Fisking, Economist by M.S.

I think the major failure of this article (HT) is that it does not explain why liberals feel taxation is just, though it appears M.S. thinks it has been explained.

"First, liberals think of taxation as paying one's fair share for the collective goods that make society feasible."

Error one: society requires collective goods. Indeed, the 'collective' status of these good is exactly due to power grabs by a particular group.

"Payment for those goods cannot be left voluntary, as ultimately everyone would welch."

If indeed society needs these things, most would learn not to welch, once they saw the dire results. The problem would be solved - the solution does not need to be imposed by a particular group.

"Not paying taxes means violating your obligations as a citizen"

Error two. I cannot have any obligations I haven't explicitly agreed to. If it were kosher to impose obligations on someone else...well, then I'd immediately impose the obligation on everyone else to stop imposing obligations. Oops.

"How do we know who nicked whose lawn gnome? It's always subject to dispute."

The rabbit hole goes deep here. Estimated errors: three through ten.

"If the case comes to trial, it is the state that will adjudicate the rival claims and impose a decision on the parties. That exercise of state authority feels just as coercive"

I think the heart of the error is here. M.S. simply assumes the state is legitimate, and then concludes that its judgments are legitimate. As M.S. is attempting to debate a libertarian, this is straightforward question-begging.

M.S. knows or should have known about the circular reasoning: look at the clarity and straightforward argument in the paragraph above. Though erroneous, the mistakes are understandable. Compare the paragraph now under scrutiny, which is a grab bag of misdirection. Individually, I largely agree with the statements and implied arguments, but they do not support each other. M.S. is either muddying the water deliberately, or should have recognized that their thinking is muddled and aborted.

I think this is an ignorance situation, based on;

"An attempt [...] to delegitimise the exercise of state authority"

M.S. apparently has trouble consciously accepting the idea that libertarians do not find the state legitimate.

"The existence of the state involves a certain level of coercion to enforce the law."

Error eleven. 'Coercion' has clearly been defined differently by Wilkinson than by M.S. If M.S. wishes libertarians to use his definition, they should define it explicitly and defend that definition. Otherwise, it is fair to demand - since M.S. is attempting to communicate with libertarians - that M.S. understand and use the libertarian definition of 'coercion.'

Since M.S. is unconsciously but deliberately muddying the waters, this is probably unconscious but deliberate equivocation.

"But the existence of the state is a good thing, both because it provides the infrastructure of a prosperous, safe and fair society, and because it enforces property claims such as deciding who has stolen whose lawn gnome."

Error twelve. Very funny. I wonder if M.S. feels they have actually defended these positions? Effectively they are either unadorned tribal signalling or merely taunts.

"It makes me happy to see the state providing a decent education to kids whose parents can't afford to buy them one."

Errors thirteen and fourteen. Tribal signalling. What you feel is not an argument, and should not convince anyone of anything. Also, M.S. thinks the state provides a decent education, which is a sickeningly bad mistake. Those are children you're sacrificing to uphold your false beliefs, M.S. Helpless children.

"It makes me happy to see the state administer justice in a fair and procedurally sound fashion."

Errors fifteen and sixteen. M.S. should not feel happy very often - though that does not seem to be what they're implying. In this case, M.S. is signalling their tribe and supporting criminals against their victims.

"It makes me happy to see the state build zoos."

Error seventeen. If feelings were arguments, then it makes me feel sad when a state wastes resources on building zoos that either the market could provide, or won't only because it's wasteful. Our 'arguments' cancel and M.S. would have to start learning to debate.

"And yeah, we all have to pay our taxes for these things to happen."

A repeat error, plus error eighteen. We all have to pay our taxes to torture children, support criminals, and waste money on zoos? How is this supposed to convince anyone who isn't already in the tribe that agrees?

This is so terrible I'm going to attack it twice.

"But I feel that a broad libertarian claim that "taxation is coercive" is an attempt to legitimise refusal to play by the rules"

Though the liberal acceptance of taxes is not explained, I think M.S. provides enough material to derive an explanation.

We all have to pay our taxes, so that 'these things' can happen. 'These things' are M.S. feeling good. So pay your taxes so that M.S. can feel good. That's it. That's the actual core of M.S's motivation.

There's a second, closely related wrapping of playing by the rules - that is, obeying M.S's tribal norms. While certainly you can voluntarily enter that tribe, and thus agree to and be bound by its norms...it would appear that M.S. cannot provide a single argument why anyone outside this tribe would find adopting these norms effective.

So why does the liberal tribe have this norm? Simple: it's their tax apparatus. They created it, they control it, and they have the benefits from it, such as feeling good. Of course they're going to declare it morally normative. Unfortunately, their attempts defend it logically merely highlight how the system simply does not benefit other tribes.

And, due to the coercive nature of the tax system, it cannot survive without preying on other tribes, which is why liberals see attempts to delegitimize it as a threat. Let me not repeat M.S's error, and define coercion: this norm is coercive precisely because it cannot survive if it were restricted to the tribe. Compare Christian communion; even if there were only one Christian, taking communion would work just fine, and be stable, as a norm. If there were only one liberal, taxation would be pointless, and would be dropped.

It is this point which shows so clearly how society could survive without 'collective' goods. Taxation is pointless unless it takes from one to give to another. If indeed taxes were to pay for roads, the road tax could be replaced by a road bill with absolutely no difference in effective outcome, but a huge difference in morality. Instead of being jailed when I decline a road tax, I would simply be barred from roads when I decline my road bill.

That M.S. declined to mention redistribution does help wonderfully to clarify this point. Unfortunately, it also clinches the inherently predatory, coercive nature of taxation. You, dear reader, I, and M.S. all know that M.S. would never accept a road bill replacing all road taxes. But since the road bill changes nothing but the coercion, it must be the coercion that M.S. values.

QED

Troubling Charity

Chappell has some good points to make about charity.

But...is there a charity that gives out responsibility and initiative? Is there a charity that people would give to if they couldn't tell anyone else that they gave to it? Is there a charity that willfully self-destructs by trying to solve the underlying cause, rather than treating symptoms?

The actual underlying fact is that I can't feel good about giving to any charity I know, which makes me wonder if a product model (warm fuzzies) might be optimal for charities, rather than my naive former understanding. (See also: lotteries. They sell dreams, not odds at cash.)

Having said that explicitly, it makes my former analysis seem so incidental...(Below; possible rationalization warning)

That first one is my biggie. If you're truly committed to utilitarian stranger-welfare ends, in the long term, then the current underclasses will have to support themselves, partly because charity is capricious and unstable, and partly because humans crave independence. Under what conditions is it better to start learning responsibility at a later point than right now?

Oops You Exist

I was thinking about error, and trying to pin down my intuitions on how often humans have succeeded at Y by getting X wrong, when I realized that, you know, natural selection.
Humans per se are just really really really bad non-nuclear mono-cellular proto-life. Literally, physics took a cell, tried to copy it, made a crapton of errors, and ended up with the human species.
Uh...oops you exist.

Just think about that next time you're embarrassed about making a mistake.

Factually Incorrect, But What Is the Intuition Getting At?

I have been irritated. Luckily, I have a blog.

""Deductively, we can assert that either Dr. Fukino is lying, or she is telling the truth"
Elizabeth Loftus disagrees. Yet again, philosophy fails to contribute."

No, this is a failure to understand philosophy. Predictably, from someone who thinks that philosophy fails to contribute. The belief obscures any evidence to the contrary, because philosophy is run on the wetware - you need to take philosophy seriously enough to install the programs before you can accurately evaluate its statements.

Either Fukino thinks she's seen a birth certificate, or not. Whether she has actually seen a legitimate document, or used her hypocrisy circuits to invent a memory of such, is quite irrelevant to whether she is lying or not.[1]

Would this small modification have helped?

"Therefore, B.H. Obama and [or] his associates [think they] are actively withholding this historical document (which should not be confused with a database printout on fancy paper) from the public in the face of substantial public interest. Remember, this is a best-case scenario."

I don't think so; I made this change automatically, as part of interpreting writings charitably, but perhaps this is a specialized skill which is more difficult than I realize.


I think there's something more to these anti-philosophy charades (I see them everywhere) that I don't fully understand. The issue of being factually incorrect is blinding me. I suspect that the situation is somewhat symmetrical - they don't understand philosophy, and I don't understand what they're finding objectionable in philosophy. Any ideas would be appreciated.


I should also mention that several commenters suggested that Obama is withholding on purpose. He's already president, so fait accompli, and a lot of his opponents are wasting time with this dead end. A sign of utter unscrupulousness, if so, but pure win for him, strategically.

[1] For the record I don't care either way. Citizenship is just a contrived legal hurdle, the real question is who should be president, for the good of the country, and the real answer is no one.

King and Country Debate

I was researching the general field of debate when I came across "world's most prestigious debating society" and its famous debate.

My prior position is that debating societies reliably disappoint me. However, of the set of all things which at one point disappointed me, I have come to find value in many of them after more thoroughly investigation. Nevertheless, I was confident that Oxford Union would disappoint me.

Soon, I was reading that,

"It is no mere coincidence that the only country fighting for the cause of peace, Soviet Russia, is the country that has rid itself of the war-mongering clique."

Communism: for when you just aren't prestigious enough! Though the resemblance to anarchist rhetoric should not be denied,[1] one should also not deny the how hilariously wrong the dove side already is. Fighting for peace? No war-mongering clique? I can guess that Kenelm Digby had no shame and wasn't the least embarrassed by that little thing we called the Cold War. I wonder how he felt about the Gulags; they weren't dying in war, per se...

It was looking good for my preconceptions. There's of course more amusing absurdities that follow that line, but the real clincher has nothing much to do with Digby.

"What is generally forgotten (but arguably more significant as an example of the Union's commitment to freedom of speech) is that an attempt was made by several prominent Union members (including Randolph Churchill) to expunge this motion and the result of the debate from the Union's minute book. This attempt was roundly defeated — in a meeting far better attended than the original debate. Sir Edward Heath records in his memoirs that Randolph Churchill was then chased around Oxford by undergraduates who intended to debag him (i.e. humiliate him by removing his trousers), and was then fined by the police for being illegally parked."

"We're for peace! And we'll beat up anyone who disagrees with us!"

Just in case you think this is insufficient evidence for hypocrisy, I found more. Focus especially on the last two sentences.

"Speaking after the debate, Digby said: "I believe that the motion was representative neither of the majority of the undergraduates of Oxford nor of the youth of this country. I am certain if war broke out tomorrow the students of the university would flock to the recruiting office as their fathers and uncles did."^[3] He was proved right. [...] McCallum recalled at the outbreak of war two students, "men of light and leading in their college and with a good academic record", visited him to say goodbye before leaving to join their units. Both of them had separately said that if they had to vote on the "King and Country" resolution then and there, they would do so. One of them said: "I am not going to fight for King and Country, and you will notice that no one, not Chamberlain, not Halifax, has asked us to".^[12]"

Yes, the anarchists in the audience can relax. The Oxford Union stands for Stalin, not non-violence, pretences to the contrary notwithstanding.

Oh, and by the way, Oxford Union can go ahead and 'free speech' my ass.


[1] Anarchists; peace is always better than aggressive war and war is the result of a minority with the ability to externalize the costs of war. No coercive minority, no war. (War to defend property within one's borders is not by this definition aggressive.)

Meta-science Dismissed

I was reading about some reasons to distrust meta-analysis, and when I went to evaluate the ideas' merits, I remembered a source of error that I'd read about recently. I enjoy Eades' epistemological takedowns, but this one basically amounts to, "Meta-analyses are usually done wrong."

Eades is correct to dismiss meta-analyses, though perhaps not for the reasons he thinks. (I suspect experience guided him.) Although he has good reasons; a meta-study including methodologically poor studies is going to be a poor meta-study, and a meta-study has to be very careful to include data fairly. If it fails to do either, I would call it a mistake, not a study; it's quite possible for a meta-analysis to do both properly.

This mainly impacts journalistic writing, as they'll happily write on any study that fits their agenda, and generally forget caveats and other subtleties. If you're in a position to read the actual paper, you're in a position to tell if they're cherry-picking data.

However, how many meta-studies do you suppose correct for the fact that neutral or negative studies don't result in papers? I'm not sure how I would check, but I'm going with negative zero. They can't even try to deal with cherry-picking that occurred before the paper is published.

It's a shame. Yesterday, the meta-study was my favourite kind of statistical study.

Flynn Effect vs. Retards?

The clinical cutoff for the mental cripple is an IQ of 70. Flynn noticed that the average - normed to IQ 100 - is getting smarter. There's a qualitative cutoff at the mental cripple stage. Such a person is literally too stupid to support themselves, and require lifelong care. Basically, childcare extends across adulthood.

Setting aside edge cases (which can be statistically smoothed out) is the cutoff actually dropping, as the Flynn effect would predict?

An Obvious Dilemma?

Blogging and print journalism seem to share a dilemma.

Obvious thought is not necessary; the audience can figure it out on their own. The only real barrier is inclination, which can be overcome simply by vaguely gesturing in a particular direction.
Non-obvious thought is automatically more useful, but deters audiences, because it is difficult both to convey and to understand.

I'm not interested in reading or writing about the obvious, and you're reading this blog; you're probably the same way. There don't seem to be enough of us to fully support blogs that pursue non-obvious ideas.

This can somewhat be overturned by posting long enough to put forth a full explanation. Beyond generating complaints, I wonder what effects long posts actually have on readers. Books work; is there some no-mans-land in the middle?

I wonder if a compromise would work. Perhaps consistent posts on the obvious peppered with eyeball busting treatises, at say 10-1. I suspect there's a lot of intersection between readers who want to be in the choir and readers who want an uphill read.

I think this dilemma has defined the idea of 'news.' One way to be both simple and useful is to supply small updates to existing bodies of knowledge. Unfortunately for the purposes of discourse, small and obvious amounts to insignificant. Thus, neither actionable ideas nor mind-changing ideas are economically viable to share. My issues with journalism may stem from journalism bloating beyond areas like weather, where facts that are insignificant as ideas can have significant physical consequences.

The part about 'existing knowledge' seems like it would drive expectations in the wrong way, too. The existing knowledge is necessary to make the update obvious, but having been raised on a diet of the obvious, can you deal properly with the non-obvious? Isn't your first instinct going to be to treat it as obvious but wrong? It was certainly my first instinct, and it would rather neatly explain around 3/4 of blog comments.

This dilemma has probably shaped the idea of 'science' as well. Specialists cannot be economically sustained by selling the ideas they develop; hence grants. Given the abysmal efficiency we're seeing grants achieve, I hope this one is a false dilemma. Since selling to a journal-equivalent is not sufficient, science should find some other voluntary exchange which does supply enough wealth. (Indeed, science did not begin in the age of grants, though measuring science by number of papers began then.)

On the other hand, sharing ideas is something humans seem to do for free. From time to time. Experiments remain expensive, but I have to ask; is there demand for science? If grants weren't cornering the market, would there be efforts to find voluntary alternatives, or would science die out, as grant-proponents (naturally) say?

More importantly, is there actually a market for ideas per se? Funding thinkers certainly puts more ideas out there, and conversely, perverted and neglected IP rights suppress the idea market. But exceeding the actual demand inherently implies waste. If ideas cannot be sold above the cost of production, there are more ideas than people want. Perhaps neglecting the market is actually the good choice. Perhaps the only reason there are so many ideas out there is that one day long ago, a scholar was frustrated that their preferred leisure was unprofitable, and then, through the devil's own luck, came into power.

Taxation versus Crime

I was surprised to discover how badly neglected the direct link between taxation and crime is.

Criminals commit crime because they perceive that crime pays. Conversely, the more rewarding legitimate work is, the more limited the rewards of sacrificing legitimacy are, in both quality and quantity. Anything that reduces that reward is going to directly stimulate crime. All this can be derived more or less a priori.

I've only found one place discussing this link, and the data look bad to me. Beyond the simple confirm/deny dichotomy, different types of crime will respond to variance in payoff differently.

This means a few things. Even setting aside anarcho-capitalist flavoured violations of property rights, raising taxes has an inescapable odour of immorality. Even setting aside corruption, government waste not only wastes the honest dollar, it creates new dishonest dollars. (Though I stress that rewards, both honest and dishonest, need not be financial.)

Finally, a patchwork would not end up taxing at the Laffer maximum, because a patch with lower taxation will inevitably have a lower crime rate, thus attracting immigration, all else equal. Competition implies market implies consumer goodies.

Experiment Confirms Biased Decision-Making; Irritation

"Our fears were confirmed."

It's not a statement that fills me with epistemological confidence.

I'm indeed interested in the long-term effects of short-term emotions, but the experiment design here doesn't help me. I strongly suspect that emotions have effects that last beyond their qualia, and I think ignoring or lacking this suspicion is what ruined this experiment.

The fear in question is that a bad decision made in the heat of the moment will echo in the future, and indeed I agree that bad decisions are habit-forming, as are all decisions.

The problem is that replicating the situation so closely is likely to consciously remind the subject of their bad mood. If I've been in a lab and played the economic ultimatum game once, and I was pretty annoyed at the time, no matter how long you wait, the second time I'm in a lab playing the ultimatum game, I'm going to remember how annoyed I was the first time around. Rightly or wrongly, I'm going to associate the annoyance with the game.

Andrade and Ariely did not test what they thought they tested.

"They were tapping the memory of the decisions they had made earlier, when they were responding under the influence of feeling annoyed."

False. They were being annoyed a second time around. They did not make a second bad decision while cool-headed.

"If you don’t, you may regret it. Many times over."

If indeed I'm saving time by re-using the result of a previous analysis, how important is it really if one of those times I have lost my cool? If I'm doing something for the thousandth time, instead of the first, and I happen to make a suboptimal decision due to stress, how likely is it that the thousandth-and-first time I'm going to reference only the bad decision?

For this particular example, I can't confirm I'm the best model, but I would actually improve my overall decision making as a result of this bad decision. Seeing first-hand what a bad decision looks like, I would be able to contrast the results directly to both my previous decisions, and my current decision. I would be able to recognize more subtle versions of stress effects on my decisions, because I would have essentially seen in magnified.

However, experiments cannot fail. You always learn something - even if it's just a way not to design experiments. In this case, it supports the idea that the all-important first impression is affected by 'rationally' irrelevant factors, such as overall mood that day.

I already knew this, but independent corroboration is always nice. When trying something for the first time, I start by making sure I'm in a good mood, and abort if something upsetting happens on the way there, unless I'm completely okay with a distorted assessment.

Psych. My conclusion makes the same mistake as Andrade and Ariely; the actual experiment is ambiguous. This experiment does falsify certain things, but not anything Andrade, Ariely, or I actually believe. As such, the only real conclusion is that you shouldn't design an experiment this way, and if we're going to have tax-funded science, it should at least spend some dough on experiments to pick apart why exactly this design does not work.

Range of Interstellar Radio

SETI has been in my news feed recently, which behooved me to track down my favourite discussion about picking up alien transmissions. I've never seen the actual physics all mathed out anywhere else, and the reason for this dearth seems obvious from the results. The analysis is basically complete, so I just have a few disjointed comments.

They simply use the word 'detect,' which I take it to mean something like 'differentiate from background noise,' which is backed up by comments like, "In keeping with the estimates of Aburto and Woolley, the Signal to Noise Ratio for all calculations was taken to be 25 since this is between the SNR of SETI@home (SNR=22) and the maximum SNR used by Project META (SNR=33). "

Especially striking is the graph showing how large your dish needs to be to pick up human TV signals from Alpha Centauri or Vega. A little extrapolation shows that at nearly all of the stars in the galaxy you require an effective dish well over a billion metres wide. Billion's a nice big round number, don't you think?

If I were a journalist I would now have to decry this outrageous waste of tax dollars. Presumably, this is supposed to stop outrageous wastes of tax dollars. I find it to just be a waste of outrage. The kind of people who fund SETI, if forced to stop, are not likely to suddenly wake up, find their heads, and screw them back on. They'll just make the exact same mistake in some new and interesting way. In short, that cash was effectively flushed down the drain the moment it left the taxpayer's hand.

I'd also like to highlight:

"beacon signals- These non-leaked signals would be intentionally designed to attract the attention of observers in the direction of Earth. If there are advance civilizations that choose to make themselves known in this way, then it is possible that present SETI efforts may one day produce a positive detection. However, these beams must be aimed at Earth at a time when we are listening for a positive detection to occur."

Aiming a signal at Earth from most of the galaxy would be difficult, especially if they're not already aware we're here and looking for it. This alternative stacks unlikelihood upon unlikelihood.

Homelessness

Specifically, hardcore, chronic homelessness.

After having read that, I thought about homeless people for a while. Then, I decided that at the first opportunity I would talk to one. So I did.

People seem to have an instinct about me. I was sitting in the bus station waiting for an intercity bus, and he walked in. Tall man. Not stringy but not too meaty. Scruffy as you'd expect. The kind of hands that get called 'ham.' He made a beeline for me.

I tried to talk to him for a bit. According to plan, when he asked for money I obliged, in an attempt to gain goodwill. Fifty cents.

It was like speaking to a robot, a wind-up thing that reacted almost at random to my queries...unless the subject was money. His fuzzy incoherence was suddenly pierced by the subject; he talked almost like a normal. And my plan worked; he felt the need to continue the exchange while hugging me. I didn't object. He clearly didn't know any better.

But not with me. I was unable to get him to attend to me at all except when he decided to call me a 'good guy' or something. Instead he tried to panhandle the rest of the room. Now it was more like talking to a television.

I know he was sober. They only panhandle when sober, because the point is to get drunk, and they stop for a while when they reach their goal, if for no other reason than that they're busy passing out.

I've met people who had more mental cohesion when stoned out of their minds than this man was when stone cold sober. If it wasn't about money, he couldn't focus. In any real sense, he didn't have a human mind anymore.

The drink - or whatever it was that put him on the street - had drained his soul. He was already dead in every meaningful way.

I couldn't help wondering, where was this man's family? What tragedy befell him that he's now living on the street now? Why hasn't anyone just scooped him and up and kept him away from the booze? What happened to his parents? Does he have children? Siblings? What do they think of him?

I tried asking him.

These people are not really people anymore. The reason we generally don't interfere with the lives of other adults is that they're responsible for their actions, and since we don't want our responsibility taken from us, we don't take it from others. However, the chronically homeless are not responsible anymore. They're not on the street by choice, or because they're lazy.

"We also believe that the distribution of social benefits should not be arbitrary."

They're on the street because they're dead inside. That's why treating them for efficiency isn't arbitrary. The only ways to stop these people from acting like beasts, from harming themselves, from costing our social services millions of dollars, is to kill them or take away their 'freedom.' Institutionalize the chronically homeless.

Go on, try it yourself. Talk to a bum.

Code_of_Laws AND ~Code_of_Laws

Curiously, it appears my laws are circular. Here's theft:

"Every one commits theft who fraudulently and without colour of right takes, or fraudulently and without colour of right converts to his use or to the use of another person, anything, whether animate or inanimate, with intent"

So if you lie or don't have the right to take something, you don't have the right to take it. The code refrains from defining who actually has rights, and who does not, notwithstanding a few oddities like this one:

"No person commits theft by reason only that he takes, for the purpose of exploration or scientific investigation, a specimen of ore or mineral from land that is not enclosed and is not occupied or worked as a mine, quarry or digging."

So geologist definitely aren't thieves. (And a mining company will probably let you take a pebble or two if you ask nicely.)

Err. Hmm. So about that lying stuff...

"Every one who, by deceit, falsehood or other fraudulent means, whether or not it is a false pretence within the meaning of this Act, defrauds the public or any person, whether ascertained or not, of any property, money or valuable security or any service"

Committing fraud by fraudulent means. Nice. Was there an alternative about committing fraud without deceit or fraud?

But surely, the murder code will be more stringent?

"Culpable homicide is murder

(a) where the person who causes the death of a human being"

That's...that's actually pretty reasonable.

I wonder where they screw it up. Emphasis mine:

"(b) where a person, meaning to cause death to a human being or meaning to cause him bodily harm that he knows is likely to cause his death, and being reckless whether death ensues or not, by accident or mistake causes death to another human being, notwithstanding that he does not mean to cause death or bodily harm to that human being;"

"Yes I'd like to be tried under section 229(b)...yes, the one that's a contradiction."

The next is just amusing. Perhaps there's an obscure legal reason for this:

"(c) where a person, for an unlawful object, does anything that he knows or ought to know is likely to cause death, and thereby causes death to a human being, notwithstanding that he desires to effect his object without causing death or bodily harm to any human being."

So if I, for a lawful object, go ahead and kill someone, it's A-okay, as long as my goal was compatible with keeping them alive? I somehow doubt that would fly in court, and yet...

Even more amusingly, the code explicitly exempts effecting an execution by false evidence. Canada has no death penalty, and indeed if we did the executioner does not appear to have their own exemption.

But, actually, I've been taking you for a bit of a ride. There's a problem I've overlooked:

"(5) A person commits culpable homicide when he causes the death of a human being,

(a) by means of an unlawful act;

(b) by criminal negligence;

(c) by causing that human being, by threats or fear of violence or by deception, to do anything that causes his death; or

(d) by wilfully frightening that human being, in the case of a child or sick person."

All the listed punishments are for murder. All murders are special cases of culpable homicide. Culpable homicide is this special kind of homicide: unlawful homicide.

Progressive. Outlawing unlawful homicide. What will they come up with next? I guess the executioner doesn't really need their own exception.


My motivation for looking up this was the libertarian and anarchist bon mot "taxation is theft." I'd assumed there would be specific exemptions for taxation, but I found that the whole code is meaningless. Reality is more interesting than radical philosophies, it turns out.

I find this puzzling since many of the code's details go to great lengths to be logically rigorous. It would actually be beautiful, if the whole thing wasn't flying on dreams. I don't demand that the code justify itself entirely - it never actually states that it is outlawing crimes, never states that crimes are wrong, and never states who will hand down punishments, nor that these punishments are mandatory, and I don't expect it to do any of this. All logic must start at axioms, and while it's nice if they're explicit, I don't expect lawyers to follow philosophical best practise. I'm naturally too lazy to look up the precedents, and perhaps there's actual statements of 'doing X is fraud' there, but even if so, that just means the code itself is dead weight.

I have trouble imagining that the courts never use the code, though. (I could only find Supreme Court records, and they would never have a reason to cite basic code. They did, as expected, cite precedent often, and occasionally legislative act.) Since it is impossible that they use the actual logical content of the code, they must be reading something into it.

Ultimately, it's not the code but the attitude of the people who support and execute the system. I don't know who these people actually are, in practice, other than I know it isn't who we're told it is. The last thing I have difficulty with is how these people can be simultaneously responsible, and allow the code to remain like this. As it is, formal reality and actual reality cannot converge, which usually means that formal spirit and informal spirit will continue to diverge.

Kids and Kuriosity

"A child's never-ending "whys" aren't meant to exasperate parents, scientists say. Rather, the kiddy queries are genuine attempts at getting at the truth, and tots respond better to some answers than others."

I'm so glad scientists have been able to join us on planet Earth.

Still, I do wonder why parents are exasperated by tot's questions. It seems counter-productive to bar your own child from your knowledge.

The reason questions exasperate people is because it is a form of challenge, like a staring contest. Being challenged for the sake of challenge, especially when you're busy, is exasperating. Small children cannot credibly challenge you, which should, in theory, short-circuit the exasperation mechanism, just like how some people find threats from children, no matter how strident, adorable instead of scary. ("I'm gunna punch you till you fall down!" *Scowl*)

The other reason for exasperation is to avoid acknowledging that the askee doesn't have the answer. I think this is in play, as children are excellent epistemologists and can find logical holes without trying. Humans are born to use the Socratic method on their parents. Parents don't usually respond well.

But even this I find puzzling, as I can't find a reason to not just tell the kid you don't know.

There's no apparent reason question-asking should be annoying, and yet....

"Past research from the early to mid 1900s on child development had suggested that young children were only aware of temporal relationships between two events and couldn't differentiate cause from effect until about 7 or 8 years of age. More recent work has suggested otherwise, that as early as age 3 children get causality."

Never forget that scientists often use their skills to act as stupid as possible. Anyone with kids will immediately think, "They must have not had children!" and be able to cite chapter and verse on their kids getting causality. This is a mistake; they likely did have children. I'd guess the story goes as thus: at home, their personal observations aren't science and thus poor evidence, but their personal observations during a study at work are scientific, and thus good evidence.

(This gets ironic if you read the comments on the other study just linked. I can easily understand the source of the above misperception.)

If I were a journalist I would say it's "frightening" that people like this are in charge of the education system. Calling the status quo frightening seems off. It's certainly depressing, though.

You may note that the science is getting better. Indeed it is, but nobody ever thinks to wait 20-50 years to properly verify a scientific finding before acting on it, despite the massive number of errors, like this one, freely admitted. (Or, you know, find a faster verification method, like logic.)

Incidentally, children as young as zero understand causality, you just don't yet know how to produce a statistically significant study showing this. Causality is innate the human brain - and to many nonhuman brains, for that matter.

"Lacking from such studies are kids' reactions to the information they get to their causal questions. "

A scientist failed at study design? Shocking. You'd almost think that universities don't demand courses on epistemology of their Ph.Ds.

I have no reason to believe the above quote is accurate. It certainly isn't precise. However, if it is right: told you so. You might wonder if the scientists have kids, I wonder if they have brains. They must be using them for something else.

Are the current crop of scientists less determined to be stupid, or are they just playing to my preconceptions better, being closer to my age? Ahh, questions....

"Results showed kids were more than twice as likely to re-ask their question after a non-explanation compared with a real answer. And when they did get an explanation, which was about 37 percent of the time, they were more than four times as likely to reply with a follow-up inquiry as if they had received a non-explanatory response."

First let me re-write that last part. "Kids ask [presumably meaningful] follow up questions to meaningful answers four times as often as to non-answers." I think that's what they're trying to say, but I'm not exactly sure how you ask a follow-up question to a non-answer unless you already know the answer. Given the ignorance on display, I also have to mention kids aren't sophisticated enough to ask questions they already know the answer to, and regardless have far too many questions to which they don't know the answer to bother with the former.

Incidentally, I wonder why parents hate their kids so much. Answer about a third of their questions? Do you want them to be educated, or not?

So, when they were highly curious and receptive, you answered about a third of their questions, and then you wonder why they don't listen to you as a teenager? Sorry bub, it's too late by then, you've already told them they can't rely on you for information.

How do you react if someone who won't answer your queries suddenly turns around and starts trying to dictate how you act?

At least there's no institution that supposedly gets paid based on its ability to teach parents to parent well, so lapses aren't anybody's fault, per se.

"Preliminary results from a separate new study of Frazier's suggest there is such a thing as too much information in a response. "It seems like kids might have an optimal level of detail they're interested in," Frazier said."

Again, I welcome you to planet Earth, journalists'-representation-of-Frazier. On Earth, you see, we pitch answers to children at their level of understanding. What do you do on your own planet?

For an example of the education system (shockingly) getting it right, when teaching addition, we don't start with the Peano axioms. We start with apples, and how if you have two apples in one basket and three in another, you have five total. Similarly, when teaching exponents, we don't do the full definition that allows x⁰ to be obviously one, but instead say, "exponents are repeated multiplication (which is repeated addition)." These statements are not fully correct, but kids understand when we later tell them that the simple things they learned earlier were not complete.

Plus, if they get into the habit of asking their parents and guardians when they're curious, if one notices a hole in their understanding, they'll ask you about it. Which makes me wonder whether odd behaviours like watering plants with coke could be largely prevented by answering questions consistently.

From a comment;

"Maybe when their whys get you riled up it becomes a game, but it's initially to learn."

If you allow your children to get one over on you, they enjoy it, and it starts Pavlovian conditioning. (Small children do not consciously plan these things.) That's why it's important to figure out why the questions are exasperating, and use the knowledge to short-circuit the exasperation.

As a bonus, letting your kids exasperate you can help you do this, because if you watch yourself carefully during the exasperation, you can figure out why it exasperates you. Often, this knowledge alone will alleviate the condition, without actually needing to act on it in any intentional way, albeit I've yet to try it on this particular example, and regardless my experience may or not mirror yours in particulars. At the very least, it will help you to understand when to stop the question flow - and to do it consciously and openly, before you actually become exasperated. If you want to do this, remember to stop a few questions short, because when you say, "That's enough questions for now," they will ask "Why?" and it would be nice if you could give them an answer.

UR Commenty

Blogspot now hates long comments. This is actually a comment on UR. I suppose I should use more than comment-sophisticated formatting, but I won't. Lazy.


Hey... Finishing stuff you've started. Always worth points in my book.

Nifty, by the Greek Junta, I can just name myself Anarchist and call it a day.

"The envelope meaning the file. The junta kept records for hundreds of thousands of Greek citizens, who did anything to oppose their dictatorship."

A sign of weakness. When a child opposes me, I laugh and pat them on the head. It's cute, not threatening. It is an ideal target for patronizing behaviour.

"And what is true peace - but isichia, taxis kai asfalia?"

Of course it's better when you don't resist because you don't see a good reason to, rather than because they have a gun in your face.

For example: expulsion for long hair? Seriously? What, precisely, is that supposed to accomplish?


Political engineering is actually slightly harder than rocket science. This is simply because there are more components to deal with.


"Is it an aggressive act of defiance to refrain from voting - or does electoral participation constitute impermissible political intervention?"

Well, let me ask: have you stopped beating your wife? When only 'yes' and 'no' are permissible, and both are wrong, then you get to do whatever you want, and nobody can blame you for it.

Though more accurately... Voting isn't going to accomplish anything. The power structures are well insulated against that avenue, so it can't very well be interventionist to vote.


It makes for good blogging, but I think you'll have difficulty with this steel rule thing.

For example you can reduce to simply an acknowledgement of the facts; "Alrenous cannot influence USG. In other news, water wet." So why waste time trying?
Only I don't end up with existential difficulties regarding whether I should vote or not. I just note it makes me feel ill, and thus avoid it. Were it to become legally necessary - I understand Australia has done this - I would simply spoil my ballot.

While I'll need the other steps to fully put it in context, it also seems that the principle at hand either cannot be the steel rule or cannot be followed.

I disagree with basically everything USG does on a structural level - intellectually, this is phrased as 'opposing' it. Certainly, I'm not likely to act on it, because of the above fact, but it does put a certain tension into the idea of the steel rule.
Now the bit about not actually populating high office with yourself - that bit's interesting and deserves playing up.


Tut tut. I notice partway through there you drop the feminine pronoun. If you must insist on annoying a substantial part of your audience, at least be consistent about it. Personally, I approve - it shows an independent will. Ditto the mask thing. (I do nevertheless find both jarring.)

"It should be obvious that any responsible management will instantly shift USG to a posture of strict cultural neutrality, allowing both competing communities - Amerikaner and Brahmin - to live peacefully according to their own principles and preferences, and cleanly divesting both of their political aspirations."

The thing to do, which nobody seem to pick up on, is to prosecute crimes. If you murder someone, you get jail time or the ax. No, I don't care that it was a religious ritual. No, I don't care that you happen to have different skin colours and some attendant prejudice. "But we need to suppress cults!" ...or you could just prosecute fraud, and the cult ends up in jail regardless.

For another example, the Greek Junta. They can outlaw hippie symbols, like long hair...or they could just outlaw hippie actions, and a ton of people with long hair end up in jail regardless, but without wasting time on meaningless style choices.


Penultimately, it's pure hubris to assume you have any idea what the timeline of such action would be like. Seems to me like a popular get out of jail card - "Hey, this seems unlikely, so I'm going to say it'll take a long time!"
On the other hand someone probably needs to point out that Mencius is producing the plan so it can be debated and refined, not because he thinks he is actually getting it right on the first try.


So I clicked over to your progressive philosopher, to check out your modus operandi. At first I was glad that other people can work through this, because I definitely have no tolerance.

J. Holbo:
"And, by the by, I have not by word, implication or heavy hint accused McArdle of wanting poor people to die."

Let's test this assertion, shall we?

J. Holbo:
"Philosophically, there just isn't a case to be made against reform unless it's this simple one: if you don't have any money, you shouldn't be entitled to any medicine. McArdle is very indignant when people accuse her of indifference to the fate of the poor, but - honestly - if it isn't that, then it's nothing."

Liar.

I wonder if Halbo is of the breed that believes his own lies, or not.

Two things of note. First, McArdle is also wrong, but at least she isn't deliberately using deceptive tactics.

Second, McArdle and Holbo think they're discussing philosophy, which is hilarious and a bit cute.

McArdle:
"It’s not enough to defend the principles of communism if what you get in practice is a nasty, murderous dictatorship every time."

Harbo responds:
"There is a big difference between the general consideration that something MAY go wrong and the knowledge that it WILL go wrong every time."

Hooray for tribalism. I can show how McArdle and Harbo are misrepresenting each other, but so what? Ultimately it misses the point, because recasting the entire thing as a tribal or sectarian spat immediately shows that it's exactly what they're doing. Slim to no philosophy will actually occur under those conditions. Ultimately, their positions are determined by in-groups, not thinking.

Me:
"Hee hee...you think you're thinking! So adorable. Look! Look at the little human! Okay, little human, say 'to each according to their needs.' Go on!"

This is what happens when you don't prioritize truth above everything else. It's nice that you're trying, but you won't actually get anywhere.

I don't, however, see the point of studying evil, in general. Study goodness, know goodness, and everything evil simply becomes obviously-so without any additional effort, whereas one can study evil all day without illuminating one iota of good.

Return to UR.

Stove; Kuhn; Cultural Narcissim

"It is not clear how accurately this represents Kuhn himself. Partly, this is because he just said, `Let’s do history, as it is so much more exciting than boring old logic.’ He does, it is true, state conclusions that seem to require such an argument, such as `There is, I think, no theory-independent way to reconstruct phrases like "really there"; the notion of a match between the ontology of a theory and its "real" counterpart in nature now strikes me as illusive in principle."

The response is contained in this statement; I cannot choose the consequences of my actions.

If my actions have been formed roughly in accordance with what's really there, the consequences will be as expected. Furthermore, were I to form my action in closer accordance, the consequences will become closer to what is expected. What I wish to understand is how an intelligent person can seriously entertain the following idea; that, were I to form my actions exactly in accordance with what's really there, that the consequences matching exactly to my expectations is somehow 'illusive in principle.'

There is a self; I can choose my actions. There is other; I cannot choose my action's consequences. Instead, I must learn of their consequences, and act accordingly; this thing which is learned is knowledge, regardless of any dilapidated definitions that have claimed to be of 'knowledge.'

That the interaction between self and other are not simple the way F=ma is simple does not mean that other is somehow illusory. Rather, it is far past the time our culture grew up and realized that 'Relativity' is a terrible name for E=mc², and learn from its rigid reality instead of trying to legitimize something that boils down to philosophical narcissism.

Not that anything like that will happen: I'm just sayin.'

Comments on an Evo Psych Primer

I can't figure out a good introduction, and I'm sure you can do without one.

"The brain is a physical system whose operation is governed solely by the laws of chemistry and physics. What does this mean? It means that all of your thoughts and hopes and dreams and feelings are produced by chemical reactions going on in your head (a sobering thought)."

This is untrue, but of course there's no way for them to know this. You may want to contemplate this and the idea of scientific arrogance next to each other.

"To say that the function of your brain is to generate behavior that is "appropriate" to your environmental circumstances is not saying much, unless you have some definition of what "appropriate" means. What counts as appropriate behavior? "Appropriate" has different meanings for different organisms."

Time to hawk my definition of life: life has goals. (Also time to use a word that isn't 'appropriate.') For a brain to produce intelligent reactions to the environment, it has to figure out first what an intelligent reaction is, explicitly or implicitly.*

*(Logically redundant. The human brain - specifically yours - is not strictly logical, so grammatically necessary.)

The main action of the brain is simply to aid the life-form in continuing to be able to pursue and defend goals. However, this is the action of every organ; typically an intelligent action is one that supports one of the sub-goals. So, instead of "'intelligent' has different meanings for different organisms," "different organisms pursue different goals."

A good philosophical definition makes everything obvious. Also note that the concept 'behaviour' easily generalizes to non-intelligent reactions like floral immune reactions...albeit the whole point of the word is to distinguish brain-reactions from the non-brain kind within biology.

"Realizing that the function of the brain is information-processing has allowed cognitive scientists to resolve (at least one version of) the mind/body problem. For cognitive scientists, brain and mind are terms that refer to the same system, which can be described in two complementary ways -- either in terms of its physical properties (the brain), or in terms of its information-processing operation (the mind)."

Scientific arrogance is negligible compared to philosophical arrogance.
Though the fault here is completely misunderstanding the mind/body problem. As far as philosophy is concerned, the information-processing is a physical property, which is probably why cogsci has found that their 'mind' and 'brain' are identical. On the other hand, note that Cosmides and Tooby acknowledge that this is only 'one version' of the problem.

"Principle 3. [...] In other words, our intuitions can deceive us."

I guess my intuition is just really good. When I examine my consciousness to ask how I see, it tells me that it doesn't know. Trying it again to make sure, I just found out it's practically impossible to even direct my awareness at the problem. I can think about what I'm seeing, or I can think about the thoughts these sights give me, but my mind's eye is blind to anything upstream or in between.

Your incompetence at epistemology can deceive you. Your consciousness rarely does.
This is basically religious dogma on the part of scientists - that your intuition is just about useless.
Generally this is because scientists refuse to relinquish their prejudices about what the intuition can do, and therefore cannot acknowledge its limitations and use it for what it is actually good for.

"A basic engineering principle is that the same machine is rarely capable of solving two different problems equally well. We have both screw drivers and saws because each solves a particular problem better than the other. Just imagine trying to cut planks of wood with a screw driver or to turn screws with a saw."

That's what is so amazing about general-purpose computers, actually. Essentially they're math machines, doing simple operations on binary numbers. And yet, they can solve basically any information problem. (Purpose-built circuits are more efficient in their domain, though.)

"To solve the adaptive problem of finding the right mate, our choices must be guided by qualitatively different standards than when choosing the right food, or the right habitat. Consequently, the brain must be composed of a large collection of circuits, with different circuits specialized for solving different problems."

And here's where the above fact comes in. No, it doesn't have to be, but it is more efficient. I suspect that when your general-purpose circuits can properly solve a problem according to some qualitative standard, it sends out the feeling we label 'understanding.' When you understand a goal, you can reason effectively around it. To understand, then, is to apply the proper meaning to various stimuli.

"You can think of each of these specialized circuits as a mini-computer that is dedicated to solving one problem. Such dedicated mini-computers are sometimes called modules. There is, then, a sense in which you can view the brain as a collection of dedicated mini-computers -- a collection of modules."

I have a math module. It sleeps most of the time and takes many seconds to boot up. From a standing start I can barely count. Once it's up, calculus is my bitch.

"(E.g., human color constancy mechanisms are calibrated to natural changes in terrestrial illumination; as a result, grass looks green at both high noon and sunset, even though the spectral properties of the light it reflects have changed dramatically.)"

Mine seem to be dramatically overpowered; it wasn't until nearly adulthood that I noticed that well-lit coloured objects throw colour stains onto nearby objects. It wasn't long after I found out that you can't see colour in the dark - by reading about it. I immediately went into a dark room and had trouble confirming it, because my brain automatically assigned everything a colour, though I suspect it would have been easier if I had a room that wasn't full of familiar objects. I rarely notice the colour of lighting unless I specifically attend to it. For example I had red curtains as a kid and it made my room red during the day when they were closed. I could only tell everything was red when I specifically asked myself about it.

So perhaps my intuition is deceiving me? Perhaps I just think I can see colour, but I'm just fooling myself...well, it's actually highly testable. If a light is turned on in dark/discoloured rooms, am I surprised by the revealed colour? It has happened, three or four times. The system is powerful but does like to guess at things it can't actually know.

"The more crib sheets a system has, the more problems it can solve. A brain equipped with a multiplicity of specialized inference engines will be able to generate sophisticated behavior that is sensitively tuned to its environment. In this view, the flexibility and power often attributed to content-independent algorithms is illusory. All else equal, a content-rich system will be able to infer more than a content-poor one."

Philosophically, I've found the best way of looking at this is that the brain learns things both through the senses, in single organisms, and through evolution, across ancestry. Even with the crib sheets, logical reasoning is necessary to produce true inferences, which means that the privileged hypotheses are essentially just innate lessons.

This transforms the last statement into "Systems with more knowledge can infer more." Good philosophy tends to make everything obvious.

What I'm trying to say here is that if a philosophy is being obtuse, it's probably because it's bad philosophy and you can ignore it as a source of truth. At worst you skip inefficient learning. In general, really, the job of being understood falls mostly to the speaker or writer.

"Having no crib sheets, there is little they can deduce about a domain; having no privileged hypotheses, there is little they can induce before their operation is hijacked by combinatorial explosion."

I guess this answers a question I've had; how did I learn philosophy? I certainly wasn't taught, and I didn't read anything specifically calling itself philosophy. I did, however, read a lot and I paid attention.
The above statement is identical to one I made last post. ("...if-then") Good philosophy ignores evidence until the final stages, because otherwise you get combinatorial explosion. Instead, work from assumptions and simply check later if these assumptions make any sense.

"Machines limited to executing Bayes's rule, modus ponens, and other "rational" procedures derived from mathematics or logic are computationally weak compared to the system outlined above (Tooby and Cosmides, 1992)."

Fascinating that they think this. (BTW, check: compare the rate toddlers learn words to the rate of incoming information. I found the ratio is gargantuan.) Generalize the concept 'machine;' now, science is a machine. So, this idea reflects back; science needs intuition. 'Scientific' findings can indeed be very interesting and very powerful, but for the most part the reach of science is limited. This is the basic reason I keep pointing out this particular flawed dogma in science culture. Until scientists recognize this, there will remain two kinds of scientists; the ones that keep using the data to support things it doesn't actually say (nutritional science), and the scientists who refuse to believe that we can find truth unless some data tells us so first. (New atheists. Also anti-historian sentiment: "Many of these accusations revolve around the idea that we cannot prove anything about the past, so evolutionary claims cannot be verified.")

"experts can solve problems faster and more efficiently than novices because they already know a lot about the problem domain."

Very good. It's more that experts can solve problems at all, though.

"In other words, our modern skulls house a stone age mind."

Evolution can happen much faster than this phrase implies. Civilization has certianly impacted the stone-age template. If nothing else, look at lactose tolerance. Small adaptations are no less likely in the brain.

"For this reason, evolutionary psychology is relentlessly past-oriented."

All knowledge is past oriented. The whole point is to use the past, which we can see, to understand the future, which we can't see without using the past.

"The premises that underlie these debates are flawed, yet they are so deeply entrenched that many people have difficulty seeing that there are other ways to think about these issues."

Cosmides and Tooby are really doing a good job, overall.

After reading this, I'd have to say that I have an EP hypothesis. Specifically, that all humans are endowed with not one but at least two general-purpose learning and reasoning architectures. I call them the 'rational logic system' and the 'emotional logic system' simply because of the way they appear to present results. Basically, one is "I think that" and the other is "I feel like." The first can solve math problems. The second seems primarily interested in causation, using correlation to try to detect it.

I can't think of a good conclusion either, and I think you can do without one. In fact, make up your own, because it will be tailored to you.

Apparently Honesty is Grace, not Will

From here referencing this.


Practising lying makes it harder to not lie when it's in your interest, while practising honesty, especially if you truly believe lying is evil, makes it harder and harder to lie even when it is in your material interest.

It's true that if you were not tempted you don't exercise virtue. However, this is meaningless to outside observers, who can only tell that some people they can trust, and some people they can't. To us outside your mind, your virtue is in the results, not in what you went through to obtain them. Just as if I have a sandwich, the taste is not affected by whether you traipsed across the Himalayas to deliver it to me or whether it was tossed together in the back room. The language, and thus the definition of 'virtue' records what is measurable, rather than trying for epistemic purity.

Don't forget to factor in the effects of culture and genetics, predisposition, brain plasticity, and so on. A single snapshot does not a philosophy make. Again, scientists are very good at gathering data - ontology. Their epistemology is worse than no epistemology at all, however.

Also, it's almost certain that Jesus is based off a real person who, in retelling, accreted various traits from various endemic myths. Basically, given that some people don't have to resist temptation, and given infinite versions of our world, most of them will contain an almost totally 'pure' person at some point in history. We have two on record - Jesus and Buddha. Aside from this one fact, the rest of what we know about them is probably about as accurate as the other stuff we know about individuals from two millennia ago. There's actually a whole essay here, so I'm going onto the next section.

There is a bridge between the first two links, which says basically what I would say about the technical aspects of the study. Then it goes onto the following.

"In any case, for thousands of years philosophers have speculated whether humans are innately good or bad, from Rosseau and Hobbes to Xun Zi and Mencius. The time for speculation is over, as experimental philosophers are looking into the empirical distribution of human moral intuition, as opposed to surveying the reflections of their philosophically oriented colleagues."

Note this interesting trick; without coming right out and saying so, and thus losing plausible deniability, Razib dismisses all reflective philosophy as 'speculation.' Strictly speaking, Razib is just calling out philosophers for their distain of evidence, noting the dearth of such. But, to any fluent English speaker...wow. So, I'm going to take it apart and blow up the pieces.

The philosophers who were wrong made two mistakes; insufficient evidence, or errors in reasoning resulting from a lack of an objective test to weed out these errors. As expected, someone with worse-than-zero epistemological skill cannot see the value in epistemology.

Like good math, good philosophy states if-then. If certain assumptions are true, then a certain result is true. This provides four benefits; first, you don't have to wait for the evidence, but can go to work immediately; second, it makes it easy to check for errors, as you don't have to worry immediately about matching the model to reality, only to its own rules; third, it makes it easy to check to see if it does match reality, as the assumptions are all right there; and finally, when contradictory evidence comes in, you don't have to work from scratch, but can modify the existing structure. Here, let me demonstrate: if and when Razib can produce this paragraph or an equivalent by himself, then he may be able to rationally evaluate contributions by Hobbes and Mencius. My main nontrivial assumption is that if you can produce the paragraph you understand it, and that if you understand the principles you can apply them.

The upshot is that evidence is entirely post-hoc to philosophy. The truth of the if-then structures is completely independent of which particular if is actually true. Philosophy is just the art of discovering new structures of if-then, though admittedly most human philosophers prefer to cleave to ones that stand a chance of having applications.

There's also a final source of error: the definition of 'innately good.' As above, it may mean, for instance, 'likely to be trustworthy, all things equal' or it may mean 'not likely to be tempted in the first place, all things equal.' If this discussion is anything like every other discussion I've looked into, this point is a source of massive confusion in communication.

Perhaps, for instance, there is some non-lying moral situation where all people are tempted, and practise makes no difference. How do you reconcile this with an overarching 'innately good,' knowing that the lying situation is so complicated? And there are four situations, two for 'most people are trustworthy' being true or false, and the same binary pair for this second situation. Only one situation, where both are false, is clearly 'innately bad.'

If you take thousands of years of thought by some of the smartest people ever, and reduce it to a single poorly defined umbrella idea, it seems kind of useless. All I can say is that I'm glad ignorance is fond of flaunting itself.

Also amusing is that he goes on to mention the exact thing I mentioned earlier; brain plasticity. The off-the-cuff dismissal of philosophy has no place in the article from a flow standpoint, from a factual standpoint, or from a competence standpoint. It's just insulting for the sake of being insulting, althought it may also be some inner circle cheerleading.

So, with this in mind, let's see if a further example hold up.

"Intelligent people will also perhaps fine-tune their model of how "free will" works, though much of this research will be irrelevant to the majority."

Intelligent people will realize that they can't define free will and thus can't possibly have any idea how it works. Also note that Razib has put himself into an 'intelligent' inner circle. (You're epistemologically allowed to guess about free will, but only if you realize all you have are guesses.)

I do have one question; what would a "one moral sense" be when it is at home?


So, congratulations, everyone is wrong. Accept your Ignorance.

MOND, Physics versus Logic

Well, yeah. The acceleration must be quantized because energy is quantized, which implies that the force is quantized as well. Quantizing force has profound effects on the aggregate behaviour. If you program, you can see this by comparing an analytical graph of x(t) to a quantized simulation; the simulation, especially in limit cases such as F <<>-2 range will be different when it feels the impulse than when it 'should' feel the average impulse, and with F -> 0 the difference will actually be significant, and each small difference pushes the next difference yet further from the continuous F=ma approximation.

Not only that, but you have to figure out how the quantized force knows when to land the impulses. If this wasn't gravity, then it would be easy; the force carriers are quantized and it applies forces upon collision. However, we can't determine whether the force-carrier description or the bent-space description works better for gravity, and even if is force carriers we haven't found the graviton and can't be sure of its properties.
I'd guess that like many things, quantized gravitational accelerations would happen probabilistically, but this pushes the actual behaviour yet further from the continuous F=ma, again because each acceleration affects when the next acceleration will be felt; late impulses will allow the object to fly farther from the analytical-continuous position

Moreover, all these possibilities must be normalized for conservation of energy. As the object is feeling these random forces, they must somehow work out to be proportional to the change in potential energy. Alternatively, the potential energy calculation needs to be altered in light of the new behaviour.

So, at the very least, as compared to continuous F=ma, objects drift off true, then feel different forces, and then the forces are somehow corrected for conservation of energy, which then feeds back by drifting it off true... Instead of x(t) = d + vt + at²/2, it's a complex partial differential equation, and a(t) is basically going to be Dirac deltas. All of this is a direct consequence of quantized energy.

This is such a basic analysis I'm surprised I haven't seen it anywhere before. I guess that means I'm grateful to Tech Review for prodding me into doing something I already should have done.

Evilsolution

See, because evolution provides solutions, but creationists think the very idea is evil...see, ha ha, I'm so clever.

That is, solutions to adaptive problems, not trying to imply right off that evolution must be true...and evil as opposed to true, not true-yet-evil. Yeah. So clever.

That plus the Zerg. A case of evilsolution if ever there was one. But anyway.


This debate is wrong. Just...wrong.

I'm going to start, however, with something that isn't. From La Wik,

"In biology, evolution is the process of change in the inherited traits of a population of organisms from one generation to the next."

As has been noted before, the idea of evolution predates Darwin. Darwin, as noted below, just came up with the mechanism - natural selection. Indeed, the idea of evolution is kind of obvious. See animal husbandry.

"Evolutionary biology documents the fact that evolution occurs"

Actually, until very recently, only paleo-documentation was possible, which as you know is not very convincing to creationists...which means you should stop trying to use it. Gaah.

Similarly, if:

"Studies of the fossil record and the diversity of living organisms had convinced most scientists by the mid-nineteenth century that species changed over time. However, the mechanism driving these changes remained unclear until the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, detailing the theory of evolution by natural selection."

Then why do I keep hearing stories about evolution getting the Galileo treatment? Pick one or the other. You don't get to claim Galilean ethics when all your peers agree with you.

The stories are not matching up. Did Darwin come up with evolution by looking at Galapagos finches, or just natural selection? (Turns out, just natural selection; New Scientist) Was it broadly accepted, or not? It seems to depend on what the speaker is trying to prove. A classic symptom of politicized science.

"This powerful explanatory and predictive theory"

Um, predictive, eh? So these would be the kinds of predictions that I see brought up in evolution debates all the time. You know, the prediction that creationists are feebleminded idiots clinging to a security blanket, or the one about how creationists are evil bastards who are going to be responsible for an Inquisition?

Actually, I kid. In my mind, I make a distinction between predictions about the future and other predictions, which is not how the word is used by scientists. And indeed, evolutionary theory has made many predictions about what we'll find in the fossil record, and predictions about the similarities we'll find between mammal genomes. However, evolution does not, and basically cannot, make anything I'd actually call a prediction.

In fact, the predictions are about the patterns that shared genes conform to. Which as I just linked, turns out to be mostly wrong. Evolution is, right now, an explanatory theory. (Of course, the theory supported by that link won't be any more palatable to creationists.)

"Organisms will adapt to their environment." Okay. Using what strategy? Changing which genes? How likely? Which adaptive pressures are lethal? Which are not? You can bring up experiments on bacteria, but that's just animal husbandry, known since antiquity. This is the basis of the claim I will make that there is no technical context in which you need to know evolutionary theory. It explains things that have already happened. And that is all.

"it has become the central organizing principle of modern biology, providing a unifying explanation for the diversity of life on Earth."

Thankfully, they said something that's actually true. It's quite the relief. Hopefully they don't screw up too much further down.

"Simple organisms have therefore been the dominant form of life on Earth throughout its history and continue to be the main form of life up to the present day, with complex life only appearing more diverse because it is more noticeable."

An excellent example of poor thinking. What does 'dominant' mean? Hah, trick question - they're equivocating. They're trying to imply that humans are not dominant simply because they are less numerous. However, to most people, dominance is about power, and dominance due to overwhelming numbers is called 'dominating counts' not just 'dominating.' (New Scientist says 'dominating counts.') This is an intentional (if possibly not conscious) obfuscation of the facts. When questioned, of course they will say they always meant that single-celled life 'dominates biomass counts.' However, they know their target audience and they know or should know that 'dominant' is about power to them. They are intentionally implying that humans are puny.

Further, they are intentionally implying that the 'fact' that humans are puny is inherent in the data. It is not. Puniness or lack thereof is entirely an aesthetic call. Putting on the lens that scientists like to 'prove' humans are puny will quickly show how common it is.

The idea we are some people on a generally unremarkable planet orbiting a unremarkable sun during an unremarkable time in history...is completely aesthetic. According to whose perspective is our sun 'unremarkable?' Ours. The sun really doesn't give a damn.

So. Scientists enjoy 'tearing down the illusions' by sustaining other illusions. They really need to stop that. As an example...

There is one unremarkable planet of an unremarkable sun in the middle of nowhere...except for the fact that this planet is entirely unique, as is by extension the sun. This apparently random planet is the only planet with consciousness ever observed in the entire universe. This apparently random weird ape thing - the one with only very fine body hair - dominates the entire planet, and by extension, is the most powerful consciousness in the universe. In a fight between a human's goals and basically any other goal - the humans win.

That's a pretty incredible height. Despite living for a tiny amount of geological time, with flaw-riddled bodies and pathetic muscles and making up a tiny fraction of biomass, human beings are the only species who hold the destiny of the planet in their hands, are the only species that may have an entire geological age named after them. That's some pretty incredible power multipliers over some scummy unicelled stuff. It's the vast majority and yet which of us can irradiate the entire planet? Which of us could, in theory, affect the climate at will? (Not talking about AGW. Am talking about solar mirrors.)

So. The data supports either opinion as that's all it is - an aesthetic opinion.

"They are produced by a combination of the continuous production of small, random changes in traits, followed by natural selection of the variants best-suited for their environment."

Actually, no. We don't know that at all. The small, random changes, when calculated out, do not accurately reproduce observed (and obviously necessary) rates of change. In fact, actual evolution can proceed extremely quickly compared to this standard. (Case in point; human brain size increase.) Further, phenotypes follow the punctuated equilibrium model, although genes tend to change continuously - the phenotypes only change significantly at tipping points, with long buffered stretches in between.

Similarly, there is at least one feedback that increases mutation during times of adaptive stress and decreases it during times of adaptive success. Considered a priori, this should be expected. If there is any way for genes to affect their own evolution, they will create the mechanisms to do so to their benefit. Some finches recently immigrated (ctrl-f 'real time') to a Galapagos island, causing significant beak size change in another species in one generation, coinciding with a gene-stressing drought.

"A substantial part of the variation in phenotypes in a population is caused by the differences between their genotypes."

Note that for the purposes of pure philosophy, this is not strictly true. All phenotypes are caused by the genetic code. Which particular phenotype is selected is determined by the interaction between genes and environment. The environment, alone, causes nothing, except in the sense that given an Earth, life arises spontaneously, or so it is thought.

So, rather, all possible phenotypes are almost entirely dictated by differences in the genes. To predict one in particular requires the calculation to involve the environment as well.

Consider the opposite. "Phenotypes would vary continuously over everything, except sometimes they're restricted by genes." Phenotypes are not somehow their own phenomenon, but rather and effect of genetics.

"For example, the human eye uses four genes to make structures that sense light: three for color vision and one for night vision; all four arose from a single ancestral gene."

Also strictly untrue. While rods are used for night vision now, the ancestral gene they're talking about was the rods, which were used for all vision. Similarly, what do you suppose colourblind people see with? It's not like red or green things are invisible to them.

"Another effect of these mobile DNA sequences is that when they move within a genome, they can mutate or delete existing genes and thereby produce genetic diversity."

I like this. "They can delete existing genes, and thereby produce genetic diversity." I'm not sure why exactly they give a crap about the exact mechanisms of mutation; for this debate, all you need to know is thermo #2. However, you certainly don't get new features by deleting genes, which means it always reduces genetic diversity, although if you're lucky it can make a new species. (More likely it deletes something important before the two variants cannot breed.)

"In asexual organisms, genes are inherited together, or linked, as they cannot mix with genes in other organisms during reproduction."

They do not, not can not. Sexual reproduction is the only known way to scramble the genome, not the only way possible. Frankly, unless this is wildly unrepresentative of the quality of evolutionist thought...well, it's not surprising they're failing to convince their opponents.

"Natural selection is the process by which genetic mutations that enhance reproduction become, and remain, more common in successive generations of a population. It has often been called a "self-evident" mechanism because it necessarily follows from three simple facts:

• Heritable variation exists within populations of organisms.
• Organisms produce more offspring than can survive.
• These offspring vary in their ability to survive and reproduce."
  

They missed thermo #2.

• Heredity. Something has to tell the next generation how to grow.
• Variation. This instruction can't be perfectly followed or copied. Thermo #2.
  
• Selection. Some imperfections will suck, but others will be awesome. This is feedback.
  

These reasons may be contained in theirs, but it's just too much work to look - especially if you're bent on proving them wrong. I guess if I'm saying that, I shouldn't use vague terms.

• Selection. Some imperfections will hamper the ability of the inherited instructions to execute, and some will improve this ability. Since we're talking about something that has generations, one of the instructions is to create the next generation - that is, the concept of 'reproduction' is contained within the first so-called 'simple' idea.
  

I feel better now.

Evolutionists often confuse Creationists' objections to evolution with the rejection of the idea of natural selection. This is only exacerbated by the fact that stupid people can be Creationists too, and these people will sometimes reject the idea, because they don't have the cognitive resources to parse all the sub-modules of evolution. If they've decided to reject evolution overall, this means, as it does in children, that they reject everything within evolution. As long as they aren't committing any crimes, it's pointless to try to improve their granularity. Also, it's a bit cruel to debate people significantly stupider than you are, especially on TV. Honourable people don't do that kind of thing. (You're welcome to decide to be dishonourable, if that's what you really want. However, you can't make me decide that I really want to respond positively to the behaviour.)

__________________________

So, if you want to know about evolution, for the sake of whatever you hold dear...don't go anywhere near an evolution-creation debate. Do not pass Dawkins, do not collect 200 soundbites.

Overall, these people are deceptive, self-righteously vindictive, and not even that good at debate. They think evolution is obvious and that most people agree with them. If it is so obvious, then I guess Darwin wasn't all that great, eh? Second, the fact is, rightly or wrongly, most people do not agree. Evolution is a highly contentious subject for people outside the field of biology, something you'd never learn of you spend all your time in the echo-chamber of Dawkins and people who don't realize he's a jerk; they use these prejudices to justify all kind of slander and villany directed against people who disagree with them.

Good lord, as if disagreement was grounds for anything but greater efforts at civility.


So, what's a good reason for believing in evolution?

First, let's talk about the system under which we take evolution as true. Then I will talk about how it is true.

Evolution is an empirical theory which is used to explain observations. At present, we cannot apply biological evolution directly, unless you count animal husbandry, which predates Darwin...just a tad. (Again, natural selection as artificial selection, the idea that if you have a random set of components you should save and develop the ones that work better, is a pretty obvious idea and while it's often linked to Darwin, it has been used since before history. Incidentally, if you know a good historian of philosophy, please direct me. I'm working very indirectly here, lacking the expertise I might wish.)

That is, evolution is not True, it simply Works. (Good example; see references to Newton in the New Scientist article.) If there is a second theory that can explain everything that evolution can, then there is no particular reason you have to choose evolution over it. Second, as there is exactly one technology which depends on evolution,* knowledge of it is almost completely unnecessary. If you want, you can completely ignore this idea in any technical context. (Talking to evolutionary biologists, without begging the question, isn't a technical context, but rather a social one. Trying to publish a paper which ignores evolution in one of their journals would be a pretty dense move.)

*(Specifically computer-aided design routines using reproduction and selection, but this could have been inspired by animal husbandry instead. Wasn't, but could have been.)

Because of this, talking about the metaphysical consequences of Evolution is also a pretty dense move. Certainly you can speculate, but only out of idle curiosity and entertainment, because Evolution is just a set of data. While it happens to be explained one way now, there is not one single guarantee that it will be explained the same way in the future, in which case you'd have to throw out every single metaphysical conclusion and start again.

Plus, of course, it is metaphysics. You can't build anything out of metaphysics.

As a result of these two facts, evolution is the absolute last thing you should hang an atheist crusade on.

But anyway, given that this is an empirical theory, what does it work to explain? Notably, not all of this was lacking from La Wik, but it was mixed with so much shit that I feel the need to filter it out.

My primary source is this, via this here. I found it a wonderfully detailed and clear article, including many bits of info I had never seen before, most of which I have yet to see again.


First and foremost; every single organism on the planet uses a nearly identical genetic code. (With handy chart.) We know which sequences of letters correspond to which amino acids. We can go out looking for organisms that use transcription factors that violate this code, and what we find is that they're incredibly rare. For me, this is the primary reason to believe in a universal common ancestor, and in addition to use evolution to explain the diversity of forms which use this basic, fundamental code. Which, again, is all of them. (Horizontal gene transfer would be impossible, otherwise.)

There's also, at that link, innumerable things like how you can tell reptiles and mammals are related because you can go into the fossil record and watch reptile jaw bones move and morph into mammalian inner ear bones.


Since this is the case,


Evolution does polish Her products. While it is difficult to disentangle genetic instincts from pure appreciation of beauty, most mammals have several universal-seeming traits of beauty and good design, including simplicity, elegance (solving problems efficiently and ingeniously) and sensory richness. Especially, the elegant

Nevertheless, we also expect many kludges, especially in recently-formed species, or during and immediately after rapid evolution, a condition humans fit extremely well. While I'm not convinced that we haven't just overlooked the function of the appendix....

The coccyx. Body hair, especially on women. Conflicting urges; jealousy and promiscuity. The desire to be accepted versus the desire to excel. The urge to relax and be lazy versus the need to procure food and reproduce.

(The reason our wisdom teeth don't work is because if you work your jaw as a kid, it gets bigger. Cooking and more complex food processing has made chewing easier, resulting in smaller jaws at maturity.)

All these things are easily explained by evolution. Either they are effective now, or they are the remnants of things that were effective in the past. Evolution, of course, has no overriding goal, and so logical consistency of drives is accidental at best. It's simply that organisms that are good at surviving are stable and thus continue to exist.

If any of the ancient divine hypotheses were true, I would expect to find urges that were adaptively neutral or negative, but clearly served some kind of religious or spiritual end. I find nothing but the exact opposite - it is easy, even trivial, to at least construct an argument showing any 'spiritual' or 'religious' urge to be in fact utterly self-serving.

There being one exception - psychologists repeatedly find that children and adults are psychologically healthier with what they call a 'spiritual' life. What, exactly, they mean I don't know, but it seems odd to me. (I would be very happy to find I cannot explain this urge in terms of self-servitude.)


Despite all this, I have some questions in case a biologist randomly stumbles on this article.

How does the cell know not to produce copies of broken genes, or to attempt to transcribe parts of junk DNA? Or, do cells end up producing a lot of useless protein strings? Shouldn't there be at least one genetic disease caused by treating a part of junk DNA as a gene?

If life arose spontaneously, then considering the size of Earth, it's extremely likely that it arose more than once. What happened? Why aren't there at least two cell lines?

Could a virus or bacteria with an alien genetic code really attack our cells? Wouldn't their proteins and ours just break?

Are the 22 amino acids the only possible amino acids, or should we expect aliens to use a different set entirely? If so, wouldn't this mean that we would be unable to digest their food, and they would be unable to digest ours?

I should first ask; I know that we higher organisms construct ourselves not out of elementary molecules, but out of pre-existing bits like amino acids and sugars and fatty acids. We cannot manufacture these ourselves; we rely on bacteria and plants to do it for us, then eat them. Doesn't this mean that any alien life, even one from our own planet using a radically different DNA code, would be inedible at best and, more likely, chaotically poisonous?

Now onto the more difficult problems.

What are the mechanics of sexual recombination? How does the cell manage to not snip genes a monomer or two off of where it should be, and break genes? How does it manage the inevitable typos? Speaking of which...

"Sexual reproduction helps to remove harmful mutations and retain beneficial mutations."

People say this all the time, but always expect you to take it on faith; nobody ever explains how. So, er, how?

How does DNA compute? In a computer, encoding is completely arbitrary. But DNA's transcription factors don't seem like they can have this flexibility. So, how does it work? Second, given this answer, is it really true that there are "1.4 x 10⁷⁰ informationally equivalent genetic codes"? Wouldn't at least some of these be nonviable because the required transcription factors cannot be built out of our amino acids, or indeed violate physical law?

Of similar criticality is how, exactly, by what mechanism, genes code for proteins, especially considering that this is recursive - the decoding protein is itself encoded into the genome...how on Earth did this start up?

I hunger for knowledge.


Logical basis
Given 1000 processes, most of them will reduce the chance they will occur again, usually by using up reactants. However, if one of them increases the chance, no matter how small that increase is, eventually it will occur enough times to become perpetual. Let there be a hypothetical equilibrium-like situation where processes will have a 0.2% chance of occurring, all things equal. But what if one, when it occurred, increased the chance by 0.04%? Most processes have a 0.2% squared chance (0.0004%) of occurring twice in a row, while this process has (0.00048%). This seems small, but after only 2495 repetitions it becomes perpetual; the process's probability hits one.

...okay that's rather a lot. The probability of this happening is indeed miniscule. (It's a 2495-term product...if YOU want to calculate it... Graphing the log and using it to estimate order of magnitude, I got well over 1000 decimal places. There are only about 10⁸⁰ atoms in the universe, and most of those are hydrogen.)

Right. So from this, plus the fact that life leapt at the chance during the formation of Earth, I can conclude either that the process is way way more likely that 1/1000 or that the increase is something on the order of 20%. The chances of RNA arranging itself by chance...miniscule. Hence, it must really really like to replicate itself.

The real estimate calculation is even nastier to do by hand, because in reality the process will never actually reach 100% chance of surviving, plus to actually spawn life it has to replicate. So every success actually spawns two chances to survive again, but eventually the chance to die stabilizes against the chance to live...if the population manages to survive that long. The odds will still be (something enormous) to one. Sure growth is exponential, but it's still probable growth; the death rate of proto-life is going to be enormous.

And...uh...no there. Adding complexity is going to make it worse. In reality, the chain of events starts with that one really rare reaction, but leads to different reactions which have different optimum environments, which are going to become more stringent as the complexity grows, just as simultaneously the delicacy and thus half-life of the reactants decreases.

I can be sure they've basically exhausted any simple reaction that can do this, and probably pairs as well. (http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/abioprob.html) Okay, so put all that shit in a test tube at massive concentration and see what happens! ... Oh wait, they already did. Several teams have tried and failed.
I can be sure, however, that they haven't tried to cook up the necessary probabilities on the processes, from which I can conclude that biologists, as a whole, are terrible at logic. (How can I be sure? Because it would have been widely reported. "Probability of life starting calculated to be X%, with Y% chance of surviving to form stable cellular life." Even journalists can understand that.)

The only solution is that it's not any of the known chemical possibilities.

But anyway, given a self-perpetuating process, any tiny error will suddenly cause a different process to self-perpetuate. Basically it will be molecular speciation. I would expect such a self-perpetuating process to be robust, simply because an error-tolerant process is more likely to survive, and indeed complexity, especially randomly sourced complexity, usually leads to redundancy.


And so, the fact that life leapt at the chance on Earth is actually a serious problem for Evolution, unless panspermia is true. While it could have just been a fluke - we hardly know anything about biogenesis - we at least have to consider that it was not. It's not a serious problem for universal common ancestor, because after the first serious go at life, bacteria are going to eat every other biogenesis event. However, if it's so easy, we should have figured it out by now, or at least found something similar in nature.

The other serious possibility is actually also problematic. Panspermia requires that life emerged and then a serious asteroid impact spread rocks across the galaxy or even intergalactically. While it's actually quite plausible to think of bacteria surviving in space like this, it once again puts the probability of biogenesis at 'high' because instead of leaping for the chance on Earth, it had to leap at the chance within rock-striking distance of Earth, which goes pretty far back in time very quickly. (It's similar to working out the size of the impactor in the impactor theory of moon formation. It has to be a certain size and a certain speed to reach Earth and not pulverize itself.) And, again, considering how fast Earth got life, the neighbourhood would have had to have been crawling with crawlies, and we should be finding more Earth-style life forms in places like the asteroid belt.

So go have a look, y'all.

I think biogenesis is a very elegant theory. It connects the elementary particles and the highest form of consciousness into a continuous, integrated process. Unfortunately it's also, given the evidence we have, very very unlikely.

Nevertheless, life did somehow occur on Earth. Given this, evolution is logically inevitable.

There has to be some way to pass on instructions on how to grow to the next generation, because where else are they going to come from? Since perfection doesn't exist, these instructions will randomly get corrupted, but part of the instruction is how the next generation should grow...and thus, evolution is inevitable given the second law of thermodynamics. Given this, what are now called mutations will sometimes improve survival to the next generation, and sometimes not, a feedback that will automatically cause organisms that 'fit' their attempted goals better, to survive better, causing Nature to equip Her creatures with the tools they need, and also causing changes in those tools over time, a process now called natural selection. So that is inter-species evolution, microevolution.

Now, the definition of species is an arbitrary concept, but however you define the boundaries, the mutational shifts will eventually cause a species or part of a species to cross the boundary.

The only way for microevolution to not imply macroevolution would be to dethrone genetics. Not all the information about the animal would be encoded by the genes; specifically, the information encoding which species the thing is. The genes would just be details about the organism, which would in turn imply that the genetic code isn't universal; the details would all be a function of the underlying species code. This species code would basically have to be stored off-platform; neither in the genes or anywhere in the organism, because otherwise it will also be subject to mutation, and thus selection.

If you want a concrete analogue to this hypothetical, go look at machine language codes on different chipsets. Many of the instructions are the same, (they look like 5BE1, which may do something simple like flip a bit or increment a memory address) but many of them are different as well. The machine itself would correspond to the species code, while the genes would correspond to the machine instructions.

But none of the evidence supports this; embryo growth appears to be entirely controlled by fragile, non-error checked* genes transcribed from the genome.

*(Indeed, as there's no 'right' or 'true' genome, you can't even coherently define error.)


I hate writing conclusions. You should draw your own, anyway. So here's some random biological tidbits instead.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGaUEAkqhMY&feature=related

Organisms often suffer catastrophic failures. Either many or most embryos self-abort. That isn't the mother rejecting the embryo (which also happens) - that's the embryo failing to divide, just dying in the womb or in the egg.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aW2GkDkimkE&feature=related

Two things. First, while for the vast majority of subjects evolution is just an explanatory theory...there is that one application. You can use random mutation plus selection to design circuits, antennas, and so on, and further these prove that evolution is smarter than you. The circuits had apparently independent loops with no apparent computation link whatsoever...yet failed to work when they were removed. The mutation+selection process was taking advantage of the physical quirks of the chip itself - it was no longer digital, but analogue-digital hybrid.