Is reductionism wrong?: a philosopher weighs in

August 20, 2012 • 6:22 am

I’ve seen a fair amount of buzz about an Opinionator column in the August 5 New York Times, “Anything but human,” by Richard Polt. Polt is a professor and chair of philosophy at Xavier University, specializing in Heidegger and in Continental and Greek philosophy.

Polt’s beef is that, as a human, he resents biologists’ notions that we are simply highly evolved animals, have computers in our heads, and that our ethics can be reduced to changes in our neurons produced by evolution. I’ve put Polt’s quotes in bullet points, and comment about them after each one.

  • “I have no beef with entomology or evolution [he’s talking about E. O. Wilson’s own Opinionator column here], but I refuse to admit that they teach me much about ethics. Consider the fact that human action ranges to the extremes. People can perform extraordinary acts of altruism, including kindness toward other species — or they can utterly fail to be altruistic, even toward their own children. So whatever tendencies we may have inherited leave ample room for variation; our choices will determine which end of the spectrum we approach.”

Well, almost no biologist thinks that learning how morality evolved, or develops as a cultural phenomenon, tells us what is the right thing to do.  I do think that the rudiments of human morality come from our ancestors, for our relatives show some strikingly moral-like behaviors, but clearly morality has a strong cultural overlay, and what is hard-wired can be overridden by social norms.  If that weren’t the case, what is considered moral wouldn’t change so quickly.  As Steve Pinker shows in Better Angels of our Nature, our moral attitudes toward violence, slavery, and the treatment of women, animals, children have undergone huge changes in the last few centuries. Nevertheless, there are common aspects of human morality, such as the aversion to gratuitous killing or torture, that do have genetic underpinnings.

  • “Next they tell me that my brain and the ant’s brain are just wet computers.”Evolution equipped us … with a neural computer,” as Steven Pinker put it in “How the Mind Works.” ‘Human thought and behavior, no matter how subtle and flexible, could be the product of a very complicated program.’ The computer analogy has been attacked by many a philosopher before me, but it has staying power in our culture,and it works in both directions: we talk about computers that ‘know,’ ‘remember,’ and ‘decide,’ and people who ‘get input’ and ‘process information’. . . None of these devices can think, because none of them can care; as far as we know there is no program, no matter how complicated, that can make the world matter to a machine. Without a brain or DNA, I couldn’t write an essay, drive my daughter to school or go to the movies with my wife. But that doesn’t mean that my genes and brain structure can explain why I choose to do these things — why I affirm them as meaningful and valuable.”

True, no current computer can think like a human, or feel pain, or show compassion, but it’s only a matter of time. And if our brains aren’t complex information processing machines, what are they? Of course we do think in far more complex ways than do other animals, and attribute meaning in ways they don’t either, but what does that mean but that we have evolved a more complex brain that is adapted to interacting with our group-mates, learning language, and so on?

  • “But concepts from information theory, in this restricted sense, have come to influence our notions of ‘information’ in the broader sense, where the word suggests significance and learning. This may be deeply misleading. Why should we assume that thinking and perceiving are essentially information processing? Our communication devices are an important part of our lifeworld, but we can’t understand the whole in terms of the part.

Given that our brains evolved, why shouldn’t we assume that thinking and perceiving are essentially information processing. Yes, it’s a complicated form of processes, but what else could it be. And maybe now we can’t understand the whole in terms of its parts, and maybe aspects of our mentality, like consciousness, are emergent properties, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t ultimately, or in principle, be reduced to the interaction of parts.  As far as we know, in all sciences emergent properties, like the behavior of gases or fluids, must be consistent with lower-level properties. There are no “top-down” properties that are not consistent with the interaction of parts.

At this point, with his strong anti-reductionist bias, one might ask whether Polt is some kind of dualist: that he thinks there’s some non-physically-based aspect of humans not present in other species. This, of course, is consonant with religious views. But Polt takes care to distance himself from those:

  • “By now, naturalist philosophers will suspect that there is something mystical or ‘spooky’ about what I’m proposing. In fact, religion has survived the assaults of reductionism because religions address distinctively human concerns, concerns that ants and computers can’t have: Who am I? What is my place? What is the point of my life? But in order to reject reductionism, we don’t necessarily have to embrace religion or the supernatural. We need to recognize that nature, including human nature, is far richer than what so-called naturalism chooses to admit as natural. Nature includes the panoply of the lifeworld. . . The call to remember the lifeworld is part of the ancient Greek counsel: “Know yourself.” The same scientist who claims that behavior is a function of genes can’t give a genetic explanation of why she chose to become a scientist in the first place. The same philosopher who denies freedom freely chooses to present conference papers defending this view. People forget their own lifeworld every day. It’s only human — all too human.”‘

I’m not sure, then, in what sense Polt is rejecting reductionism.  If his claim is that we must at present study emergent phenomena on their own terms since we don’t fully comprehend their components, then I’m with him 100%. But already things like volition, emotions, and other mental phenomena are beginning to give way to reductionist analysis, and there’s every reason to suspect this trend will continue.  In the meantime, yes, we can act as though we have free will, we can appreciate Mozart or Dylan without understanding what about our brains, evolution, genes, or upbringing leads to “musicophilia,” and we can revel in our humanity, which I guess is what Polt means as “the lifeworld.” But in the end, it still comes down to molecules, genes, and our environment. (I can’t give a genetic explanation of why I’m a scientist, but I can give a pretty good one based on my environment. And what does Polt mean by “freedly chooses to present conference papers”? He may appear to freely choose things, but that could be an illusion perfectly consistent with determinism.)

In the end, this denigration of reductionism is a denigration of science, and though Polt argues that we needn’t embrace woo, his antiscientific views do buy into that kind of antimaterialist and antinaturalistic thought.  Of course we have human needs that have been addressed by religion, but I’m convinced that a properly constructed secular society can also meet those needs, and we don’t have to reject the principle of reductionism to do that.

But most of all I wonder why Polt wrote this column in the first place, unless it’s yet another defense of philosophy’s turf against the incursion of science.

p.s. Polt published a further explanation of his anti-reductionism in an August 16 Opinionator column, and I may take that up later.

h/t: Miss May

More cool mimicry: a ladybug-mimicking spider

August 20, 2012 • 4:41 am

From the Flicker page of Nicky Bay, a photographer from Singapore, we have this beautiful example of mimicry: a spider (not an insect) mimicking a ladybug (“ladybird beetle” to Brits, which is actually more accurate since these insects are members of the order Coleoptera—beetles—rather than that of the “true bugs”, Hemiptera).

Screen shot 2013-08-04 at 5.24.25 AM
Photo by Nicky Bay (used with permission)

Ladybugs are brightly colored with what we biologists call aposematic (“warning”) coloration: a warning to predators to avoid them because they’re bad tasting (ladybugs contain toxic and foul-tasting alkaloids).  Such coloration is common: other examples include black-and-orange striped bees and wasps, the orange-and-black monarch butterfly, and the striking pattern of the noxious striped skunk. (I once had a pet striped skunk for several years—descented, of course. It was a lovely animal, bred in captivity, tame, loving and litter-box trained, but I still feel a bit bad about having a pet whose genome was adapted to living in the wild.)

Once an aposematic model species is in place, there is an advantage to tasty and nontoxic species to evolve the patterns and colors of the model, for by so doing they avoid predation.  This form of imitation is called Batesian mimicry after the British naturalist H.W. Bates. Here’s one example of a model (this one American) which the spider is likely imitating:

Ladybug at Frozen Head State Park in eastern Tennessee. Photo © Wade Franklin
on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/w_franklin/481357492/

There’s no problem in explaining the evolution of Batesian mimicry, but how aposematic coloration evolved in the models has always been an evolutionary puzzle.

The system works now because predators learn to recognize and avoid the bright coloration after a bad experience tasting the prey (predators may occasionally evolve an innate, genetically-based aversion).  But imagine the first mutant ladybug that is somewhat brightly colored. It won’t be avoided by bird predators because they’ve had no experience with the coloration, and will stick out because its color is conspicuous. This mutant individual may attract the attention of predators, and thus be more likely to be eaten than less-colorful individuals in the same species. In other words, natural selection would seem to work against the initial evolution of such colors, even though individuals benefit once the pattern becomes common. But how does it get to be common?

One suggestion is kin selection: mutant individuals may occur in broods of relatives, so an individual “sacrifices” its life to perpetuate the colorful genes of its brothers and sisters, now presumably protected by a bird that’s learned its lesson. And indeed, some aposematic caterpillars tend to stay together as groups of relatives more often than individuals of related species that aren’t colorful.  But other evolutionary models show that the bright color could result from individual selection, particularly if the colorful individual isn’t really killed, but only tasted and released.  There are other, more complicated models as well. For the time being, the evolution of such coloration remains a bit of a mystery.

And here’s a video showing another “ladybug spider”; I’m not sure if it’s the same species.

Here, from the website “What’s that bug?” is another example of what is likely to be a Batesian mimetic spider.

I found it on Arkive as well; it appears to be a rare, sexually dimorphic species in which the males are Batesian mimics and the females, much larger, aren’t. Here are both sexes with an egg case.

The attractive ladybird spider (Eresus sandaliatus) is one of the rarest in the UK. The males have a bright orange or vermilion back with four large black spots and two smaller ones, and superficially resemble a ladybird. Females and juvenile males are black and velvety. Both sexes and immature individuals have obvious large bulbous heads. Photograph by David Fox.

Kenan Malik on religious freedom

August 19, 2012 • 2:26 pm

by Greg Mayer

Kenan Malik has an article in New Humanist magazine (online here) on religious freedom that is very interesting. While applauding John Locke’s views on religious toleration, he espouses a more Spinozan approach, which places religious freedom as merely one of a set of freedoms centered on freedom of  expression and conscience, and finds Baruch Spinoza’s views more influential on the U.S. First Amendment religious freedom guarantees. He enunciates a series of principles, and then applies them to a number of controversies. Is there anything wrong with offending religious sensibilities? No. Should burqas be banned? No (except in very limited practical circumstances). His most basic principle:

Whatever one’s beliefs, secular or religious, there should be complete freedom to express them, short of inciting violence or other forms of physical harm to others. Whatever one’s beliefs, secular or religious, there should be freedom to assemble to promote them. And whatever one’s beliefs, secular or religious, there should be freedom to act upon those beliefs, so long as in so doing one neither physically harms another individual without their consent nor transgresses that individual’s rights in the public sphere. These should be the fundamental principles by which we judge the permissibility of any belief or act, whether religious or secular.

h/t: Matthew Sitman at Andrew Sullivan

Astaire Week: Begin the Beguine

August 19, 2012 • 2:20 pm

This is my first post from 30,000 feet, and I’m convinced that the installation of wireless on planes will be the death of me. I’ve always counted on airplanes’ freedom from internet to afford me huge chunks of uninterrupted reading time. But since this is only an hour flight, my one book is by theologian Alvin Plantinga (more painful than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick), and internet is ony $5 for the nonce on Southwest (my favorite airline), so be it.

Thanks to my friend Latha, I’ve recently rediscovered the marvels of Fred Astaire, certainly the greatest “popular” male dancer of the 2oth century. He was an artistic polymath: not only a great dancer and choreographer, but a talented drummer and a hugely underrated singer with a light but expressive voice.  Watching some of his videos in the past two weeks, I’ve realized what a massive talent he was.

So, for the next seven days, let’s look at that talent.

Born Frederick Austerlitz in 1899 (he lived until 1987), Astaire had many famous partners, including Ginger Rogers, Eleanor Powell, and, later Cyd Charisse. But some of his best work, as we’ll see in the coming days, was on his own. Perhaps his best known “couples” dance on film is this 1940 routine to “Begin the Beguine” with Eleanor Powell.  As Wikipedia notes,

His first post-Ginger dance partner was the redoubtable Eleanor Powell—considered the finest female tap-dancer of her generation—in Broadway Melody of 1940 where they performed a celebrated extended dance routine to Cole Porter‘s “Begin the Beguine“. In his autobiography Steps in Time, Astaire remarked, “She ‘put ’em down like a man’, no ricky-ticky-sissy stuff with Ellie. She really knocked out a tap dance in a class by herself.”

Watch this video carefully; I’m convinced that we’ll never see a dance talent like this again. It knocks me out.

Powell was great, but looks, well, labored next to Astaire, whose hallmark was the ease and grace with which he performed incredibly difficult steps. Even Gene Kelly, another giant talent in movie dancing I admire, is not close to being in the same league with Astaire.

Darwin’s Ghosts

August 19, 2012 • 1:44 pm

by Greg Mayer

A new history of evolutionary biology before Darwin, Darwin’s Ghosts: The Secret History of Evolution by Rebecca Stott, appeared earlier this summer, and an interview with the author appeared in yesterday’s New York Times (it was posted to the Times‘ website several days earlier).

Darwin in 1881, already looking a bit spectral. From the first American edition of The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (1887).

I must admit that the subtitle made me a bit wary– I imagined some impassioned plea for the priority of On Naval Timber and Arboriculture— but the review in the New York Times by Hugh Raffles, and yesterday’s interview, show it is no such thing.

As is well known, spurred on by Alfred Russel Wallace’s Ternate paper, Darwin completed an “abstract” of his big species book. This abstract was the Origin, and it was rather long for an abstract: 513 pp.!  Because he thought of it as an abstract of a much longer work to come, and completed it hurriedly, Darwin did not include the footnotes and citations that were typical of scholarly practice of the time, and indeed, of his other works (see, for example The Descent of Man). In response to criticism that he had slighted his sources and predecessors, Darwin wrote a “Historical Sketch” for later editions. R.B. Freeman, in his monumental bibliography of Darwin’s work (1977, p. 78; now carried on and extended by John van Wyhe), explains

The third [British] edition [of the Origin] appeared in April 1861, 2,000 copies being printed. The case is the same as that of the two previous editions, but again differing in small details. It was extensively altered, and is of interest for the addition of a table of differences between it and the second edition, a table which occurs in each subsequent edition, and also for the addition of the historical sketch. This sketch, which was written to satisfy complaints that Darwin had not sufficiently considered his predecessors in the general theory of evolution, had already appeared in a shorter form in the first German edition, as well as in the fourth American printing where it is called a preface; both of these appeared in 1860.

Stott takes the sketch as her starting point and writes about the history of evolution and natural history from Aristotle to Darwin. I’ve not read it yet, but Raffles liked it, and it seems good based on his review and yesterday’s interview, and it will probably be of interest to WEIT readers.

The Discovery of Evolution, by David YoungThe standard academic history of the grand sweep of evolutionary biology, from the ancients to today, is Peter Bowler’s Evolution: The History of an Idea, now in it’s 3rd edition. My favorite history of evolution is The Discovery of Evolution, by David Young of the University of Melbourne. It covers less time than Bowler, starting with John Ray and Francis Willughby in the 17th century, but it is very well illustrated, and presents not just the history, but the biology as well, so you learn not just what ideas were propounded, but the evidence for those ideas as well. I strongly recommend it.

And, don’t confuse Stott’s book with Darwin’s Ghost: The Origin of Species Updated, by Jerry’s friend and colleague Steve Jones. Like WEIT, it’s an account of the evidence for evolution, in this case structured around Darwin’s chapter topics. Coincidentally, I just bought a copy last week.

__________________________________________________________

Bowler, P. 2003. Evolution: The History of an Idea. 3rd  ed. University of California Press, Berkeley.

Darwin, C. 1861. On the Origin of Species. 3rd ed. John Murray, London. (full text: the ‘Sketch’ is on pp. xiii-xix; it was revised in later editions)

Darwin, C. 1871. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. John Murray, London. (full text)

Darwin, C.R. 1887. The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Including an Autobiographical Chapter. F. Darwin, ed. 2 vols. D. Appleton, New York. (full text of British edition)

Jones, S. 2000. Darwin’s Ghost: The Origin of Species Updated. Random House, New York.

Matthew, P. 1831. On Naval Timber and Arboriculture. Longman, London. (full text)

Stott, R. 2012. Darwin’s Ghosts: The Secret History of Evolution. Spiegel and Grau, New York.

Young, D. 2007. The Discovery of Evolution. 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

The weird, twisted Catholic cult of suffering

August 18, 2012 • 4:06 pm

Guest post by Grania Spingies

A friend drew my attention to this on Facebook. It’s an excerpt from the children’s section of the Irish Catholic publication Alive! that describes itself as an attempt to evangelise for the Church in a new way. It probably doesn’t have a readership anything like what you’d expect in a country that is, according to the most recent census, 84% Catholic: Alive!’s circulation  is somewhere between 240,000 and 380,000.

That’s probably a good thing given this:

Link to edition

You can read about Maria Goretti (1890-1902) here and here.

I don’t think much commentary is needed: this speaks for itself. The problem isn’t so much the gruesome nature tale, for a great many beloved children’s stories contain death and violence – even in the Disney versions. It’s the tone of approbation of dying a violent death for Jesus, or perhaps the idea that the only reason an eleven-year-old girl would resist being raped would be out of a sense of religious piety. But that tends to be what you get when religion makes a virtue out of suffering.

[Note for non-Irish readers: “bold” in Ireland typically refers to naughty behaviour – here evidently used as a euphemism for rape.]