Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
This is said to be a Brazilian bird (please identify the species), and it sure looks to me as if it’s playing, though, I suppose, one could say it’s trying to crack what it thinks are eggs. (The velocity of hurling, however, seems to great for that.) Birders—any guesses?
h/t: Ant
I swear, it’s harder to convince the average person that their behaviors and “choices” are determined solely by the laws of physics—and not by some kind of dualistic “ghost in the machine”—than it is to convince the average religionist that there’s no evidence for God. That’s because not only do goddies have a special reason to believe in dualistic free will—their attainment of paradise or hell depends on their free ability to choose—but all of us have a strong feeling of agency, as if we really could have chosen otherwise when making a decision. (The classic dilemma is a burger vs a salad at a restaurant.)
Let me define terms before I pose my question, a sort of survey of readers. And let me divide up people into three categories, A, B, and C.
A. Libertarians: Those who believe in a kind of dualism: that somehow our brains can really overcome the laws of physics and, were we to return to a previous situation of “choosing”, with every particle in the universe configured as it was before, we really could have chosen differently from how we did.
As I’ve shown before, a study by Sarkissian et al., surveying people in four countries, found that this is indeed the way most people conceive of the world: between 65% and 85% of people say that were they to return to an identical situation of choice, they could have chosen differently from how they did. (You can, if you wish, deny the Sarkissian et al. results, but they do match my anecdotal experience with people who have never discussed determinism and behavior.) Further, 60%-85% of people surveyed say that in such a deterministic world, people would not be considered “fully morally responsible” for their actions.
B. Hard determinists. (I am one of these.) Those are people who believe that our brains, being material objects operating under the laws of physics, can give only a single output from the inputs they receive (barring any quantum indeterminacy operating in our neurons). Our behaviors are solely and uniquely decided by our genes and our environments, and nothing else. There is no dualism, and if you returned to the “original situation” described above, you would always decide the same thing. We feel as if we are agents who could have chosen otherwise, but in reality we can’t. Hard determinists like me feel it’s pointless to talk about “free will.” Besides me, to other hard determinists are Alex Rosenberg and Sam Harris.
C. Determinist “compatibilists.” Members of this class share the view of hard determinists that in a given situation, with all molecules configured identically, we can do only a single thing. As Sean Carroll argues in his new book The Big Picture (p. 295):
Under naturalism [Carroll’s a naturalist] there isn’t that much difference between a human being and a robot. We are all just complicated collections of matter moving in patterns, obeying impersonal laws of physics in an environment with an arrow of time.
The difference between members of this class and hard determinists is that the class “C” members think that determinism is compatible with some conception of free will, though of course not the version adhered to by libertarians.
How compatilists conceive of free will differs: some say our “freedom” is simply the complexity of the human brain, which allows us to weigh different inputs (“reasons”) before acting in a way no other animal can, even if those weights are simply aspects of our neurons existing in our brains. Others say our freedom resides simply in not acting under duress: a person cannot “choose freely” to go to the store if he’s locked in jail. (My response, of course, is that the bars of a jail are no different from the bars in our mind that compel us to do one thing rather than another.) Because compatibilists disagree on what constitutes “free will”; the only thing they agree on is that we can conceive of human actions so that we have something called “free will.” Examples of compatibilists are Dan Dennett, Sean Carroll, and our own reader Vaal, who has argued elegantly for compatibilism on this site.
Readers who have followed our discussions know my view: I fit into class B, and consider the difference between classes B and C to be largely semantic. If you want to call the complexity of human brain programming as “free will,” so be it, even though that’s not what most people think of it. To me, it’s like saying to a Brit, “Okay, if you want to call a cookie a ‘biscuit,’ fine. They’re still the same thing.” But of course others disagree.
You’ll also know that the reason I bang on about this at length—frustrating compatibilist readers—is because I believe that fully grasping determinism has a huge potential effect on human behavior, including in particular how we treat transgressors or criminals. It also has import in politics in general: e.g., many Republicans believe in their “just world” philosophy that many people are poor simply because they made the wrong choices. Such a philosophy makes no sense under determinism. Finally, we all surely agree that accepting determinism will sink the libertarian free will inherent in many religions, which I think is a good thing. You simply CANNOT freely accept whether or not to hold Christ as your savior, or Muhammad as Allah’s prophet. To punish people for eternity on the basis that they could have chosen otherwise makes no sense at all.
This is a long-winded preface to my question for readers, which I’ll put in bold. It’s this:
Philosophers squabble about the difference between classes B and C, whereas to Professor Ceiling Cat (Emeritus), a far more important argument is to be had between members of combined class (B + C)—the determinists—versus members of class A, the libertarians. To me, the latter argument, B + C vs. A, is of vital importance for making society better, while the argument between B vs. C is basically a semantic squabble that has an import on academic philosophy but not on society.
Do you agree with me or not? State you reasons. (Try to be briefer than I’ve been!)
When you read this I’ll be over—or, if something goes wrong, in—the Atlantic. If all goes well, Grania will have done the Hili dialogue; please her a hand for repeatedly filling in for me when I’m traveling.
I woke up about 2 a.m. in the Warsaw airport hotel and this idea suddenly popped into my head. Usually, genius ideas I have in the middle of the night are forgotten by morning (and rightfully so!), but I still remember this one. I’m throwing it out here because I can’t remember anybody making this claim before, though given the tortuous history of theology, someone surely has.
One thing that every liberal Christian or Jew admits is that the morality laid out in the Old Testament (and, for liberal Christians, much that appears in the New Testament, like the existence of hell for those who reject Jesus as Savior and heaven for those who don’t) are to be ignored—that most Biblical morality no longer applies. So, for instance, we no longer agree with these views of right and wrong, which the Wikipedia article on “ethics in the Bible” summarizes conveniently:
Elizabeth Anderson criticizes commands God gave to men in the Old Testament, such as: kill adulterers, homosexuals, and “people who work on the Sabbath” (Leviticus 20:10; Leviticus 20:13; Exodus 35:2, respectively); to commit ethnic cleansing (Exodus 34:11-14, Leviticus 26:7-9); commit genocide (Numbers 21: 2-3, Numbers 21:33–35, Deuteronomy 2:26–35, and Joshua 1–12); and other mass killings.Anderson considers the Bible to permit slavery, the beating of slaves, the rape of female captives in wartime, polygamy (for men), the killing of prisoners, and child sacrifice. She also provides a number of examples to illustrate what she considers “God’s moral character”: “Routinely punishes people for the sins of others … punishes all mothers by condemning them to painful childbirth”, punishes four generations of descendants of those who worship other Gods, kills 24,000 Israelites because some of them sinned (Numbers 25:1–9), kills 70,000 Israelites for the sin of David in 2 Samuel 24:10–15, and “sends two bears out of the woods to tear forty-two children to pieces” because they called someone names in 2 Kings 2:23–24.
Blackburn provides examples of Old Testament moral criticisms such as the phrase in Exodus 22:18 that has “helped to burn alive tens or hundreds of thousands of women in Europe and America”: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” and notes that the Old Testament God apparently has “no problems with a slave-owning society”, considers birth control a crime punishable by death, and “is keen on child abuse”.Additional examples that are questioned today are: the prohibition on touching women during their “period of menstrual uncleanliness (Lev. 15:19–24)”, the apparent approval of selling daughters into slavery (Exodus 21:7), and the obligation to put to death someone working on the Sabbath (Exodus 35:2).
There are, of course, many more. Abraham and Isaac aren’t even mentioned!
These days nobody feels obliged to carry out such commands.
There are several ways to get around this rejection of Biblical morality; the first two assume that the Bible was somehow either the Word of God or divinely inspired by God.
Now we nonbelievers know this already. The priors for humans making up the Bible are surely higher than the priors for some Palestinian scribes channeling the word of a God who never left any evidence for His existence. (This is, of course, irrelevant to the issue of whether Jesus or Moses really existed as non-divine beings.)
I’m absolutely sure that religionists will say that my argument is naive, but who is more naive than someone who not only believes a book that has already proven to be wrong in many parts and a human construction in others, but also thinks their own scripture is the right one, invalidating, say, the Qur’an and the Bhagavad Gita? Who is more naive than someone who claims to prove definitively that humans can go to Heaven but dogs cannot?
Even neglecting the Euthyphro argument, which I consider one of the greatest contributions of philosophy to everyday human life, the fact that Biblical morality not only no longer applies, but is largely considered to be immoral, must certainly mean this: the precepts of behavior laid out in scripture were applicable only to their time, and were therefore constructed by humans. This, of course, completely destroys the argument that without the Bible, “Western” civilization would degenerate into anarchy and immorality. For if humans could make a workable morality for two millennia ago, they can surely construct one that works in our day.
Okay, tell me where I’m wrong.
For those who have followed my various gropings and goosings at airports, I will happily report that, at Chopin Airport at Warsaw, security was a breeze. We didn’t have to remove our shoes (but we did our watches), we had to remove laptops and liquids from our bags, as well as taking off our belts, but then we passed through a metal detector only, and I WAS NOT GOOSED—or even touched.
As far as I can see, nearly all European airports have abandoned what to me is the most noxious aspect of security besides groping: removing your shoes. In the U.S. the shoes-off thing is simple security theater: a precaution that is meant to make us think we are safe but doesn’t really do so.
And so, buttocks ungroped, I board my flight to Chicago.
by Grania
Good morning! Jerry is in the skies at the moment, the holiday is sadly over. He will check in with us when he can, wifi permitting.
Today is the anniversary of the death of Elvis Presley back in 1977 (remember the Elvis is still alive conspiracy theories that used to abound?)
His music was never particularly my taste (although I have a few friends who will disown me for that admission) however he had an undeniable influence on rock and roll and other genres both contemporaneously and for decades afterwards.
Here is Jailhouse Rock from 1957 where he is all young and fresh-faced and innocent looking.
This is probably the Presley track I like the most, the JXL bowdlerised version of A little less conversation from 2002.
Hili is acknowledging the end of her holidays as well, although I suspect that her business as usual days look suspiciously similar to her leisure days.
A: You haven’t been here for a long time.
Hili: The holiday is over, it’s time to get back to the duties of the editor-in-chief.
In Polish:
Ja: Dawno cię tu nie było.
Hili: Wakacje się skończyły, trzeba wrócić do obowiązków naczelnej.
The bold explorer Leon is still on his travels though.
Leon: I will just check whether we are going in the right direction.
Update:
Since I posted the Elvis video this morning, Youtube has updated my Recommended Viewing lists and has completely repopulated the My Mix lists. It’s my own fault. I literally brought this on myself.
Courtesy of reader blue, we have a hippo, apparently in Japan, who seems to be regularly fed a round watermelon in front of tourists. He disposes of it in a few seconds—rind and all. Check the dentition that allows him to do that!
I’m not a fan of zoos, especially not when they keep large, free-ranging animals. But if they allow zoos to exist, at least give the prisoners some novelty—like this.
LOL, I love PuffHo headlines. Here, His Highness Brian Cox throws serious shade on a climate-change denialist. This tweet is from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “Q&A” show which just featured Cox on a panel which includes an elected Senator, Malcolm Roberts, who’s also a climate change denier (Aussies, please tell us who this clown is).
When the politician denied temperatures were rising, Cox pulled out a NASA graph to demonstrate the data. (It’s like pulling Marshall McLuhan from behind a sign in “Annie Hall”). Roberts then claims the supposed rise in temperatures reflects a conspiracy, and Cox notes the difficulty of getting virtually every scientist in the world to conspire as part of the same hoax (that, by the way, is also what creationists believe about us evolutionists.)
And why on earth would scientists want to cook the data anyway? Creationists think evolutionists conspire because the rotten foundations of evolution help prop up our atheism, but what’s the reason for the collusion among climate scientists?
We've had a pause in warming & NASA corrupted data, says Malcolm Roberts. @ProfBrianCox examines the graphs #QandA https://t.co/HTNk4Bzrk1
— QandA (@QandA) August 15, 2016
For more on Roberts’s views, see this article from the Brisbane Courier-Mail.
h/t: Grania
It’s with a heavy heart—as usual—that I take leave of my human and animal friends in Dobrzyn. And although the cherries may go uneaten, I know that Hili and Cyrus will not go unloved.
Here are a few photographs of quotidian life here, a relaxing combination of work, walkies, five meals a day, and cherry pie (Malgorzata, amazingly, has made good on her promise that I would have fresh cherry pie every day).
Cyrus is an old dog (estimated to be 11 or 12), and so he has occasional joint pain and walks stiffly. Yesterday Andrzej gave him a pain pill cunningly concealed in a juicy bit of beef that I’d purchased for the d*g a few days before:
I may have posted this earlier on this trip, but in case I didn’t, this is an old-style wooden house in town, of which there are a few. About a century old or more, they are typical of the houses that the Jewish residents of Dobrzyn inhabited before the war. I’m told that about a third of the town’s inhabitants before the war were Jews; now, as far as Malgorzata knows, she’s the only person of the 3000 in Dobrzyn of Jewish ancestry. (Andrzej was brought up Catholic, but both of them are now atheists.)
Third breakfast, the meal formerly known as “lunch.” Beside the usual assortment of cheese, ham, garden vegetables, and sausage, we had oscypek, baked smoked sheep cheese from the Tatra mountains (I believe this local variety was made of cow’s milk). My lunchtime tipple of blackcurrant juice is visible at lower left (why don’t American supermarkets stock this stuff?)
Many cherries still hang in the orchard. Although locals are invited to harvest these stragglers, few do it, and so there are many pies that will never be made. It’s the laws of physics.
This is one of the many trees whose cherries weren’t ripe at harvest. You can see all the fruit waiting to be picked (actually, the cherries should be a bit darker than those above).
These are ready for picking; sadly, their fate is not a pie, but withering on the tree:
Twice a day, Cyrus chases his ball on the soccer field during walkies to the river.
A happy d*g with his ball:
This is an old child’s toy—perhaps a Polish version of a teddy bear—‘that Malgorzata found upstairs after the lodgers moved out. (They’re now gone, so the upstairs is empty.) Not a very cuddly toy!
Below: a violation of the Laws of Nature, though cute nevertheless. Hili, of course, is the dominant partner in the relationship:
A typical scene: I am working at the computer with Hili sleeping next to me. I thoughtfully provide her with a blanket to make her more comfortable, and also tuck her in. (Photo by Malgorzata)
This is the penultimate pie, which I finished by eating from the pie dish rather than soiling another dish. (Photo by Malgorzata.)
True to form, when that pie was gone Malgorzata made another. I picked and pitted the cherries. The plastic cherry-pitter is truly an amazing device: it’s simple in design but stupendously effective. (Photo by Andrzej).
I found a cherry shaped like a butt! Andrzej says he’s never seen one like this.
The pitted cherries are put in a sieve over a bowl, and fresh cherry juice drops into the bowl: enough to allow us a glass each:
Last night’s dinner: four-cheese quiche made with leeks, cream, and spices—served with salad and, of course, a cold Zubr.
Goodbye to my friends!:
Goodnight and farewell!
