Maybe my philosophy isn’t so unsophisticated after all

October 24, 2011 • 4:29 am

All kinds of ticked-off Christians have been giving me flak for raising the Euthyphro argument in my USA Today piece criticizing the religiously-based assertion that morality comes from God.  (Just to refresh your memory, that’s the argument that what is morally good cannot be so just because it’s commanded by God, because God could command things—and has, if you read the Qur’an or Old Testament—that violate our notion of what’s moral.)

One of those critics was the oxymoronic “Thinking Christian,” whom I answered in a post this week.  That Unthinking Christian cited William Lane Craig as having provided a good answer to the Euthyphro problem. That answer invoked the Divine Command Theory, which is this: “whatever God orders is good and morally obligatory simply by virtue of the fact that He is God.”

That’s bogus, of course, and no answer at all, because God ordered really bad stuff in the Old Testament.  Nevertheless, the “Thinking Christian,” who seems obsessed with my website, sees Craig’s as a really good response, and claimed I was philosophically unsophisticated for not knowing it existed. (I did, of course, but find it too stupid to address.)

Ditto for Matt Flanagan, a Christian apologist from New Zealand who, on his website, used me as an example of “when scientists made bad ethicists.” His claim is that the argument I dispelled was that people cannot have moral feelings without God, but that what theologians really mean is that people cannot have moral obligations without God.

I did know about that one, too, but it’s a mug’s game to argue with Christian apologists on their websites.  Now a real philosopher has come along to save me the trouble by explaining in detail what I said in condensed form in my USA Today piece. At his website not just a philosopher, Jason Thibodeau shows pretty definitively that “the Euthyphro objection is robust.”

To set the record straight for all thinking Christians, I’ll just let Jason explain:

Coyne does not make the mistake that Flannagan accuses him of; he is not just saying that in order to judge God’s commands as moral or immoral we would have to have a moral sense that is independent of God. Rather, he is saying that we would need a standard of moral obligation that is independent of God. What Coyne has done is condense a bit of argumentative interaction between the purveyor of the Euthyphro objection and the defender of the divine command theory (DCT). One aspect of the Euthyphro objection is that, if the DCT is true, then morality is arbitrary. If the DCT is true, God can make any action (even something universally regarded as horrendous such as torturing small children) morally right just by commanding that we do it. But this conflicts strongly with our moral intuitions: it seems natural to believe that something as awful as torturing children could not possibly be morally right. But the DCT implies that this action, along with any act that causes unwarranted and horrendous suffering, could possibly be right (Note: the notion of possibility at use here is metaphysical possibility, not epistemic; more on this below.) One divine command theorist response to this is to say that a loving and moral God would never issue commands the require us to needlessly cause people to suffer (this is the response that Coyne mentions).

There are a few problems with this response. The most important (and the one that I think that Coyne had in mind) is that if we are to understand the reply to mean that a moral God would not issue immoral commands, then this in essence capitulates to the Euthyphro objection. That is to say, the response implies that there is a standard of morality that is independent of God against which he and his commands can be judged. But if morality is independent of God, then the DCT is false.

I won’t summarize the rest of Jason’s arguments lest I bore those who aren’t philosophically inclined, but let me add that he then takes up, and disposes of, the standard Christian riposte that “Well, God wouldn’t do that because he’s a moral being. And besides, he’s an all-loving being.”

My own response to this is to say, “How do you know that? You couldn’t prove it from anything in scripture!”  And of course the whole point is moot unless you can show that there’s a God to issue moral commands in the first place, which nobody has done. (UPDATE:  And of course most people who assert a good and loving god have a prior, non-goddy notion of what “good” and “loving” mean.)

But Jason has a more nuanced response, one that you may like to read.

This is so wrong

October 23, 2011 • 9:15 am

From the Army Public Health Command:

Killer Kittens

via Wired, which says this:

On Aug. 31, Army Spc. Kevin Shumaker, 24, died of rabies after being bitten by a stray dog in Afghanistan. Shumaker was the first U.S. soldier to die of rabies since the Vietnam War. In response, the Army launched a public education offensive, hanging up posters like the one above that warn of the deadly viruses lurking within even the cuddliest of creatures.

Now look at that poster again and see if you don’t think it’s implicitly saying, “Shoot that kitten!”

If you’re one of those misguided atheists who likes dogs, there’s a similar poster with puppies at the link above. . .

h/t: Michael G.

Paper on “living fossils” finds recent radiation, but misses the point

October 23, 2011 • 7:15 am

Cycads are a group of plants that resemble tree of ferns or palm trees.  But they’re not closely related to either: rather they constitute an ancient group of gymnosperms (naked-seeded plants) that originated around 300 million years ago.  They reached their peak of abundance during the Jurassic, the age of the dinosurs, when they were abundant throughout the world.  Now, though, they are restricted to tropical and subtropical areas, and most of them are rare and endangered, though some are grown as ornamentals.

Cycads are one group of organisms known as “living fossils,” because the living species highly resemble ancient ones (other “living fossils” include the coelocanth, horseshoe crabs, and the tuatara of New Zealand).  In other words, living fossils show the “morphological stasis” so beloved of Steve Gould and other advocates of punctuated equilibrium.

The term “living fossil”, by the way,was coined by Darwin in Chapter 4 (“Natural selection”) of The Origin (my emphasis):

And it is in fresh water that we find seven genera of Ganoid fishes, remnants of a once preponderant order: and in fresh water we find some of the most anomalous forms now known in the world, as the Ornithorhynchus and Lepidosiren, which, like fossils, connect to a certain extent orders now widely separated in the natural scale. These anomalous forms may almost be called living fossils; they have endured to the present day, from having inhabited a confined area, and from having thus been exposed to less severe competition.

Note that Darwin attributed their long-term morphological stasis to a lack of competition: Darwin always thought that most natural selection resulted from competition between individuals of a species or between members of different species.

Other explanations for the stasis, have, however, included a lack of genetic variation (you can’t evolve if there’s no variation in your genes), or the possibility that the group either lives in a constant environment or seeks one out, so there is no selection to produce change.

Both of these explanations have had problems. The first—lack of genetic variation—is almost certainly wrong, for surveys of genetic variation in “living fossils” like horseshoe crabs show that they’re just as variable as species that have changed more over time.

The “constant environment” explanation, which seems more plausible to me, suffers from the fact that some living fossils seem to live in the same environments as species that have evolved more rapidly. And some, like cycads, can’t behaviorally seek out the environments to which they’re adapted.

We should not, however, think that just because “living fossils” look like their ancient relatives, that they haven’t changed.  When we compare extant with ancient species we see largely the external morphology: the hard parts that are on the outside and replaced by minerals. Perhaps some “ancient fossils” have changed extensively on the inside since their origin—either in the internal anatomy or physiology, or simply via wholesale DNA changes that were largely caused by random genetic drift.  Still, the constancy of external morphology over hundreds of millions of years is an evolutionary puzzle.

In our book Speciation, Allen Orr and I note that “living fossils” such as gingko trees and horseshoe crabs not only haven’t changed much on the outside, but never were particularly speciose: that is, the unchanging lineages also didn’t produce a large number of species over their evolutionary history. (It is possible for a group to produce lots of species but not change very much in external appearance. That just doesn’t seem to have happened.)

Here’s a cycad showing its “cone,” which resembles that of a pine tree (another gymnosperm):

Cycas circinalis (from Wikipedia)

A new paper in Science by Nagalingum et al. sheds some light—or purports to shed some light—on the puzzle of living fossils.

There are now about 300 living species of cycads in three families, and the authors used DNA from both the nucleus and chloroplasts to a) make a family tree of 199 of the species, and b) estimate when the living species diverged from each other.  Estimates of divergence time are made by using calibrated “molecular clocks,” which assume (and there is support for this), that divergence in DNA sequence is proportional to the absolute time in the past when species diverged.  With calibration, then, we can get a decent handle on when living species of cycads diverged from each other.

The “family tree” of cycads yielded no surprises: the families, and relationships between species within families, were pretty much related in the same way that previous data based on DNA and morphology had indicated.

But the surprise was this:  all living cycad species formed recently: within the last 5 to 12 million years. That means that although the group itself hasn’t changed much in appearance in 300 million years, the species we have today (i.e., the lineages that are reproductively isolated from one another) are relatively new.  That is, reproductively isolated lineages have arisen much more recently than previously thought, and the species we see today are not identical (in the sense of being reproductively compatible) with their ancient ancestors. Nor are they the products of a single unchanging lineage that extends back to ancient times.

That is a surprise, but doesn’t, I think, have much bearing on the question of “living fossils,” that is, the question of why some lineages don’t change in their appearance over long periods of time.  

And it’s clear that cycads don’t change much over millions of years, at least judging by the authors’ own statement highlighting the “morphological conservatism” of the group.   So that mystery remains.

The authors do note that cycads show “low levels of genetic diversity” compared to other groups, so it’s formally possible that their morphological stasis is due simply to a lack of genetic variation.  But that is contradicted by the fact that they’ve formed so many new species in the past few million years—for the formation of new species requires genetic variation.  No, the explanation for the morphological conservatism of cyads—and of other living fossils—probably lies elsewhere.

Another mystery remains: why was there a relatively sudden radiation of cycad species in the last 12 million years?  The authors think that climate may be involved:

The near-simultaneous initiation of diversification of six of the living cycad genera across the globe (in Australia, Africa, south-east Asia, and central America) indicates a single trigger may have been responsible. During the late Miocene, the global climate shifted as the world’s landmasses largely assumed their current positions (28). This closed the last of the equatorial seaways that had allowed warm tropical water to circulate the globe, leading to a shift from globally warm, equable climates to present day cooler, more seasonal climates (29). The majority of cycad species live in tropical or subtropical climates in regions of predominantly summer rainfall (2). Thus, it is possible that cycad diversification was largely driven by the global climate change that increased the geographic extent of those subtropical and tropical biomes that became marked by seasonality.

What is disturbing is that most cycads are endangered: the authors note that fully 62% of all cycad species are on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Plants, a higher proportion than in any other plant group.

So what the author have shown is that morphological conservatism of a group does not reflect the lack of ability of that group to produce new species.  What they haven’t shown is why morphological conservatism exists in the first place.  There are ways to rule out some possibilities. If genetic diversity for external characters were pervasive, you could rule out the lack-of-variation explanation. You could, for instance, perform artificial selection on living cycads to see if you could change them into plants that looked markedly different, as we’ve done with the ancestors of corn and broccoli. But ruling out alternative explanations doesn’t always tell us the real explanation unless only one remains.

___

Nagalingum, N. S., C. R. Marshall, T. B. Quental H. S. Rai, D. P. Little, and S. Mathews.  2011.  Recent synchronous radiation of a living fossil.  Science (published online, 20 Oct. 2011).

I get email

October 23, 2011 • 6:28 am

Here’s a comment that didn’t make it, but I’m putting it up for your delectation. I get a fair number of these.  Americans, meet one of your neighbors:

Evolution (ha), the chance of that theory holding water is like me putting my watch in a bag ,the smashing it with a hammer . Then shaken the bag and dumping the broken watch out and it becoming whole again! It simple did not happen ,God is the alpha and omega ! Not a monkey . Come on people if your as smart as you wish you were you would KNOW the TRUTH. ( JESUS CHRIST) THE TRINITY . Seek him and you shall find him ,believe in him(john 3:16) and have eternal security in HEAVEN. Don’t. Well I guess you will be without bananas in HELP FOR ETERNITY…..

Physics pwns creationism

October 22, 2011 • 11:08 am

I’m not a big fan of biologist Michel Zimmerman’s Clergy Letter Project, which involves soliciting churches to write letters supporting evolution. I’ve criticized the project for being “harmless at worst”: it smacks too much of the failed accommodationist view that religious people who oppose science (evolution in particular) will suddenly accept evolution if they see that church leaders push that comity.

And too often the brand of evolution supported by churches is “theistic evolution”, i.e., God either created or (worse) guides the evolutionary process. The project is simply dripping with the brand of accommodationism that, to me, pollutes the scientific enterprise. Here, for instance, is part of a letter from the Project signed by over 12,000 Christian clergy:

We the undersigned, Christian clergy from many different traditions, believe that the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist.  . . . .We ask that science remain science and that religion remain religion, two very different, but complementary, forms of truth.

We all know what’s wrong with that: unless you define Biblical “truths” in a circular fashion, so that the “timeless truths” are by definition those not disproven by science, you still run into conflict.  That includes the virgin birth, the resurrection, and all manner of divine intervention in the world. Further, there are no “timeless truths” produced by faith—at least none that haven’t also been produced by secular region.  And the last sentence smacks of NOMA-ism.

Nevertheless, when an accommodtionist does strike a blow for pure science, and against creationism, I’ll give him due credit.  In his latest post at PuffHo, “What physics teaches us about creationism,” Zimmerman points out a difference that many of us have noted (and one I emphasized in my debate with Haught): the atmosphere of doubt surrounding a “revolutionary” scientific finding differs completely from the assurance with which many of the faithful buy the tenets of their faith.  (Yes, I know some Christians and Jews are doubters, but really, how many doubt that Jesus was the son of God?).

The doubt that surfaced when researchers reported that neutrinos seems to move faster than the speed of light instantiated the pervasive doubt and criticality of scientists.  Here’s a sentence I used in my debate: it was uttered by one of those researchers, and perfectly epitomizes the character of science:

“This is quite a shake-up,” said Alvaro de Rujula, a theorist at CERN. “The correct attitude is to ask oneself what went wrong.”

Zimmerman contrasts that kind of doubt with the certainties of creationism, though the contrast holds as well for all those “timeless religious truths”:

Creationists regularly assert that science is a closed operation, that those offering opinions differing from the norm cannot get a fair hearing within the scientific community. They argue that it is impossible to publish papers in the technical literature that call the dominant paradigm into question. It is this narrow-mindedness, they continue, that keeps their “important” ideas from being shared broadly. I can’t begin to count the number of notes I’ve received from creationists who rail against the biologists who refuse to consider what they have to say. The charge is always the same: scientists are biased and unwilling to consider any ideas that contradict their opinions.

The work arising from CERN demonstrates just how absurd this argument is. The scientists responsible for the work calling special relativity into question had absolutely no trouble getting their results in front of their peers. No one closed ranks and black-listed those who challenged the prevailing paradigm. Quite the opposite occurred. The physics community is abuzz with the results, and healthy discussion, meaningful skepticism, and plans for replication abound.

Indeed.  It’s a pity that Zimmerman doesn’t indict all the superstitions held by the faithful rather than creationism alone . But then he’s an accommodationist, and we all know that while creationism is fair game, we should keep our strident atheist mitts off the other fairy tales.  But kudos anyway to Zimmerman for pointing out this difference, and for saying this:

How does one go about attempting to overthrow a scientific paradigm? Very, very carefully and as transparently as possible. Consider what Antonio Ereditato, the spokesperson for the CERN group, said about their work, “We have high confidence in our results. We have checked and rechecked for anything that could have distorted our measurements but we found nothing. We now want colleagues to check them independently.” These scientists worked for three years, found a result that might shake physics to its very core, presented their full methodology and have now asked their fellow scientists to check and replicate their work. They understand that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Creationists, on the other hand, simply make assertions. They offer no data and perform no experiments. As was pointed out by creationists themselves under oath in the Dover, PA intelligent design trial in 2005, no one is performing any scientific investigations of intelligent design. No one is publishing any empirical data on the subject. No one is doing anything at all other than saying, “wow, it seems really unlikely and counter-intuitive for evolution to work.” What the creationists want is for an alternative theory of evolution to be accepted – and taught to our children – simply because they don’t like the one that currently is supported by the data and by virtually every scientist in the field.

His ending is strong, but I’ve edited it a bit to reflect my own feelings, crossing out what Zimmerman wrote and replacing it with bolded words:

The difference between scientists and creationists the faithful is so stark that it can be summarized simply enough to be placed on two bumper stickers.

Don’t believe everything you can think!

Don’t think about anything you believe!

I bet even creationists religious folks can figure out which one is theirs.

h/t: Grania Spingies

A new biography of Van Gogh with a provocative theory

October 22, 2011 • 5:03 am

If you watched 60 Minutes last week (the only t.v. show I make a point of watching), you’ll have seen a two-part report on a new biography of Vincent Van Gogh, Van Gogh: The Life, by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith. (The NYT has a free excerpt here, and the book has a companion website here.) Much of the show was devoted to Vincent’s mental problems, but also a lot to the “mystery” of how he died. There was also a bit on how literate and intellectually curious Vincent was, something I noted when I read his letters on display in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

Van Gogh at 13 (from the Van Gogh Museum via the NYT)

The classic story is, of course, that he painted “Wheatfield with Crows,” and then shot himself in that wheatfield. In a previous post, I impugned the myth of the “final painting,” but did accept the idea that he committed suicide.

Naifeh and Smith’s biography, however, has a different take. Michiko Kakutani gives their theory, which doesn’t involve suicide:

As Mr. Naifeh and Mr. Smith tell it, a rowdy teenager named René Secrétan, who liked to dress up in a cowboy costume he’d bought after seeing Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, was probably the source of the gun (sold or lent to him by the local innkeeper). Secrétan and his friends used to bully the eccentric van Gogh, and the authors suggest that there was some sort of encounter between the painter and the boys on the day of the shooting. “Once the gun in René’s rucksack was produced,” they write, “anything could have happened — intentional or accidental — between a reckless teenager with fantasies of the Wild West, an inebriated artist who knew nothing about guns, and an antiquated pistol with a tendency to malfunction.”

The authors also suspect (with more evidence this time) that Van Gogh suffered from temporal-lobe epilepsy.

Kakutani is a tough critic, but she likes the book, and I usually agree with her take:

What Mr. Naifeh and Mr. Smith capture so powerfully is van Gogh’s extraordinary will to learn, to persevere against the odds, to keep painting when early teachers disparaged his work, when a natural facility seemed to elude him, when his canvases failed to sell. There was a similar tenacity in his heartbreaking efforts to fill the emotional void in his life: ostracized by his bourgeois family, which regarded him as an unstable rebel; stymied in his efforts to pursue his religious impulses and become a preacher; rejected or manipulated by the women he longed for; shunned and mocked by neighbors as crazy; undermined by a competitive Paul Gauguin, with whom he had hoped to forge an artistic fraternity.

The one sustaining bond in van Gogh’s life was with Theo, an art dealer, who provided emotional, creative and financial support.

I’ve visited the graves of Vincent and Theo in Auvers-sur-Oise in France. It was a terribly moving sight: two simple headstones, entwined forever in ivy, as they were entwined in life:

Here are two Van Goghs that I photographed (without flash) at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.  There is no glass on the paintings (I suspect there should be!), so one can get very close to inspect the impasto:


Who doesn’t love Van Gogh? (Yes, I know that at least one reader will report an aversion!) If you do, you can buy this provocative and acclaimed book for only $23 (hardcover!) on Amazon. I’ll be reading this for sure.

Caturday felid: drainpipe rescue!

October 22, 2011 • 4:48 am

From wthr.com in Indianapolis, Indiana, comes a story to give your weekend a jumpstart:

INDIANAPOLIS – A rescue was underway Wednesday for kittens trapped underground. Those kittens were stuck for more than 48 hours in a drainpipe near Park Tudor School. One of the kittens was successfully rescued.

Librarian Susanne Russell turned cat whisperer as she tried to coax three kittens from a storm drain.

“It’s sad when you can hear them meowing,” said student Ellee Moyer.

It started Monday when staff members noticed the resident feral cat they’d been trying to catch had kittens.

“All of the sudden I looked up on Monday and I saw this little ball of fur – kitten – and I thought the mommy kitty was dead. And I stepped right there and three babies just jumped right into the pipe,” said Barb Skelton, Park Tudor.

They tried several methods to get the kittens out, including putting strips of carpet down the pipe.

With time running out, a plumbing company arrived to run a sewer camera down the drainage pipe. Initially they didn’t see anything.

Then one of the kittens came into view walking down the pipe right up to the camera.

They dug a three-foot hole near the camera hoping to cut the pipe and pull out at least one of the kittens.

The kitten was, of course, named “Stormy.”

Sad bout about the other two, but kudos to the plumber. A longer video—a news report filed before the kitten was rescued—is here.