in the sense that we are inherently social-learners made to imitate each-other and take on the beliefs of successful others. We are conformist, we pay attention to social markers, we heed signs of success, and social status signals. If you want to call that faith, then, sure. But it's a question of what institutions develop given the architecture of human social learning. Religion is one common result. So is mercantilism. So are ethnic identity, familial clans, secret societies and informal clubs. If humans only religion in the sense that we also need currency, or language. For me it's a bit more interesting to ask instead why we have developed religion, language, currency, and trade so reliably, because asking that forces you into the complexities of it all.

"Voltaire was right. Take away one form of religion, and another will pop up. We are wired to make up meaning no matter what materials we have in hand."

Yes and yes. But meaning is not religion, and religion need not provide meaning (see Sartre, and the state religion of modern England). Religion is an institution, composed of a good number of powerful beliefs that create a functioning social unit. Within that institution can reside any number of potential meanings. Another way to think about this is: how does the structure of religious institutions interact with the "meaning" (metaphysics, lets say) that percolates through them? Certainly there are differences between major religions, and they can be concretely linked to the types of meaning they store. But the institutional structure, in almost every case could be re-infused with a different meaning, giving rise to a structurally similar, but metaphysically different religion. Of course, this has happened in most world religions many times throughout history. So let's keep that structure vs. content distinction in mind.

"In that sense the anti-evolutionists are right: science is just another religion. It claims "reason" as its god, but in most respects acts like any other religion with its belief system, rituals, ethics, expectations, etc."

Oh, Larry. Are you pushing buttons intentionally? Of course you are. Well, button pushed.

I will give you that science is like religion just as much as NetFlix is like either. All three are social institutions that function as a cohesive unit. They all rest on humanity's basic social instincts, they are all systems of thought (systems of belief, co-adapted meme-complexes, cultural entities, call them what you will) which control people's actions, and change their minds. They all affect what we might call meaning. But such categorization is so vague as to loose conceptual leverage. Aside from these most basic similarities along the "a-dog-and-a-seahorse-are-both-organisms" type of logic, these are very different creatures.

Religions are diverse in structure, so summarizing them is dangerous, but I'm forced to do make a rough sketch, so please take it lightly. Most of the religious institutions that I have encountered are structured around the protection and promulgation of a set of core beliefs, the dogma. While the dogma might change over centuries, such change is not directly due to the structure of the institution itself. Instead, the Catholic church protects it's beliefs from the environmental and social changes in the rest of the world. And well it might. The scientific institution also has a structure, and also transmits content, which we might roughly consider parallel to the dogma of religions. In both cases the "content" consists of beliefs about the nature of the world, and the human place within it. However, the institutional structure of "science," or for that matter any peer-reviewed empirical institution (such as the open source software world) does not protect the content itself. Instead, if anything the institutional structure is hostile to any particular content, demanding that it either find evidence to support it, adapt to meet the evidence, or get out. These are not routes offered to the "content" of religious belief or dogma.

Now, you might argue that the scientific method is itself a type of belief. Of course it is. So is the belief that Bishops are below Cardinals and the rule that the Pope is above them. So is the strongly upheld norm that the journal Nature takes only the most controversial papers, and has very tight page limits. But these beliefs (rules, norms, edicts, laws, etc) are structural beliefs. They matter, for sure. They can be linked to some concept of "worldview" if you like, but they are not core metaphysical beliefs, but supporting beliefs. Neo-Darwinism or string theory, or even scientific methodologies are of a different sort. They flow through the structure, while the supporting beliefs are the structure. Thus, if there were an institutional anatomy textbook (and I sincerely hope that one comes into being in my lifetime) it would differentiate the structures of "science" and "religion," based on how they handle their own core content. Please note that the way I've set this up, "religion" could include certain types of nation-state, various ethnic group identities, the Cult of Apple, etc, just as "science" here could also refer to so many typically "non-science" social structures such as various democratic decision-making institutions. This is a big difference!

"And, frankly, I am not convinced that Science would make a better religion than Quakerism. It would leave out so much!"

Obviously!

"Anyway, I would just argue that my agreement with you on this does not make me an atheist, and I don't think you are either."

Okay, well, you are going to need to face the music on that one. I am an atheist by the sensible definition of atheism as belief in the non-existence of God or other supernatural forces. And, frankly, if you believe that kind-hearted, spiritual, well-meaning folks can't be atheists, then you are in the same camp with those who believe that healthy families can't be raised by homosexuals. Atheism doesn't equate to fundamentalism anymore than does any other particular metaphysical belief. In fact, if I had to wager (which I am prone to doing), I would guess that the atheist belief is less frequently associated with strong fundamental approaches than the dogmas of many world religions, precisely because it comes from a skeptical, inquisitive milieu. This is an hypothesis, not a statement of belief. The data needs collecting.

Now, going a step further, let's get into atheism and agnosticism. The two are not mutually exclusive! Atheism is a belief in no supernatural shenanigans, and an agnostic is, by my dictionary:

"a person who believes that nothing is known or can be known of the existence or nature of God or of anything beyond material phenomena; a person who claims neither faith nor disbelief in God."

Any well-reasoned atheist must admit to being agnostic for the obvious reason that they cannot prove god doesn't exist - a fact with which they are very familiar because of their exposure to the opposite fact. This holds the atheistic belief in good company. Agnosticism by itself is dull and lifeless, but if you can believe in God, AND be agnostic (as I believe that Larry does), THAT is enlightenment. Similarly, if you take atheism seriously, you must admit that you cannot KNOW about the existence of god. Empirical methods cannot render a judgment. It is, by nature, unknowable*. Thus the Atheist is forced closer to the point of admitting that she has a belief than is the theist, who has, and will always have, the get-out-of-jail-free card. It's easy to say that you know the truth when you've got God on your side. See Richard Dawkin's interview with Stephen Colbert, for instance. So I bet more atheists are agnostic than God-believers are, and if so, that is evidence that they are more open-minded. Like I said, though, the data needs collecting.

"My third point is that you are right on about the constructed nature of reality. Let me here move a bit away from your paper to elaborate. . . We know so little. Why not just call the whole thing, including, of course, ourselves, "God"?"

Yes! I like this way of yours of selling the use of that worn out term. If you were a salesman, I'd buy your product, but no matter how persuasive you are I don't use the term, except when translating.

Best,

Your favorite Atheist.

*Although, as Dawkins demonstrates, we can render a decent probability estimate of the existence of God, and sadly for "God" the odds aren't so good.

Google Maps Rocks!

2007-04-03T21:24:00.000-06:00

Driving directions from Boston to Paris? Not a problem for Google Maps. Check out the instructions it delivers for such a journey. Interestingly, if you want to go to London, they have you swim to France first, drive a ways, and then take a ferry across the channel.

Woodpecker Moves in Next Door!

2007-04-02T19:08:00.000-06:00

Check out their accommodations!

Atheism - 6: Healthy Atheism

2007-03-31T23:41:00.000-06:00

To all my favorite provocateurs, a special message from your favorite atheist.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/atheism.html

The above links to a piece published in Wired on the "New" Atheists, and below I offer my own thoughts on atheism. The "new" atheists of the title are the standard crew; Dawkins, Dennett, and a few other less well known folks. I'm sharing it with you because it gives a fair hearing to the atheist message (which is exceedingly rare), and contrasts the new atheism with the new fundamentalisms - a comparison whose time is ripe.

Of course comparing nearly anything with the new fundamentalisms (think the Jesus Camp documentary) puts that thing in a good light. The author makes the case the "new" atheism suggests that it's not just that belief in god is wrong, but that tolerance for belief in god is wrong, and therefore religion is not just incorrect, but evil. The argument is that because faith is the soil in which fundamentalism grows, the only way to solve the problem of fundamentalism is to eliminate the cause of faith. There is logic here, but also a seeming lack of awareness about human evolutionary psychology.

As you would guess, I agree intellectually with their critique of religious belief, although not their solution. Dawkins and others seek an end to false faith, and a beautiful day when everyone is intentionally careful about their beliefs and only accept those ideas that have the most evidence. This is a rosy picture of homo sapien decision-making if I've even seen one (and I've seen a few). Of the bunch, Dennett has the most even-keeled response to faith, recognizing some of the cognitive function of such an institution. The rest would have religion and superstition eliminated entirely. This is the author's gloss of their solution, and I'm disappointed.

Now, these atheists are nice people and have noble goals. They want more truth and less suffering. They've got the upper hand in providing the former by a considerable margin (read the article), but can't touch the church-delivered securities in the latter. And therein lies the reason why their quests are misguided. Below, I hope to explain what I see as the greatest error of such fundamentalist atheism, and to offer a more sensible solution to the same problem they identify, namely religious beliefs' capacity for harm.

* * * * *

PART I
What's Wrong with Fundamentalist Atheism
A Radical Atheist's Perspective

The fundamentalist atheism of the article suggests that we rid ourselves of false beliefs. That sounds like a great idea - we should all struggle to do that. It also suggests that organized religion is more bad than good, and that we should have less tolerance for faith and supernatural explanations. Finally, the proposed solution is to achieve a world without such frivolous beliefs. Let's take these one at a time.

First, is religion bad? Yes, but it's also good. Does the amount of destruction and pain caused by the false beliefs of organized religion outweigh the peace and comfort it can also bestow? In my opinion, it does. But there has been no tally. We need a historical record keeping for each of the major faiths to determine the bloodshed-to-beneficence ratio for each. I think the tally will be negative, (keep in mind even Buddhism has been pretty nasty) but the data just are not collected. Besides, let's say that we had the definitive data in hand, and that the report card was very bad. We would then make the comparison to other human institutions such as liberal democracies and atheist communisms, and make a tally for each of them. Among these peers organized religion blends right in. So saying religion is bad doesn't make much of a point because so are many of humanities largest institutions.

Let's follow their solution - the elimination of faith - through. Obvisously it is 1) impossible, and 2) massively unethical. But this is not a call to arms, but an appeal to the mind. These atheists want people to re-evaluate their own beliefs, not forcibly change those of others. At least that is a refreshing difference between fundamental Atheists and religious fundamentalists. Because this is a thought experiment, one problem with eliminating the institutions of false faith is finding something to supplant it with. One of the biggest critiques of religion is it's capacity for polarization. Humans take to institutions that accentuate in-group solidarity at the expense of between-group connections like a swarm of bees to a hive. Call those institutions whatever you want. Some are religions with wacky beliefs, others are computer platforms, some a nations, others are sports teams. We love our us-vs-them groups. If religions magically disappeared, other social groupings would rise to the ethnocidal challenge (nation-states anyone?). Eliminating religion is not therefore a very worthwhile goal, considering the replacements are just as likely to be destructive. There will always be "religions" in the sense that we will consistently form groups with rituals, beliefs, status, mob-like decision-making, the whole shebang.

If we eliminate "faith" we are left with the psychological realities of the human organism and its population level consequences. Namely group-ism, (racism, sexism, agism) us-vs-them-ism, to name just the most damaging of our inbuilt tendencies. As the author discovers, even if faith could be eliminated, there is little psychological cushioning from the harsh realities of the cold universe. You're born, with defects, and you die. The logic that there is no magical connection to something greater can be hard to handle, and worse yet, the road to economic rationality and hedonism. While these atheists don't seek that goal, others do, and I strongly object. Before we go eliminating faith we need suitable alternatives that will A) keep people happy, and B) keep them contributing to the common good. So eliminating faith is not a useful solution, even in theory.

Now for me, as an evolutionary scholar of human nature and human behavior, the quest of eliminating faith is riddled with theoretical problems. First, faith cannot be eliminated given our understanding of human nature for the simple reason that we like forming clubs, and that our logic is error prone. That's all you need. Preheat to 350˚ and bake for a millennium. Serve your new religious zealotry with a side of ethnic violence, or garnish with a dash of discrimination.

What these atheists are missing is the crucial difference between the medium and the message. When talking about faith, the message, is the faith itself, the erroneous beliefs. But what makes those beliefs circulate in the population causing so much harm? What is the medium? The medium is our evolved cognitive capacities that are designed not just to make sense of the world, but to find both ecological and social benefits, and (here's the evolutionary kicker) do so at low cost. Enter our imitative psychology - our inbuilt gullibility. We are gullible because being gullible makes us more flexible, adaptable, and perhaps, makes the world easier to handle, and because, honestly, being gullible is cheap, especially if you live in a group of like minded people. The message being transmitted over the wires of imitative-psychology is that of a costly, false belief. The fundamental atheists seek an end to damaging belief, but their ideas are built on the assumption that the false nature of these beliefs stems from the beliefs themselves, rather than from the the framework that brought them into existence. They fail to recognize that erroneous belief is a product of the cognitive infrastructure that undergirds all our beliefs.

On a basic level faith is necessary for social function. Faith is acceptance of socially acquired information without fact checking. We trust each other, we accept food without checking if it's poisoned, code with out checking if it contains viruses, rides without knowing the motives of the driver, and most importantly we accept facts and ideas from others without doing the research ourselves in order to verify them. We can't. We don't have the time. It's too expensive. But being gullible is cheap, and so long as you are in a group of people in similar situations, you can trust their advice. And, this is the reason why we prefer creating groups of people like us. Our gullibility is what distinguishes us from other animals, and it is literally the foundation of all culture.

So, for an non-fundamentalist atheist like me, if "faith" so defined is not the enemy, what is? The author (whose name I forget) makes the distinction between naturalism and supernaturalism, which is, I think a useful one to use in dissecting the nature of our own beliefs. It also gives me a new, better label for my own beliefs: I'm a naturalist.

* * * * *

PART II
How to Build a Reasonable Atheist Platform

So, we can't criticize religion for harboring erroneous ideas, because they are ubiquitous. However, these atheists suggest we should not let religious belief off the hook, because it is responsible for so much bloodshed. So, can we then criticize major world religions for causing such injustice? I think in part we can, but doing so misses describing the real dynamics that drive group-based hate. Fundamentally it is human group tendencies that cause some of the problems attributed to religions, and that doesn't just go away - it's a part of us.

So should an atheist have any complaint against religion or religious belief? Yes. Religions are institutions just as much as the state of Oklahoma, the DMV, NBC or McDonalds are. They are party arbitrarily defined human entities that constrain action and affect the belief of the individuals they influence. Religions are some of the oldest and most powerful institutions around. As a category they are perhaps second only to the state in power, yet unlike a state many modern religions do not have to make provisions for the survival and health of their members. In fact many religions are able to sustain themselves on the generosity of their members. This would be fine, if it didn't rest on our gullibility.

If there is one good thing about capitalism, it is that a capitalist society becomes used to the idea of choosing how institutions should behave. We tell our companies: Don't pollute. Treat workers well. A little insider trading is okay, as long as we don't catch you. I would argue that it is very healthy for any society to collectively exert control over the structure of their institutions. Of course, in a capitalist system, we only control businesses, and often only weakly. Take pyramid schemes for instance, or predatory lending, or credit card companies that make it easy for you to default. In my view when an institution becomes predatory (and *any* institution can) we should reform it.

Furthermore, institutions should be measured by the extent to which they engender inter-group cooperation and respect. Ecumenical work does this between Christian faiths, and beyond. Now that's my kind of religion - bringing people together. But so much of religious belief is structured to separate people. Of course this is not intentional, there is no conspiracy theory here, but rather things evolve this way naturally. So, we should try to build institutions that wear away those boundaries, and discourage the creation of new ones. No small feat.

The problem with religion, is therefore, two problems: the problem of false belief (a minor and ubiquitous problem), and the problem of institutional structure. Ultimately there is no solution to problem of false belief. However we can fashion institutions to improve the veracity of belief over time. See science for our best version of such an institution. Science is a unique institution because it divorces its function from the beliefs of it's practitioners (to a decent degree). Science is not-centralized but distributed. It's structure allows beliefs, "theories" rise and fall, and re-emerge changed in light of new evidence, but the institution remains largely unchanged. The basic structure is that of the collaborative project: have and idea, share it with others, everyone test it, make revisions, and bring it back to the table. Interestingly, this is very analogous to another institution that has evolved to design software: the open-source movement. The open-source practitioners design some code, share it around, everyone is welcome to re-use or incorporate it in anyway they like (save for commercial benefit), so long as they share what they've done. It works well too. You know the Web? 80% hosted on the open-source web-server Apache.

The second, and more difficult problem with religion, is the problem of institutional structure, and is by no means unique to religion. To the extent that a given religion promotes us-versus-them mentality, it is evil. Of course, these religions often do well for obvious evolutionary reasons. (Take Quakerism as the antithesis of this type of religion. It's shrinking because it doesn't make that distinction, and doesn't proselytize.) And to the extent that a religion uses the cheap spread of erroneous belief to extract support from individuals while that support is simply put to the purpose of furthering the institutional machine itself, it is a waste of resources. To the extent that religion is spirituality, it is healthy.

A healthy society would attempt to configure itself in such a way so as to reduce the effect of everything from pyramid schemes to predatory religious institutions to run-away governmental bureaucracies. Imagine if we could make our institutions like the open-source folks make software, and bat around different theological ideas they way scientists debate theory. A healthy society, might a more benign form of capitalism, where citizens control not only businesses but all institutions. Everyone would be allowed to apply for temporary funding to create a new institution, a new revision to the way society functions. At the end of every year, the populace would vote on the most innovative institutions to incorporate into the government. Thus, the government itself would be and open source, collaborative project. New institutional mechanisms (like a new welfare system) could then be evaluated on their ability to provide social benefits. This way society would evolve to be harmonious with itself.

We will always be susceptible to institutions that only use support dollars to further their own propaganda. But I believe that an open-source society would be a make us a little more immune.

The "end to faith" logic is not the solution, but I do think it is a healthy thought. Specifically to question one's belief, and the beliefs of others is healthy for individuals, but more importantly, for society, and democracy. We need more of such skepticism in our public discourse, especially these days.

Tim M. Waring, 2006

Atheism - 5: Pleiotropy

2007-03-31T22:41:00.000-06:00

Oh, Larry, thanks for catching that!

For those spelling whizzes out there, it's pleiotropy, not plieotropy. And the meaning is, essentially, complex interdependencies in genetic systems. We don't just have a gene for height, for example, but many genes effect it. In fact a gene "for" liver function might affect height, and also immune certain responses. This is super common, and makes studying genetic systems a real rats nest. Because, obviously, most genes are so old that they do multiple things, and cannot be said to be "for" anything.

Kind of makes you want to throw up your hands and say "oh, it's all so irreducibly complex!" doesn't it?

:) Tim

Atheism - 4: Insitutional Differences

2007-03-20T22:41:00.000-06:00

Recently, Jesse and Larry had made some comments on the adaptive nature of religion, spirituality, and faith. I'd pointed out that just because evolution has generated some feature does not mean that it was necessarily ever adaptive, because of processes like genetic drift, pleiotropy, sexual selection and runaway processes. Furthermore, I argued that our spiritual/religious capacities probably co-evolved with our cultural capacities because they enhanced cooperation, cemented in-group bonds, and heightened competition between groups. Thus, I would guess that the capacity for what you might call religious/spiritual fervor/excitement IS adaptive. Additionally of course, the institutions of religion, the cultural rituals and beliefs that depend upon our spiritual nature, themselves evolve over time, through cultural rather than genetic processes.

Jesse asks:

"Keep in mind that if it is adaptive, it's adaptive 10,000 years ago, not necessarily now. On a basic level, whether or not it's helpful now isn't really a meaningful question, because the general belief is that natural selection is no longer operating in any particular way. Right? Is that still the way most people are thinking, Tim? "

Actually, No. Natural selection doesn't just go away, and hasn't just gone away in humans. Granted, we seem bent on trying to make it go away, for our species, and I think that we've achieved a surprising degree of relaxation of selection forces, especially in industrialized nations. But, of course, that's only a small part of the world's population, and even within industrialized countries there are selection forces playing, they are just weaker than they have been. However many important selection forces are weak, but they act over very loooong time spans, slowly accumulating adaptive characters. For instance we might be selecting ourselves for the ability to reproduce even in the presence of high levels of endocrine disruptors such as dioxins. I do know that people in industrial nations have a much higher level of dioxins in their tissues than do those in nations that haven't completely taken the plunge.

In THOSE countries, though, there are very strong selection forces occurring today. One highly publicized case of this is that of AIDS selection in Africa, not to mention Malarial resistance. Your broader thought, though, is very common. Yes, we ARE relaxing selection pressures, and we are also subtly steering them. But in what ways? What reproduction differentials exist? Are these correlated, even slightly, with any interesting heritable traits? These are the questions of evolutionary science.

I think spiritual/religious thinking comes from exactly the same impulse as scientific thinking, which if it has an evolutionary reason of sorts, I think has to largely be about gaining and communicating information about a dangerous world.

Science and religion, and any cultural structure for that matter, are generated from the same basic human tendencies and capacities, and the question becomes not what is religion based on, or what is science based on, but rather what is human nature? The practice of faith is crucial to science, obviously because science isn't pure skepticism, and pure skepticism isn't productive. Science needs faith, or else we'd make no progress. Faith, of course, does need some empirical grounding too, in order for people to believe that its true. Stories are not all fantastical, and often in religious traditions a whole slew of stories connect the fantastic elements to more everyday sorts of things, events, rituals, persona.

I think that religion and science (and government and what have you) do not spring from independent biological evolutionary needs or selective forces, but rather are simply different institutions which have evolved over time, and occupy different niches. Science plays on scientists quest for prestige. Religion plays on our powerful imagination, as does cinema. Capitalism plays on our greed, and they all play on our desire for control, or in some sense, power. They are all very successful clusters of habits, but that is what they are.

So we evolved a capacity to describe the world around us, to use metaphor, to use myth, to use empirics, and those talents are more part of the same mechanism than they are distinct spheres of action or thought. We don't have to think about science as just another form of religion (or the other way around), per se, but the ability to practice each form is very much an interrelated phenomenon. The human brain, and behavior it generates, is not modular, but highly integrated.

Science, at its best, _can_be_ intellectually safer than religion because it doesn't seek to hold knowledge stagnant, it's always evolving in response to new ideas and new evidence. Often, however the institutions of science fail to be responsive to evidence, and must rely on the death of old guards for true progress to be realized. Religion, at it's best needn't hold belief stagnant either, usually though, it does.

The large grey zones differentiate science and religion are something to be examined closely. What critical features determine the different natures of these institutions?

For one thing, some institutions allow for more revision and transparency than others. In this I think a good metaphor is that of information systems, especially the spectrum of privacy and information security between the military and the open source software movement. Extremes on the continuum, clearly. But the interesting thing is how prestige is aligned with information sharing (or secrecy). In the military, prestige and power is correlated with how much exclusive information one has access to, in contrast to the open-source movement where prestige is correlated with the utility, quality and distribution of information one has generated. Very different schemes, and it's important to notice that they serve different functions.

Similarly religious and scientific institutions are differently structured with relation to knowledge production, and the power given to single ideas. Less power is given to ideas in science (interestingly) than in religion, where individual concepts define and control the the entire world view. While in science certain ideas are highly influential, obviously, but there's a never-ending competition to discover how things might be different than what we thought in the past, making any individual idea less sacred than in religions (stereotypically conceived).

Both scientists and theologians are subject to the same problematic impulse, which is to constrain and circumscribe knowledge, but the institutions of science have a built in feature to deal with that negative impulse, while the majority of religious institutions do not. I think we have to be open to the possibility that this feature of religion, to hold knowledge fixed and unchanging, may be a semi-recent phenomenon. Was that the case before priests (however defined) with societally-given authority over that knowledge received a stake in continuing to control knowledge?

Religions (and all cultural structures) have gained much power and sophistication at holding the status quo. The invention of writing helps this. I look at African Traditional Religion "ATR," and although I'm no scholar on the topic it seems much less codified and much more open to evolution and diversification than the roman catholic church is today, or even 1000 years ago. How much of this difference can be ascribed to centralization?

Jesse:

"That's what's so weak about Intelligent Design the movement, not the idea (which I don't necessarily have any particular problem with, though I'm skeptical). They couch their debate in a misperceived conflation of Darwinism with Scientific Materialism. In so doing, they use the language of opening science up to a possibility that it's missing, but evolution isn't about denying the influence of god, really."

No kidding. You are right, jesse, this is why it's nasty. The people who don't believe in god are disproportionately interested in evolution (because it's such a useful way to conceptualize reality). ID folks are trying to say that evolution denies god, which it does not. Instead ID assumes god - the worst of all intellectual mistakes! What type of god, I wonder? Could we call that God Allah? in public schools? Hmm.

"Darwin wasn't an atheist, was he?"

Nope. Though Dawkins rightly, and powerfully argues that having an empricially supportable non-supernatural explanation of the origin and change in the biological world sure pulls the rug our from under the whole "the world is beautiful, therefore someone must have made it" argument. If only the ID people could take a step back and realize that evolution and god go together, now THAT would be something.

"Instead, by relying on "irreducible complexity" as a cornerstone of a whole system of thought, they are trying to remove that assumption from scrutiny--to except it from the one thing that keeps science honest in a way that religion is not (currently) kept honest. I think irreduceable complexity in a situation like this should always be considered, but it has to be continually tested and challenged. I think it's arrogant in the extreme to assume that we are scientifically sophisticated enough right now to make a pronouncement about irreducible complexity that is ahistorical, a fixed and unchanging unit of analysis for the future of scientific inquiry. That's why I think it's dangerous."

No kidding. Thanks Jesse.

Tim

India Feb 2007, part 2

2007-03-10T04:30:00.001-06:00

IndiaFeb2007

Atheism - 3

2007-01-27T23:41:00.000-06:00

So I got up this morning and recapitulated the email of last night to Katie (always a good idea), and thanks to her questioning, I came up with a slight alteration:

For me, the human capacities for wonder are too often saved for fictional beings, and since there is so much more to wonder about, and since we are spiritual creatures we should simply try to connect our spiritual sense of wonder with the actual world.

That's for me. Of course I have friends who are hindu, judeo-christian, buddhist, muslim, and they have certainly figured out how to be wonderful people. Clearly, we've all got our own way in.

Finally Jimmy Carter agreed with Gould about the non-overlapping nature of science and religion. From one view-point, this makes sense: science and religion are about radically different types of questions. What we can or could know on the one hand, and what we can never know on the other. These are distinct, logically. But that's an artificial distinction, of course, and not one made by nature, but rather by philosophers. In my view what we can never know extends throughout everyday experience, is a huge silent backdrop to our science, and our perception, its always there, and we DO get to know parts of it. And not just through the progress of science, but through seeing things, like the hummingbird in our backyard as he yields territory to larger birds. Or, like the story of the cat and the deer:

A friend was housesitting. Looking out the bay windows at a group of deer, about 4, grazing rather close to the house. The housecat saw them too, and decided to prowl up on them. Bit by bit the little predator hunkered down, sprinted a couple of meters, only to hide and hunker down again. This continued as the deer began to slowly move away, oblivious to the attack. Eventually the deer were all but gone, and our little predator summons the courage for the final charge, intent on taking down her prey. As she drew nearer to the last of the deer, she began to slow down, though, perhaps because reality was beginning to set in. But the deer had heard the approach, and turned toward the cat. For a second they just stared at each other. And then the deer bent its head down and the can stretched up and they touched noses. Other deer made a noise, and the pattern was broken, but the deer turned back again, and they touched noses again, one last time.

For me, a world with such as this has enough wonder all by itself. We just need to watch.

Love,

Tim

The World's Newest Religion!

2007-01-27T23:36:00.000-06:00

Our wonderful friends Brian and Rachel are living in Texas. Rachel's doing medical school (she'll be a great doctor) and Brian is distorting the minds of young people in that terrifically creative way that he always has (he's an brilliant elementary school teacher). We lived with Brian and Rachel in India, where we all taught at Kodaikanal International School, after which they went to Alaska and Katie and I went to California. After a couple of years in each place, Brian and Rachel up and move, to Texas. San Antonio, to be exact.

We think all is going well, med school for Rachel, a new job for Brian. They bring their dog, huck. They buy a house.
They start a religion. They. Start. A. Religion?

Well, yes. And while at first I was skeptical, I realize that Brian is the perfect guy for the job. Yes, our fearless leader, Brian Ferguson has started a terrific new religion, which is in fact "The World's Newest Religion." It's a crafty blend of fun, spirituality, wacky videos, cosmic questioning, web-nuttiness, theism, and Brian's brilliant comic art, with a little bit of capitalism and underwear thrown in for good measure. And best of all it's got a Jesus Point System! Very cool, indeed. This system is probably the most sophisticated christian technology yet created. It's very flexible and very powerful (you get goodies in the afterlife if you earn Jesus Points now, how can you beat that?). So what are you waiting for?

Get hooked up with a healthy dose of fun:
The World's Newest Religion!

The best part about all of this, is that Brian's new religion is poised to enter the scene just when I've begun posting the results of a terrific discussion I've been part of on Atheism. Brian and I figured that it makes good sense to do a co-release, so we've decided to to partner up. Religion and Atheism walk hand in hand, and the lion lays down with the lamb.

Check out the Atheism Blog, and post a comment if you're so inclined: Tim's Thoughts on Atheism, Part I of 9

Happy Trails!

-Tim

Atheism - 2

2007-01-26T01:41:00.000-06:00

Jimmy Carter was just on Fresh Air with Terry Gross. He's a kind man. The type that can say "I'm born again" without it sending chills down my spine because I know that he still thinks that other people have important connections with god. But he thinks that science and religion are separate, much in the way Stephen J. Gould did with his "non-overlapping magisteria." I'm both for an against that separationist view, more on this later. Anyway, Carter has problems with Intelligent Design, or "ID." Now, that said, the mans got some disappointing views on abortion, but hey. He's a gaffer!

So here are some of my thoughts on ID, in response to your old email.

"I hope I didn't get anyone upset with my little flirtation with ID."

You were inciting a scuffle. We need this like we need a good republican in the family, to keep wits sharp.

"I read a piece recently that started out asking, "Do you believe in life?" Then, having made the point that it's a kind of meaningless question, the author went on to make the same point about 'God.'"

Cool. I like that starting place. I even like exploring that connection. What is god if not life itself? As an atheist, though, I do not go on to the next step as others do. Although I am in complete harmony with my friends' and relatives' concepts and use of the term, I choose not to use it. Here's why.

First of all, despite how _you_ use the term to denote "the whole freakin' enchilada," this is not how it is used by most people, I fear. The term itself refers to an anthropomophization of the creative powers of the universe. I dislike that way of thinking about reality. Like you said, it's the separation of God from the rest of the universe that is unstable - they are one and the same. So my problem is that for most people the "God" concept is a kludge. Just throw it in when we don't want to think about it, or can't be bothered.

There's a phrase in Swahili "Mungu anajua," which translates to "God knows." In that culture fatalism is rather common, and this phrase is the flagship of the fatalist armada. It can be a phrase which enables and justifies inaction, which forestalls positive change. Sometimes it's a beautiful thing, but it can also be a source of dispair.

But my problem is not with the fatalism of the Sukuma (which as I understand it comes from the wonderful animist beliefs typical of African spirituality), but with the western god. The term God is an anthropomorphization of the creative powers of the universe, and its a black box, a substitute. Now let me remind you that if everyone thought the way you did, that I would not need to call myself an atheist, because I believe in what you believe in, and I believe that the mystery is what we name, what the Sukuma are referring to, and what we all must live with. I also believe that it is healthy to leave some things unknown.

But the way God is used, I believe for the most part, is uncritical. It takes all the amazing intricacies of the universe, packages them up, and gives them feelings, words, emotion, reason, actions, desires, and retribution even! This is the equivalent of meeting a fascinating new person full of amazing knowledge and experience and language, who is just about to introduce herself, and stuffing a sock in her mouth only to proceed to tell your stereotyped version of who they are, while you wander in the other direction.

Want to get to know god, or gods message? How about studying history, and if human history isn't enough, go back into primates, then the history of life. Then look at the stars, and get to know god through red shift. What does an expanding universe mean to our concept of god? I don't have my ear to the ground but I'd be willing to bet that religions are not even considering this powerful facet of the universe as we've come to know it. As Miriam T MacGillis (my favorite spiritual thinker) says "we are the universe becoming aware of itself." So, if religions are serious about this whole "god" thing, they'd better not just be on top the fact that the universe is expanding, but have an idea about what to think now that we know that the expansion is accelerating!

Trying to access god through a single book or set of books that are at best a few thousand years old is like trying to understand evolution by studying the dispersal of flour beetles in the laboratory. Yes it's part of the picture, but it's just a single pixel of a 15 petapixel moving image which extends in 12 dimensions. It just ain't enough to really give you a clue.

Here's my thing. To know god, to hear gods message, you gotta listen. And for me, using the term god just enables us to refer to too much in one dinky three letter word. There are of course times to be expansive, and then the use fits. And there are times to try to understand what life is about. When we are in the latter, for me, we need to use a *touch* more precision than the concept of deities. Let's face it, we as a species, know a whole lot more about the world then we used to.

"Speaking of which, did youse see March of the Penguins? Talk about awesome!"

Yes, ROCK ON! There's some of gods message! In one scene where they shot underwater and the penguins were diving into the hole in the ice. Did you catch the brief flash of inspiration where they flipped the picture 180 degree, so the penguins were diving UP, out of the little pond of air? It was a brilliant reference to ducks, i think, taking off from a pond. A connection and a contrast to those other avians, so far away, yet so close. God, it was good.

"Intellectually, it's easy to posit a world without a prime mover. What's intellectually weak is deciding without adequate ado that there is NO greater presence. What takes intellectual guts (oxymoron?) is to lean into the MYSTERY, the incredible not-knowing of this life and say YES to it over and over and over until we die, still saying YES."

I am in complete accord.

"Beyond that, do you really believe the world would be a better place if the human being had not evolved with a need for some kind of spiritual projection?"

Hmm. Now here's a good question. Directly responding, I think that I can't really know how such a world would be, but it is an interesting thought experiment, isn't it? I mean we'd still have ethics, still favor kin, still need food, and seek shelter, companion ship, love. We'd still marvel at what we don't know, and take pride in what we do. What would change? These things ARE spiritual. Life is spiritual in a direct sense, but I don't think that we have evolved with any kind of spiritual intuition, like some say. We've got no "god circuit" in our heads. No. Instead existence itself is a spiritual experience. It's deep. It's awesome. It would be no matter who you are, and how you evolved.

"Do you really want to trade the wondrous things that have been done in the name of one god or another for the terrible things?"

Given what I've just said, I think that my answer is yes, but. Yes, but I know that it wouldn't do any good. Without gods to fight about humans would fight more about other things, nations, food, language, culture. Since gods and religion are just a part of culture, if, in our little thought experiment we remove all gods and religion from all human minds, we'd be killing each other over something else. AND we'd be doing all of the good things, in another way, under another name. So my real answer, like the answer above, is it doesn't make a difference. Humans are the way they are, beautiful terrible creatures.

"In fact, it is almost a tautology to ask that since we have very clearly evolved with such a [spiritual] need, so it must have been adaptive, right? It must have brought more benefit to our species than not."

Oh no. Sorry, but that is just not the case. Evolution is not just the ever increasing upward trend of positive adaptation. There's lots of that, though, and more than some are willing to admit. However, the history of life, both current, past and future is riddled with maladaptive traits. I'm not talking about evolutionary dead ends either. I mean instead the evolution of forms and functions that are useless, or even an impediment. They are everywhere, and as long as they don't cause a system failure, they stick around. For example there is a muscle in the human eye which pulls at nearly 180˚ from the direction of motion. It's counter intuitive, a waste of energy, and perhaps prone to failure, but not often or severe enough to endanger our lives, so there it is. Evolution just makes things work, makes stuff fit its environment, and fit it well. (Sadly we are losing that heritage by breaking open our ecosystems and mixing species around, but that's another story.) Maladaptation is in everything. You are only designed well enough to get the job done. No more. In fact, mother nature is miserly (and quite a bit more real, not to mention particular than this "god" impostor anyhow), and if there's a left over feature that's too hard to get rid of, she'll just leave it in. See whales pelvic bones, see snakes vestigial feet, see Hens Teeth and Horses Toes, see Appendix.

There are other ways that evolution does not just produce perfect survival machines. One is genetic drift, one is genetic draft which is related to pleiotropy. But the most fun one is Fisherian Runaway selection. Also known as the Handicap effect, which is most commonly seen in sexual selection. Take that hideously maladapted bird the peacock. The thing is a disgrace, it can hardly fly with all that tail, and yet there it is, a tail so large is all but totally inhibits true flight. Why? Because tails used to be a reliable signal of health, perhaps, so females would mate with males with larger tails. But then the genes for preferring tails and the genes for building tails became associated over time, and bingo, bango, hey presto, everyone's got a tail, and everyone prefers them. This is the conspicuous consumption of the biological world. We all know that big tails take a lot of energy to build, so a male that has a big shiny tail AND hasn't been eaten, must really be something, huh? Now the signal is not of quality, but rather of excess used as a proxy for quality, and yet it is evolutionarily stable. We see it all over the avian world, and in many other places to boot. Such fanciful morphologies are often driven by sexual selection. You are perhaps more familiar with the cultural version of this phenomenon involving fancy cars, big houses, SUVs and the like.

So coming back to your idea that since we have some capacity for believing in deities, and this was provided by evolution, that such a trait must have therefore been adaptive. This is clearly far from true. If I had to posit a likely evolutionary explanation for our tendencies toward belief in supernatural beings or forces, I would say that it probably coevolved with our cultural capacities. Specifically I would guess that early proto-religious cultural practices helped cement in-group bonds, and bolster cooperation, and increase out-group competition. This lead to massive run-away effects between genetic and cultural evolution. And because genes can't tell what we are thinking, only that it works, selection for the cultural capacities to enhance cooperation and group level processes, also ended up selecting a neurological system predisposed to anthropomorphize, and well as intuit laws of the universe.

In other words "god" is a side-effect evolution, and of of gene-culture coevolution to be exact.

"But your final paragraph below is really devastatingly excellent."

I'll just put that through again, because it was pretty good:

In my mind, this type of logic represents a poor grasp of a number of
things: evolutionary time scales and stochasticity among them. One
problem is that vast amounts of the lay public tend to think of
evolution as highly random. While chance driven it is, random it is
not. ID people seem on some deep level to be reacting to the
misconception that evolution or natural selection, or whatever they
are afraid of is a random exploration of design space. Well it
ain't. It's a highly non-random exploration of design space. Hell,
it's even intelligent.

I think I should leave it right there,

Tim

Atheism - 1

2007-01-05T23:40:00.001-06:00

[These posts are from a terrific extended and wide ranging conversation on the general topic of atheism that I've had with some of the best intellectual playmates a boy could hope for. My sister: Sarah Waring, and an age-old (but still spry) friend and mentor, Larry Daloz. These posts have been 'reprinted' here with their permission, though I have edited out less interesting bits. Every once in a while I've added some new thoughts or comments and when I have, I have set them out with [Brackets.] Thanks for reading. - TW]

Dearest Elder,

Thanks for that great letter and much less great article. The author of the former is genuinely open-minded it seems, while the author of the latter simply wants to drive a point home, namely that Intelligent Design (ID) has been getting a hard rap from all sides and deserves fresh attention on its actual substance. That point, unfortunately, for me, mimics the central political trick of ID too closely to be comfortable. Bush himself has mouthed this trick too with phrases like "I just think people should be taught what the debate is about." But there is no debate, and that's the trick.

The proponents of ID would like their "theory" examined like any other scientific theory, and they would like it to be taught as a rational scientific alternative. Interesting that the Discovery Institute wants to extract itself to a respectable distance from the culture wars that it strove for so long to foment. And too bad that ID now seems to have escaped. I mean that it's more than their creation now, and therefore they have been successful.

After getting your letter, I stewed for a while. Read some stuff online:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/21/national/21evolve.html

I talked with Katie, other friends, and stewed some more. And, now, finally I have come down to replying. First there were some little tidbits in your letter my response to which I think you would appreciate, so I'll share those before I pull back to the larger issue.

YOU)
ID ... "Sounds like an effort to name the Mystery that any of us who fall to the right of radical atheism are willing to acknowledge."

ME)
Hmm... Do I fall to the right of radical atheism? No I think I fall to the left of it, but if so, then Larry and I are using different axes. I have described myself as a radical atheist in the past, taking a hint from Douglas Adams, who described himself that way mostly as a way of making it clear to people who asked that he REALLY was an atheist. This helped him avoid the frequent question: "Oh, don't you mean agnostic?" I have felt his pain.

Katie doesn't believe I'm a radical atheist, and furthermore has the point that calling ones self radical in front of the atheist label only makes a huge divide between me and the rest of the country even huger. But if I'm not a public radical Atheist, then I am a pure and true one at heart. Does that rub people the wrong way? It shouldn't. This is a multidimensional issue, the comprehension of life, the universe, and everything. To often people want to simplify the exploration of possibilities into a debate between poles. One's belief in a "higher power" is but one of the infinite axes that we have to describe our feelings and understandings, yet so often it is treated as the only one. A rallying point. It's us versus them. That damn logic always draws a crowd.

But what am I, then? A bit of Richard Dawkins: "thinking this god stuff is not only intellectually weak, it's also bad for our culture, civilization and species," A bit of Stephen Jay Gould "the realms of religion and science are 'nonoverlapping magisteria'," and a bit of Miriam T MacGillis, "We are the universe, becoming conscious." There, that's at least a description of where I stand on these issues that involves 3 dimensions instead of one.

YOU)
"If, for instance, you do not assume that the universe is entirely random (as I imagine a proper atheist would)"

ME)
Wait now! Even a fool of an atheist must acknowledge pattern. Order, structure and even direction MUST be part of an atheists world view. A "proper atheist," in my lexicon, would be one for whom pattern is the primary fascination in the universe. Pattern is what sets life apart from non-life, order from chaos, and all we can do is hope to understand some small parts of the pattern, marvel at others, and throwing our hands up at still more aspects of the amazing mandala we find ourselves in.
So, am I now left, or right of radical atheist?

YOU)
"Why not call it "God" until we have a reasonably solid explanation for how it occurs?

Me)
I love this use of god. Very succinct, and very applicable for me. Ever since you first gave me this tidbit back who-knows-when, I've kept it ready, and use it now and again. [But, the thing is we do have a reasonable explanation for how pattern, complexity and life, the universe and everything occurs. Seriously. Our scientific descriptions are quite sophisticated, and are constantly being updated. Find me a religion that makes use of a modern scientific view of the universe, and you can call me a believer.]

YOU)
"And maybe what we feel in a giant Douglas Fir against our chest or the whole earth rolling under our backs in a field of star is just our own vibration. Maybe so. But why not imagine something more wondrous while we're at it?"

ME)
What can be more wondrous than a giant Doug Fir stretching to the limits of reality, or the dizzying expanse of billions of light years wheeling under our bellies as we are saved from falling into it, and pulled softly to the grass above our backs?

So, yes, there is room for discussion. Way too much room, and we use so very little of it. Perhaps the grass is always greener, but it typically seems that we use a very restricted and polar view of the issue in this country, where we are so unfamiliar with diversity. Now, on to the topic at hand:

What to do with Intelligent Design. Well, I'm afraid that I've seen nothing, to date, that endears me to the idea that intelligent design is anything "but a shill for the nut-cases." ((Shill - nice word by the way)) "Intelligent Design" would love to be considered an alternative philosophy, and even desires to be an hypothesis, or a theory. The brilliance of it's supporters is in merely asking to allow discussion. Once discussion is allowed, then we are back where we found ourselves, except that now there's been a discussion, and a legitimate questioning of natural selection. This is all fine, [if you have been trained in how to evaluate the merits of a scientific theory] but if you are a member of the public, this little charade comes off as rocking the foundations of evolution [which, of course, it does not, as it is not a falsifiable nor parsimonious theory], and thus weakens the popular support and understanding of the same.

My judgement: ID is neo-creo, and not unrelated to neo-cons.

But lets examine the underpinnings. Intelligent Design simply says that some of the characteristics of life (or what have you) exhibit properties that are "most likely" the product of intelligence rather than of "random chance" or natural selection or "evolution" (whatever that is). Fair enough, especially for non-biologists, life is hard to fathom, especially the unfolding thereof. Thus the continued focus on things like the eye. The eye, and other structures, are said to be "all-or-none" systems. In other words, they couldn't have arisen through chance and selection, but rather had to come as a package. Well what use is that? [I would say the same thing for a modern computer. And indeed no one person could ever design a modern computer. But that fails the test of science.]

If they are interested in the intelligence capable of producing a given structure they should formulate a hypothesis about what TYPE of intelligence, or process, might be able to create such a structure. Then, generate an algorithmic process to represent such an intelligence. Then, create and large family of such algorithms to test out other possible types of "intelligence" that might be up to the task. Finally, if they were really interested in what type of logic created a given structure, they test them all statistically against the available data. Of course in so doing they would find that they were off in at least one assumption, and have to re-evaluate, and start again. [This is the standard evolutionary approach.] This is what I do professionally, and it can be humbling especially when your theory is so beautiful and clean and elegant that you just KNOW it's got to be right. Something makes me think, however, than they are not interested in the type of logic or intelligence that created any given structure, but instead interested in showing that parts of the world appeared in chunks from some fanciful universal source. [Thus they cannot be truly interested in science, but are rather interested in manipulating the scientific establishment to their ends.] Worse yet they are not interested in the possibility of starting again with a different outlook, or being humbled by data, (the real world), but rather pressing their point home. This is the critical breaking point of course: open mindedness. Give me an truly open minded ID person, and I'll have a good conversation with them - we'll both gain something.

In my mind, this type of logic represents a poor grasp of a number of things: evolutionary time scales and stochasticity among them. One problem is that vast amounts of the lay public tend to think of evolution as highly random. While chance driven it is, random it is not. ID people seem on some deep level to be reacting to the misconception that evolution or natural selection, or whatever they are afraid of is a random exploration of design space. Well it ain't. It's a highly non-random exploration of design space. Hell, it's even intelligent.

Love all,

Timbo

The "O’rulikzam" Ceremony among the Aychbeeyee of Yuciedie

2006-12-03T23:48:00.001-06:00

Last friday I took part in a strange and unique ritual practiced by a bizarre people that make their lives in the central Californian plains. As I have been working with this particular tribe for nearly 3 and a half years now, I know many of them by name - though some I do not know. Also, since I have made my intent to understand the ways of this people clear elsewhere, I will not belabor that point here, but instead focus entirely on this singular ritual rite.

The group goes by the names Aychbeeyee or Peeslab, and inhabits a small area of Yuciedie. Although these terms are used mostly interchangeably to make self-reference, it is clear that in some way they are not equivalent terms, though I have not been able to decipher their difference as yet. I usually refer to them as the Yuciedie Aychbeeyee group, or just Aychbeeyee.

From my other comments on the Aychbeeyee, readers may be familiar with some of the individuals, such as Peejayar, the kind old patriarch of one cluster of them, Em'Ciel another high ranking male who is very young for his rank, and deemed of very high quality, and Em'Bea'em, the shrewd and intelligent matriarch of the other Aychbeeyee cluster.

The ritual was a sort of induction, or initiation, or at least that's how I perceived it. It was something that Peejayar had discussed with me for the last couple of years as something that I must do, now that I was a part of Peeslab in Yuciedie. Interestingly, Peejayar was not able to attend although he has become my primary informant and mentor in many ways. Their customs strictly forbid him from participating in my ceremony precisely because of his close relationship to me. Thus, this was a rite of passage.

The entire affair took but two hours, though for all the discussion before and afterward you might think that I had just braved a dragon! Instead I was made to find a spot to my choosing and to select people to would initiate me. Although this makes it seem rather flexible, it is not, as one is actually constrained in their choice of initiator by the phoarm that is created when you join Aychbeeyee. The phoarm concept in particular is very powerful in all of Yuciedie society, second only perhaps to the great litrechur. Although I cannot completely describe the function of the phoarm (for it seems to be invoked everywhere, and can refer to almost everything), it is clear that because my initiation was governed in some way by the phoarm that I was truly being treated as a member of Aychbeeyee, Peeslab, or at least Yuciedie society.

The phoarm commanded that I cannot chose Peejayar, but that I would have to chose three initiators. When I made my selection (Em'Bea'em, Em'Ciel and Emjyebie) Esie’aych told me that Emjyebie would not be allowed because he was a part of Peyee’es and the phoarm did not allow it. I spend a nearly a week discussing this matter with both Esie’aych and her overseer the jovial Jijiyee Chayar. Eventually, by some good luck, the generosity of both Esie’aych and Jijiyee Chayar, and much invocation of the phoarm I was allowed to proceed with my selection.

On the appointed day Em'Bea'em, Em'Ciel and Emjyebie met me in the mid morning, in a special location that, although I had chosen, was then dictated by the phoarm, I believe. The phoarm dictated that Em'Ciel be refered to as the O’rulikzam Chayar, which, as I understand it, is the leader of the whole ceremony, which is in turn refered to as O’rulikzam. As the O’rulikzam Chayar Em'Ciel was also made to bring food for the ceremony.

First I stood and performed the “dance of the presentation” while they sat, and watched, serious. They interrupted and questioned me a few times during the dance, but they eventually allowed it to end. I interpreted this as a sort of acceptance of my quality. Each of my initiators then took turns, each lasting about 20 minutes, to ask me more arcane questions having to do with what the litrechur would say about my ideas, and essentially defend them against the great litrechur. I am not very familiar with the ways of litrechur or the meaning that some in Yuciedie ascribe to it, but I simply recounted what I could, having studied for weeks before hand. When each was satisfied by my performance, and the two hours were up, I was banished from the group for a short period while they discussed my fate. Then, shortly, Em'Bea'em gave to find me, and welcomed me back, at which point they congratulated me and we all shook hands.

Strange as it may seem I have felt certain lightness in my step since.

Mathematica Rocks!

2006-10-10T21:50:00.000-06:00

So I've finally got around to using Mathematica. I only recently got around to using it because of an assignment. Richard McElreath gave me Joe Henrichs new model on the evolution of social stratification based on economic specialization to analyze for a modeling class we're doing. While I solved the first equilibria (the equitable case) myself, solving for the complex one was not going to happen.

Enter Mathematica. Blamo. Soon I was finding errors in Joe's manuscript, and reproducing his graphs. This is satisfying stuff, especially if you are used to the infuriatingly vague math-mechanics of my brain. This has finally lead me to consider the purchase of the actual software, because it's just so damn great.