Perspectives on Discussion of Science and Religion

Conversation
41

That’s possible. But we can’t ignore the fact that dualism has probably been the dominant worldview for most of human history. The view that only the material/natural/physical exists is a relative newcomer to our intellectual heritage. I’m not convinced that this is just because dualism is more comforting. I think it genuinely seemed to provide a better accounting of why the world was the way it was, until our technological advancement reached a point that we could actually perceive enough of the world to make feasible the use of the scientific method to understand its fundamentals.

Did I actually write anything meaningful there? It makes sense in my head, but maybe it just reads like gobbledygook.

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42

I don’t know about meaningful, but the Information content is less than or equal to 4712 bits (8 bits * 589 characters). :wink:

Our brains may have evolved to allow for supernatural thinking. Nicholas Wade wrote a book about this, The Faith Instinct, where he makes a plausible case based primarily on anthropological research.

We now have the tools/capacity to think differently, but it requires retraining our brains to do so. Not everyone has this training, and most of us aren’t nearly so well trained as we think we are. :sweat_smile:

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43

Oh I agree that would be a simplistic claim, and surely wrong. (I added “or other resources” for that reason.) However, with the Standard Disclaimer about being outside my wheelhouse, I understand that dualism is not actually universal in history. Only a fool would suspect that naturalism as we understand it today was pervasive in any ancient cultures, but I recently read a book about the humanism of Confucius and Lao Zi, and there’s the famous Greenblatt book (The Swerve) with epicurean poet Lucretius and his De rerum natura as supporting characters. I know this is a swerve (ha) off topic but did want to note that there are likely more than just a few ancient cultures who saw a way past gods and demons. Lucretius, particularly, seems to me to be clearly embracing what today we call naturalism.

As for providing comfort, I know I am learning a lot recently about views of the psychology and sociology of religion, from a brilliant and wonderful expert named Britt Hartley. She has a long exploration of “levels” of atheism that she presents as a thought experiment just-asking-questions kind of exercise, wherein she refers to arguments that human minds evolved to confront death cognitively and then those minds urgently needed tools to deal with the ensuing danger/damage. Religion, so the argument goes (I guess I would know this is Nietzsche in a nutshell if I’d read him), provides the resources to deal with this otherwise devastating cognitive challenge. (To societies and not just individuals.) In my view, that’s comfort with a capital C and it’s the kind of resource I have in mind when I argue that it is not surprising that religion has evolved to be as impermeable and untouchable as possible.

But anyway, you are right to question/reject a simplistic narrative of dualism simply “providing comfort” and especially a laughable narrative of dualism being intentionally constructed so as to insulate itself from reality.

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A slightly different way to look at it is that we could only become more intelligent after we developed the ability to deceive ourselves.

https://cmm.ucsd.edu/research/labs/varki/denial/index.html

Varki gives a great talk.

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45

Thanks for the suggestions for future reading!

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46

Opium des Volkes. I don’t think you are being cynical at all–I think you’ve hit the nail squarely on the head…

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Yes indeed. Lucretius (1st century, BC) was an “early adopter” of Democritus’ atomic theory (which was probably circulated around 400 BC or so, I think.) Yes, there are a lot of years between them but Lucretius wrote in detail about Epicurean philosophy and that was based upon Democritus’ atomism.

Lucretius, like many of the ancient world’s great writers was “rediscovered” in the Renaissance, when everybody who was anybody (and thereby educated) read Latin. So his long poem—and quite laborious in my opinion—on the nature of things became an important foundation of the development of modern science.

I recall his Latin hexameter (the usual meter for great epic poetry of Classical Latin) one of the greatest tortures of my youth. Or I should say that what was difficult was not the hexameter but the very difficult vocabulary and what seemed to me at the time such inscrutable grammar. And he often used lots of metaphorical and odd poetic techniques to make his points in the most challenging ways. To Lucretius’ credit, I must tip my hat for his creativity in inventing new Latin words to express his ideas, much like scientists today combine Latin (and Greek) morphemes to come up with a descriptive scientific term. So I’m not criticizing the long dead Lucretius. I’m mostly admitting my own severe limitations.

Anyway, I think he should be regarded as an important early pioneer “explainer” of science even though Democritus tends to get a lot more credit.

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48

Far as I’m concerned your skepticism is entirely justified. It’s an audacious claim, and I am certainly not the most qualified person to be making it.

I first considered the possibility that the explanatory logic of evolution was fallacious around 25 years ago when I read Dawkins’ self-described “theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection” in The Blind Watchmaker, where he explained the functional complexity of “complicated things” by boiling it down to so many individual tiny adaptations accumulated over vast periods of time. At one point Dawkins speculated that “an ancient animal with 5% of an eye…used it for 5% vision” – as if x% of a given system could be relied upon to perform x% of its function. By arguing essentially that an integrated system is literally the sum of its parts and nothing more, he seemed to commit a fallacy of composition.

Years later I read where Ken Miller responded to Michael Behe’s argument from irreducible complexity by saying, “Darwin’s answer, in essence, was that evolution produces complex organs in a series of fully functional intermediate stages,” and adding, “If each of the intermediate stages can be favored by natural selection, then so can the whole pathway.” But that doesn’t follow. Precisely because natural selection is an incremental process, it cannot really favor an entire pathway consisting of so many hypothetical intermediate stages. So Miller’s inference from parts to whole also struck me as a fallacy of composition. Others, Darwin included, have appeared to commit the same basic fallacy, whether explicitly or implicitly; yet I have found no better explanation than theirs for the evolution of irreducible or specified complexity.

But as you say, no one else seems to have noticed. Or maybe no one else thinks it’s important. I don’t know.

49

Right. That’s why I keep talking about the importance of fallacies associated with certain evolutionary inferences. Given that all science is inference, an invalid scientific inference is invalid science.

If we already know that a journey is doable, then yes, both steps and journey are clearly doable. But all journeys are not created equal. Behe once described a blindfolded walk from the plains outside of Lubbock to the top floor of the Sears Tower in Chicago as one example of an almost certainly not doable journey. Reminds me of the proverbial turtle on top of a fence post: you know he had some help getting there.

Your counter scenario does help underscore why the fallacy of composition is an informal fallacy, and why it’s so easy to both overlook and commit. The point to emphasize is that an inference from parts to whole cannot be justified simply by the form of the logic. If each step of a 100-mile journey takes less than a minute, can we say the same for the entire journey?

You mentioned protons. Suppose someone argued that if each of the quarks said to compose a proton has no measurable mass, then neither does the proton. That person would be committing a fallacy of composition. By the same principle, even if it were true that each of the components of a given biological system evolved by a process of mutation and natural selection (or any other mechanism or number of mechanisms), it would not follow that the entire system evolved by the same process. It may be that a process which explains the elongation of a finch’s beak cannot adequately account for the systematic functional complexity of an entire finch.

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50

Yes it does. I have personally explained to you how. You liked my post, but never responded to it.

I consider your not modifying your case in light of correction to be an act of dishonesty.

You should completely stop giving the argument you are giving here if you’re not going to also give my rebuttal to it. I’m serious. If you give that argument again anywhere, or to anyone, in the rest of your life, without also giving the rebuttals to it you have received from me or others, then you are a dishonest person because you’re knowingly holding back information that contradicts your claim.

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51

I’m helping a friend “de-program” from Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box and this article so well addresses my friend’s questions about irreducible complexity and the evolution of antibodies. I thought it might be useful to others who are assessing Behe’s claims.

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52

Each step of the path is an end in itself. Each subsequent step is an end in itself. There is no teleology. Can you make a case that some fallacy of composition is at play in nature, such that when an advantageous trait is favored, that nature cries out STOP, you cannot do this, you are on the forbidden pathway of composition?

OK, but that would be the least of the physical problems in that argument.

It is not the same principle as the relativistic mass-energy relation. At all. But to your point, when selecting for components, natural selection operates on the whole organism, hence the system. The entire system must evolve by the same process; it is the same process.

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53

Oh, well that is simply very poor reasoning on your part.

Suppose I load 500 two-pound boulders into a dump truck, one boulder at a time.

By your reasoning, I could not possibly do this unless I was capable of lifting 1000 lbs of boulders at one time. To reason that I could do it would (according to you) commit the “fallacy of composition.”

This is very unfortunate. It is clear that you have wasted many hours of your time writing a book based on a very simple failure of reasoning on your part. If, at least, you now realize that you should not presume to understand a subject, about which you are almost completely ignorant and untrained, better than the people who have devoted their careers to understanding it, it will not be a total loss.

I will add that I do not quite agree with Miller’s explanation. I do not believe it is necessary that each incremental step be subject to positive selection. It is sufficient that each step be merely compatible with survival, so it can remain in the gene pool long enough to be combined with other mutations that, collectively, may be subject to positive selection.

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54

Hi Ron
Natural selection selects for survival and not future function. I think based on this Don’s idea has some merit.

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55

Exactly. The intermediate steps don’t need to be superior to previous steps and positively selected, merely functional enough to not provide a strong fitness disadvantage. Change can accumulate and lead to new functions without requiring the changes to always be better than the ancestral version.

In an evolutionary history with 10 intermediate stages, half or more can be neutral. Neutral changes can accumulate and still result in new functions occasionally. Part of the evolutionary history of a complex trait can owe mostly to constructive neutral evolution, where complexity builds up neutrally before a new function is discovered.

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56

Intermediate steps can include removing existing parts, thus irreducible complexity.

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57

Yes, exactly; that is what I meant by “there is no teleology”. But that does not support the contention that complexity cannot develop as a succession of steps, each having immediate consequence.

58

As a community service announcement, I will provide a reminder that @colewd doesn’t really understand words.

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59

Don, I think you need to do two things here:

First, the notion that one will find a problem in evolutionary theory purely through reasoning, e.g., by identifying “fallacies,” is just incorrect. This is not a logical, but an empirical, problem, and the only way you can access it meaningfully is by engaging with specific evidence and demonstrating what you think the problem is. Others have pointed out that the thing you judge to be a fallacy clearly isn’t; but even if it were I can’t see how this would help you in the face of the evidence.

I would strongly suggest that you take up the project of better understanding some major evolutionary transition, so that you get some idea what this actually looks like. Two books I would recommend are Kemp’s Origin and Evolution of Mammals and Clack’s Gaining Ground. The first is, of course, about the origins and evolution of the mammals, beginning with the earliest, very reptile-like synapsids from the time just after synapsids and sauropsids diverged. It addresses, at length, the many structural changes and the stages through which they’ve passed. The second is about the origin of the tetrapods by way of their lobe-finned fish ancestors.

Both of these books are a bit technical for the layman. But as a layman I can also attest that if you read them carefully and diligently, you will learn a great deal; they are far from inaccessible but will require effort.

That effort, however, will be richly rewarded. Rather than having a sterile “reasoning without evidence” approach to the question, you will gain an evidence-based understanding of some very understandable examples of how complex suites of characters arise in a population without any teleology, without any need to look forward to some “goal,” at all. If, after that, you still have some critique of evolutionary theory, it will now be a better-informed critique, at the least.

P.S., added via edit:

I also have to say that it appears that you have a very broad conception of the fallacy of composition. From the way you speak of it, I would expect that you think that when you look out and find six feet of snow on the ground, this cannot have resulted from the deposit of many individual snowflakes. Again, the concept of “fallacy” is pretty useless in this context anyhow; the question is whether the evidence supports the proposition that changes in populations can accumulate, or not. But that’s pretty much just as clear a proposition as the one that says snowflakes can accumulate.

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60

Why do you, AFAIK, never mention the observations that support any such inferences?