Andrew Brown: there are lots of ways besides science to find truth

July 5, 2011 • 8:49 am

Well, we have Andrew Brown, over at his Guardian blog, joining the chorus of those who claim that a) science is only one of several routes to truth and b) science is itself based on unscientific and unjustifiable assumptions.  Brown’s piece, “Science is the only road to truth? Don’t be absurd,” takes off from a speech by atheist Harry Kroto at a meeting of Nobel Laureates in Austria.  (There’s a video of Harry’s talk, but I’m not able to view it.) Apparently Harry made an offensive and insupportable claim:

. . . around eight minutes in he goes off the rails. First there is a slide saying (his emphases): “Science is the only philosophical construct we have to determine TRUTH with any degree of reliability.” Think about this for a moment. Is it a scientific statement? No. Can it therefore be relied on as true? No.

But formal paradoxes have one advantage well known to logicians, which is that you can use them to prove anything, as Kroto proceeds to demonstrate. Or, as he puts it: “Without evidence, anything goes.” Remember, he has just defined truth (or TRUTH) as something that can only be established scientifically. So nothing he says about ethics or intellectual integrity after that need be taken in the least bit seriously. It may be true, but there is no scientific way of knowing this and he doesn’t believe there is any other way of knowing anything reliably.

I’d say that Kroto’s assertion is a scientific one, in the sense that we can do a test: define “truth” (I define it as “things about the universe that are in accordance with fact”), and see if there are other ways to reliably achieve it.  If there are, his statement is false.  If not, it’s supported.

And if you use my broad definition of science as “using reason, observation, and experiment to determine things about the universe that can be verified as true by other independent observers”, then I agree with Kroto.  Perhaps this is what Kroto did mean by “science”. (Someone please watch the video.) And of course what Kroto says about ethics and intellectual integrity are opinions, not truths.  Who cares? Different people have different ideas of what constitutes “intellectual integrity” and different standards of morality.  But Brown (I am trying hard not to use a slur here) wants to dismiss Kroto’s opinions simply because they’re not scientific!

As I’ve said before, we don’t need a scientifically based or a strong philosophical underpinning to validate science.  All we need to know is that the method works: that it produces results that all scientists could in principle replicate (if they can’t the results are discarded), and it produces—apologies to Jane Austen—truths universally acknowledged.  It also produces progress.  It cures diseases, flies us to the moon, improves our crops.  No other “way of knowing” does that—certainly not religion, Brown’s favorite hobbyhorse. And yes, the practice of science rests implicitly on the value that it’s good to find  out what is true and real, but does Brown disagree with that?  In the end, the method is validated by its results, and needs no a priori justification.  After all, the methods of science weren’t devised before science was practiced—we simply learned from experience that if we wanted to find truth, we had to go about it in a certain way.

What Brown is trying to do, of course, is claim that there are other ways to find truth beyond science (he doesn’t define “truth”). I believe that Brown’s ultimate aim—though he doesn’t state it here—is to validate religion as a viable way of finding truth. I base this conclusion on having read—at great cost to my digestion—a number of his columns over the years.  If you look up “faitheist” in the dictionary, you’ll find Brown’s picture next to it. He goes on:

The rest of us, of course, are perfectly free to believe that education should involve the promotion of critical thought, or at least to consider the question seriously. We are under no obligation to believe anything half so silly as that science is the only road to truth. We can reasonably argue that there are lots of ways to establish truth that are not scientific. Obviously they rely to some extent on the sifting and weighing of evidence, but that doesn’t make them part of science, or else every member of a jury would be a scientist.

Well, jurors are behaving like scientists to the extent that they weigh evidence in favor of and against a hypothesis.  But of course their verdict is not the same thing as a scientific truth—it’s an imperfect consensus judgment about whether a jury sees “reasonable doubt” of guilt.  The reason juries aren’t as good as scientists as finding truth (i.e., did the person really do the crime?) is because their decisions are often based on rhetorical persuasion and the veracity of police and eyewitnesses (unsupported personal testimony isn’t really part of science), jurors aren’t allowed to ask questions and demand more evidence, or other tests, from the prosecution, and, as we saw in the O.J. Simpson case, laypeople often aren’t qualified or trained to evaluate forensic evidence.

So what are the other areas that produce “truth”?  Brown says that there are lots of them, but mentions only one: ethics.

In a similar way, we can believe that ethical truths exist, even though these clearly aren’t scientific, or the products of science; but Kroto can’t. Not that this stops him. Like anyone else who is sane he talks as if ethical truths do matter, and exist.

I don’t believe there are such things as “ethical truths”—certainly not in the same sense that there are scientific truths.  What Brown means is ethical precepts, which are value judgments about what is good and right.  How can you possibly determine whether a statement like “forgive your enemies” is true?  It is not a reality about our universe, but a guide for behavior.  (A truth claim involving ethics would be something like “everyone forgives their enemies”.) And, of course, many ethical “truths” aren’t universal at all; in fact, I doubt you’d find more than a handful that don’t have exceptions.

So Brown is wrong on ethics, and fails to mention any other methods for ascertaining truth.  He bangs on about Galileo a bit (he’s done this twice before, so I’ll spare you this), arguing that Galileo was wrong about things like the distance from Earth to the stars, and so his conclusion about a heliocentric solar system, while ultimately proved correct, wasn’t supported by his own “scientific” evidence. I’m not sure what this is about unless Brown is trying to argue, as mushbrained accommodationists are wont to do, that because science is fallible, this vindicates those “other roads to truth” (e.g. Jesus).

Andrew Brown is a fool with a megaphone. I’d urge you to go over and set him straight, but he has a history of purging criticisms that appear in his comments—and not just intemperate and nasty criticism.

New data on an ancient species: the coelacanth

July 5, 2011 • 5:31 am

You’ll know about coelacanth, a lobe-finned fish that is closely related to the ancestor of tetrapods (four-legged vertebrates).  The first pre-amphibian that crawled ashore might have looked much like this fish.  Lobe-fins originated about 400 million years ago, and until fairly recently all but the lungfish were thought to have gone extinct about 80 million years ago. No fossils were found between then and the present, but then a live specimen was dredged up off South Africa in 1938, astounding biologists (read the whole story at the link!):

 On December 23rd, 1938, the Nerine entered port after a stint trawling off the mouth of the nearby Chalumna River. The dockman called Marjorie [Courtenay, curator of a Museum in South Africa], who was busy mounting a reptile collection, but felt she ought at least go down to the docks to wish the crew of the Nerine a merry Christmas. She took a taxi, delivered her greetings, and was about to leave when, according to her account, she noticed a blue fin protruding beneath a pile of rays and sharks on the deck. Pushing the overlaying fish aside revealed, as she would later write, “the most beautiful fish I had ever seen, five feet long, and a pale mauve blue with iridescent silver markings.” Marjorie had no idea what the fish was, but knew it must go back to the museum at once. At first the taxi driver refused to have the reeking, five-foot fish in his cab, but after a heated discussion, he drove Marjorie and her specimen back to the museum.

It’s called a “Lazarus species,” because it came back from the dead.  (Of course, there’s no guarantee that modern coelacanths would be reproductively compatible with their fossil relatives.)  The next specimen wasn’t found until 1952, but now they’re caught by fishermen (accidentally) fairly regularly.  Two species are recognized, with widely divergent habitats:   Latimeria chalumnae, living in a few localities off East Africa, and the congener  L menadoensis, known from two specimens off Indonesia, the second captured alive (but dying in a few hours).  Their status as different species was first based on differences in skin color (a terrible way to diagnose two species as different), but their status is fully confirmed from differences later found in their mitochondrial DNA, which put the divergence between L. chalumnae and L. menadoensis at around 40 million years ago. (I’d bet there are other populations in between these areas!)

Here’s the African species photographed underwater:

The behavior of both species was largely unknown, but we now know a lot more about L. chalumnae from a new paper in Marine Biology by Fricke et al., based on 23 years of study around the Comoro Islands, including many hours of underwater observation by unmanned submersibles.  I’ll just hit the high points:

  • The population in the study area was stable about about 300-400 individuals.
  • (This is known from earlier studies): the embryos aren’t expelled into the sea until three years after zygotes are formed: the longest period of embryonic development of any vertebrate.
  • The submersibles watched 115 individuals over the period and were able to recognize individuals.  Several were marked by the submersible with acoustic tags, allowing them to be tracked. One fish in 1987 was seen again in 2008, confirming that some can live at least 21 years as adults.  But it takes them years to become adults, so the life span is undoubtedly much longer.
  • The rate of natural mortality is estimated at about 0.04, or 4% of individuals dying per year.  The authors note that there are no known predators on adults except fishermen.
  • Based on this low rate of natural mortality, the authors estimate that the mean adult life expectancy is about 23 years, but that some  individuals can live over 100 years.  This is a long time, but in line with longevities of some other deep-water fish.  Females are estimated to give birth only about 7 times during their lives, producing about 140 offspring.
  • There is a strong size dimorphism, with males being larger (range 1.6-1.8 meters) than females (range 1.2-1.3 m). How do they know this? Because they measured live individuals with lasers, like this one (figure from Fricke et al.):

  • Coelocanths hunt in the depths at night (they’re piscivores, or fish eaters), often at 500 m, and rest during the day (sometimes in small groups) in underwater volcanic caves at lesser depths (180-206 meters).  It’s dark 500 m down, and I wonder how these fish hunt.  Some individuals use the same “home caves” over and over again.
  • Curiously, the authors did not observe a single subadult or juvenile coelacanth during the entire study.  (One has been seen elsewhere).  The authors hypothesize that the young stay down deep to avoid cannibalism by adults.
  • The good news: the population off the Comoros is not declining, due mainly to the use of motorized fishing canoes that take fisherman further offshore, away from where the coelacanths live.  The bad news is that coelacanth populations in Tanzania are far more endangered, since they’ve started using deep-water gill nets.  More than 80 coelacanths have been killed in this way since 2003.  The IUCN status of the African species is “critically endangered” and the Indonesian species as “vulnerable.”

Here’s a wonderful video of L. chalumnae photographed at depth.  Note its curious “head-standing” behavior toward the end, which I think is a mystery to biologists.

This one was taken in a submarine canyon; you can see its distinctive lobe fins very well:


____________________

Fricke, H., Hans Fricke, K. Hissmann, R. Froese, J. Schauer, R. Plante and S. Fricke. 2011. The population biology of the living coelacanth studied over 21 years. Marine Biology 158: 1511-1522, DOI: 10.1007/s00227-011-1667-x.

Why am I reading theology?

July 4, 2011 • 6:22 am

Under the tutelage of the estimable Eric MacDonald, I have spent several weeks reading Christian theology.  And so far, I have learned only three things:

1.  I am spending my middle age reading drivel about beliefs that have no basis in fact. This seems a total waste of time.  I could be reading books about real things instead.

2.  Theologians can’t write.  A lot of what they have to say is postmodern or obscure bafflegab, and I’m starting to believe that this obscurantism is deliberate because of reason 3 (below).  I have for example, just opened my book (An Introduction to Christian Theology, edited by Roger A. Badham) to a random chapter, which turned out to be “Process theology and the current church struggle” by John B. Cobb, Jr.  (Process theology holds that god is not immutable but changes over time, and so does his creation, not totally under his direction.) And there I find this, in a discussion of Alfred North Whitehead (one of the founders of this “school”):

But each occasion transcends the causality of the past by responding to it with more or less originality.  This requires that physical prehensions  are supplemented by “conceptual” ones.  Thus, in addition to prehending past events, an occasion also takes account of possibilities ingredient in those events or closely related to them.  Just how it relates these possibilities to the actualities it feels is its “decision.”  That means that in a situation that is inherently indeterminate, there is a determinate outcome  Other possibilities are cut off.

Believe me, the book contains paragraphs far more obscure and pretentious than this one.  Can you imagine reading this stuff night after night?  Do you see why my head feels about to explode? Eric, why are you doing this to me?

3.  There seems to be no “knowledge” behind theology, and I haven’t learned anything—not even any clever philosophy.  One gets the strong sense when reading theology (and granted, I am biased) that everyone is just making stuff up.

I’m trying to learn theology so I can meet head-on the argument that atheists are ignorant of theology and hence unqualified to combat religion.  But it doesn’t take much reading to realize that we already know the best way to challenge theologians: ask them “how do you know that what you’re saying describes anything about reality?” and “How do you know that your take on reality is better than that of other theologians?”

But I persist, and am asking readers, particularly if they have some knowledge of theology, if they have any insight into the following questions.  I am dead serious here, and not looking for sarcastic answers.  I’m even hoping that some real theologians will read this and provide some answers.

  • What are the arguments for god’s existence in the new sophisticated theology that aren’t taken up and refuted in The God Delusion? I must say that I haven’t found any; in fact, there are few arguments for god’s existence at all in what I read: people just assume he/she/it is real and go from there.
  • Has theology really “progressed”? That is, has it gotten closer to some deeper and more accurate understanding of the nature of god, how that god operated, what that god is like, and what it wants?  As far as I can see, theology “progresses” only when it has to quickly regroup to deal with either scientific advances or changes in secular morality (e.g., it’s wrong to have slaves and oppress women).  So the idea—adumbrated by Francis Collins in yesterday’s post—that god uses evolution as his means of creating humans, is not an advance in theology.  It is a change in theology confected to accommodate an advance in science. Ditto with the 1978 “revelation” by Mormon bigwigs that it was okay after all for blacks to enter its priesthood.
  • What knowledge about the world (or about god) has theology produced? By “knowledge”, I mean “truths about the way things are”, and here I explicitly rule out philosophical advances that aren’t directly rooted in faith.
  • Is theology anything more than a bunch of smart people making stuff up and couching it in academic language? If it isn’t, then we already have the armamentarium to combat it:  requests for evidence.  If it is, what are its major accomplishments?

I know I’m repeating the frustration I’ve expressed in earlier posts, but I don’t want to waste months of my life reading this stuff if there’s nothing to be gained from it except the ability to say to my opponents, “Yes, I do know about theological schools X, Y, and Z.”  Why bother to torture our brains if we can simply ask theologians to prove, using evidence and reason, that their viewpoint is correct, and better than that of either atheists or other theologians?

I’m starting to think that modern theology is simply postmodern literary criticism applied to a single book of fiction.

Happy Fourth

July 4, 2011 • 5:11 am

. . . and have pity on those of us who are working (I haz a deadline).

According to a new Marist poll (the complete data are  here), only 58% of Americans know that our independence was declared in the year 1776 (26% were unsure and 16% thought it was another year).  The uncertainty is greatest among the young: only 31% of those under 30 knew the correct year, which jumped to 75% for those between 45 and 59.

As to which country we declared independence from, only 76% knew it was Great Britain (19% were unsure and 5% declared a different country [!]).

A scientific test of Noah’s Flood: a good idea which is mine

July 3, 2011 • 12:14 pm

Inspired by a comment from TheRationalizer, and Francis Collins’s admission that genetic data show that Adam and Eve could not have been the literal ancestors of all humanity, I had a great idea, which is mine and belongs to me.  We can test another Biblical claim using genetics: the claim of the Great Flood of Noah (Genesis 6 and 7).  The Bible says that every species on earth was reduced to either two or fourteen individuals, depending on whether you agree with Genesis 6 or 7 (I’d never noticed this discrepancy before).

For many species we can do genetic tests identical to the ones used by evolutionists to show that humans leaving Africa were reduced to a population of only a few thousand individuals.

The Flood Hypothesis, then, predicts that all species, some time around 10,000 years ago, went through a population bottleneck of either two or fourteen individuals.  With a few assumptions, current estimates of genetic diversity can be used to test that claim. And I’m sure that the relevant data exist for many species, especially the fruit flies (Drosophila) I work on.  From that data, you could determine if there was a bottleneck around then, how large it might have been, and the confidence limits around that estimate.

So, some bright young scientist out there: get on it.  I can’t guarantee, though, that any reputable journal would publish your result.  On the bright side, it wouldn’t take much work to figure this out.

Oh, and the problem doesn’t go away if you say that what Noah put aboard the Ark were not species but “kinds” or “sorts.”  Those supposedly gave rise to all existing species, so the bottleneck problem still stands.

O noes! Bafftime coming!

Spiders in their dotage

July 3, 2011 • 10:08 am

If, like me, you’re feeling the ravages of age, no longer lithe and limber, and you’re starting to realize that you grunt every time you sit down, take heart.  Other animals also fall apart with age.  ScienceShot reports that spiders do too:

On Saturday, biologists will present research at the Society for Experimental Biology annual conference in Glasgow showing that as spiders age, they build shabbier, less perfect webs than they did in their youth. As a young creepy-crawly, the European house spider, Zygiella x-notata, weaves intricately patterned webs with regular spacing and exact angles, like this one in the left photo, built by a 17-day-old spider. The web in the right photo was built by a 188-days-old spider nearing the end of its life, and its web design is far more irregular and shows numerous gaps. Researchers suspect that, like in humans, the spider’s central nervous system breaks down in old age.

Photo by Mylene Anatoux

I love the two comments on the page:

Mike
Maybe the old dude just doesn’t care what the other spiders think anymore. Maybe it is attitude not capability. Again, just like humans…

and

brea
i have to agree with Mike, perhaps its not the fact that its older but that it knows its nearing the end of its life and just no longer cares enough about due to its impending death, perhaps this too is why elderly folks don’t seem to give a f&%$ ?

h/t: Matthew Cobb

America’s top scientist again peddles woo in public

July 3, 2011 • 6:28 am

Yes, it’s Francis Collins again, director of the National Institutes of Health and an evangelical Christian.  I previously mentioned the Christian Scholar’s Conference at Pepperdine University in California, noting that Collins was scheduled to give a keynote address: “Reflections on the current tensions between science and faith”.

He delivered it on June 16, and although the speech doesn’t seem to be online, the gist of it has been reported by The Christian Post (CP) and The Malibu Times (MT). I guess the content was predictable from what we know of Collins’s views, but I nevertheless find it infinitely depressing that America’s most prominent scientist goes around saying, as Collins did, that science gives us evidence for God.  I thought he was going to stop that kind of stuff when he resigned his position at BioLogos and took over the reins of the NIH, but apparently not.  But before I get to the substance of his talk, let me highlight the halfway decent things he said (and even the three points below are not unalloyed win):

  • According to both the CP and the MT, “Collins stressed that he was speaking at the conference as a private citizen, and not as a representative of the U.S. government” (MT).  Well, I’m glad he said that, and the man has every right to promulgate woo on his own, but I still think that his position as NIH director gives extra credibility to his assertion that science proves God.  It’s really no different from him going around and saying that he believes in the efficacy of homeopathy or spiritual healing.  Yes, he has the right, as a private citizen, to say what he wants, but what he said at Pepperdine is an embarrassment to scientists everywhere and the NIH in particular.
  • Collins asserted that the Earth was old and that evolution was true (thank Ceiling Cat!), though his version of evolution is a theistic one: the process was created and directed by God to a specific end: the evolution of Homo sapiens:

“God is the author of it all and we just learn something more about the how,” said Collins. “God is an awesome mathematician and physicist … God’s plan included the mechanism of evolution to achieve that, to create this marvelous diversity of living things on our planet.” His view of evolution being a part of God’s creation plan is called theistic evolution, or another term is biologos. Bio is the Greek word for “life,” while Logos means “word.” So biologos would mean God speaking life into being. (CP)

Unlike most scientists, Collins argued that God created the universe, bestowing it with evolution as the mechanism that would shape its eventual form. From evolution, man was gifted with free will, consciousness and morality. Thus man was made “in God’s image,” Collins said. (MT)

  • Collins admitted that the facts of genetics show that Adam and Eve could not be the literal ancestors of all humanity.  But, like a good theologian, he said that that actually makes things better.

Quote from CP: “So I think you can preserve the idea of a literal, historical couple (Adam and Eve) as long as you don’t try to say they were the only humans and we are all descended from just them,” contended Collins. “That second part science won’t support.” . . .

. . . The former director of the Human Genome Project said based on genetic research, it is impossible to support the belief that people today all came from only Adam.

Another benefit of accepting that there were thousands of people besides Adam and Eve is being able to answer questions from the Bible like: Where did Cain find his wife? Who was Cain afraid would kill him? How was Cain going to build a city with just his family?

“People in the world are hearing you can’t have both. It has got to be one or the other,” said Collins about choosing between science and creation. “The essential thing is we’re about the truth. A faith that basically asks people to disbelieve facts is not about the truth. If there are aspects about our Christian faith that has gone down that road, it is up to all of us to try to pull that back.

“Look at the facts, look at the truth, and in the process, admire all the more and worship all the more God the creator. But in the nonessential things, let’s not get too worked up about those options about Adam and Eve as long as they’re consistent with the facts.” (CP)

But “we’re about the truth”? Indeed, only when it concerns the “nonessential things” like Adam and Eve or the Genesis story of creation.  (Incidentally, how does Collins now preserve the idea of a “literal, historical” Adam and Eve? Who were they?)

But what about the “truths” that people cannot come back to life when they’ve been dead for a couple of ways, or that there’s no known way for a human female to give birth through parthenogenesis?  Oh, I forgot—the virgin birth and Resurrection are essential things, so let’s just ignore the science there.  Apparently Collins defines the “essential” things about Christianity as “those claims whose scientific accuracy can’t be checked directly.”  I strongly suspect that Collins believes in a literal resurrection and in miracles.  And, by the way, theistic evolution is not how scientists understand evolution, which is as a purely materialistic and unguided process that was not aimed at coughing up H. sapiens as its ultimate product.  Theistic evolution is really a watered-down form of creationism.

So what is the woo that Colllins peddled at Pepperdine? He highlighted two phenomena that, he said, science cannot explain, ergo Jesus:

1. Fine-tuning.  This is rapidly becoming accomodationists’ favorite argument for God.  Here’s a Collins quote from the MT:

“If [those constants] were set at a value that was just a tiny bit different, one part in a million, the whole thing wouldn’t work any more, because after the Big Bang it would have just the right balance of forces to enable matter to come together,” Collins said. “If you are an atheist, either it’s just a lucky break [and the odds are enormous], or you have to go to this multiverse hypothesis, which says that there must be an infinite number of parallel universes that have different values of those constants. And of course we are here, so me must have won the lottery, we must be in the one where everything worked.?”

(Note: Collins here is espousing the strong anthropic principle [SAP], not merely the idea that we are the result of a lucky break, because if those constants were otherwise (so Collins claimed), we wouldn’t be here to make the observation.  As Victor Stenger notes in the article and book below, the SAP posits that the universe must have the properties it has to allow life to evolve.  But of course we could be simply the result of a lucky break!)

Collins sees the answer in God, of course:

“And there are serious scientists who believe that, and sort of are forced to, because the alternative is you have to see the hand of a creator who set the parameters to be just so,” Collins concluded.

Well, there are alternatives to God.  Collins dismisses the multiple universe theory too quickly, and he’s apparently not familiar with Lee Smolin’s theory of cosmological natural selection—granted, a controversial view—nor with Victor Stenger’s many solid criticisms of the “fine-tuning” argument, including the idea that maybe the universe isn’t so “fine-tuned” at all, or that there are underlying reasons that we don’t yet understand for the physical constants to be what they are. To see the scientific counter to Collins, read Stenger’s piece “Is the universe fine tuned for us?” [pdf at link] or his new book, The Fallacy of Fine Tuning.

We don’t yet understand why the physical constants of our Universe are what they are, much less how much they could vary and still allow life, nor do we know whether “multiverses” actually exist (these are not, by the way, an idle speculation of physicists designed to save secular science: this idea falls directly out of some notions of physics).  But to posit an immensely complex spiritual being as the answer is simply foisting a God-of-the-Gaps argument on the American public as a “scientific” conclusion.  “See, those atheistic scientists haven’t yet given us a good explanation for the SAP.  Therefore God exists, and not just God, but the Christian God with the whole armamentarium of Mary, Jesus, and miracles.”  Collins has yet to tell us why fine-tuning (or morality; see below) is evidence for his god rather than the gods of Hindus, Muslims, Jews and so on.

Francis Collins is to physics what Michael Behe is to biology.

2.  Morality and altruism. Collins sees the ingrained morality of humans (he calls this “The Moral Law”) as strong evidence for God, since evolution couldn’t produce such feelings and behaviors.  From the MT:

“As a scientist, how do you explain random acts of kindness from an evolutionary perspective?” Collins asked.

Collins pointed to the case of Wesley Autrey, a black man who jumped from a subway platform in New York City in 2007 to cover a white man who had fallen onto the tracks after having a seizure. Incredibly, neither was hurt as an onrushing subway train passed over them.

Collins said there was no reason, evolutionarily speaking, for Autrey to put himself in danger to help a total stranger who on the surface was different from him. Rather, he should have been thinking about self-preservation.

“Evolution, in its simplest form, would say ‘Wesley, you got it all wrong here. That’s not what you were supposed to be thinking about,’” Collins said. “But when you look at that, are you not moved by it? Are you not taken with the sense that this is human nobility in the form that we’re called to do? So what’s this about?”

What’s this about?  Not necessarily about Jesus!

Morality itself is not a problem for evolution: my own view is that it’s a combination of sentiments and behaviors that were evolutionarily advantageous in our ancestors, who lived in small groups that would promote some sort of morality, along with reasoned morality: non-evolved sentiments that we have worked out through rational thought.  It’s my contention, and I’ll have a piece out on this soon, that human morality reflects a combination of evolved behaviors and the rationality that was a fortuitous byproduct of the big brain vouchsafed us by evolution.

It’s hard to deny that reason itself can produce morality, for what humans see as “moral”  has changed drastically over the last few centuries.  In many places ethnic minorities, gays, and women, for example, are treated much better than they were about 200 years ago.  That change, and the sentiments behind it, could not have come from God (unless He changed his mind about slavery, women and homosexuals), nor from evolution either, for the transformation happened too fast to be explained by genetic change.

The observance of human altruism (and it can’t be denied that some people sacrifice their lives for non-relatives) is only a conundrum if you think that altruism—and by that I mean sacrificing your life for a complete stranger—is  a) based solely on genes in our DNA promoting that behavior and b) evolved precisely so we’d sacrifice our lives for strangers.  Natural selection, except for an unlikely form of group selection, can’t promote such “sacrificial” genes.  But there are two non-goddy sources of altruism like that shown by Wesley Autrey: one evolutionary and one based on reason.

The first is simply that acts like Autrey’s reflect an ancestral morality that is now being applied in situations where it’s not adaptive.  Evolution could have instilled in us the sentiment to risk our lives for our relatives or members of a small band of individuals whom we know might reciprocate.  We no longer live in such bands, but we still have the genes that evolved over the long period of our evolution in small groups (remember that the last two millennia constitute only 0.03 percent of the time since we diverged from our common ancestor with the chimp).

This is not an idle speculation, for every day humans behave in ways that contravene our evolved nature.  This happens each time a man puts on a condom, or a couple adopts a baby.  Both of those behaviors are modern and nonadaptive responses to impulses instilled in us by evolution: the desire to copulate and to have children.  It would have, of course, been manifestly maladaptive for australopithecines to use condoms or nurture the babies of completely unrelated individuals, and genes for those behaviors could not have survived because they subvert gene’s “desires” to propagate themselves. (Note to Mary Midgley: I’m using shorthand here.) What we see with adoption is similar to what Autrey did in New York: the nonadaptive coopting of ancestral behaviors that were once evolutionarily advantageous.  And this could explain all of those other “random acts of kindness” that don’t involve potential sacrifice of reproduction: they’re simply the byproducts of an evolved morality.

Second, pure altruism could reflect simply our realization that such behaviors are moral or at least admirable.  That is, they could result from secular reason.  This is Peter Singer’s thesis in The Expanding Circle:  as we become familiar with other individuals and think about things, we realize that one’s gender, race, or sexual preferences are completely irrelevant to how they should be treated, because morality can’t privilege one group over another.  And our evolved tendency to be moral toward our own group simply expands to others based on that reasoning.  This, I think, is really the only explanation for why (in many places) morality, both in terms of moral codes or individual behavior, is improving.  It cannot be due to evolution, and it cannot be due to God, unless he changed his mind.  (God: “I used to approve of slavery and the stoning of nonvirgin brides.  But I had second thoughts.”) And if we can reason our way toward a more inclusive morality, extending morality beyond our small group and our kin to the world at large, then we can be altruistic towards strangers.

None of this appeals to Collins, because, after all, he saw that frozen waterfall that convinced him of the Trinity.  But as a scientist he really has the responsibility to consider, and talk about, the non-Jesus explanations for “fine tuning” and morality.  His going around giving lectures on how physics and human behavior proves God is an embarrassment to the NIH, to scientists, and, indeed, to all rational people.