“Zeuglodon” on free will at the RDF site

July 12, 2012 • 3:57 am

Over at the Richard Dawkins Foundation, you can find a new essay by “Zeuglodon” on free will and determinism, “The raw deal of determinism and reductionism.” It’s a bit wordy and hard to follow, but seems to conclude that free will is a convincing illusion.  Along the way, though, Zeuglodon makes an unnecessary diversion:

Speaking of crimes, the notion that responsibility evaporates because we can point to prior causes and therefore shift the blame is made dubious by the reductio ad absurdum that, following the chains all the way back, you come to the conclusion that the Big Bang should be blamed for all the crimes ever committed. Indeed, the Big Bang caused every earthquake, every intention to kill, every stroke of luck and so on. It’s possible to blame the universe, of course, but this is mostly achieved by anthropomorphising the universe as something that can be blamed, and here lies the key to the strangeness of this argument. In any case, this argument only really works if culpability was solely about causality. . .

I’m not aware of any incompatibilist—those who claim that determinism and free will are incompatible (I’d add that the indeterminism of quantum mechanics may not do much to give us free will)—who claims that determinism absolves us of responsibility. Though it absolves us, I think, of moral responsibility, we still must hold people responsible for their actions for the good of society. For holding people responsible can deter others from actions we think are bad for society, or stimulate others to do good. No incompatibilist thinks that minds can’t be changed by what they observe.

At any rate, Zeuglodon reaches a conclusion that some may find harsh:

Determinism and reductionism thus pull through, not because they have finally grasped the truth, but because – like our excellent brain simulations and the world they simulate – they fit much better than the alternative options and are quite up to the job of helping us decipher it. Free will – at least the metaphysical kind – has by comparison done little more than stoked human egos and misled people down unpromising avenues. Indeed, it has done what intelligent design proponents have done; offered a pseudoexplanation and worked hard to justify its intellectual laziness, a paradox if ever there was one. It is tempting to blame religion for this, but religion works with what’s there, and free will would never have been so alluring if it didn’t appeal to people’s desires for power and to people’s fear for weaknesses that could be exploited. Even now, brainwashing, and something like it if you don’t like the Hollywood connotations of the word, are terrifying prospects made easier if you think the mind is something that can be predicted or shaped.

Yes, free will is pushed largely by the faithful, but also by many atheist philosophers like Dan Dennett. I do agree with Zeuglodon, though, if what he means by “people’s desires for power” is that “people want to think that they really can make choices undetermined by physical law.”

Again, if there is no ghost in the machine—and none of us think there is—then what, exactly, is “free” about “free will”?  Nothing. That “freedom” merely means that we don’t understand the antecedent and deterministic (and perhaps quantum-mechanically random) causes of our actions and decisions.

Zeuglodon floats the old canard that “freedom” of will means “uncoerced” will, i.e., we don’t have freedom about whether to hand over our money when there’s a gun to our heads. But even in those cases we do seem to have a choice (some people don’t hand over the dough!), and the results are just as determined as what we “choose” to eat for lunch. At any rate, “lack of coercion” is hardly a substantive base for “free will,” and if that’s what it means, than virtually all animals have it, too.

Curiously, at least one of Zeuglodon’s commenters ( “ccw95005” in comment #4) sticks up strongly for free will:

Of course if you go down to quantum level we are all just robots made up of colonies of cells. All our decisions are the result of the structure and connections and chemicals in the brain and could be predicted by a superdupercomputer or God if he existed, within the limits of quantum uncertainty.

What does that have to do with our everyday lives? Nada. It’s an intellectual exercise, nothing more.

For all we can tell, in our actual existence we have total free will, unless we get into theoretical mode. You can decide one second from now to raise your right hand, or your left, or neither, or both. Go ahead, try it.

At a higher level, we can ask whether we have been programmed by our life experiences so thoroughly that out free will is limited. No. Your personality characteristics and tendencies have been shaped by nature and nurture, but you still have free will. You can decide to pull the trigger or not. Upbringing and environment have made your decision more predictable, but you can still do either . . .

Although the commenter fails to define “free will,”  he/she seems to be pushing the ghost in the machine, Can we really decide, in any meaningful sense, which hand to raise, or has that decision already been made for us? We think we can make that decision, but if its has antecedent causes that precede our “trying it,” then our choice isn’t really free.  And if our personality characteristics have been shaped by nature and nurture, and are based on a material body and brain, what does the commenter mean by “we still have free will”?  That’s an assertion without evidence.

To those who argue on this site that nobody believes in the ghost in the machine, or that our “choices” aren’t determined by physical forces, I offer this commenter (and several of my friends with whom I’ve discussed the issue) as a counterexample.  Just trying getting into a discussion about free will with a friend who hasn’t pondered the issue before.

h/t: Dale

Internet Cat Video Film Festival

July 11, 2012 • 10:52 pm

by Greg Mayer

From the BBC’s Technology [?] section, comes news of the Internet Cat Video Film Festival at Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center. The festival will be held August 30, 2012, from 9:00 PM to 10:00 PM. (An hour seems a bit brief, but most cat videos are really short.)

If you can’t go, you can participate by nominating a cat video for screening at the festival. I hope some nearby WEIT reader will be able to attend and send us a report. (If it were a squid film festival, I think we know someone in Minnesota who could be relied upon.)

The cat video is the 21st century’s signature artistic form, transcending barriers of language and culture to produce an enduring record of humanity’s attempt to inaugurate an era of truly global connectivity based on the immanent, universal, and yet wholly locally-contextualized presence of the feline in all of our lives. With that in mind, here’s 43 seconds of my cat rolling around on the floor.

Jump of a cat is YUGAMINEE – けしからん猫の跳躍力は歪みない。(ちょっと加工版)

July 11, 2012 • 2:17 pm

by Matthew Cobb

It’s not Saturday yet, but it’s never too early for a cat video. This popped up in my Twitter stream from evolutionary biologist David Winter (aka @TheAtavism) from NZ (follow him! Visit his blog!). Some lovely slo-mo footage of a rather fetching tabby leaping up for clothes pegs…

Dawkins discusses creationism, the Giant’s Causeway, and the evidence for evolution

July 11, 2012 • 1:46 pm

Here’s a new YouTube “video” which is a broadcast of a talk Richard Dawkins gave on the BBC about the National Trust’s inclusion of creationist views in its Giant’s Causeway exhibit.  That’s a springboard for a debate with creationist listeners who call in about evolution and the age of the earth.

It saddens me to hear creationists with an Irish accent (I’m used to either Americans or the noxious Aussie Ken Ham), some defending a 6,000-year age of the Causeway, but Richard disposes of them handily by simply asking them to look at the evidence. (There’s no sign any of them have; they simply cite creationists who have “reputable degrees.”)

WEIT gets a shout-out, too.

h/t: Thad

Amazing reef fishes

July 11, 2012 • 8:28 am

The Evolution meetings are over, and I’m heading home tomorrow, spending today in Ottawa to visit friends. Because of that, and other exigent tasks, posting will be light.

But thanks to pinch-blogger Matthew Cobb, who directed me to these pictures of stupendous reef fish. Those fish comprise some of the world’s most beautiful and bizarre animals.

Have a look at some of these spectacular fish from a new book, Reef Fishes of the East Indies by Gerald Allen and Mark Erdman (University of Hawaii Press); the book’s photos are excerpted in The Guardian, which adds:

A new book, Reef Fishes of the East Indies, is the culmination of a combined 60 years’ work to document the biodiversity of the hugely diverse coastal waters of the region. The three-volume publication features the 2,631 known reef fishes of the Coral Triangle, including 25 species new to science.

Non-new species: Pteroidichthys amboinensis – an unusually coloured specimen of the Ambon scorpionfish. Photograph: Roger Steene/Conservation International.

I wonder what the eyespots in the photo below are for. Could they be mimicking an octopus to ward off predators? And what about those strangely colored and shaped fins?

Some male cichlid fish have spots on their anal fins that mimic the female’s eggs. Female cichlids are often mouth-brooders, who lay eggs and then gather the unfertilized eggs into their mouths to protect them. When they see the spots on the male’s anal fin, they think they’ve lost an egg, and swim up to the male’s posterior end, opening their mouth to retrieve the supposedly stray egg. When they do that, the male squirts sperm into the female’s mouth, fertilizing her eggs. This is one example of mimicry in which members of one sex fool members of another.

Non-new species: Signigobius biocellatus. Photograph: Gerald Allen/Conservation International.
Non-new species: Synchiropus splendidus. Mandarinfish of the dragonet family mate just before sunset. The pair meets and swims slow spirals off the substrate. At the apex of their ascent they release sperm and eggs then dash back to the protection of the bottom. Photograph: Jones/Shimlock. Secret Sea Visions /Conservation International.
Non-new species: Antennarius commersoni – a frogfish spawning and then releasing a floating egg raft. Photograph: Roger Steene/Conservation International.

In contrast to many freshwater fish or open-water marine fish, reef fish are often arrayed in dazzling colors and patterns. Why is that?
Well, we don’t really know, but, as a piece by Greg Laslo emphasizes, what we see when we look at these fish may be very different from what the fish see, since their color sense may be very different from ours and they also see in the ultraviolet.

Since the fish are not sexually dimorphic in pattern and color (males and females usually look alike), it probably isn’t a result of sexual selection. I suspect, as does Laslo, that it facilitates interspecific communication.  But this is simply one of those ubiquitous phenomena that we don’t understand. Laslo gives a quote from biologist Gil Rosenthal, an acquaintance of mine and an avid diver:

“The conventional explanations for why they are colorful don’t really work,” Rosenthal says. Bright colors are useful to advertise that the species is dangerous or bad-tasting — for example, poison dart frogs in the Amazon and coral snakes or monarch butterflies in North America. So, too, in some fish — the butterflyfish has spines, and the scorpionfish will display colorful pectoral fins when they’re frightened. And while that’s all well and good, most brightly colored reef fish are actually pretty tasty. At least to humans. Bright colors could also help fish attract mates. For instance, in birds, brightly colored male peacocks are perhaps the best example, but that doesn’t work with most fish. For example, in Picasso triggerfish and Queen angelfish, the males and females are equally colorful, and you can’t tell them apart by looking at them.

“There isn’t going to be just one explanation, that’s the bottom line,” [George] Losey says. “There are going to be a lot of contributing factors.”

New species: Ptereleotris rubristigma – a blue dart fish named for the prominent red spot on the gill cover. Widespread throughout the East Indies region and found on soft bottoms exposed to currents. Photo by Gerald Allen/Conservation International.
New species: Lepidichthys akiko – a candy-striped clingfish known only from deep reefs of Cendrawasih Bay in West Papua. Photo by Gerald Allen/Conservation International.
New species: Pterapsaron longipinnis – A deep reef species (below 60m depth) discovered in Cendrawasih Bay in West Papua. The name refers to the unusually long pelvic fins which this fish uses to rest on the bottom in tripod-like fashion. Photo by Gerald Allen/Conservation International.

RIP Philip Tobias

July 10, 2012 • 10:01 am

If you haven’t heard of Philip Tobias—and you should if you know a bit about human evolution—you will have heard of the Sterkfontein Caves, a World Heritage Site excavated by Tobias, a paleoanthropologist who spent most of his career at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. Tobias died Saturday June 7 at age 86.   (I was off by a month, and hadn’t heard the news, but the man still deserves an RIP.)

Tobias was a student of Raymond Dart, who discovered the first austraolpithecine fossils in 1924, also in South Africa (I describe Dart’s dramatic find at the beginning of my chapter on human evolution in WEIT). Tobias was also mentored by the Leakeys, and worked at Olduvai on the famous hominin fossil nicknamed “Nutcracker Man” or “Dear Boy”.  As the New York Times obituary notes:

Dr. Tobias wrote a treatise that described Dear Boy in minute, almost microscopic detail.

“That monograph continues to be the benchmark on how we should chronicle these important discoveries,” said the paleoanthropologist Donald C. Johanson, co-discoverer of the famous hominin fossil Lucy and founding director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University. “It’s on every paleoanthropologist’s shelf.”

“Nutcracker Man” became the holotype specimenof Paranthropus boisei (formerly Zinjanthropus), a robust hominin (ergo the name, derived from its massive teeth) that was a sterile offshoot of the hominin tree.

The NYT adds this:

In the 1960s, Dr. Tobias became involved in excavations at South Africa’s Sterkfontein caves, which yielded a trove of hominin fossils and tools, including a specimen called Little Foot, an unusually complete hominin skeleton whose age has been estimated at 2.3 million to 4 million years. Dr. Tobias campaigned successfully to have the caves declared a World Heritage site.

“Little Foot” is an australopithecine whose affinities are still uncertain.

And an obit at tributes notes that Sterkfontein is where over a third of all known early hominin fossils have been found, including specimens of Paranthropus, Australopithecus, and Homo.

Finally, Tobias was a fierce opponent of apartheid during the years it was the law in South Africa (Witwatersrand, or “Wits,” was a center for both black and white opposition to apartheid.) The Times describes a lecture he gave in Stony Brook in 2006:

In his Stony Brook lecture, Dr. Tobias said he wanted to correct accounts in several books that said Louis Leakey had browbeaten him into agreeing that Homo habilis was a distinct species. Dr. Tobias said that he had come around gradually to agreeing with him, but that his agreement was based strictly on the evidence.

“My personality was not such as to be easily browbeaten into a certain standpoint,” Dr. Tobias said. “My individualism had stood behind me in my 40-years-long fight against apartheid and the inroads against academic freedom by the apartheid government of South Africa.”

Tobias in 2006 in Johannesburg, where he taught. Photo for the NYT by Alexander Joe/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images