I saw this photo at Jerry Coyne’s place a couple of days ago and laughed out loud.  It’s flippant, but the question actually deserves genuine, serious consideration.

To the theists reading this:  When you’re stranded on the throne, why doesn’t God poof a roll into existence for you? He’s surely powerful enough to do it, with less effort than it takes you to lift a finger, so what holds him back?

If your spouse, child, or even a roommate that you didn’t particularly like were in a similar predicament, you would surely be kind enough to rescue them by fetching a roll and placing it outside the bathroom door.  Why doesn’t God do the divine equivalent?

Is it for the same reason that he never restores the limbs of amputees?

In a new post at UD, Denyse O’Leary quotes an article from The Scientist (which she misattributes to Science):

Populations of Escherichia coli grown in the lab quickly evolve tolerance when exposed to repeated treatments with the antibiotic ampicillin, according to a study published today (June 25) in Nature. Specifically, the bacteria evolved to stay in a dormant “lag” phase for just longer than three-, five-, or eight-hour-long treatment courses, before waking up and growing overnight until the next round of treatment began.

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On the Counterintuitive evolutionary truths thread, I expressed amazement at the sheer number of distinct kinds of intragenomic conflict that have been discovered by science.  In response, Allan Miller recommended the 2006 book Genes in Conflict, by Austin Burt and Robert Trivers. Burt’s name is unfamiliar to me, but Trivers is famous for proposing the theory of reciprocal altruism.

I ordered the book (28 for the paperback), and so did Gralgrathor, so I thought it would be nice to have a discussion thread for the book as we read it. Anyone is welcome to join in, of course, whether or not you are reading the book.

In the Roger Scruton on altruism thread, some commenters have expressed confusion over the evolutionary explanation of altruism in ants.  If workers and soldiers leave no offspring, then how does their altruistic behavior get selected for?

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Religion is notorious for requiring and valorizing faith.  Consider the story of Doubting Thomas, or this bit of “infallible” dogma that every Roman Catholic is required to believe:

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<video snipped on request>

From the video description:

<redacted> TEDx presentation speaks to the debate over innovation of ideas specifically regarding evolution, creation and intelligent design. He asks whether or not science can have the courage to work together with philosophy and religion or worldview to discover where humanity is headed and presents the idea of human extension as a way to promote human dignity, cooperation, altruism and flourishing instead of Darwinian dehumanisation, conflict and struggle.

I’ve just started reading philosopher Roger Scruton’s new book The Soul of the World, in which he defends the transcendent against the scientific conception of reality. Chapter 3 contains an interesting but wrong-headed argument to the effect that evolutionary explanations of human altruism are superfluous, because altruism can be explained perfectly well in moral terms. It’s particularly interesting in light of our discussions on the Critique of Naturalism thread, so I thought I’d share it:

An organism acts altruistically, they tell us, if it benefits another organism at a cost to itself. The concept applies equally to the soldier ant that marches into the flames that threaten the anthill, and to the officer who throws himself onto the live grenade that threatens his platoon. The concept of altruism, so understood, cannot explain, or even recognize, the distinction between those two cases. Yet surely there is all the difference in the world between the ant that marches instinctively toward the flames, unable either to understand what it is doing or to fear the results of it, and the officer who consciously lays down his life for his troops.

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It’s time to start a continuation thread for Split-brain patients and the dire implications for the soul, because the original thread is being affected by a software bug. Only the final page of comments is affected. Continue reading →

Barry’s latest post at UD has the title Biology Students Score Below Religion and Classics Students on Test of Critical Thinking.  Unsurprisingly, it’s Barry who actually flunks the critical thinking test.

(Click graph for a bigger version)

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