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.

Blogger is Experimenting on Their Live Servers

Update: This post is now a part of Some of My Mistakes.


Again. As opposed to, say, test servers. This blog post is a workaround.

It's also a proof that Democracy is an inherent contradiction.

Anyway...

It's fun to watch someone flail around trying to define Democracy. (Communism too.) Due to this, I usually have to derive my own.

Seriously, if I use this particular definition, I don't even have to do any work.

Democracy = rights, some liberties, separation of powers and separation of church and state. Also has a constitution that guarantees independent courts.

Well, constitutions don't guarantee anything in any practical sense. Case closed.

But cuz I like overkill...

Elections can be held without electing anything of consequence.

If you want to guarantee human rights, the first item on the agenda is to abolish Democracy. It doesn't matter who you are, you don't get to say how I run my life unless you have a contract with my signature or seal saying that you do. Rule by majority is an inherent violation of the human right.

Ditto independent courts. Separation of powers immediately entangles them with the political arena, exposing them to strong pressure to either submit or be submitted to.


So I'm going to go back to demos kratos and say, okay, the people rule.

Sovereignty, ownership of the geographical area which corresponds to a jurisdiction, is owned by the stakeholders, the people affected, by this jurisdiction.

I'm going to accept that the majority have this right as an axiom. Clearly, if you have a bunch of people, with different opinions, but one outcome must be applied to all of them, the best way to maximize value is to match the opinions of the most people as closely as possible. Hence, demos kratos automatically means majority rule.

I'm going to accept that the majority are allowed to appoint a steward to run the thing for them.

So the majority are appointing someone to tell them what to do.

Right, TGGP, I'm hiring you to be my master.

Or...err...not, as that doesn't make any sense. Who's in charge, here? Do you get to tell me I cannot fire you?
What about unpleasant orders? The canonical example being to clean my room - perhaps to cut down on insect infestations. I decide I don't like that and fire you, defeating the whole purpose.

Circular authority collapses. The whole exercise is absurdity incarnate.

So I'm going to toss out the idea that they can appoint a steward. As any venture founded in contradiction, you can pretend to do it, but in reality it will be something very different and painfully corrupt. All Republics are automatically evil.

So, pure Democracy or bust.

The first problem is that now we're flying the space shuttle by ballot box. Imagine the Apollo XIII mission, except before the astronauts could do anything, they had to run an election across all three hundred million Americans...after all, they paid for it.

We're lucky the free market can run itself. Soviet Russia had much less support and had a nice controlled flight into terrain.

There's more, naturally; some of the Apollo XIII repairs and manoeuvres would accrue prestige to various factions, resulting in objective-outcome-independent decision making. The astronauts are quite fucked.

But, as I'm a philosopher, I find it much more damning to find a logical contradiction.

Telling yourself what to do is even more absurd than hiring someone to tell you what to do. The majority is just going to do what it was going to do anyway. They will legalize all their favourite pastimes, criminalize everything they find disgusting, and institutionalize every bias and misconception they have.

The only people affected are the minority...everyone else.

Again, I can instantly slay Democracy here by the standards of 'modern Democracy,' by invoking the rights of the minority. But that is too easy, so I'm going to throw out the idea of rights entirely. (It also narrows down the source of the contradiction.)

Instead: Democracy is the enslavement of the minority by the majority. The full scope of people ruled by Democracy have exactly no say in how they are ruled. Their opinions, freely voiced or not, are tossed aside. Their votes are meaningless. Their 'possessions' are held due to the sufferance of the majority.

Democracy is the ultimate in disenfranchisement. Oh and incidentally most people get to run around with their heads cut off. I'm sorry - like chickens with their heads cut off. I got the idea that they're chaotic and the fact that they have no qualification to rule mixed together in my head. (Not only that, no desire to learn to wield their power.)

This state of pure chaos is the closest you can get to approximating rule by the people. Insofar as your average Democracy isn't this, it isn't even trying to be Democracy, isn't even attempting to put legitimacy to votes, and is contravening majority rule.

Democracy is, in short, the opposite of what it is supposed to be. It is the rule by nobody at all. Democracy is the definition of pure chaos. As each successive definition has attempted to tame this rabid 800-pound gorilla, it simply gives me more and more ways to show that third stage rabies cannot be cured.

For example,

"Even though there is no specific, universally accepted definition of 'democracy', there are two principles that any definition of democracy includes. The first principle is that all citizens, not invested with the power to govern, have equal access to power and the second that all citizens enjoy legitimized freedoms and liberties."

By definition, any citizen who might benefit from power does not have access to it. Without gutting majority rule, and thus abandoning any pretence of Democracy, just under most citizens do not enjoy any legitimate freedoms or liberties. Simultaneously, the majority are all like, "Yay, I'm free from myself, I have liberty from my tyranny!"

The idea that the people affected by rule should have a say in how they're ruled is a very feel good idea. Unfortunately, it is impossible.

I'd like to finish off with a thought I've had basically forever but never seen anywhere else.

The actual point of Democratic ideology is that anyone can be president. People looked at the world and found that not only were their lives largely controlled by others for others' benefit, but that there was never any legal way that they could have been masters of their own destiny. While acknowledging that someone had to rule, (I reject this) they realized even basic fairness required that everyone at least have some shot at the top job.

And that's it. That's the point. That, if you were being misruled or exploited, at least to have the opportunity to do a better job by doing it yourself.

Again, this essential point just goes to show that Democracy is the first thing to get rid of if this is the outcome you want. This goal, as with the feminist movement, was immediately hijacked by cruel, mendacious power seekers. (You can see me contort trying not to say 'evil' because I know you don't accept the concept.) Attempts at Democracy turned out to be extremely useful to these people.

Return to UR

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.

Black Holes versus Big Bang

The Schwartzchild radius for a mass equal to the entire universe is, I estimate without calculation, larger than one metre.

If the Big Bang theory is true, then the entire universe was once inside its own Schwartzchild radius.

Inside the Schwartzchild radius, colliding with the singularity within finite proper time is inevitable.

The universe is not a singularity.

Conclusion:

Big Bang theory is false.

OR

Black holes do not exist.

QED.

Obviously, objects very similar to black holes exist, as attested by accretion rings and gravitational lenses. The Big Bang may be allowed to be singular because the first event is in many ways special - as long as after any finite time, it is no longer singular, everything is fine.

Ergo, most likely, black holes do not exist. When our physics tells us there is a singularity in nature, we're wrong.

Space, Regarding Nothingness

There seems to be a lot of confusion about virtual particles with regard to ex nihilo.

Specifically, people seem to think that space is exactly equal to nothingness.

Just some quick points.

Space is expanding. So I guess it gains somethingness just long enough to expand and then becomes nothing again?

Warping space causes light rays to bend. They're travelling though nothing, which by definition can have no properties, but bending the nothing causes an interaction. Right.

Finally, empty space has an energy density. That's pretty impressive for a nothing.

So I guess the ex nihilo problem isn't virtual particles, it's that there's an entire ex nihilo energy density. (Which I believe is currently linked to dark energy.)


In reality, pure nothingness is very different from the vacuum. The vacuum is simply a backdrop for particles.

To test this statement, consider the first moments of the universe. By the Big Bang theory, it started as a singularity. Everything, including space itself, was packed into a single point. (Something that is normally impossible, but the Big Bang really did come from nothing.)

Shortly after, the universe is a finite size, and a very small size at that. What happens when the particles hit the edge?

If space is really nothingness, of course the phrase "space was packed into a single point" is meaningless, and they just kind of keep going. Whoosh. (This contradicts the idea that the universe is about 44 billion light years across, of course, since nothingness has no definite size.)

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.