Social evolution

There was a paper recently in PNAS on "The cognitive and neural foundations of religious belief". A couple of bloggers, Epiphenom and I Am David, come to opposite conclusions. Epiphenom says that the study shows that religion is not a side-effect of the evolution of cognitive processes, while IAD says that is exactly what it shows. The paper purports to show that when thinking about God or beliefs about God, the very same areas of the brain are used that are used in ordinary social interactions and so on: The MDS results confirmed the validity of the proposed psychological structure of…

This is a response to David Brooks' column in the New York Times, today: "The End of Philosophy". Other respondees include PZ Myers, Brian Leiter, James Smith, bottumupchange, Mark Liberman, and chaospet (who does a very nice cartoon summarising many of the problems with Brooks' column). Hume once wrote: "Reason is, and ought only to be, slave to the passions". By this he meant that reason is motivated by a moral sense, but at the same time Hume also wrote that one cannot derive a statement of "ought" from a statement of "is", which attempts at naturalising morality G. E. Moore called the "…

Some links and issues I have come across lately. Those who read this and my other blog know that I am deeply opposed to internet censorship. Recently, Wikileaks put up a leaked list supposed to be the list being used in Australian trials of what will be a mandatory blacklist of URLs. First the minister said it wasn't the list, then he said it had some similarities, and now he says it's substantially the right list but there have been edits, but that's not my point. Now, in Germany, a Wikileaks host has been raided at the behest of a German minister. It's even possible that the Australian…

There are a lot of folk who think they have a handle on how to communicate science to the general public, and a lot of folk, mostly scientists, who think nobody else does. But I was reading Carl Zimmer's twittering today, about Rebecca Skoot getting a column gig for a new magazine devoted to issues of interest to women, Double X. It hit me that science journalism is not dying, it is having to adapt to a new business model. Traditional media made its money from advertising and sales. It used a broadcast model of publishing - a single source (the printing presses or the transmitters) to many…

I'm posting this on my American blog because the Australian government, through the Australian Communications and Media Authority is fining people on Australian sites who give the links below the fold $11,000/day. Pretty well everything I feared about censorship by the internet filter and heavy handed government action is coming true. First of all, it transpires that only one bureaucrat at ACMA is required to block and ban a site, with no further oversight or redress. Second, it turns out that yes, ordinary and popular pornography sites are being blocked, so that if the filter becomes…

Actually, this one is better called "Darwin was a racist", but as the text concerned is from the same source as those claims, I thought it might be easier to evaluate a single claim and generalise from that. Our gospel for today is chapters V and VI of The Descent of Man, published in 1871. If you read Darwin sloppily, or to find evidence that he really was a Very Bad Man for rhetorical - usually religious - purposes, you soon come across this statement. In fact, you can find paraphrases of it in literally hundreds of creationist documents and sites. Here is the offending passage, from…

In the Descent of Man, Darwin cites a paper published about 5 years earlier by W. R. Greg, which argues that natural selection is not active among humans (or, as the convention had it then, "Man"). It is most interesting that he does, because Greg is the intellectual father of all those who think that civilisation, and in particular medicine and poverty relief, leads to a degradation of health and virtue. In short, Greg is the father of social "Darwinism". What is Darwin's response? First he spends a dozen or so pages showing that in fact civilised human beings are still subjected to (…

So there's a rather livid article in the Independent by Johann Hari, titled "Why should I respect these oppressive religions?" Starting in 1999, a coalition of Islamist tyrants, led by Saudi Arabia, demanded the rules be rewritten. The demand for everyone to be able to think and speak freely failed to "respect" the "unique sensitivities" of the religious, they decided – so they issued an alternative Islamic Declaration of Human Rights. It insisted that you can only speak within "the limits set by the shariah [law]. It is not permitted to spread falsehood or disseminate that which involves…

If you happen to be near the University of Guelph, then not only is Massimo Pigliucci giving a talk there, but there's this event by my friend and former colleague, Stefan Linquist:

An excellent fisking by Johnny at Ecographica is here - including the cover that New Scientist should have used... More from Larry at Sandwalk here, on the cover and the intent of the article. Marco F at Leucophaea has a blog in Italian that I think says complimentary things about the critics [Babelfish kept on interpreting something as the evolution of the geniuses, and I'm fairly sure that wasn't about me]. And a drunken front doorstop by Malte and David at Mr Darwin's home here. Mr Darwin was unfortunately unwell. Naturalists should never be allowed to drink. More: Chance and Necessity…

It came as an email. Then it was on the Seed Bloggers Forum. Now it's on my frigging Facebook - they really want me to answer this: In his first speech as President-elect last November, Barack Obama reminded us of the promise of "a world connected by our own science and imagination." And on Tuesday, in his inaugural address, President Obama cemented his commitment to a new ethos and culture by vowing to "restore science to its rightful place." At Seed, we are firmly committed to President Obama's vision and want to help make it a reality. We begin today by asking you, our friends and…

Truism 5: One is only required (by our language games) to justify moral claims one or two levels Scholium*: Justifying moral claims is a language game in Wittgenstein's sense, but only in a philosophical language game do we justify the justifications. That is why many people prefer to make God the source of morality. Scholium: All moral claims are founded on duties, not utilities Scholium: Moral duties and rules encode past utilities * I'm going to use this term now instead of "corollary" (see comments to Truisms 4)

Truism 3: Humans are moral because that is the nature of the species - moral is what humans do Corollary: Morality is not based on commands from on high Subcorollary: If God is dead, how could everything be permitted? We are still social apes. Corollary: The 95:95 Rule - 95% of people are decent 95% of the time Subcorollary: "Perverse" is 3 2 sigmas of a normal distribution of propensities Discuss

I's an ego thing, sure, but it's also a handy way of seeing what one did this past year. Here are what I think of as the substantial posts of Evolving Thoughts from 2008. Sorry for the lateness - it's a longish list. I (and my guest blogger) have been real busy this year... Religion and Creationism Desecration, blasphemy in public, and manners Why are there still monkeys? Can a Christian accept natural selection as true? Does religion evolve? The heat of religion The religious we have always with us Agriculture and the rise of religion The origins of agriculture now extended Darwin, God and…

Here at monkey's uncle, the blog of James Holland Jones, a Stanford anthropologist. Well worth the read. Basically he attacks the presumption that there was some kind of Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness needed to make the rest of the EP argument. Merry Christmas. Or should I say Happy Holidays, being that there's a war on Christmas?

The Bradley Report [Here] is proposing, among other things, that [Australian] students have vouchers to attend the university they want to, rather than making the university the funding recipient directly. Two things stand out to me. One is that this makes higher learning a marketable commodity, in which the desires of the consumers determines what is most important intellectually. So if everyone wants to be a business manager, accountant or surfing doctor, that is what we should fund? There's no important cultural legacy to be supported? If not, why does the government support art? Surely…

... shh, not so loud or everyone will want one. Here's a piece by Darksyde at Daily Kos in which he reports the outgoing EPA chair (who has overseen all manner of bad science and decisions, although that may not be his own fault) as saying "It's not a clean-cut division [between evolution and creation]. If you have studied at all creationism vs. evolution, there's theistic or God-controlled evolution and there's variations on all those themes." It seems to me that theistic evolution is not exactly about God controlling evolution, although there may be plenty of biblical warrant for God…

The General Ecosystems Thinking (GET) Group centred at Queensland University of Technology (or as we at UQ like to call it, the "city university") invited me to come give a talk on the ontology of evolution. I gave it yesterday. As it will be part of this series of posts that will end up as some form of publication, I thought you might like to hear my dulcet and husky tones, and read the incredible slide. If so, go here, or get the PDF slides here and the WMA sound here. Check out some of the other speakers too. Thanks to Marco Fahmi for the invite and shepherding. The actual title was: "…

Read this article by Mark Newton. This gets murkier and sillier by the day. Late addition: From the comments at the linked site: As a young person ( 22 ) who has been brought up on the internet and as a ALP member myself working for a Labor State Govt. I have told my boss the state MP that I will seriously think about resigning my memberhsiup to the ALP should this pass. Used to be, the ALP was the party of liberalisation and freedom of expression... Late late note: From here, courtesy of Jason Grossman Later note: It's picking up in the media at last... see ITWire, and now The Age.

It has become common in recent years for people to use terms of philosophy in distinct contexts, as it has terms of biology. Thus, ontology has gone the way of taxonomy, being dragooned into service of database techniques, to mean something quite the opposite of what it originally meant. I have noticed this tendency of computer technology for decades, ever since I got hopelessly muddled when doing database programming in the early 80s until I realised that they were using some terminology of formal logic in exactly the wrong way (I forget what it was now). A database ontology is not an…