Category Science

The Life-Dinner Principle and Creationism vs. Evolution

I recently ran across the “life-dinner principle“. In evolutionary biology, two groups (whether different species, or groups within a species) are often in competition with each other. But the selection pressure may not be equal between groups: a fox that can’t catch up to a rabbit may die of starvation, though it may have time to reproduce before it dies; but a rabbit that gets caught by a fox will not reproduce. Hence, the rabbit is running for its life, but the fox is only running for its dinner.

I wonder whether something similar is going on in the meme war between science and creationism. Those of us on the science side are fighting for education, for scientific literacy, for the future of scientific research in whichever country one happens to be.

But for many people in the creationist camp, the stakes seem much higher: the Truth™, their self-worth as important beings in the eyes of the creator of the universe, basic social cohesion (the “evolutionism implies no moral standards” argument), and even the risk of genocide (see the various attempts to tie “Darwinism” to the Nazi holocaust and Stalin’s purges).

If this is so, then the creationists have much more motive to defend their position by any means, including deception.

While there are parallels between memetic and biological evolution, there are significant differences as well, so I won’t try to apply to a clash of ideas the lessons learned from biology.

I do take heart, though, in the fact that I’ve run across two threads recently on Uncommon Descent where IDists have expressed disappointment with ID: one was when PZ Myers was a guest on a Christian talk radio show and utterly trounced the other guest, a creationist who claimed that there are no transitionals in whale evolution, to which PZ was able to name several of these “nonexistent” transitional species. The rout was so complete that one commenter at Uncommon Descent suggested that “In my opinion we should just close our eyes and pretend that this debate never happened.” His wish was granted when the entire thread was deleted.

The other was in the discussion of Richard Dawkins seeing Expelled. Although many are still pushing the idea that Dawkins somehow snuck into the theater under false colors, others have realized the breathtaking hypocrisy of the situation, and fear that it’ll make their side look bad.

So maybe the solution is what people have been advocating for years: educate the public. Have scientists get out of the ivory tower and talk to the public about science (let ten thousand Carl Sagans bloom!). Show people what despicable liars the creationists are.

How Do I Know This Isn’t Garbage?

I’ve said elsewhere that science can be distilled down to two questions: “What is the world like?” and “How do I know this isn’t garbage?” Richard Feynman stated the second question as:

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.

(Emphasis added.)

Over the years, scientists have discovered a great many ways to fool yourself and others. So It’s nice to read by Peter Norvig, listing some that even professionals get tripped up on. It gives the distinct impression that the hardest part of doing an experiment is not the business with the test tubes or telescopes or particle accelerators or what have you, but simply avoiding all of the mistakes that others have made before you, that could invalidate your results.

He has an equally good companion piece that analyzes a bunch of studies on the effect of intercessory prayer. (Summary: the experiments can be divided into two main groups: those that show no effect, and those that are flawed.) Most interesting for believers is the way that he points out exactly what the flaws in the papers are. Well worth reading.

(HT PZ for the link.)

Google Maps Illustrates How Averages Can Fail

Call me easily amused, but I thought it was funny that if you search Google Maps for Florida, the green arrow points at the Gulf of Mexico (and the one for Michigan points at Lake Michigan).

Even better, if you search for Maryland, the arrow points at Virginia.

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Doing the IDers’ Research for Them

In Pinker’s How the Mind Works, there’s a brief passage on artifacts (pp. 327-329 in my copy) that caught my eye because of its connection with creationism.

Artifacts come with being human. We make tools, and as we evolved our tools made us. One-year-old babies are fascinated by what objects can do for them. They tinker obsessively with sticks for pushing, cloth and strings for pulling, and supports for holding things up. As soon as they can be tested on tool use, around eighteen months, children show an understanding that tools have to contact their material and that a tool’s rigidity and shape are more important than its color or ornamentation. Some patients with brain damage cannot name natural objects but can name artifacts, or vice versa, suggesting that artifacts and natural kinds might even be stored in different ways in the brain.

References:

  • Brown, A.L. 1990. Domain-specific-principles affect learning and transfer in children. Cognitive Science, 14, 107-133.
  • Hillis, A.E., & Caramazza, A. 1991. Category-specific naming and comprehension impairment: A double dissociation. Brain, 114, 2081-2094.
  • Farah, M.J., 1990. Visual agnosia. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

(Emphasis added, and list of references expanded from endnotes and
bibliography.)

This seems to me to have a direct bearing on creationist arguments like William Dembski’s Mount Rushmore example:

Designed objects like Mount Rushmore exhibit characteristic features or patterns that point to an intelligence. Such features or patterns constitute signs of intelligence. Proponents of intelligent design, known as design theorists, purport to study such signs formally, rigorously, and scientifically. Intelligent design may therefore be defined as the science that studies signs of intelligence.

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Is Ungrammatical Text Really Harder to Read?

I’m in the middle of Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works. He talks about experiments in which subjects are shown letters in random orientations, and have to figure out whether the letters are mirror-flipped or not. What was found was that people have to mentally rotate the letters they see, so that they’re right-side-up, at which point they can tell whether the letters are mirror-reversed or not. This rotation takes time.

I wonder if similar work has been done with respect to words and text. It seems that when I’m reading text with a lot of typos, or 1337-speak, or poor punctuation, or inappropriate homonyms (e.g., “who’s” when it should say “whose”), it takes me longer to read than to read text with proper sentence structure, punctuation, and spelling. I wonder whether this is just an illusion, or whether it actually takes more mental work to read the text as written and translate it into proper English.

Reality Can Be Mean

GMAFB:

DUNDEE UNIVERSITY has been accused of “antagonising Christians” with a forthcoming Christmas lecture that challenges one of the central tenets of the faith.

Second-year dental student Emily Mackie said the university’s decision to call its inaugural Dundee Christmas Lecture “Why Evolution is Right … and Creationism is Wrong” is badly timed and insensitive to Christians.

The article shows a photo of Mackie holding a ticket to the lecture. Since she’s a dentist in training, maybe she can go and tell the lecturer how wisdom teeth are evidence of God’s design.

(HT Jesus and Mo.)

Innate Social Skills

CNN has a story about an experiment that suggests that 6- to 10-month-old infants have at least some innate social skills:

The infants watched a googly eyed wooden toy trying to climb roller-coaster hills and then another googly eyed toy come by and either help it over the mountain or push it backward. They then were presented with the toys to see which they would play with.

Nearly every baby picked the helpful toy over the bad one.

The babies also chose neutral toys — ones that didn’t help or hinder — over the naughty ones. And the babies chose the helping toys over the neutral ones.

Obviously, this needs to be confirmed by other researchers, and one shouldn’t place too much trust in the result of one experiment, but it’s still interesting: it suggests that babies have an innate sense of “this person is friendly” and “that person is unfriendly”, based on observation of people’s behavior.

Now, this does not mean that babies or young children have any idea of “I should be friendly”, nor does it suggest that these babies can judge whether they themselves are being friendly.

The article does mention, though, that

A study last year out of Germany showed that babies as young as 18 months old overwhelmingly helped out when they could, such as by picking up toys that researchers dropped.

Note the 8-month difference between this study and the German one: presumably in that time, children learn that if they act in a friendly or helpful way, then others will be friendly in return.

So if confirmed, this should form a fairly solid basis for morality as an emergent phenomenon. We’re social creatures who want to be liked by those around us. This experiment suggests that we’re born with the ability to figure out whom to like (or at least can work it out at a very early age). We can also start modeling other people’s minds (in the sense of “if I do X, will it please that person?”) early on as well. In short, we have the capability to work out a set of behaviors that will allow us to get along, as well as the desire to do so.

Now, it’s true that we also want base self-gratification (e.g., “I want to play with that toy, so I’m going to take it away from you, and I don’t care whether it annoys you or not”). But wanting to get along with others plays a part as well. And of course children tend to believe what their parents tell them, and presumably the parents tend to teach children their own values, like playing nice with others.

So it’s a noisy and chaotic process, but over time, people can figure out what sorts of moral rules work and which ones don’t, and improve morality.

It’s sort of like Wikipedia, in which lots and lots of people making changes, some good and some bad, can nonetheless gradually improve.

(HT Martin Wagner for the link.)

Knowing Like A Crossword Puzzle

If you enjoy solving crossword puzzles, you may have found yourself in the same position as I did the other day:
Crossword puzzle

“Thug” is “GOON”, obviously: the O’s fit “OIL” and “NOTONYOURLIFE”. As for the G, well, I know nothing about ballet, so for all I know there’s someone named Twyla T. Garp out there.

I didn’t know what “With feet all askew” could be, but worked on filling in the words that intersected it, until eventually it became obvious that “_IGEONTOEN” couldn’t be right. The problem lay either in “GOON” or in “_IGEONTOEN”, but both were connected to other words: fixing one might unravel a whole section of a puzzle that seemed to fit together quite well. I wasn’t sure about “Zubin of music” → “MEHTA”, but other than that, my answers seemed pretty solid.

Eventually, of course, I figured out that “With feet all askew” was “PIGEONTOED”, and “Thug” was “HOOD” (though the name Twyla Tharp still doesn’t ring any bells).

And this strikes me as a good metaphor for how we understand the world.

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Ben Stein vs. Daniel Dennett

There are people out there who want to keep science in a little box where it can’t possibly touch God.
[…]

Scientists are not allowed to even think thoughts that involve an intelligent creator.

— Ben Stein in the teaser trailer to Expelled

There are obstacles confronting the scientific study of religion, and there are misgivings that need to be addressed. A preliminary exploration shows that it is both possible and advisable for us to turn our strongest investigative lights on religion.

Religion is not out-of-bounds to science, in spite of propaganda to the contrary from a variety of sources. Moreover, scientific inquiry is needed to inform our most momentous political decisions. There is risk and even pain involved, but it would be irresponsible to use that as an excuse for ignorance.

— Daniel Dennett, summaries of chapter 2 of Breaking the Spell, pp. 28, 53

Then there’s Victor Stenger’s book, God: the Failed Hypothesis, which considers the proposition that God exists as a testable hypothesis. Oh, and Dawkins dedicates a chapter to the God hypothesis as well in The God Delusion.

So who are these scientists that Stein is going on about, the ones who want to “keep science in a little box where it can’t possibly touch God”? Call me cynical, but I wonder if they aren’t the ones who are afraid that science would either disprove God or make him irrelevant.

Proof that We Are Beloved of God

(Update, Dec. 12: Welcome, ShoutWire-ites! I’m glad y’all liked this entry, but please don’t leave a comment if you’re retarded or can’t recognize sarcasm without a blinking 72-point smiley.)

The Astronomical Observatory of Padova gives us this picture of the large-scale structure of the universe:

Each point is a galaxy. Notice how they’re arranged in two cones that meet at a single point.

And what’s at that point? Us.

If that’s not proof that we’re at the center of the universe, the apex of God’s creation, I don’t know what is.

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