Intelligent Design Pre-Darwin, Naturalism, and Evidence.

Prior to the theory of evolution by natural selection, Intelligent Design was the theory supported by all the evidence. Scientists from Galen, Newton, Jefferson, Galileo, even Darwin when he was younger accepted this as the best explanation for how such amazing functional complexity could exist in the human body. The only alternative at the time being chance, and chance was a clear loser.

There wasn't a lack of any evidence, but rather a huge amount of evidence for the propositions. Which weren't as much magical thinking as we would think today as they were simply unknown. They weren't wrong for thinking this way. They honestly were very rational and went where the evidence lead them, and it lead them towards something that had many of the attributes one would ascribe to a God.

It actually was good evidence for God. Which is why when evolution came around and kicked that ideas' teeth in, all the foremost scientists in the world went from largely being deists and theists to being atheists. For this diversity of life to exist without God requires that there be a process like evolution that could create the diversity out of only randomness and time, and lo and behold there is *EXACTLY* such a process.

It isn't proof or certainty, but the fact of the matter is that evolution is good evidence that there is no God. It would be remarkably strange for God to create a universe whereby God need not exist, considering with God every universe would be possible. However, if there were no God, we would have to have a universe like this universe.

The chances that we'd have this universe are much higher if there is no God. And such claims that the only alternative to our current science is nothing at all is absurd. From preformation to Phlogiston and miasma, we've been wrong before, but we were lead there because that's actually what reasonable logical inference and evidence led us to conclude.

Ignoring such things and thinking the other side is a blank slate is actually kissing away an easy win. If you assert nothing, and they only assert bad arguments, when you've torn through their bad arguments you've finally managed to tie, because you never pointed out that what you're saying has always been the case and that the universe actually is particularly good evidence that they're wrong. And that what you're saying isn't an implicit assumption of science but rather the conclusion of science. It isn't that science must assume that the supernatural doesn't exist but rather than science works so damned well without it that that is considerable evidence that it doesn't. Science builds on the shoulders of other science, and the if one treats naturalism as a theory, you will find it has considerable evidence to support it, no evidence that contradicts it, and that it works effectively as a base theory for the rest of science. You need not exclude the supernatural a priori, you can do so a posterori. The supernatural doesn't work, it never has, and has always been wrong. It's not some special bias against supernatural claims but rather the fact that it's always been wrong that rightfully leads one to assume it would be wrong this time as well.

Evolution Is Intelligence: Paley, Design, Hume, Darwin and Conclusions

I do accept that there is merit to the bits of Paley's argument that survive Darwin's explanation. Because the Argument from Design, if we remove the ad hoc conclusion that 'God did it', still says something. While Darwin explained how nature can design itself through a rather amazing emergent phenomenon, he didn't explain why these things look "intelligently" designed.

The conclusion Hume draws is still, I believe, acceptably true. "Since, therefore, the effects resemble each other, we are led to infer, by all the rules of analogy, that the causes also resemble; and that the Author of Nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man..." -- The equivalency fundamentally holds. Darwin simply showed us that the Author of Nature was a bottom up process of self-design by evolution. He in no way showed that therefore it's nothing like "the mind of man." This is generally and wrongly ignored, and often thought to be a complete rebuttal. That because we know how design occurs in nature, that it can't be intelligence. But, really we don't know how intelligence fundamentally works, so Darwin pinning down the "Author of Nature" side of the equation does nothing to negate the equivalency and we should, I believe rightly, conclude that the mind of man works very similarly to evolution by natural selection.

In fact, if one considered a robust evolutionary algorithm surviving on, accurate predictions about some external environment, rather than energy, one would find that such a system would account easily for the senses, how they work, how they adapt to shortfalls and gaps, how they cooperate, and a great deal of the robust bits of intelligence which current theories completely fail to explain, much less predict. As well as giving a rather interesting paradigm for how the brain would necessarily have to work. Namely as a virtual black box, which could be as isolated as DNA is from the ongoings of nature, but still able to contain a great deal of very important and accurate information about that environment. DNA, afterall, knows a lot about the world, and the only sense it possesses is death. Is it therefore much wonder that a skullful of neurons testing theory after theory against confirming or rejecting senses could create a remarkably accurate view of the world, without those senses in anyway necessarily causing that view or needing to be fundamentally accurate?

I think that Intelligent Design in Paley's time had merit, and was right about a lot of things. But, like Einstein expanding Newton. Darwin actually built on Paley and Intelligent Design, by finding the underlying process for bottom-up self-organizing design, and explaining not only the design but ultimately intelligence. The best metric for intelligence is the Turing Test which explains nothing but comes off as a version of Justice Potter's pornography test: "I don't know what intelligence is, but I know it when I see it."  -- And yet, for thousands of years people have been looking at trees and saying: "That's so clearly made by intelligence!", and thus, in a very general sense, passing the Turing Test with evolution. And I think that with such an proper understanding creationism and intelligent design is hollower than anybody ever dreamed. When they offer that the intelligence behind nature is God, they are really deifying evolution, an apotheosis of a simple bottom up mechanism for producing additional order by ruling out what doesn't work, very much akin to the accusation of "worshiping evolution" that atheists are occasionally pilloried with; frankly I don't blame them.

David Hume, I pencil, Markets, and Intelligence.

All these various machines, and even their most minute parts, are adjusted to each other with an accuracy which ravishes into admiration all men who have ever contemplated them. The curious adapting of means to ends, throughout all nature, resembles exactly, though it much exceeds, the productions of human contrivance; of human designs, thought, wisdom, and intelligence. Since, therefore, the effects resemble each other, we are led to infer, by all the rules of analogy, that the causes also resemble; and that the Author of Nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man...

 One should logically draw this conclusion. The author of nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man. Somehow about the time Darwin looked behind the curtain and determined  that the author of nature is nothing more than compounded dumb luck, blind chance distilled into the miraculous, where life cheats at thermodynamics and only collects on the winning bets and forgets it even made the losing ones. That design is the product evolution by natural selection sufficed to give cause for forgetting these previous conclusions. Why should we accept a logical conclusion of the sort that "the author of nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man"? When we know full well how the author of nature writes? Sure we don't have a flipping clue how the mind of man works, but certainly we can be justified to ignore the logical arguments above out of hand, without explaining it. After all when one considers the amazing nature of  human minds, it ravishes into admiration all men who have ever contemplated them. And equivalences somehow only go one way, to say that the author of nature is similar to the mind of man, certainly it true but to be disregarded because we now have Darwin to explain the authorship of nature. And why should anybody bother taking that one tiny extra step of saying that perhaps the mind of man is somewhat similar to Darwinian evolution? -- I would argue that they should because it explains the vast majority deep mysteries about intelligence. But that's just me.

There was a somewhat influential essay within Economics, which some are coming to understand  is Darwinian in nature, called I Pencil. Which argues, that the markets are such that nobody really knows how to make a pencil. That we cannot fathom how trees are made and so we conclude that it must be God. Only God can make a tree. But, nobody really knows how to make pencils. We know they are wood, graphite and brass (now aluminum for the ferrule) but who knows how to mine graphite, who knows how to make the mining equipment, who knows how to drill for oil to power the equipment, who knows how to make the lighthouse for the shipments of tin, or to power the saws. The division of labor by the markets is so profound that nobody really knows all the steps. You could set no person on a massive island filled with resources for the taking and have them make a pencil, because nobody knows how to do it.

There is a fact still more astounding: the absence of a master mind, of anyone dictating or forcibly directing these countless actions which bring me into being. No trace of such a person can be found. Instead, we find the Invisible Hand at work.

Since only God can make a tree, I insist that only God could make me. Man can no more direct these millions of know-hows to bring me into being than he can put molecules together to create a tree.

 That evolution plays a distinctive role is nothing new, to economics. It's gaining some steam but isn't a rather widely understood point. Evolution is decentralized and doesn't require that particular part know the whole. It's just not needed. And though, Read here seems to suggest that God is behind the invisible hand rather than the same blind watchmaker behind the tree. And also concludes his essay with a presumption of laissez faire faith.

The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely organize society to act in harmony with this lesson. Let society's legal apparatus remove all obstacles the best it can. Permit these creative know-hows freely to flow. Have faith that free men and women will respond to the Invisible Hand. This faith will be confirmed.

Neglecting that the blind watchmaker does better for humans when humans gum up the works. Everything in nature is on a knife's edge. Nature's red in tooth and claw. And filled from the foot fungus to head lice with parasites. We shouldn't have faith in the markets, we should recognize that they are the single most powerful economic tool we have but are far better off domesticated than dominating.

In any event, the invisible hand of the markets, the blind watchmaker, the homunculi that live in the pituitary gland are really just different sides of the same process. A decentralized process that doesn't require knowing anything to know everything, to design without understanding, to arrange without forethought, to create without a creator. Is it any wonder that religious people the world over have been saying intelligence is behind the designs of nature? Darwinian evolution looks exactly like intelligence, because intelligence is likely the same process at its core. Intelligent design is trying to replace the cranes (in the Dennett sense) of evolution with the skyhooks behind intelligence often wrongly attributed to God, but really if one takes the arguments seriously, the universal acid of evolution flows the other way. It doesn't save God from the clutches of evolution, it allows the universal acid of the explanatory power of evolution to explain away that meek idol of that He who made the lamb made thee. It ends up splashing acid in the face of God. Because yes, you can argue for intelligent design in nature, but the intelligence, like all intelligence, is just another face of Darwin. The illusion of design, and the thoughts of intelligence behind nature, which even Darwin noted tend to come and go, are the other side of the same coin.

Within research into intelligence, we haven't produced anything even remotely intelligent and fail to produce anything, there is an utter lack of something we could confuse for intelligence. Within biology we have gobs of intelligence, it's all over the place infecting ever facet of what biologists do, and a seeming effort to call it an illusion of design, a mirage of intelligence. On one side of intelligence, we have no intelligence and deeply want something we could confuse for intelligence and no understandable processes and on the evolution side, we have lots of intelligence and a process we understand and all the while deep in the vaults of human intellectual history we have valid arguments which say these are the same thing. It was a mistake to disregard the equivalence of the Author of Nature with the contrivances of human minds, just because Darwin fully explained nature. We should have, at the time, and in the years since, realized that Darwin also explained human minds. It isn't that intelligence in nature is an illusion or that the design is a mirage, it really is there. It's actually completely really deeply and truly a part of nature. God is the illusion. We see the intelligence in the essence of nature and claim that it must belong to somebody, but that's just not the way it works. You can worship the Author of Nature as God, the Intelligent Designer as a divine being, but really if you look behind the curtain you'll find that you're just worshiping what Darwin so aptly described. But "It's intelligent!" one  might insist, rightfully I concede, but that's not a contradiction. Darwin's process is behind that curtain as well. Intelligent Design doesn't save God from evolution, it meekly attempts to call evolution God. Somehow I don't think that even theists who find Paul Tillich's God (a theism as close to atheism as twilight is to night) palatable could manage to swallow that bitter idolatry when properly unmasked.

Properly, the argument for design has been touted as the greatest argument for God ever devised, but really, when you get down to the core, and a dollop of universal acid is splashed on it. We find that much of theological effort, has been, over the years, engaged in worshiping Darwinian Evolution. Insisting on the false distinction that because it's intelligent, it can't be evolution.

Intelligence is evolution & evolution is intelligence

Evolution === Intelligence.

I don't mean this in any sense but the most absolute. The two have an absolute equivalency. Intelligence is an evolutionary algorithm and only an evolutionary algorithm. Evolution is intelligence at the very core of its essence.

I think it's strange that this idea hasn't found any traction or have been fully realized as a fundamental equivalence. I also find it to be completely understandable that it has not, because it seems to throw up red flags.

I figured it out 6/29/07 while blogging and narrowly managed to not dismiss it out of hand. It's actually a fundamentally profound idea and a seemingly obvious one that suffers a long history of near misses.

A lot of people seem to understand evolution is intelligence at a cursory level. I've watched as people come tantalizingly close over the years, while others have waxed poetically about obvious absurdities.

Gerald Edelman's neural Darwinism goes to great lengths to show how the seeming learning of the immune system via a microcosm could be expanded to explain how neurons work. And for as much promise as that idea has it seems to get bogged down in explaining neurons rather than piercing the fundamental equivalencies.

People point out how intelligently designing things requires a sort of tinker, tweak, and try methodology which sort of works like evolution, or how more generally technology evolves over time.

Jeff Hawkins goes on about how prediction is fundamentally what intelligence is about but fails to see what this means about the underlying algorithm. I read his book and looked at the source code for the work it spawned. A lot of promise and its ends up a basic Bayesian engine.

There's a 1995 paper from 15 years ago. That seems to get it (which I discovered a few days ago) but suggests using it with regard to neural networks and fuzzy logic.
http://65.44.200.132/Library/1995/Evolution_CI.pdf

In principle the truth is all of these ideas and none of them. Intelligence and evolution are two sides of the exact same coin. And to actually program a machine intelligence you need to evolve a prediction biosphere. How would a well functioning evolutionary algorithm whose population's successes and failures depend on the efficacy of their predictions about the outside world differ from an intelligent mind? I don't think they would.

If you were to codify predictions about anything and everything and evolve organisms whose success depends upon making accurate predictions, even if you could not see them as directly and obviously as equal to an intelligent mind, you should at the very least be given the jaw dropping impression of the power of such an idea.

One of the obvious problems with using genetic algorithms for anything more than making a really awesome antenna or critters to walk in a virtual world is that even the best solutions are still profoundly limited to their selection metrics and the sparsity of the environment. However, what couldn't you do with evolved predictions? You would have a set of understandings that could apply at a given time. In example of illusions two or more could apply but rarely at the same time.

With evolved predictions you could figure out the nature of the planets. You could identify a briefcase. You could use sound to help recognize something visual. You could go from the tiniest predictions about the distance of objects to the nature of the universe. After all, there's really no fundamental difference between a child playing and a scientist trying to figure out the nature of reality. There's also no real difference in going from a thoughtless baby to having figured out the most basic elements of the real world. One can go through most of Jean Piaget's developmental steps and understand why and how those understandings build.

You should also note that the idea answers a number of fundamental questions about how the brain works. Such a system would necessarily reverse the generally assumed information flow of senses and the brain. It isn't light hits your retina goes through some neurons and into the brain and then gets processed by the brain. Rather the mind is constantly making predictions and this light either confirms or denies those predictions. You don't need the image at all. There is no Cartesian Theater to watch the outside world through your eyes. You have already predicted what it should look like, and the only thing "seeing it" does is check if that prediction is correct or not. This is after all how evolution works. It isn't the DNA that contacts and interacts with the outside world but rather the body built by the DNA that either survives or does not.

This also demands that the brain is very plastic. That you should entirely be able to see again via electrical impulses on your tongue. You should be able to learn echolocation to see. You could quickly learn how different magnetic and electrical fields feel with a tiny magnet surgically implanted into your finger. If we allow for new predictions to be made, even if they seem rather absurd, if they are right they thrive and expand if they are wrong they die off. The first law of psychology is the second law of thermodynamics. We can learn skills quickly and effectively, even if we don't know we're learning them. We evolve a robust complete intelligence. We have a good "picture" of what the world looks like even without needing to really see anything in the world. There's no need to program anything about this internal landscape because evolution is a fantastic programmer (as I've seen many times first hand).

Much to my dismay, there is a lot of popularity for the Computational Theory of the Mind. That we have evolved programming and simply re-adapt it to a more modern context. But, there's no need to take the Pleistocene programming to throw spears and re-adapted it via fuzzy laws to do Euclidean geometry. After all, if we're already going to suggest that our brains have programs in them and these programs are evolved, why not evolve them again in real time? The idea ultimately relies on evolution making programs, and in fact there's no debate that evolution is at the core of human intelligence (regardless of what people think it is).

Why are we to conclude that this programing is somehow stored in our genes? After all, we don't have that many genes to make these programs. And why would these programs largely need a massive amount of development in order to perform? Why must children learn the basics in order to adapt the basics to other tasks. Why is childhood development so damned long before children engage these magical eye focusing programs? And why do they seem to actively learn so much? If so much of this is adapted from other bits of mentalese then why can't such things be coded by the brain from ground up. Why can't we all be Cartesian code houses? Solving the problems as they arise? And why can't we just use the same very powerful idea to solve all of these problems?

Further, when you realize the power of the idea, you also realize all the little things that cognitive science typically leaves out of the theories. Even the simple act of learning to focus your eyes involves a lot of prediction. You need to know which part of which eye fits with which part of the other eye and when those two points are actually further apart than expected it gives one the prediction that the perceived object is further away. While also accounting for the jiggling of the eye, and staring at different things, while not changing anything about the ones internal idea of what the world should look like. Your brain does a powerful amount of work that at some level everybody gives credit to evolution but somehow escapes people's that if its really evolution all the way down, all the problems go away.

William Paley is credited with one of the better versions of the Argument from Design, which in turn is probably the best argument in favor of a God (even despite it's shortcomings). The argument is admittedly an argument from ignorance. It says, basically when you look at a tree you know that it needs an explanation far different than what you could give for a stone because there's some kind of intellectual real work there. That there is an amazing amount of real design work that has gone into that tree and when we consider things like watches we equally well know that a lot of real design work went into them and they need a real explanation. He then "reluctantly" admits this is must be God. Then after Darwin, the evolutionists chime back that the equivalency is false. If I can explain exactly how the tree came to be using only natural well understood laws, it can't be intelligence. Therefore Paley is wrong and there's no equivalency between the intelligent works of man and the evolved works of nature.

This is wrong. It's true that the 'God conclusion' that Paley attempts is unwarranted but there is a conclusion you can draw and it is that the intellectual works of man and intellectual works of nature are cut from the same cloth. Establishing that evolution is the foundation of the works of nature doesn't set asunder the ingenuity of man might not also be evolution incarnate. After all, what kind of refutation is that: "This can't be intelligence because it's evolution." Why can't it be both! On one end we have a well understood, natural process, and on the other end we have a glorified and fundamentally unexplained skyhook. The only problem that seems to arise is that accepting that it is true demands that we finally have an explanation for intelligence.

The problem with the "intelligent design" movement isn't the claim that there is "design" but rather that "intelligence" is a solution. Intelligence isn't a solution unless it's on fundamentally firm ground. You can't claim that intelligence is the answer unless you can explain intelligence. After all, Alan Turing provided the only answer for the question "What is intelligence?" that was ever met with any good reception. It was pretty well Justice Potter Stewart's explanation of what obcenity is: "I don't know but I'll know it when I see it." It seems a bit silly but prudent to note that I know something that passes the Turing Test: an oak tree. People have for millennia been identifying the products of nature as being the product of an intelligent mind, maybe, just maybe, they aren't all completely stupid? After all it is admittedly rather naive to suggest that humans don't have a spidey-sense of design. That we can look upon the natural world and see real intelligent design work having gone into every twig and every critter while at the same time knowing that that it's evolution at work. Why must we tell ourselves that these are mutually exclusive? Why can't they be a very fundamental equivalency?

Nature is the product of non-random selection of randomly varying replicators. To say that because we understand this, it certainly can't be intelligent, is rather naive. If nature is so stupid, why do we steal many of our best ideas from nature? If nature is dumb, why are natures designs so much better than our designs?

“I said it was impossible to look at these without seeing that they were the effect and the expression of mind. I shall never forget Mr. Darwin’s answer. He looked at me very hard and said, “Well, that often comes over me with overwhelming force; but at other times,’ and he shook his head vaguely, adding, ‘it seems to go away'” - Duke of Argyll (F. Darwin 1888, I:316)

With much being played at via this observation of intelligence in nature from Paley's arguments to William Dembski arguing that there's some amount of "Specified complexity" where evolution no longer suffices to explain design and only intelligence on the other end of this same fuzzy line can manage to explain anything (while explaining nothing, as it taken as a hollow skyhook). There's no limit to the amount of obvious interplay between the jaw-dropping power of evolution proper and the cunning wit of sharp intelligence. And while we noddingly agree with things like Orgel's second rule "Evolution is cleverer than you are." we don't take it seriously, and we should.

The truth will set us free. Nature's design, nature's intelligence, and nature's brilliance are not merely illusions they are reality and the production of evolution and evolution is intelligence. Evolution is the real intellectual work of nature. If we are to manage to have any hope at all of programing intelligent computers to do real intellectual work, we need to know that intelligence is to do more than code a tiny subset of poorly executed solutions. We need to make the solution to solutions, and with evolution this is exactly what we have. With evolution working on prediction space, we'd can answer everything. Until we see life itself as the most basic form of intelligence, we stand little chance of programming anything of note in Artificial Intelligence (a term which itself makes about as much sense as artificial evolution.)

It has been said that geology is just physics in slow motion with some trees. Well, biological evolution is just intelligence in slow motion carried out in nature, rather than in a skullful of neurons. They are the same exact thing. And the sooner we pay attention to that fact, the sooner we can use the universal acid of evolution to melt away our problems with intelligence.

"In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation." - Charles Darwin, Origin of Species

Googling: "intelligence is evolution".

• "The cause of human intelligence is evolution"
• "But the essential ingredient in using these structures in computational intelligence is evolution: population-based search with random variation and selection."
• "If intelligence is evolution squared then what comes next will be expolution"
• "One major advantage that animal intelligence has over robotic intelligence is evolution."
• "Intelligence is evolution's unique gift to humans."
• "The cause of human intelligence is evolution."
• "The seeking for Intelligence is Evolution and bangers big or small"
• "less sophisticated forms to complex life (or even intelligence) is evolution."
• "Intelligence is evolution on steriods."

Googling: "evolution is intelligence"

• "It was these extensive research areas that later became the watershed for his book, “Nuclear Evolution is Intelligence, and Intelligence is Life”"
• "As the major survival element in human evolution is intelligence, the conclusion that the higher evolved race, the Caucasians, possessed a superior"
• "The biggest issue I have with evolution is intelligence. If we arrived over millions of years of chaos, chance, uncertainty and random processes"
• "The key to this evolution is intelligence and information management. In order to hit a target,"
• "The positive tool of evolution is, intelligence used with honesty, love, understanding, compassion, sensitivity and kindness."
• "Evolution is intelligence/information accumulation. Development is intelligence/information preservation. Evolution causes ongoing unpredictability"
• "I'm inclined to agree with Idiocracy: the determining factor of procreation (and therefore evolution) is intelligence, though I would add"
• "A more likely sign of Human evolution is intelligence level."
• "Would they argue about evolution? Is intelligence a blessing or a curse?"
• "The most important trait in human evolution is intelligence."
• "I agree that the pinnacle of evolution is intelligence"
• "So, I guess that what I am saying, is that evolution is intelligence at work. Not there yet. What we have is mechanical principles at work"
• "Evolution is intelligence/information accumulation. Development is intelligence/information preservation. Evolution causes ongoing unpredictability"
• ""Evolution is intelligence denying intelligence." Sorry to ruin your party, guys."
• "If evolution is intelligence then why can't we identify it? -- Some have claimed evolution to be the cause behind design and yet who has isolated the scource of this ability for evolution to think or built?"
• "'Evolution Vs. Intelligence?' - Evolution is intelligence. -- We think we're intelligent, so we look at nature and some think that it shows intelligence, while others think it is down to evolution. The basic principles of both intelligence and evolution are the same"
• "Details of Evolution Is there intelligence behind it ?"
• "Further, you make an implicit assumption that the 'aim' of evolution is intelligence – that is completely untrue."

This is every example I've can find of those words together. And the solutions themselves seem so very satisfying that I cannot fathom that they are out there, in earnest, and I've somehow never heard of them. Please consider the idea, and please tell me what you think.

Darwin's Day is coming up!

Prepare the festivities. Waiting on pins and needles. I'm set to donate blood that day, so I guess it's just needles for me.

Social Darwinism vs. Evolution on life, economy and society.

Social Darwinism is the general view of selection within societies being good for the species or that one's plight in life has to do with one's fiber, blood, character, superior breeding, genetics, race, class, etc. That the drunk who dies in the ditch earned his place in the ditch because he was somehow inferior to the businessman who inherited his father's fortune. That if we help the weak, heal the sick and educate the ignorant we are serving to weaken humanity because the weak are weak because they are inferior, the ill are ill because they are weak-blooded, the idiot is stupid because he is unteachable.

Social Darwinism suggests that somehow social situation is the principle result of ones abilities. That some people do well in business not because they had the opportunities and education and luck to succeed but because they are somehow more worthy and able in some intrinsic capacity. Social Darwinism is a hollow echo of actual evolution by natural selection.

In nature the geometric rise of populations of all organisms is checked by nature, predation, death, mate selection, starvation, illness, weather, and sometimes some of these attributes are a little better suited to a situation or a little worse and these improvements find they increase in the gene pool at a greater rate and keep doing so. So by sickness, death, and predation all organisms are naturally given to a propensity towards complexity, utility, adaption, and improvement spiraling off into the infinity of the unknown.

Now, we should notice stark differences between the two things. One is based on some nebulous idea of inferiority and the other is based on certain individuals doing slightly better as far as their genes were concerned. One has a vague idea that somehow peoples lots in life are their own fault or their lot, while the other recognizes the general struggle for existence. One asks that we withhold our mercy and condemn the victims of fate while the other asks that we do jack squat because it simply sits there explaining all the design of life. Social Darwinism is after all an argument about how we should act and general vague notions that that is how things should be or that they are somehow better that way. Whereas evolution by natural selection explains life whether we care or not.

While sometimes Social Darwinism finds political cover and adherents especially among the wealthy and affluent and gets rehashed over and over again in more modern social philosophies like Ayn Rand's Objectivism and finds strong comradeship with bizarre ideas about the need for anarchy as a system of government and deregulation to unbind the invisible hand of the market. That the world is better as a dog eat dog world because it demands we pick ourselves up by our bootstraps and become the captains of our souls and masters of our fate. Interestingly these related ideas find themselves properly opposed by the same thing that opposed Social Darwinism in the first place, actual evolution by natural selection.

Evolution, beyond simply being just a theory to explain the design of life, also finds itself properly applied in very diverse disciplines such as game theory, morality, and economics. It turns out the world isn't really best off as a dog eat dog world. In fact, one would be well advised to understand that the world isn't dog eat dog but that dogs are themselves pack animals and work together in cooperative groups. The invisible hand of the market isn't a magical wand but rather the economic equivalent of the blind watchmaker in biological evolution. And we should closely observe that the blind watchmaker doesn't craft simply efficient producers but is riddled with parasites from top to bottom. And that we should properly understand that cooperation is the natural propensity of evolution rather than necessarily competition. Markets will naturally gravitate towards parasitism or monopoly rather than simply producing the best product for the cheapest price. We should not nor cannot embrace the idea of letting the chips fall where they may while the greatest indicator for where you will end up in life is where you started in life.

Truth comes from understanding that we live in a cooperative society rather than a meritocracy and that the poor are not necessarily poor because of some vague sense of inferiority but rather more correctly because there but for the grace of God go I. That I was born in America has much more to do with my successes than my genes could ever account for. The fact that I was born to a middle class family and was able to go to college without trouble or incident, that I lived in a good neighborhood, that my country has public schools, that I went to honors classes, that both my parents are college graduates in the sciences. Dumb luck has more to do with individual success than anything else. Science has more to do with societal success than anything else. Morality has more to do with humanity's success than anything else.

Suffice it to say that Social Darwinism in all its iterations both old and modern are predicated on rather staggering errors, and evolution as properly understood within society, biology, and economics strongly indicates that our greatest prosperity will be seen not within the idea of laissez faire (hand's off economics) but in the domestication of our markets and the socialization of the essentials of modern life, the promotion of science and embracing of international cooperation.

Reason's Greetings.

Darwin and the Fossil Record.

I don't see many people calling "bullshit" properly on the apologetic that the fossil record is some kind of Achilles heel to the theory of evolution. The fossil record is actually great evidence for Darwin's theory and the objection he rendered to his own theory actually implies something vastly different than we are lead to suppose.

But just in proportion as this process of extermination has acted on an enormous scale, so must the number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed on the earth, be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record.

- Chapter 9, On the Origin of Species

He says that if his theory is true there should be a lot of previous life forms that aren't found in the fossil record. To explain why geology does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chains, he suggests that the fossil record is extremely imperfect. He's right. We understand the processes involved and have a better view of the fossil record and significantly more fossils than we did in Darwin's time. He was specifically saying that his theory calls for a lot more organisms than we're finding in the fossil record and the explanation for this is that the fossil record is much much worse than many people of the day were advocating.

Rather than an Achilles heel to his argument, this would seem to be a remarkable prediction of his theory. That his theory predicts that there were massive numbers of gradually changing ancestors to all the species on the planet and the reason we didn't find them in the fossil record is that fossil folk are grossly wrong about how very very few fossils we have. We have good areas of fossils and a lot of really good fossils, but Darwin never suggested that we needed all these fossil but rather suggested that there were massive gaps in the fossil record, a fact we know to be true. If life forms don't evolve than one could be sated to believe that a new fossil represented a new species that was created by God wholecloth out of nothing. There's no reason to think anything is missing.

Darwin said we were missing large tracts of fossils.
Today we understand that we are missing large tracts of fossils.

Darwin was right. It's not a condemnation of his theory it's yet another example of Darwin making an amazing prediction by using his theory that we later confirmed to be absolutely right. Next time a creationists gabs on about how there are massive gaps in the fossil record, you can understand that this fact was *PREDICTED* by Darwin. You could tell them, but it might be akin to talking to a coffee cup.

It's just something to think about.

The invisible hand of the market, Darwinism

I have long based my beliefs in favor of market regulation on what seems to be a significant flaw in basic economic theory. It turns out others are starting to come around. The analogy of an invisible hand within economics seems to be a firm parallel between the blind watchmaker of evolution. That economics is, at it's core, a Darwinian process where the system that makes the most money tends to survive. So from humble beginnings we end up with an amazing system that is intricate and impressive that self-regulates in basic ways like many simple biological evolutionary processes.

The laissez faire belief is that the market works best when governments and society keep their hands off and lets the hand of the market decide. What they don't seem to understand though is that nature is full of parasites, from worms that live in your eye, to plants that choke to death other plants, to viruses that take over your cells and mold that grows on your feet. Nature is largely a web of parasites. Organisms that devour plants for all the added energy and eat and leech and prey upon each other. And where nature gets along and works in some cooperative fashions the economic parallels are those of monopolies and trusts and market collusion. It isn't a dog eat dog world out there, in fact, dogs are pack animals and work together to devour various other kinds of prey. Rather than fight each other and yield benefits to the consumer, they work together in order to help each other and thus themselves.

There is a long relationship between the theory of evolution and economics. In fact, Darwin borrowed from and saw the light because of the economist Malthus. If the economies of nature were like the economies of humanity, then there is a required curbing of the exponential growth of all species and so any tiny advantage that crept into an individual would quickly become extremely important. The error behind laissez faire thinking is similar to humanity without society.

It is no coincidence that many of those who adhere to a firm belief of hands-off when it comes to the market also tend to oppose societal equality as well. The idea being, we should simply stay out of everything and let reality decide. These individuals show a strong adherence to the social Darwinistic idea that if somebody is poor, it is because he or she simply isn't the fittest when it comes to society.

The claim is that we should exist within a state of nature, within society, within economics, within the world. Such unbending faith is akin to Nietzsche heralding that coming prophesied Uberman, or Ayn Rand lamenting the evil of taxation as a scourge on the creative people. However, much as Hobbes' state of nature where there is "No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short"-- the adherence to the belief that the invisible hand of the market is a benevolent Deus ex Machina leads to societal outcomes equally as disturbing. And while there is a certain draw to the idea of letting the chips fall where they may, the truth is that the strongest indicator of where you will end up in life is where you started in life. Much of business is successful but parasitic. Success in the realm of buisness is not indicative of a healthy econosphere or a satisfied consumer.

Prior to the regulations of the markets, we suffered collapses every decade or so. It was boom and bust like algae blooms, and a modicum of domesticating the markets to actually work for us rather than blindly accepting quasi-mystical beliefs in the unerring nature of the market, ushered in a long standing era of prosperity. When these regulations were reversed, we started to suffer the market blooms again in the form of various economic bubbles.

It is certainly true that nature designed a marvelous sheep, but with the human domestication of sheep, the benefits to mankind are pronounced, woolly, warm, and scratchy. The advocacy for regulations is an advocacy for domesticating the market. To make it work for us, rather than for its own self interests, which may or may not coincide occasionally with those of the consumer.

The parallels between economics and evolution are deep and far reaching. It is simply one of many directions the universal acid of evolution flows. I think it's actually a minor one (comparatively) but, as a result sheds considerable amounts of light.

Been picking on ignorant people lately...

You'd be astounded how often people think evolution says they evolved from a monkey. I'm thinking of getting a generalized reply to the claim:

Common ancestry suggests that humans have common ancestors with monkeys. This common ancestor seems to have lived about 30.5 million years ago. It isn't that one species or group turns into another but the variation within the previous group in the past lead to all the successive species.

Humans are members of the following groups in descending order of size.
cellular organisms; Eukaryota; Fungi/Metazoa group; Metazoa; Eumetazoa; Bilateria; Coelomata; Deuterostomia; Chordata; Craniata; Vertebrata; Gnathostomata; Teleostomi; Euteleostomi; Sarcopterygii; Tetrapoda; Amniota; Mammalia; Theria; Eutheria; Euarchontoglires; Primates; Haplorrhini; Simiiformes; Catarrhini; Hominoidea; Hominidae; Homininae; Homo

Japanese Macaques are members of the following groups in descending order of size.
cellular organisms; Eukaryota; Fungi/Metazoa group; Metazoa; Eumetazoa; Bilateria; Coelomata; Deuterostomia; Chordata; Craniata; Vertebrata; Gnathostomata; Teleostomi; Euteleostomi; Sarcopterygii; Tetrapoda; Amniota; Mammalia; Theria; Eutheria; Euarchontoglires; Primates; Haplorrhini; Simiiformes; Catarrhini; Cercopithecoidea; Cercopithecidae; Cercopithecinae; Macaca; Macaca fuscata

Common ancestry doesn't suggest that humans came from monkeys but rather humans came from Catarrhinis and monkeys such as Japanese Macaques also came from Catarrhinis some time in the past. And where variation with species are minor, those small variations in separate groups over the last 30.5 million years have lead to greatly varied species such as humans and gorillas on one side of the divide and macaques and baboons on the other. The theory of evolution suggests that the slight variation between species such as the gray and red squirrels could become as great as the variations between the different primates. It isn't that we are related to monkeys, but rather that if you go back far enough, we are related to all life on this planet.

The process by which organisms change is called evolution, and the mechanism is natural selection. Given any population of crickets for example if allowed to reproduce such that every offspring were able to grow to adulthood and have more offspring themselves the entire world would be several feet deep in crickets within a few generations. Therefore there must be forces which are restricting the ability of crickets to carry out their natural exponential growth. Predation, access to food, access to mates, etc limit the cricket population. Now, if in this necessary struggle for life a change were to occur in a cricket's DNA which was beneficial to it's possessor in this struggle for life, that cricket and those crickets with that gene would do better than those organisms without that gene. If it were not useful it would either quickly die or be less successful in the struggle for life.

What once was very little variation, over eons becomes very large variations. So what once was several millions of years ago only a slight change within a species become a small change between two species such as gray squirrels and red squirrels and as time goes on and more and more beneficial changes are added into the genomes as they better and better adapt to different and changing conditions of life, independently and among the great tapestry of lifeforms and selective pressures.

Taken to the intellectual limits this suggests that all organism on the planet are related and explains the biology, genetics, design, development, distribution, and every other aspect of life on this planet.

--

Somehow I think it needs a toss in with the theory of evolution by natural selection. A sentence or two with some oomph that if thought about would explain the theory.

update: added a couple paragraphs describing the main thrust of the theory.

Algorithmic Darwinism?

Generally evolution isn't just a theory but an algorithm for beneficial change in direction of the selection. So if variations occur within a species and any of those variations are, for any reason, beneficial to that organism it will increase at a rate greater than that of the average population. So whatever seeks to keep a population down will keep only a certain subset of the population down. The population which can avoid being naturally selected against will flourish. If there is a general ability (like that in DNA) to change and engineer very specific structures and organs and organisms then this process will spiral up creating organism of ever increasing adaptation, complexity, and functionality. Further as every species is undergoing this process they all will play off each other in complex and wonderful ways like newts so poisonous that they could kill thousands of people with a drop of poison and snakes that regularly eat them. Like cheetahs running quickly and gazelles running about as quick. Like the antlers of a deer that weigh so much that they make the deer far easier prey and the females who mate with the males with the largest antlers. It's a very simple process but, even a cursory look will show that such a process would work, and when we look at nature there are abundant artifacts that are only explained by exactly that process.

It's all a work in process. Whatever explain the theory in an understandable way in a pretty short read is certainly the most fit variation of this.

Did Darwin Kill God, Part 3: Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda.

Despite the poor handling by Cunningham, the question of whether or not atheism and evolution have any direct or indirect ties is actually a fairly interesting one. On one hand, atheism is simply the non-belief in any gods or gods and the only reason one truly accepts atheism is because theism is not embraced. In this sense atheism certainly doesn't rely on anything other than the failure of theism. Whereas evolution is an astounding and impressive explanation as elegant as it is simple, and as powerful as time allows. It fully explains the location, design, complexity, elegance and beauty of life. It's a complete explanation for one of our greatest questions, but it says nothing about God. -- And in that, it is somewhat atheistic. In the solution to one of the most important questions ever there's no role for gods to play. If we contrast this with Paley's argument which would have been the foremost accepted explanation prior to Darwin we can see a stark contrast between the two. Paley's theory could very well have made deists out of pure rationalists simply by being the most convincing explanation. When we see the amazing designs of nature, Paley was just scratching the surface, and though his claim was, admittedly, an argument from ignorance, what an argument it was. It would seem unfathomable to anybody that you could explain all of life with simple secular terms. That any force, other than an intelligent fathomer, could come up with such amazing and seemingly purposeful designs.

As Richard Dawkins noted in The Blind Watchmaker,

An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: "I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one." I can't help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.

In this same vein, it is my opinion that the way in which it could be said that Darwin Killed God is that he moved the end point of a functional epistemology. If one lived their life based on the evidence and the best reasons they had at hand, prior to Darwin one would have been a rational deist and after Darwin, outright atheism became the natural endpoint to living an evidence driven life.

It has always been the case that there have been scientific ethics and scientific endeavors, since the first of the ancient Greeks questioned the notion of whether or not progress was possible. Whether or not people could understand more of the world than they currently understood. If there exists some way of investigating reality. This is the first scientific conflict with religion.

There has always existed specific scientific virtues of curiosity, empiricism, and progress throughout history. Wherever they are suppressed, science is suppressed. Wherever embraced, science is embraced. When Galen challenged early evolutionists whose theory of transmutation was weak, powerless and wrong, he attacked the ideas with empirical evidence, pushed our understanding of the human body, and yet still concluded that the divine was the most logical conclusions. However, he didn't go beyond his evidence. He didn't propose an infinite God because there were noted limitations within men. He went were the evidence lead him, and the evidence lead him to God.

When ever these virtues are challenged, even by great minds, they end scientific inquiry. Wherever they flourish, science flourishes. Aristotle was a proponent of science in one's own mind. The idea that one could rightly divine by thinking about an issue the correct answer. This idea may seem compelling, but it has always been wrong. It was wrong when Aristotle concluded that objects of different masses fall to Earth at different speeds, it was wrong when Galileo dropped different masses off the Tower of Pisa to see if they did, and it was wrong when the masses struck the ground at the same time. Asking whether or not our beliefs are true, and how we can go about seeing if they are, has always been the scientific way of looking at the world. Wanting the most true beliefs and the fewest false beliefs has always been the core of science and the results of scientific virtues.

Isaac Newton was the greatest scientist to ever live (if this is hyperbole, you'll have to drop a few names). But, he was also a Christian. He wasn't Christian because he was blinded by his faith and wrong about what to believe, he was Christian largely because that is what a rational view of the world would lead on to believe in the 1600s. With no explanation of how life or any part of the universe arises by chance or by simple laws, it would have been absurd for Newton to not conclude theism. That is not to say he wasn't a freethinker. He refused to be ordained as was required by a man of his position because he felt that Trinitarianism was idolatry because the first commandment said that "I am the Lord your God, who delivered you out of Egypt, you shall have no other gods before me" and frankly Jesus didn't deliver the Jewish people out of Egypt so worshiping Jesus is worshiping an idol. And in those places where the scientific ethics failed and religious ethics succeeded they rendered Newton sadly moot. In the end of Principia, Newton concluded that the order of the planets and their interactions between each other must be the result of the hand of God keeping them working. It was another hundred years before Laplace properly explained perturbation theory and did the calculation properly without God ('I have no need for that hypothesis' or so he was rumored to have told Napoleon).

Cunningham cited St. Augustine to make the claim that Christians never really took Genesis as literal. However, what Augustine was really angling at is that they never really took science literally and they shouldn't embarrass themselves in the company of those who do. Augustine wasn't saying that it should be taken as figurative, but that rather it didn't need to reveal scientific facts about the world (which Augustine noted God clearly knew) but that we didn't need to know them. We have no need to be curious about the world because all we need is to be saved and all we need to be saved is the Bible. We don't need to test the world or test God, because we just need to be saved. And even if we could progress in our understanding of the world, it simply isn't necessary to be saved. Augustine wasn't saying that we should throw Genesis out the window and ignore it, he was saying that science is stupid and you don't need it to be saved, so God didn't include it in the Bible. This isn't a hard conclusion to reach, Augustine spelled it out:

In short, it must be said that our authors knew the truth about the nature of the skies, but it was not the intention of the Spirit of God, who spoke through them, to teach men anything that would not be of use to them for their salvation.

This is the division that has always existed between science and religion. Why when we look back through the ages we find many rational and scientifically minded people believing in God in times prior to Darwin and after Darwin we find that these examples cease with a surprising abruptness. Why should Thomas Jefferson, who was perhaps our only scientifically literate president, have said, "He (Calvin) was indeed an Atheist, which I can never be". He derided the newer supernaturalist brands of theology as talks of nothing and to be equivalent to saying that there is no God. Why should Jefferson be a theist when any contemporary individual of such a caliber embrace atheism? I contend that the answer is Darwin.

Cunningham is not only wrong on the obvious points, that Genesis was intended to describe the start of the universe within Christian theology and was clearly believed as mostly literal by a vast majority of Christians throughout the ages. Or that ultradarwinists extremists are trying to use Darwin to argue against God by embracing the Selfish Gene and Memes. Cunningham is also wrong on the core points, there is some respect that we could say that Darwin killed God. We can't accept that literally, as there never was a God to be killed. But, it is safe to say that Darwin made not believing in God the reasonable position to embrace, given a careful and full examination of the evidence. It wasn't until after Darwin and largely because of Darwin that a full embrace of scientific ethics lead to atheism. Darwin moved the endpoint of a functional epistemology from theistic conclusions like those (somewhat non-sequitury) drawn by Paley and others to having no need for God. Darwin made God superfluous. And for a God that does nothing, this is worse than a bullet. A difference, that makes no difference, is no difference. A dead God, or living God, or non-existent God doesn't change a jot or tittle of our existence, and Darwin made all three functionally identical when he explained life itself.

Did Darwin Kill God, Part 2: Science

Continuing from Part 1.

When we left off we learned that the battle between Evolution and Christianity has nothing to do with science and religion and rather everything to do with politics and morality. Having previously learned that real Christians have never ever believed Genesis was literal.

William Jennings Bryan was a fundamentalist Christian Socialist who opposed evolution largely because he hated social Darwinism and clearly Social Darwinism is exactly the same as evolution.

So no Christian ever takes Genesis as literal in the all of history and nobody has ever opposed the teaching of evolution. Until now, we are currently caught out in left field by Bizarro-Superman's failure to stop the Scopes Monkey trial. Bryan was a complete freak and that's why he opposed evolution. Darrow on the other side, thought that science and reason could give a better morality than Christianity. We are told that that "Is a morality based on survival of the fittest!" However, nobody on either side bothered to ask if by embracing some absurd apologetics they couldn't be compatible and this is why people thought they were at odds, because everybody was just too stupid to ask whether they actually were at odds. When, as Cunningham has repeatedly told us, Magic Man done it in a garden with a magical tree is clearly compatable with it happened slowly by a self-refining process over billions of years so long as nobody *ACTUALLY* believes "Magic Man done it in a garden with a magical tree."

But Bryan suggested that the days were time periods rather than literal days. That's old Earth Creationism and they aren't at odds. What? Pfft. Worried about morality and social decline Christians embraced Young Earth Creationism by the 1960s because somebody wrote a book about Noah's Ark and how it totally happened. The creation museum freaks him out.

Literal Biblical interpretations undoes several hundred years of science and several thousand years of theology. However, the theology he's talking about is just pragmatism. You shouldn't tell the non-believers the funny parts because they'll laugh... guess what, we're laughing.

"By calling Genesis a science textbook they are calling upon us to worship science" -- WTF. No. Talk to creationists you dumbass they want you to worship God, not science. They oppose science because the Bible and scientific understandings are at odds with each other and they want their Bible to win.

But then there was ID which claimed to be science. "But, in reality it was just Paley's discredited notion of God." Oh, fuck you very much. Paley's notion of a watchmaker God was clearly the majority opinion and though the argument has a few holes in it (you can't actually conclude God did it) the notion is far more impressive and important than Cunningham credits it with. He seems to be very inclined towards suggesting that the Argument from Design is a mere footnote of frindge elements who weren't part of real Christianity that always disregarded Genesis as hokum.

'ID talks about God who intervenes with world affairs, and this means that he should intervene to defeat evil.' There are so many problems with that that I'm at a loss to list them all. First off ID doesn't need an intervening God. God could have just designed everything and scampered off. Cunningham's God still doesn't get to dodge the Argument from Evil because Cunningham's God is "the source of the gift of life". As to why this couldn't be the God of ID escapes me, but apparently for those keeping track:

ID God, Has no solution to the problem of evil. Not the source of life.
Cunningham God, doesn't need to solve the problem of evil. Gives gift of life.

Cunningham's God doesn't stop child molesters either, but these failures are only failures for other people's gods. Cunningham's God is the god of Traditional Christianity. Your Christianity is a freakshow bit of nonsense that actually has the audacity to believe the Bible. Philistines!

"God is existence itself." -- There's a word for that retard! It's called "existence". Creationism is a modern anomaly, that has nothing to do with Christianity. They believe that God created the world like it says he did in the Bible. That means they are nothing more than idolaters who want to worship science. -- I'm running out of absurd things to say about this position so I've taken to just repeating it in different words.

DARWINIAN FUNDAMENTALISTS! He's going to Boston to meet somebody who says that evolution has killed the need for God all together. Who could this fundamentalist be? Who could this closed-minded bigot against religion be? I'm on the edge of my seat! Universal Darwinism? Ultra Darwinism? Targets God? Hm. Who could it be. -- Dan Dennett? Really?

He uses evolution to justify atheism? What? Hey dumbass, you don't seem to know what you're talking about. "There's no role for a creative God. It takes no intelligence and it happens automatically." -- That's absolutely right.

"Ultradarwinists say that evolution says that there cannot be a God. " -- What? What part of "no role for" said "cannot be"? Evolution properly understood doesn't need God. It doesn't need anything but imperfect replication and heredity. That's why it's so jawdropping. It doesn't mean there's no God, it just means that God isn't needed to create life because life is fully able to create itself.

The basis for the newfound confidence in this is "The Selfish Gene". Now this is just poor scholarship. Its much the same as attributing all of Young Earth Creationism to one book on Noah's Ark. The Selfish Gene simply takes the Gene-Eye-View to better explain things like kin altruism.

"Some of those who disagree are some of the best scientists in the world." Hm. Francis Collins? What does he have to do with anything. There are more genes in other things than in other people. And our understandings of genes are quickly becoming more fuzzy. And this means the Selfish Gene fails and Ultradarwinism fails. What? These are certainly insightful but they aren't demolishing to universal-darwinism or evolution as an algorithm. Gene-Eye-View isn't a rock solid view, it's just a better view than organisms-eye-view. People with Huntingston die of Huntingston, but they also have more children on average than those who don't have it. This means that the gene prospers at the expense of the organism. It's hard to understand how a fatal genetic disorder could prosper without understanding that it makes more copies of itself. Also, things like altruism don't make much sense when one is constantly competing with others. Why should you give your life to save your entire family, because the genes that tell you you should are found more in your family.

You can't just reduce it to a gene and say that's the only unit. Nobody does that. In fact, after the Selfish Gene Dawkins made a point in several of his later books to point out the levels at which evolution occurs. However, since genes are the units of heredity it is these emergent properties at higher levels that ultimately reverberate down (they don't actually go anywhere, evolution is a bit like spooky action at a distance in this respect) and promote those genes that gave rise to those properties.

While flocking is useful to birds, and something about genes causes birds to flock (or those genes in those environments in those mixtures), it's those genes that benefit from flocking but the behavior even if we can't really pin down exactly what does what. We can predict however that if a gene somewhat critical to flocking breaks down that organism is going to be less fit in certain circumstances.

Collins: "Atheism, the statement that there is no God. Is not a scientific statement." -- Well the statement, I don't believe in God because I don't feel the proponents of the God theory have successfully made their case, IS a scientific statement.

"Science is limited to making statements about nature." -- In nature, we find no evidence that there is a God.

"Evolution is the answer to how. God is the answer to why." - Why is grass green? How did that come about? They evolved to be green because the red and blue ends of the spectrum are filled with some high quality photons and a vast number of low quality ones. The middle line green photons are fairly common but fairly weak and neither way of exploiting chemical reactions as such can properly utilize them (either get the most or get the best). So we have plants that evolved from blue-green plants into green plants and reflect green light because they never evolved a way to properly utilize it. How the fuck does that not answer the questions of how AND why?

"The God of the Gaps was never part of Christainity." -- Really. I'll just let that line sink in.

Not just believers in God who share his views. Atheists do to, who is this Chamberlin atheist he's going to bring up? Michael Ruse. Hey, I remeber that name. He published a few things that were utterly incoherent and nonsensical.

Neither Dan Dennett nor Richard Dawkins implies that Evolution implies atheism. Ruse is fucktarded if he doesn't understand their position.

"Atheists use the selfish gene to try and suppose that evolution does imply atheism." -- No.

"A theory has emerged that thinks it can explain everything, love, morality, even my belief in a creator. So is it safe to say that Darwinsm has killed god. It's a theory, which was born in Britian, it's call the theory of memes." - While certainly Christianity would be a meme of sorts, it's certainly the case that love and morality are both largely explained largely in the context of good old genetics.

"It goes much further than saying there's no God. It says there's no you or me." -- First off, evolution never said there was no God and neither did your supposed Darwinian Fundamentalists make that implication from evolution. There's no God because there's no God. Evolution is true because evolution is true. Memes don't suggest for a moment that you don't exist, but that you are colonized by memes. That a number of the ideas you have are had by you because those ideas are propagated by society, because those ideas are those ideas which are good at propagating.

It's a really good theory and the deficits are in the vagueness of how they are stored which is more an problem in cognition than with the theory in the context of universal Darwinism. This doesn't mean that everything is an illusion, it means that much of cognition is gleamed from society and society evolves. This doesn't imply for a moment as Cunningham suggests that being colonized by the Christianity meme means he's deluded and God isn't real. I'm infected by the gravity meme and I can verify that a trillion different ways, all of which are quite useful.



There's a fundamental flaw at the heart of theory. He also believes in evolution and therefore he's been colonized by the theory of evolution meme. Yes, it does. "How can I trust this meme to be any more true than any other meme?" -- Science. Ever heard of it? The meme that humans only use 10% of their brains is popular but false. You can quickly verify that it isn't true with a little research or careful reflection. Science is how you sort the true from the false. Science is the epistemological foundation that allows you to accept the true and reject the unproven.

Cunningham, with dramatic music, suggests that his utter idiocy on this point is a "philosophical problem that confronts anyone who believes in the theory of memes." Science requires objective truth, but there's no benchmark and their survival has nothing to do with their truth. The problem is science in such a view of the world is the clear suggestion that we should test these ideas and reject those which aren't true. Science is the methodological process by which we are asked to give true memes a selective advantage over the false ones.

Darwin's theory cannot be the whole story, and being but a chapter can't explain away God. First off, nobody said it was the whole story, he misunderstands universal Darwinism. Evolution by natural selection is an algorithm, algorithms apply everywhere and where ever we have the needed bits, evolution will occur. Memes, however, meet this criteria and thus must by definition evolve as such.

Cunningham then visits Morris who talks about music who notes that birds use music in much the same way humans do. This is generally as Dennett notes a Good Trick™, where two different bits of evolution converge on the same solution, much like bats and birds both fly. This isn't a demolishing blow to evolution, or something bizarre or odd, it's quite common and fairly interesting. The fact that there are solutions to things in design space which can be discovered via evolution, doesn't suggest that evolution is somehow flawed or incomplete. The reverse of the insinuation here is utterly flummoxing, would we expect to find that evolution actually made flight work in the first place? Is it evolution that made insects fly, not because the design for flight evolved within the world of physics, engineering, and design space, but because evolution itself produced flight and deigned that an upward force exceeding the downward force of gravity would propel something upwards?

"The theory of evolution helps my understanding of God from becoming too comfortable. Darwin hated religious controversy. He would have been dismayed. Accepted it and stop using it to attack religion!" -- Fuck you. Your magic man done it ideas are retarded, and just because you can claim with a straight face that nobody actually thinks "magic man done it" doesn't make it remotely true. I don't say there's no God because of evolution, I say there's no God because there's no God.

Part 3, Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda, coming soon.

False Dichotomies, Fractals, and the nature of beauty.

There is within apologetics an argument which actually serves to, when one properly understands the flaws in the argument, point out an interesting oversight people make about the nature of reality. The general problem with apologetics is that they argue for the existence of God and thus, by the non-existence of God, are going to be wrong. However, the flaws of the surviving apologetics almost always are indicative of inadequacies of explanations. For example, Paley's argument for the design of nature is and was compelling because there was an underlying problem of how to design natural things in a mindless fashion. When Darwin answered this, there was considerable wind taken out of the sails of the underlying argument. To some extent there are similar bits to be found in other popular apologetics. After all one must note that there is some evolution taking place. Silly arguments are only made once. If somebody else is repeating the argument there must be a reason they suppose they won't be laughed out of the room.

"Does that mean that universals like 'Good', 'Beauty', 'Justice' amd nimbers and ideas are lost because they cannot be found in space and time?"

Here we find subtle throws toward the Transcendental Argument for the existence of God (TAG). And should, if my idea holds, find that any seeming plausibility of the argument is because there's an underlying real and impressive failing. We can certainly fault the argument across the board for various failings on validity and soundness, but it must be tapping into something real and something misunderstood to seem plausible enough to repeat.

There is ultimately an underlying contradiction within such arguments. The relevancy of the concepts of numbers, beauty, goodness, justice, morality, etc. simply extends from the underlying usefulness of those things to us.

The real problem is the assumed dichotomy which is actually a false dichotomy. Everything which doesn't physical exist is a concept. -- This is the underlying mistake. It actually lines a number of different apologetic arguments and needs to be kept in mind. There do exist somethings which don't physically exist but which aren't concepts either. I could think of a number that nobody has every thought of ever before, where was this number before I thought of it? Did it physically exist? Did it exist as a concept? Was it real before? Is it different now? Some arguments within apologetics rely explicitly on this distinction such as the transcendental argument for the existence of God which offers that because math, logic, science, morality etc. exist but do not physically exist, they must therefore conceptually exist (false dichotomy). And since conceptual existence would make them subjective they therefore cannot be the concepts of anything imperfect like people but must be the products of the mind of God.

Basically, there are systems which arise out of basic rules as emergent properties or general themes or monsters of various sorts. Fractals (initially called monsters by mathematicians) are a good example. Fractals are generally things we simply couldn't imagine but they are really there and are heavily utilized by natural selection. Even if fractals aren't used by something they can still be described and prescribed and derived. That they function in the real world and are very useful simply testifies to this fact. The same could be said for all such designs. Where is the giraffe located? There are giraffes now, but before they evolved they didn't physically exist nor did they exist as a concept of reproduction, mutation (monstrosities as Darwin called them, "another sort of monster"), and selection. However the general design for the giraffe would have still worked assuming the proper environment even without physical or conceptual giraffes. Ultimately another transcendental example (and a better one for understanding) is design space (the space of the infinite number of possible designs). Better than logic or mathematics which are coaxed by design to only allow a limited array of possible answers we have the infinite set of possible designs to be utilized within physical space. They aren't concepts and they aren't objects, nor does it hold that they are entirely non-existent either.

While things like beauty might be subjective, things we consider good or just may actually have non-physical non-conceptual components to them. It may actually be better to eat a cheese cake than to murder an entire school full of kids, not simply as a concept but as an actually. And though, you cannot touch the reason for this betterment, it does actually exist. Change some of the parameters and you change the resulting outcome or solution, but that's not to say the same best solution and same general approximations of a solution do not really exist (even though they aren't concepts or objects). Every time you use proper mathematics to add 2 and 2 you will get 4. Not because God wills it, or because it is the nature of God to provide a consistent mathematics, this will always work because that is what the system requires. There are infinite other varying systems which allow contradictions and thus collapse, but there's also this structure which allows for amazing complexity. Much like when you change some of the variables in a fractal you get basically nothing.

The underlying mistake is that the transcendental myriad of possible possibilities are considered illusionary or simply recrafted as God or aspects of the nature of God. Ultimately the compelling parts of the argument are the parts which suggest that there's some here here, because there is. Just as there was something to that which Paley was suggesting. It certainly isn't as breathtaking as Darwin's revelation, but it's certainly real. Mathematics exists. It isn't physical and it isn't conceptual, but it's real. We need to properly understand that, and know how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Darwin Day 200th

Happy Birthday God-Crusher D.

Good old Bicentennials.

http://www.seedmagazine.com/darwin_200.php

Watson and Wilson talk about Darwin.

(via Pharyngula)

The Genius Of Darwin

I really love these little programs Dawkins puts out. Program 1 of 3. (Others out in due time).

Darwin Day Tomorrow... Bow before your God!

(via Skepchick)

199th Darwin Day is tomorrow (actually it would just be Darwin's 199th birthday and hardly similar, also 199th Lincoln's birthday too). Remember, desecration of the Bible is Mandatory. Drinking the blood of Christian babies is canceled (due to increase awareness via Saint Dawkins we were going to drink the blood of "children of Christian parents" but then a lot of atheists are children of Christian parents and that kind of weirded people out, the suggestion of drinking wine and just saying it was blood was blasted on the grounds that "nobody could be that stupid").

Hallowed are the Ori.
Read the book of Origin!

On the Origin of Species: E-book.

For those odd characters who care about biological evolution and evolution in general enough to hear the Father of Evolution's words on the subject, directly... but not caring enough to read them with a well-formed eye (save that reversed ganglia), one can do so with their well-formed ear.