NPR show on Robert Ingersoll

January 18, 2013 • 1:39 pm

From yesterday’s National Public Radio’s “On Point” show, Tom Ashbrook discusses The Great Agnostic, Robert Ingersoll, whom you surely know by now.  Ashbrook has two guests (Susan’s book is new, and she’s quite eloquent about the man):

Susan Jacoby, author, “The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought.”

Dale McGowan, writes the secular parenting blog “The Meming of Life.” Author of “Parenting Beyond Belief” and the upcoming “Atheism For Dummies.” (@memingoflife)

The show is 47 minutes long, and I recommend it. At 5:20, you can hear a rare recording of Ingersoll’s voice!

h/t: Kurt

A physicist gets muddled about free will

January 18, 2013 • 10:19 am

Physicist and broadcaster Jim Al-Khalili is apparently a big macher in the UK, though I confess I hadn’t heard of him before today. His webpage notes:

Jim Al-Khalili OBE is a British scientist, author and broadcaster. He is a professor of Physics at the University of Surrey where he also holds a chair in the Public Engagement in Science. He is president of the British Humanist Association.

OBE and President of the BHA! Those are some impressive credentials. I was thuys doubly disappointed to see Al-Khalili go badly wrong in a recent essay he wrote for his website, “Do we have free will—a physicist’s perspective?“.  Now the question mark is in the wrong place and all implying that we don’t know whether it’s a physicist’s perspective, but that’s the least of his errors. Prompted by a piece at i109 by George Dvorsky (“Scientific evidence that you probably don’t have free will“), Al-Khalili tries his hand at defending the concept. His essay is apparently an excerpt from his recent book Paradox: The Nine Greatest Enigmas of Science.

Before I show briefly how Al-Khalili goes wrong, let me again note that when I assert that one doesn’t have free will, I am arguing about classical dualistic free will. So when I ask whether we have free will, I am adhering to Anthony Cashmore’s definition (in bold):

I believe that free will is better defined as a belief that there is a component to biological behavior that is something more than the unavoidable consequences of the genetic and environmental history of the individual and the possible stochastic laws of nature. Here, in some ways, it might be more appropriate to replace “genetic and environmental history” with “chemistry”—however, in this instance these terms are likely to be similar and the former is the one commonly used in such discussions. (Cashmore A., 2010, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA, 107:4500).

Now before you say that “nobody believes in that form of free will any more,” let me add that I’ve talked to plenty of people who do, including scientists. One of my colleagues recently told me that she got into an argument with a well-known scientist who was an adamant dualist, frankly admitting that he thought there was the equivalent a little man in his head making free decisions.

And yes, I know you can define free will so that we have it by definition—it’s our ability to make apparent choices without having a gun to our head, or our evolved ability to consider many factors before “deciding” on a course of action, or the fact that a mammal named Jerry is seen to make decisions, and so on. Hell, I could define free will as simply “it looks to an outsider as if we’re making choices,” and then everyone has it!

To me, the important task of philosophers should not be finding some new definition of free will so that the masses can think that they have it and thus be reassured (after all, false reassurance is what theologians do), but letting people know that our decisions are behavioral outcomes of physical processes in our brain, determined by the laws of physics or indeterminate according to quantum mechanics. Either way, dualism is dead, and educating people about this is the most important thing philosophers can do vis-à-vis the free will question.

But philosophers don’t like to do that since, as some explicitly admit, it’s bad for society if its members feel that their choices are predetermined. I find that a condescending and almost dishonest attitude. Catering to the idea that people must think that they are free agents is like theologians catering to people by saying that they must have a God because otherwise they’ll act immorally.  It’s time to admit that our choices are made by our genetic and environmental history, for only that admission will enable us to adddress the legal and moral changes that must accompany an understanding of how our brain works and why we behave as we do.

And the most important task for scientists in this area is, of course, to find out how our brain works and what factors determine our behavior.

At any rate, Al-Khalili does the same thing that many philosophers do: admits physical determinism (with perhaps some quantum indeterminacy), but then argues that we have free will anyway:

Our physical brains, consisting of a network of a hundred billion neurons that are linked together via hundreds of trillions of synaptic connections are, according to everything we know about them so far, nothing more than sophisticated and hugely complicated machines that run the equivalent of computer software, albeit involving a complexity and interconnectedness far beyond anything a modern computer can achieve. All those neurons consist ultimately of atoms that obey the same laws of physics as the rest of the Universe. So if we could, in principle, know the position of each atom in our brains and what it was doing at any given moment and we understood fully the rules that govern how they all interact and fit together, then we should in principle be able to know the state of our brains at any time in the future. That is, with enough information I could predict what you will do or think next – provided of course you are not interacting with the outside world, otherwise I will need to know everything about that too.

Were it not therefore for the weird and probabilistic quantum rules according to which those atoms behave, and in the absence of any non-physical, spiritual or supernatural dimension to our consciousness of which we have no evidence, we would have to admit that we too are part of Newton’s clockwork, deterministic universe and that all our actions are preordained and fixed in advance. In essence, we would have no free will.

It would have been good had he stopped there! (Note that here he appears to be adhering to a classic dualistic definition of free will.)

But no! Like a good philosopher, Al-Khalili simply redefines free will, but in a way that few philosophers accept: it’s based on the unpredictability of our behavior. (Chaos theory shows that in complex systems, sometimes very small changes in initial conditions will lead to radically different outcomes. It’s still deterministic, but prediction may require information that is very hard to get.)

So do we have free will or don’t we? The answer, despite what I have said about determinism, is yes I believe we still do. And it is rescued not by quantum mechanics, as some physicists argue, but by chaos theory. For it doesn’t matter that we live in a deterministic universe in which the future is, in principle, fixed. That future is only knowable if we were able to view the whole of space and time from the outside. But for us, and our consciousnesses, imbedded within space-time, that future is never knowable to us. It is that very unpredictability that gives us an open future. The choices we make are, to us, real choices, and because of the butterfly effect, tiny changes brought about by our different decisions can lead to very different outcomes, and hence different futures.

So, thanks to chaos theory our future is never knowable to us. You might prefer to say that the future is preordained and that our free will is just an illusion, but the point is our actions still determine which of the infinite number of possible futures is the one that gets played out.

When he says “the choices we make, are, to us, real choices,” he’s punting: what he means is, as he admits, “the choices we make seem like real choices, even though they’re pre-determined.” They are illusions, for they aren’t what they seem to be; and in that sense free will is purely illusory, based on our false sense of agency.  And Al-Khalili knows this:

Whether we call it true freedom or just an illusion in a way does not matter. I can never predict what you might do or say next if you really want to trick me because I cannot in practice ever model every neuronal activity in your brain, anticipate every changing synaptic connection and replicate every one of those trillions of butterflies that constitute your conscious mind in order for me to compute your thoughts. That is what gives you free will.

Most distressing is his notion that free will is based on predictability.  Yes, chaos theory means that some choices aren’t predictable, but what if, as seems likely (and recent experiments demonstrate), we’ll be able to predict some decisions moments or even hours before we’re conscious of having made them? We’re already able to do that with some accuracy over ten seconds or so, and we all know of people whose behavior seem predictable—to us, not to them—because we know them so well that we’re able in some sense to figure out what their neurons are going to make them do.  I fully believe that, as brain science develops, our behavior will become predictable with increasing (but not perfect) accuracy and increasingly far in advance. What then becomes of Al-Khalili’s notion of free will? Will some of our “free” decisions really be free because science isn’t good enough to predict them, while the other decisions eventually become “unfree”?

According to Al-Khalili’s definition, the problem of free will resembles a problem of theology.  Just as theological tenets are dispelled one by one as science advances, so Al-Khalili’s notion of free will (and other notions, too) is gradually eroded as brain science advances. What Al-Khalili is trying to do here resembles what accommodationists do with faith and science: reassure people that they can have their determinism and free will too.

I find the whole enterprise intellectually dubious: a sop to the average person who, according to some philosophers, will become a beast or behave erratically if he doesn’t think he makes real choices.

But that won’t happen. As I and real experts on brain science know: we have no choice but to feel that we make real choices!  We won’t become bed-bound nihilists if we accept the notion of determinism.

In the end, it’s always better to know the truth about our behavior than to remain ignorant or hide the truth with sophisticated definitions. And in the case of free will, knowing the truth is vital for thinking about punishment and reward, or pondering the concept of moral responsibility. (I happen to feel that for societal reasons we should be held responsible for our actions, but because of determinism we don’t have real moral responisibility.) Surely advances in brain science should change the way we think about reward, punishment, and responsibility, but if you desperately try to save the idea of free will with definitional tricks, that won’t happen.

Sam Harris is right.  We are puppets of our genes and environments, and it’s bloody well time we admitted that.  Philosophers should be telling us that too, as did Sam, instead of retooling notions of free will so we can reassure a public that’s wary of determinism. We’ll still behave as if we have choices, but we can then move on to a more meaningful dialogue about punishment and moral responsibility. By playing with words, Al-Khalili isn’t helping here.

In the U.S., it’s easier to get a gun than a kitten

January 18, 2013 • 8:08 am

Here’s a poignant CBS television interview with the Barden family, whose 7-year-old son Daniel was murdered in the Newtown shooting. What struck me, besides the inconsolable pain that could be multiplied eleven thousand times per year in the U.S., was what Mrs. Barden, whose family is adopting a kitten, says starting at 1:28.  “I don’t know a lot about guns, but I think it’s a little easier to get a gun than a kitten.”  That’s pretty much true, and it’s what’s wrong with our gun-ridden society.

But what’s just as sick as our lax gun regulations is the description of the video written by its poster, which he—I’m sure it’s a male—titled “Grieving Newtown parents want your guns.”

Still not a single tear from this Stepford family. This Barden woman is complaining that its “easier to buy a gun than it is to adopt a kitten.” Pretty funny actually.

The Bardens don’t want your guns, they just don’t want you to have guns. And neither do I, you sick s.o.b.!

h/t: Chris

A hilarious and informative series on metatherians

January 18, 2013 • 5:42 am

Jake Buehler is a young biology major, bound for grad school, who set out to create a website that was not only informative about the wonders of nature, but also funny. His site is called Shit you didn’t know about biology; and judging by the latest (and long) post that I’ve recently read, “Metatherians (Part 2 of 2): Odd living representatives,” he’s succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. I mean, this kid is good.

Metatherians are a superclass that includes all living and extinct pouched mammals, and to us that means “marsupials.” Buehler’s post, 37 pages when printed out (with many large pictures), is compulsively readable and funny as hell.  (There’s an earlier post, “Megatherians (Part 1 of 2): Extinct megafauna,” which recounts the evolutionary history of the group. I haven’t yet read it, but it looks equally good.)

There’s a lot of solid biology in Part 2, and a lot of comic writing, and they’re often mixed together. I’ll give a few excerpts and show some of the pictures with Buehler’s LOLzy captions:

Another effect of that short gestation is some serious impact on development after birth. Newborn joeys have to, crazy as it sounds, climb along the mother’s fur from the birth canal all the way up to the pouch, where it attaches itself to a nipple and doesn’t really budge until much later in development. Keep in mind that this is a fetus; blind, pink, without even facial features or hind limbs…and it has to drag itself through a thicket of fur for the equivalent of hundreds of feet, and get to the right destination. The mother also doesn’t really help out much. Some species may lay down a wet saliva trail for the joey, but that’s about it. Perhaps they figure if the little bastard is going to be living rent-free in a pocket made out the mother’s own flesh for months on end, then they can figure out their own damn way there.

This epic journey requires that even at such a rudimentary developmental stage, the joey must have overly-developed forelimbs, strong enough to pull the nubby body that great distance. These forelimbs must also be able to grasp and lock onto the fur. This severely limits the evolutionary avenues for marsupials in general; because of this reproductive strategy, climbing forelimbs must be in play. That is why there are no fully aquatic marsupials with flippers, no flying marsupials with wings, and no hoofed marsupials. With Australia’s wide, flat plains, you would expect a whole host of fleet, running, herbivorous marsupials to evolve, but because of that need for a climbing forelimb, you get things like kangaroos instead. There are gliding marsupials, but no flying species. You’ll never see a marsupial ‘whale’, a marsupial ‘bat’, or a marsupial ‘horse’. Marsupial reproduction is a massive wet blanket on evolutionary creativity in locomotion.

Well, given that evolution is cleverer than we are, I wouldn’t be so quick to say what marsupials could or could not evolve. After all, a climbing forelimb could develop into a flying forelimb.

Here are a few beasts themselves, the main topic of Buehler’s piece.  His text is indented.

Matschie’s tree kangaroo:

One species that is especially threatened is the Matschie’s tree kangaroo (Dendrolagus matschiei) of the Huon Peninsula in eastern New Guinea. They inhabit the mountain forest there on the rugged peninsula (and only on that peninsula) up to 10,000 feet in elevation. The joeys of this species also look a little like ewoks.

Welcome to Endor! May I take your coat?
Welcome to Endor! May I take your coat?

Look at that cute little shit! It’s surprising to me that there isn’t more worldwide outrage, pledge drives, and ‘Save the Roo’ merchandise being hawked for this animal’s survival. It looks like what emerges from the very bottom of a pit of adorable Pokemon starters, Internet bunny videos, and every carnival plush animal on the planet after decades of fermentation. I’m still slightly suspicious that it was developed in a lab specifically to be a widely loved ‘spokesperson’ for fabric softener commercials. It’s an organism of unrealistically pure, distilled, baby-talk inducing infatuation. You drop a crate of tree kangaroo joeys into the middle of war zone, and you’ll have peace in ten minutes.

Here’s the numbat:

The next metatherian on this list is technically a member of that carnivorous Dasyuromorphia order, and is relatively closely related to quolls, Tasmanian devils, and the like, but it is definitely a weird example. It is known as the numbat (also called the ‘walpurti’ and the ‘banded anteater’), and while it used to be widespread across southern Australia, it is now restricted to several tiny areas along the southern and western perimeters of the continent and is severely endangered. It is the only species in the genus Myrmecobius and the only member of the family Myrmecobiidae, meaning it was unlike anything we know living.

What are you?!
What are you?!

Genetic studies place it in with the Dasyuromorphia, but it likely diverged from other members as far back as 40 million years ago or so. It appears to be a highly-derived offshoot dasyuromorph that has taken up a lifestyle of eating small insects (termites, to be exact), and only that. The numbat could be erroneously called a marsupial ‘anteater’ (since it only eats termites), and is a striking example of convergent evolution on a common form evolved several times across the world; anteaters in Central and South America, aardvarks in Africa, pangolins in Africa and southern Asia, armadillos in the Americas, the echidna of Australasia, and finally the numbat. In order to engage in this diet, it has specific adaptations, including reduced, non-functional teeth, and a ridiculously long, sticky tongue.

How do you even have room in your head for that thing?
How do you even have room in your head for that thing?

There are many more. Here’s the most bizarre: the bilby:

If tiny, termite-eating, tiger-striped squirrel things like the numbat weren’t weird enough, then get a load of the bilby (Macrotis lagotis) of the arid interior of Australia.

You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.
You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.

This is, apparently, what happens when a rabbit gets its face stuck in a Chinese finger trap for a few years. ‘Bilby’ is a short name for what is, from initial appearances, a ponderous chimera of a bunny, a shrew, and a pig, mashed together in a comically ridiculous mockery of the natural order.

There are a lot more pictures, many of them showing convergent (independently evolved) adaptations in marsupials similar to those in placentals.  I’ll refer you to his site to see Buehler’s discussion of the rare marsupial mole:

“OM NOM NOM NOM NOM“
“OM NOM NOM NOM NOM“

Go have a look ASAP.

Quote of the day: Walter Kaufmann on the gerrymandering of theologians

January 17, 2013 • 1:23 pm

I am repeatedly told—as have all of us sympathetic to New Atheism—that we are not engaging with the “very best” of theological thought, the so-called “Sophisticated Theology™” (I notice that the term now has a nice RationalWiki entry, and I will greedily claim credit for the trademarked phrase).  Instead of dealing with Kierkegaard, Tillich, or (God forbid) Plantinga and Aquinas, we are said to caricature religion, taking it to be the faith of fundamentalist yahoos or extremist Muslims. Modern religion, we’re told, is not closely tied to any form of literalism. In fact, just today I was accused by a colleague of making that mistake. I gladly accept the charge, since most believers are theists and therefore, at least to some extent, literalists.

As Sophisticated Theologian™ John Polkinghorne said, “I cannot regard theology as merely concerned with a collection of stories which motive an attitude toward life. It must have its anchorange in the way things actually are, and the way they happen.” This is merely a modern restatement of Paul (1 Corinthians 15:13-14): “But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then Christ is not risen: and if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.”

Such criticisms of New Atheists also neglect the fact that, at least in America, the vast majority of Christians continue to embrace a faith that rests solidly on belief in Satan, Heaven, Hell, the divinity of Jesus, and the Resurrection.  Islam has its own faith claims, and I doubt that many Muslims see Allah as an ineffable Ground of Being. And, of course, even Sophisticated Theologians™ like Plantinga believe in the Resurrection and the notion that Jesus was the son of God.

The argument that “sophisticated” religion is that brand of religion free of epistemic claims fails to acknowledge that no brand of religion knows more about God than any other; ergo “sophistication” rests not on more advanced knowledge, but on the ability to use fancier words or gain affiliation with a university.  In what sense is Tillich more “sophisticated” than William Lane Craig? Does Tillich know more about God than does Craig? I don’t think so.

But I fulminate—as I’m wont to do with faced with accommodationists or apologists who accuse us of ignoring Sophisticated Theology™, as if that represents mainstream religion.  If you read Sophisticated Theology™ as Walter Kaufmann did, you’ll see that it is a pile of garbage, steaming away in a dump of intellectual dishonesty. Its advocates make things up exactly like Less Sophisticated Theologians, but, as Kaufmann notes, they try to have their cake and eat it too, striving to simultaneously satisfy both semi-literalists and more sophisticated believers. Kaufmann has no love for people like Kierkegaard.

I’ve just finished Kaufmann’s great book Critique of Religion and Philosophy. Here’s his take on the cherry-picking that characterizes modern theology (p. 157).

56. Gerrymandering.  This is a political term, but unfortunately, politicians have no monopoly on dividing districts in an unnatural and unfair way to give one party an advantage over its opponent. Many theologians are masters of this art. Out of the New Testament they pick appropriate verses and connect them to fashion an intellectual and moral self-portrait which they solemnly call “the message of the New Testament” or “the Christian view”; and out of other Scriptures they care all kinds of inferior straw men.

Theologians do not just do this incidentally: this is theology. Doing theology is like doing a jigsaw puzzle in which the verses of Scripture are the pieces: the finished picture is prescribed by a denomination, with a certain latitude allowed. What makes the game so pointless is that you do not have to use all the pieces, and that the pieces that do not fit may be reshaped after pronouncing the words “this means.” This is called exegesis.

I love Kaufmann’s concision and dry wit.

Atheist cartoon

Rick Perry says prayer will solve the problem of gun violence

January 17, 2013 • 10:25 am

I swear, sometimes I feel like I’m Henri living in a country full of les imbéciles blancs. As reported in several outlets today, Texas governor Rick Perry, responding to President Obama’s new gun-control proposals, says that the country needs not laws, but prayer. As the Houston Chronicle reports, Perry said this:

“There is evil prowling in the world – it shows up in our movies, video games and online fascinations, and finds its way into vulnerable hearts and minds,” Perry said in a statement issued after the president’s Washington, D.C., news conference on gun violence. “As a free people, let us choose what kind of people we will be. Laws, the only redoubt of secularism, will not suffice. Let us all return to our places of worship and pray for help. Above all, let us pray for our children.”

Perry said few of the recommendations put forth by Vice President Joe Biden’s committee on violence, appointed by the president after the Newtown school massacre that killed 20 children and six adults, had anything to do with what happened in that Connecticut town.

“In fact, the piling on by the political left, and their cohorts in the media, to use the massacre of little children to advance a pre-existing political agenda that would not have saved those children, disgusts me, personally,” the governor said. “The Second Amendment to the Constitution is a basic right of free people and cannot be nor will it be abridged by the executive power of this or any other president.”

Yeah, and prayer would have saved those kids at Newtown? Had we known about the impending attack, and beseeched God to stop it, that would have worked?

What a country.

Picture 3

A moth that squeaks

January 17, 2013 • 8:22 am

Today is shaping up as Animal Post Day.

Very few moths make any sound at all. This one, Acherontia atropos (the “death’s head hawk moth), squeaks.  That makes it endearing, no?

The Wikipedia article on the species (link above) says this:

The moth also has numerous other unusual features. It has the ability to emit a loud squeak if irritated. The sound is produced by expelling air from its proboscis. It often accompanies this sound with flashing its brightly marked abdomen in a further attempt to deter its predators [JAC: notice that, too, in the video above]. It is commonly observed raiding beehives for honey at night. Unlike the other species of Acherontia, it only attacks colonies of the well-known Western honey bee, Apis mellifera. It is attacked by guard bees at the entrance, but the thick cuticle and resistance to venom allow it to enter the hive. It is able to move about in hives unmolested because it mimics the scent of the bees.

The British entomological journal Atropos takes its name from this species.

h/t: Bug Girl via Matthew Cobb