Category Evolution

Evolution of Morality

The Post has an interesting article about the origin of morality (HT ). It talks about research showing that various moral impulses are hardwired into our brains by evolution.

This dovetails nicely with another bit of research I stumbled upon recently (but can’t find now) that showed that, when posed with a moral problem, people from all over the world pretty much agree on what the right answer is, though they offer different explanations.

What this suggests is that we dislike stealing because we’re wired that way, and any explanation, be it “It goes against the 8th Commandment” or something involving Rousseau’s social contract, is post-hoc justification of a chosen conclusion.

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Why Everything Good Is Bad for You

Imagine an animal that requires some substance, but that substance is scarce. Say, a mountain goat that needs salt, but lives in mountains where there’s hardly any around, unlike the seashore. In such an environment, it’ll need all the salt it can get, and natural selection will favor those goats that find salt tasty, since they’ll seek it out.

Obviously, it’s possible to have too much salt in one’s body, so ideally there ought to be a biological function that switches off this craving for salt. But in practice, if salt is that scarce, there’s no such thing as too much salt, so the mechanism that switches off salt’s tastiness can be horribly miscalibrated and still not be selected against.

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Software Enzymes for Musical Composition

When
I last wrote about using evo-devo to compose music,
I had gotten stuck on the problem of implementation. In particular, I couldn’t figure out how to write a seed organism that would develop into a simple composition that I could then use to evolve other tunes. I also wasn’t sure how to get the various genes to actually work together, not at a level at which I could start coding.

After some thought, it occurred to me that enzymes and proteins act sort of like functions in software: they bind to molecules (take arguments), which they can then modify, and sometimes release another molecule into the surrounding medium (return a value). So I just needed to come up with the software equivalent of an enzyme.

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Doctors Don’t Like the Word “Evolution”

I’m guessing that some researcher wondered aloud in the cafeteria, “How come medical researchers don’t talk about the evolution of antibiotic resistance? I mean sure, they talk about it, but they don’t call it evolution.”
This article
in PLoS Biology attempts to measure this observation.

In a nutshell, they found that biology journals say that antibiotic resistance “evolves”, whereas medical journals say that it “emerges” or “arises”.

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Flock of Dodos Meme

I went to see Flock of Dodos for its Darwin Day showing on Thursday.

At one point, Randy Olson, the filmmaker, points out that the Intelligent Design movement has lots of points that fit on a bumper sticker, such as “no transitionals” (or “not enough transitional fossils”), “teach the controversy”, and so forth, while proponents of evolution, especially scientists, can’t seem to express any point in less than a paragraph. And while this may indicate that scientists are careful to make well-thought-out, nuanced statements and avoid oversimplification, it makes for bad PR.

Later on, perhaps unintentionally, Olson does present an anti-ID slogan of his own: ID never rises above the level of intuition. For instance, as IDists like to point out, it’s obvious that Mt. Rushmore wasn’t carved by erosion and tectonic forces. Okay, fair enough. But that’s just the first step. Now they need to quantify this intuitive feeling, and come up with an objective metric of “designedness” or something, so that two people in different parts of the world, with different backgrounds can look at the same phenomenon and independently arrive at the same “designedness” number.

Likewise, creationists of all stripes are fond of saying that certain structures are too complex to have arisen by chance. Setting aside the obvious fact that natural selection is the very opposite of chance, one can still easily imagine a person to whom it’s intuitively obvious that human eyes are too complex to have arisen through the action of natural laws, without an intelligent guiding hand.

But again, that’s just a first step. How do you turn this intuition into something objective and quantifiable? I would expect someone to write a paper showing that natural laws can produce X amount of complexity in such-and-such amount of time, but that human eyes have X+100 complexity. X+100 > X, ergo human eyes are too complex to have arisen naturally.

The first step toward this would be to come up with a definition of complexity in biological systems, and a way of measuring it (and people like Bill Dembski do refer to the work of Shannon, Kolmogorov, and Chaitin in this area). The next would be to estimate the upper limit of complexity that natural processes can generate (which creationists have never done competently and honestly) and measure the amount of complexity in a biological structure (which, again, they’ve never done. Dembski has been asked several times to produce such a calculation, but has never done so, to my knowledge).

So when the Discovery Institute, trying to avoid getting sucked into the Dover trial, said that ID wasn’t ready to be taught in classrooms, they were right. ID has yet to rise above the level of intuition and gut feeling. And until it does, it has no right to be taken seriously as science.

Addendum: Another bumper-sticker-sized slogan for evolution I’ve run across is that we are risen apes, not fallen angels.

The Cruelest Line

While working on the Dover trial podcast, I think we’ve found one of the most cruel lines one can inflict on an actor:

Their names here, just for a couple of
examples, Moythomasia and Howqualepis. The names are really
unimportant. And on the other side, Psarolepis and Achoania.
Again, the names are unimportant.

By the way, if anyone knows how to pronounce these words, please let me know.

Pandas Podcast: Casting Call!

I’m putting together an audio dramatization of the Dover Panda trial, to be podcasted, and I need actors. If you’re interested in helping, go to the
project page and sign up!

Here’s how it works: pick some parts you’d like to play (preferably more than one in case your first choice isn’t available) and send me the list, along with a demo (because I’d like to know that you know how to record stuff on your computer). Once roles are handed out, you’ll record yourself reading your part in the
Dover
transcript
and send it to me. I’ll collect all of the recordings and splice them together into something like a radio drama or dramatic reading, and put them on the net.

The Evolutionary Basis of Religion and Consciousness

Daniel Dennett has proposed what he calls the
intentional stance, which is basically the way that when we interact with other people or animals (and sometimes things), we act as if there’s a mind there that intends to behave in a certain way. If confronted with an angry dog, we behave as if that dog is an agent that intends to do us harm or to chase us off of its property, rather than, say as if it were a machine for barking.

We humans are good at this. In fact, one of the things our minds are very good at is modeling other minds. It’s easy to see why this would have arisen: it’s very useful to be able to predict how elements of one’s environment are going to behave, whether those elements are bricks, trees, tigers, or other people. Animals, whether predators, prey, domestic animals, or companions, often behave as if they have a mind that wants things, pursues goals, and avoids harm. This is even more true of people. So being able to predict how a herd of antelope will react to a sudden noise, or how a woman will react to a gift, provides an evolutionary advantage, and would have been selected for.

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Gil Dodgen: Uncommonly Dense

Gil Dodgen posted the following over at Uncommon Descent:

All computational evolutionary algorithms artificially isolate the effects of random mutation on the underlying machinery: the CPU instruction set, operating system, and algorithmic processes responsible for the replication process.

If the blind-watchmaker thesis is correct for biological evolution, all of these artificial constraints must be eliminated. Every aspect of the simulation, both hardware and software, must be subject to random errors.

Of course, this would result in immediate disaster and the extinction of the CPU, OS, simulation program, and the programmer, who would never get funding for further realistic simulation experiments.

All I can say is “wow”. Either Dodgen is having us all on (which I doubt, since he’s started a new thread to respond to the charge that he doesn’t know WTF he’s talking about), or he honestly doesn’t understand the difference between the simulated environment and the machine doing the simulating.

Presumably he also believes that when NOAA simulates the effect of a hurricane hitting the Florida coast, they have to pour rain onto their computers. And that every time an orc dies in World of Warcraft, a real orc dies in some distant land.

I know that I’m often too rooted in the concrete and have trouble going from a collection of facts to a general principle, but damn!

Dembski Proposes Research Program, Cordova Misapplies It

I’ve been saying for a while (and I’m not alone) that if the ID folks want to be taken seriously by the scientific community, they need to do some actual, you know, research. So I was taken aback when William Dembski actually
suggested a line of research Read More