Here’s something fun to leave on your screen for a while. It’s an evolutionary car.
Ouches in 3..2..
The problem here is: what’s the the best wheel (and load) size and position to get a little car across a rugged landscape? Genetic algorithms are good at these kinds of problems. Just release a population of slightly differing individuals into the wild, and let the best performers produce offspring that are sort of like they are. Nifty.
“We’re sensitive to the fluid dynamics of the campaign, but we have a game plan and a strategy,” said Mr. Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe. “We’re familiar with this. And I’m sure between now and Nov. 4 there will be another period of hand-wringing and bed-wetting. It comes with the territory.”
Democrats last week were in a panic over Palin, prompting the run on adult diapers that reverberated through the economy, inadvertently destroying Lehman Brothers, fomenting global warming, and hastening the eventual heat death of the universe.
I admit to indulging in a bit of the panic. One night I woke up at 3, worrying that Obama was going to lose this thing. Another night I dreamed that McCain had asked me to be his running mate. There I was thinking, “What am I doing on the Republican ticket?” (It has occurred to me since that I’d be a stronger running mate than Palin. I don’t have any foreign policy experience, but I do have a degree in International Relations.)
We Democrats do this. We fret and fume, and watch helplessly as the worst people in the world control the dialogue and capture everyone’s attention with the dumbest things. And we worry that, yet again, the scumbags will win.
And every time the polls show the race to be closer than we’d like, we get people telling us that there’s something wrong with what we’re doing. It always seems to be about… the good people. Yes, those simple humble folk who bow their heads and pray around the dinner table every night (with no fancy lettuce, mind you). They’re founts of wisdom, these common decent souls, issuing simple homilies as they hook their thumbs into their armpits and rock back and forth. And we Democrats abuse them mercilessly as we look down our urban noses at their pious ways. We’re losing… (wait for it!)… people of faith.
Here’s a prognosticator now. Scott Atran.
I’m an atheist liberal academic who strongly leans Democrat. But I’m stunned at how blind so many of my colleagues and soul mates are to the historical underpinnings of American political culture and the genuine appeal of religious conservatism for so many of our fellow citizens.
…
Among many Republican conservatives, one factor strongly correlates with patriotism and national security, is of even more overriding concern in daily life, and stands inseparable from love of country. Religion.
Well, it’s one thing to understand the appeal religion has for people, and quite another to be infected with it yourself. I only wish Democrats were more immune to it — they’re nowhere near as secular as Atran is suggesting.
Or this article from Jonathan Haidt. I’ve linked to him before.
When Republicans say that Democrats “just don’t get it,” this is the “it” to which they refer. Conservative positions on gays, guns, god, and immigration must be understood as means to achieve one kind of morally ordered society. When Democrats try to explain away these positions using pop psychology they err, they alienate, and they earn the label “elitist.” But how can Democrats learn to see—let alone respect—a moral order they regard as narrow-minded, racist, and dumb?
Now, how is this view different from the “Democrats need to learn some respect” meme seen here? Only in tone, not in substance. If we don’t tell the believers (you know, the ones who are trying to block certain kinds of marriage and birth control) that their views are perfectly valid and very nice, they’ll never vote with us.
As though they ever would. When did Republicans ever concede any ground to us? Now that they’re down in the popularity polls, are they abandoning parts of their social agenda? No-sirree! Are the radio hate jocks acting more conciliatory? With rare exceptions, no. Do we hear Republicans saying that they need to reach out to secular Americans and try to understand us? No, they still think we’re vermin, and they wonder whether we can have any sense of morality at all.
But that could be the point. The antagonistic approach (surprise!) doesn’t win friends. So the question Haidt, Atran, and other concern trolls pose is: Do you want to win elections or don’t you? It’s all very well for you to be right, but do you want to be president?
Well, I understand the concern. I’ve seen the disaster that political and religious fundamentalists have wrought and I’m not anxious for more. But I am not certain that it is worth winning elections at any cost, if part of that cost is abandoning rationality and sinking into the mire of fuzzy-headed spiritism. That’s an approach that’s guaranteed to make the problems we face worse, not better.
And suggesting that Democrats need to mend their ways is silly. How do conservatives magically know what individual Democrats think? How do they know your individual views? Have they asked you? Or are we just being stereotyped — again? I think the latter, and if you feel like modifying your behaviour so others won’t stereotype you, frankly you need to grow a set. If we all changed our ways tomorrow and acted like Atran, Haidt, et al wanted, how long would it take hardcore conservative fundamentalists to even notice? They haven’t yet noticed that Bush is an incompetent liar and they still think Iraq was a fine idea. The reality lag for these people is measured in geological time.
So don’t wait for them. Have your facts straight, pick your battles, and tell people (politely but firmly) when they’re wrong on factual matters. Realise that it may not be possible to be ‘right’ on moral matters — they often won’t be good at realising this — so you may need to state your values clearly, and stay open to change.
Sam Harris’s response to Haidt is my favourite:
How should we live? Is it wrong to lie? If so, why and in what sense? Which personal habits, uses of attention, modes of discourse, social institutions, economic systems, governments, etc. are most conducive to human well-being? It is widely imagined that science cannot even pose, much less answer, questions of this sort.
Jonathan Haidt appears to exult in this pessimism. He doubts that anyone can justifiably make strong, realistic claims about right and wrong, or good and evil, because he has observed that human beings tend to make moral judgments on the basis of emotion, justify these judgments with post hoc reasoning, and stick to their guns even when their post hoc reasoning demonstrably fails…. This reliable failure of human reasoning is just that—a failure of reasoning.
…
Haidt often writes, however, as if there were no such thing as moral high ground. At the very least, he seems to believe that science will never be able to judge higher from lower. He admonishes us to get it into our thick heads that many of our neighbors “honestly prefer the Republican vision of a moral order to the one offered by Democrats.” Yes, and many of them honestly prefer the Republican vision of cosmology, wherein it is still permissible to believe that the big bang occurred less than ten thousand years ago. These same people tend to prefer Republican doubts about biological evolution and climate change. There are names for this type of “preference,” one of the more polite being “ignorance.” What scientific purpose is served by avoiding this word at all costs?
And second is Roger Schank.
It is all very nice to come up with complex analyses of what is going on. As is often the case, the real answer is quite simple. Most people can’t think very well. They were taught not to think by religion and by a school system that teaches that knowledge of state capitals and quadratic equations is what education is all about and that well reasoned argument and original ideas will not help on a multiple choice test.
We don’t try to get the average child to think in this society so why, as adults would we expect that they actually would be thinking? They think about how the Yankees are doing, and who will win some reality show contest, and what restaurant to eat it, but they are not equipped to think about politics and, in my mind, they are not equipped to vote. The fact that we let them vote while failing to encourage them to think for themselves is a real problem for our society.
…
Republicans do not try to change voter’s beliefs. They go with them. Democrats appeal to reason. Big mistake.
Well, that’s pretty dark. But maybe (just maybe!) this time the good guys will win. I think so, but I’m an optimist. Obama beat the Clintons, he can beat McCain. Even if he doesn’t, you have to live with yourself more than other people do. So quit your hand-wringing and your bed-wetting. You’re already part of the community on the Web that’s waging the battle of opinions, and setting the agenda for the next Information Age, comment by intelligent well-supported comment. Take heart! Be your own freaky self. Vote.
That is all.
Still laughing over this snippet from a Dawkins talkback radio session yesterday.
Dawkins and the radio host talk about what it would have been like to meet Darwin, and the host asks:
Dawkins doesn’t miss a beat.
‘Anonymous’, who’s done such great work on the Scientologists lately, made a comment in the last thread on bones from other planets:
Strange that he felt a need to defend an idea that, as far as I remember, is not part of official mormon doctrine.
Ah, yes, OMD.
But why isn’t it official? How many Latter-day Saints (and what kinds) need to believe it before it becomes official? Is there a list? Determining official Mormon doctrine is harder than it ought to be.
Usually religions make statements that can’t really be confirmed or disconfirmed by empirical evidence, like ‘God exists’ or ‘After you die, you continue to live on as a spirit’. But occasionally a religion will make a claim that can be tested and disconfirmed. For example, physical evidence indicates that the earth came together right where it is, instead of being smooshed together. People with dark skin who join the Church do not become whiter, contre the Book of Mormon and General Conference.
What’s a true believer to do? Easy. Just say that the claim was never ‘true church doctrine’ in the first place. This is possible because of the LDS concept of ‘continuing revelation’: that later statements by church leaders trump older ones. So old doctrines can be dropped without much trouble; they’ve been superceded by new knowledge. This is why people in the know no longer teach that the whole of North and South America was populated by Hebrews, and they now say that the entire Book of Mormon narrative took place within a few square blocks in Guatemala.
‘Official Church Doctrine’ (which I’ll hereafter call ‘OCD’) is a slippery notion. There’s an incredibly high bar for a doctrine to be considered ‘official’, and even statements that meet the criteria for OCD can be disavowed if the belief becomes problematic.
An idea can be taught by Joseph Smith or Brigham Young, spoken from the pulpit of General Conference, written in Church publications, be widely believed by the membership and still be disqualified from OCD status if the need arises.
So what is OCD? The Doctrine and Covenants says that anything that missionaries say when they are “moved upon by the Holy Ghost” is scripture. Since there’s no way to tell when someone’s been ‘moved upon’ in this way, we need another definition.
Here’s a page that addresses this question:
Virtually every religion has procedures for distinguishing the individual beliefs of its members from the official doctrines of the church, and so do the Latter-day Saints. In fact among the Mormons the procedure is remarkably similar to that of many Protestant denominations. An example of the procedure can be taken from the records of the Fiftieth Semiannual General Conference of the LDS church, 10 October 1880, when President George Q. Cannon addressed the conference:
I hold in my hand the Book of Doctrine and Covenants, and also the book, The Pearl of Great Price, which books contain revelations of God. In Kirtland, the Doctrine and Covenants in its original form, as first printed, was submitted to the officers of the Church and the members of the Church to vote upon. As there have been additions made to it by the publishing of revelations which were not contained in the original edition, it has been deemed wise to submit these books with their contents to the conference, to see whether the conference will vote to accept the books and their contents as from God, and binding upon us as a people and as a Church.
Subsequent changes of content in the standard works of the Church have been presented similarly to the membership in general conference to receive a sustaining vote. It is that sustaining vote, by the individual members or by their representatives, that makes the changes officially binding upon the membership as the doctrine of the Church.
In other words, OCD is anything that is
a) in the Standard Works, and
b) sustained by the membership.
In fact, this definition of OCD is a bit of a furphy. There are wide swaths of doctrine that Latter-day Saints believe to be true that aren’t in the Standard Works, including ‘bones from other worlds’, policies on illegal drugs, almost everything concerning temple work, and lots of ideas about the spirit world. There are also some ideas that are in the Standard Works, but that Mormons don’t really practice, like Jesus’ views on divorce, and meat in the Word of Wisdom.
This is not a bad thing — it’s completely normal, as religions go — but it does mean that Mormon doctrine can metamorphose to protect itself. It makes it very hard to disconfirm an official doctrine, which is probably the point.
What I think is happening is something I call ‘revelation by prevailing belief’.
1. Joseph Smith et al. started a lot of ideas during the early fertile part of church history. Some were based on made-up stories in the scriptures, and others they made up themselves (Book of Abraham, King Follett discourse).
2. These ideas go to work within the general membership, and at times compete in the minds of members. It’s those memes again: the ideas are involved in an evolutionary struggle for mindspace, and some ideas will prevail. What gets taught in church and at conference are the beliefs that are winning. For example, the prohibition on R-rated movies was folklore when I was a lad, but in 1986, Benson mentioned it in conference, which was certainly enough to get that idea canonised.
3. If by some chance the belief becomes problematic, the Church’s immune system kicks in. We start to hear some members claim that it’s ‘not church doctrine’ in Sunday School or Elder’s Quorum. This retroactive expungement will take a while to propagate through the community, just as the original doctrine did. It’s hard to expel an entrenched doctrine though. It takes about 40 years, if ideas about Blacks and the pre-mortal life are any indication.
The difference, then, between true Mormon doctrine and Mormon folklore is that True Mormon doctrine is doctrine that is considered to be true by most Mormons at any given time. It’s not pronouncements from General Conference that gives the official imprimatur — those statements are sometimes disavowed. It’s not being published in the Standard Works — Latter-day Saints can ignore scriptures that don’t coincide with prevailing belief. It’s whether Mormons believe it enough not to challenge it in church.
This is why we see Mormon doctrine change subtly from generation to generation as unpalatable or scientifically bogus ideas are dropped. It’s not just a Mormon thing; it happens in lots of religions these days (I’m thinking Vatican II). It’s people making things up, and then adapting their beliefs when needed.
Personally, I don’t mind if Mormon doctrine changes. There are quite a few beliefs that need to go. And even the scientific method allows for change. The difference is that when scientific ideas change, it’s because new evidence (in the form of empirical observation) renders an old theory untenable. But when old Mormon beliefs get discarded, it’s based on no evidence at all, or because Mormon doctrine needs to flee from scientific advancement.
However, as scientific knowledge expands and the God of the Gaps shrinks, I think there may come a time when overwhelming evidence may come head-to-head against a core Mormon belief, such that members won’t be able to ignore it without disavowing the scientific method entirely. That will be interesting.
Don’t you love Chick tracts, in an awful way? PZ at Pharyngula has reminded me of this one about why evolution is a filthy devil-spawned lie. It’s called ‘Apes, Lies, and Ms. Henn‘.
If you don’t feel like clicking through, this panel nicely sums up the passive aggression of Extreme Christianity.
That’s right; I’ll pray for you — because you’re going to Hell.
I plan to use that line as I drop the boys off at school. Bye, boys! Remember not to believe in evolution instead of Jesus, or you’re going to Hell! Lucky for me I don’t ‘believe’ in evolution.*
While we’re on the subject of Chick tracts, here’s one of my favourite parodies: This Is Your Death!
It has a special place in my heart because of this idea on its back page:
1. Enjoy life while you can.
2. Be nice to others; they only get one life, too.
Believe it or not, it was the first time I could really grasp why lack of belief in an afterlife might not automatically lead to a life of psychopathic hedonism. I can now see why that was stupid, but a lifetime of church can do that to a person.
*Instead, I accept it as an accurate explanation of what’s happened in life on Earth, supported by overwhelming physical evidence.
First Alex the Gray Parrot, and now this: Washoe has passed away.
Washoe, a female chimpanzee said to be the first non-human to acquire human language, has died at the age of 42 at Central Washington University.
Not exactly. Washoe was able to imitate some signs, but this doesn’t constitute human language. Human language involves putting words into syntactic patterns, and these patterns show features like recursion and structure dependence. Washoe wasn’t quite able to do this, nor has any other non-human.
I hadn’t even realised she was still alive.
But then comes the good bit of the article:
[C]laims about Washoe’s language skills were disputed by scientists who believed that language is unique to humans. Among those who doubted that chimps could use language were MIT linguist Noam Chomsky and Harvard scientist Steven Pinker.
Chomsky contended that the neural requirements for language developed in humans after the evolutionary split between humans and primates.
Pinker contended that primates simply learn to perform certain acts in order to receive rewards, and do not acquire true language.
Nice. There’s a lot to say about Chomsky coming around to evolution, but I’ll tackle that a bit later.
Does this picture look like a face to you? It’s been generated somewhat randomly, along with tons of others at Mutating Pictures. You decide how much it looks like a face, and the more facey ones get to produce more offspring.
It’s not really natural selection, but it is a good example of how randomness plus feedback can cause certain features to recur. It even works when the feedback is very vague — you’re not saying exactly what it is that’s more face-like, but the more facey ones survive anyway.
Let’s dip our canteens in the stream of public opinion.
The majority of Republicans in the United States do not believe the theory of evolution is true and do not believe that humans evolved over millions of years from less advanced forms of life.
And the more often you go to church, the less likely you are to understand facts.
The data from several recent Gallup studies suggest that Americans’ religious behavior is highly correlated with beliefs about evolution. Those who attend church frequently are much less likely to believe in evolution than are those who seldom or never attend.
You see what’s happening here: evolution is being used as an indicator for other kinds of scientific understanding. Good choice, too. It’s as well-supported a theory as we get, so if someone refuses to accept it, it probably means they lack understanding on other scientific topics, as well as skill at knowing how to tell if an idea is good or not.
These results follow some patterns that I think are pretty consistent in religions I know of. As a Mormon, I happily believed unsupported or even counterfactual ideas, as long as I liked them or already believed them. I was sometimes encouraged to superficially examine the basis for my faith, but only if I eventually arrived at the conclusion that the Church was true. And I was given terrible mechanisms for evaluating ideas; basically, if I felt ‘good about it’, it was true. I was also surrounded by parents, friends, and authority figures who constantly worked to build my (and their) faith in false beliefs. And so the religion forms a bubble that keeps you ‘feeling good’ about your beliefs by constantly reaffirming them. It’s very difficult for facts to penetrate the bubble.
Religions are support groups for reality deniers. And so, it seems, are political parties.
The Fallacy of the Day comes from Sam Brownback. You may remember him — in a recent debate, he was one of three Republicans who didn’t ‘believe in evolution’. This means he’s too stupid to run for president of the USA, and America being what it is, that’s exactly what he wants to do.
Now he’s written this piece: What I Think About Evolution.
Just a note here: It matters not a jot what Mr Brownback or I or anyone else ‘thinks’ or ‘believes’ about evolution. Evolution is happening all the same, though we may need to update the theory from time to time as evidence warrants. Actually, I don’t believe in evolution either; I accept it as a more or less correct theory. But let’s put semantics and pedantics aside.
Here’s the heart of his argument:
The question of evolution goes to the heart of this issue. If belief in evolution means simply assenting to microevolution, small changes over time within a species, I am happy to say, as I have in the past, that I believe it to be true. If, on the other hand, it means assenting to an exclusively materialistic, deterministic vision of the world that holds no place for a guiding intelligence, then I reject it.
…
The most passionate advocates of evolutionary theory offer a vision of man as a kind of historical accident. That being the case, many believers — myself included — reject arguments for evolution that dismiss the possibility of divine causality.
The fallacy committed here is that of wishful thinking. Mr Brownback doesn’t like the idea that humans might have arisen through random, unguided chance, so he’s agin’ it.
Let’s inform the scientists. Everyone: the Republican from Kansas doesn’t like it. It must not be true.
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