Dr. Joshua Swamidass, a theistic evolutionist, joined us recently at TSZ. I think the following comment of his will lead to some interesting and contentious discussion and is worthy of its own thread:
Third, if we drop “Darwinian” to just refer to the current modern synthesis of evolutionary theory, you are right that the scientific account does not find any evidence of direction or planning. I agree with you here and do not dispute this.
So the question becomes, really, is it possible that God could have created a process (like evolution) with a purposeful intent that science could not detect? I think the answer here is obvious. Of course He could. In fact, I would say, unless He wanted us to discern His purpose, we could not.
In my view, then, evolution has a purpose in creating us. Science itself cannot uncover its purpose. I find that out by other means.
Neil Rickert,
Does this randomness that you are not sure what it means exist outside of the human mind?
Yes and it’s an evolutionary strategy (I think only so far known in the Sandtiger shark, in other species, the female produces extra eggs as nourishment for already growing young) that must work for those species.
Sibling competition for food that results in death of the weaker seems common in birds, barn owls for instance. Yet it’s quite logical when food sources fluctuate from season to season. Kangaroos keep embryos in reserve as insurance against lean times, I seem to recall. Whatever an organism can do to survive… whatever it has the opportunity to do to survive.
There’s no exclusion there. There’s nothing stopping something being nasty and opportunistic. Donald Trump?
Alan,
Yes, which is why it was silly for you to write:
Tapeworms are both.
You and fifth are the false dichotomy twins.
Disagree. Having a tapeworm might be nasty, though depending on the level of infestation, it is usually asymptomatic. Tapeworms have no choice about their lifestyle, they’ve been shaped by their niche. To call them “nasty” is naïvely anthropomorphic. You’ll be calling the Ebola virus evil, next.
Christ, Alan.
1. Nasty vs. opportunist is not a dichotomy.
2. Tapeworms do not need to choose their lifestyle in order to qualify as nasty.
3. ‘Anthropomorphic’ is not the word you’re looking for.
4. Tapeworms are nasty.
nasty
1
a : disgustingly filthy
b : physically repugnant
Speaking of dichotomies, true or false, (btw, there’s another, quite popular meaning for “nasty’, no? The one Alan actually meant?) I note the slide in this post from your earlier “programmed” to the kind of comforting “shaped.”
Do I think that we can do what we want because we want if we have been “shaped” to want this or that–perhaps, as I’ve urged–by “the hand of nature”? Yes. I do think that. I’ve been a compatabilist for decades. But consider the robot you apparently don’t want to talk about. Has it been “shaped” to bark and to simultaneously want to bark or has it simply been made to do so? You are an engineer; when you write a program, are you “shaping” a result? If you program the result only to occur in, e.g., 75% of the time, has it now been “shaped” rather than programmed? Do you not see the difference I’m trying to get at?
So, supposing I’m right for a moment that there IS a difference, the question is, why couldn’t an omniscient god do the shaping as well as nature can? Why would it be constrained always to program and never to shape? If a Jeffersonian’s set-the-clock type God just arranged everything perfectly and then got out of the way, it would still, in a sense, be nature doing it the shaping wouldn’t it? How can I say, then, that in one case freedom is possible and in the other case we’re programmed, coerced? (Are only certain conceptions of gods consistent with human freedom even without committing the “logical determinism” fallacy?)
How could this distinction possibly make sense? I don’t know, frankly, but it nevertheless appeals to me, partly, perhaps, because there are so many different terms, at least in English, to distinguish shaping or encouraging from programming or commanding, or coercing. How can compatibalists who disagree with me explain those differences if it all comes to the same thing?
Just to clarify, do you agree with walto (and now me too I guess) that there’s no reason to accept the Principle of Alternate Possibilities?:
*If you cannot do otherwise when you do an act, you do not act freely*
Doesn’t seem earth shaking, but to me, nasty means disgusting. Stomach turning.
But not evil.
Evil actions can also be nasty, which might be the source of confusion.
Question for keiths, walto or anyone interested in helping me figure this out:
Can this purported omniscient god, timelessly know the outcome of a random process in a world that doesn’t exist?
As walto points out “nasty” referring to a
person has a suggestion of intent: “he’s a nasty piece of work!”. Not the same meaning referring to an injury “a nasty burn” or bad smell.
Suggesting there is confusion is a charitable way of looking at it. 🙂 But it’s a distraction anyway.
You decided to accuse me of a false dichotomy. Look back carefully and see if you can see where I said anything to suggest that entities described as nasty or not must then be opportunistic or not.
Tapeworms did not choose their lifestyle. I’ll concede that they can be described as “nasty” in the sense of “Eew, that’s disgusting”. I happened to interpret the use in context as suggesting some malignity in the lifestyle of parasites.
Mindreading fails again. Anthropomorphism is what I meant.
See response to 2. In the “eew!” sense, maybe, depending on how squeamish you are.
Wow, that seems like the kind of question that medieval schoolmen might have tortured themselves with for decades. My guess is that the answer is yes, BWTHDIK? Also, can you remind me why this matters? 😉
Here are the synonyms that turned up as the first item in my google search:
You think it’s possible that keiths might have particularly excluded those that supported your contention?! Nah. I mean, that would be a quote-mine, no?
The ability of mutation and selection to explore many possibilities is what makes them possible.
“Why those things and not something else?”
A confused question, since there are millions of examples of “something else” in nature.
“Or is nothing impossible for Evolution?”
It is constrained by 1) what is logically possible, 2) the principles of physics, 3) the principles of chemistry, organic or otherwise. 4) the necessity of surviving in the environment, including acquiring energy and replicating.
That’s chance and necessity in a nutshell.
walto,
Not so charitable, but on previous evidence? Perhaps not an unreasonable inference.
Surpressing the urge to ask “which purported omniscient god”, I wonder how information passes between the immaterial omniscient god and the real universe. Actually, I don’t. I find these hypothetical considerations impossible to take seriously. I’m happy for anyone to follow their own beliefs. I don’t consider it my rôle (unless asked) to persuade anyone to reject or dismiss any religious inclinations they have. It’s their business. (Caveat to exclude consequences such as burning at the stake, stoning, beheading and so on.) I think religion is an issue of emotion rather than logic, which is why discussions can get heated and nasty!
Maybe, but some care about the internal consistency, or logical plausibility of their belief system. In my case I just want to make sure I don’t present challenges to theists that may be no challenge at all. I’ve argued with theists before that theological fatalism was a real problem and now it looks like it wasn’t and I was wrong.
For all the above and because it’s fun… for a while 😀
OK, well then I’m gonna stick with “Yes.” Gods can do all kinds of cool stuff. (Like fly upside down even, I think!)
😉
Selection can’t select for wolf traits when wolf traits don’t exist. These involved developmental and associated regulatory mechanisms. Just because a functional niche may exist doesn’t mean natural selection will likely evolve creatures to fill lthat niche — example, Lewontin pointed out the strange fact we don’t have birds that eat leaves.
Sal, you’re starting to get the idea of this niche thingie.
Not so strange if you think about the nutritional content of leaves and the rate of avian metabolism, especially for flight. Koalas and sloths have low metabolic rates dictated by diet.
walto,
Alan’s words:
So in your view “the one [meaning] Alan actually meant” is “evil”, and Alan is claiming that it’s evil to have a tapeworm? That makes no sense.
At best he was equivocating on the meaning of “nasty”. Also, he seems unaware that if referring to a tapeworm as “nasty” counts as anthropomorphizing, then so does referring to it as “opportunistic”.
If you and Alan feel compelled to deny your mistakes, carry on. I’m turning my attention back to the thread topic.
I’d do that too if I were you. Since his relevant quote was actually this:
Tapeworms aren’t nasty, they are opportunists.
And what he OBVIOUSLY meant was that tapeworms aren’t mean or evil.
Lewontin was perhaps unaware of hoatzins, but let that pass. What “wolf traits” did not exist in the ancestral placentals and marsupials? What traits does a wolf have that are not just modifications of common mammal traits, reachable by — dare I say it? — numerous successive slight modifications?
You are right that evolution is myopic, constrained by history and physics. But all that doesn’t seem in any way relevant to making your case here. I think you’re just throwing out whatever comes to hand. After all, you can’t select for good arguments that don’t exist.
The more I think about this, the stranger that fact becomes. As in “not actually a fact”. In addition to hoatzins, which are the sort of traditional leaf-eater you imagine, there are geese, which eat mostly grass (and a number of other water birds, coots for example, that do it on occasion), and grouse, many species of which eat mostly conifer needles. And I’m probably forgetting some. Just where did Lewontin point out this “fact”, and did he ever speak to any ornithologists about it?
Hah!
walto,
I did that deliberately, for your sake. You were getting hung up on the word “programmed”, asking if the metaphor of “evolution as programmer” was valid:
So I switched to a word that lacked the same connotation of conscious intent — “shaped”.
We are free to choose our actions based on our wants, but we aren’t correspondingly free to choose our wants. They are imposed on us [ETA: Or perhaps more accurately, imposed in us], and I still don’t see why you think it makes a difference if the imposition is done consciously, by an agent, versus mindlessly, by an impersonal process such as evolution.
dazz,
Yes, I agree. As a compatibilist, I think free will can exist even in a deterministic world.
Fascinating facts. Blows my “low energy diet means low metabolic rate” out of the water. Geese! I’ve seen ’em grazing.
Not obviously enough for some, apparently! 🙂
I suppose I have no option but to freely come to terms with the fact that I never had a point
Moved a comment to guano.
dazz,
I say yes, because that ability seems to fall under the remit of omnisicience, which I take to mean “knowing everything that it is logically possible to know”. I don’t see how granting this ability to God leads to any contradictions, so I take it to be logically possible.
Another weird thought experiment, just because…
Let’s say god decided to spawn a trillion worlds, all of which were intended to produce human beings by a non-deterministic process like evolution. When scientists from all these worlds share their data they can’t believe what they’re seeing, this seems to defy the law of large numbers. So on one hand there’s unmistakable evidence in every world that evolution is non-deterministic, undirected and the outcome can’t be determined, but there’s also this blatant violation of the Law of Large Numbers.
In that case should we believe that evolution is non-deterministic or not?
By the way, somewhat unrelated but I guess that to produce humans by evolution the entire human lineage should be reproduced in all worlds mutation by mutation, speciation by speciation, right?
dazz,
I might argue that arguing over consequence-free hypotheticals is somewhat pointless. 🙂
You (and Lewontin, if he actually said it) are not completely wrong. Hoatzins do have anomalously low metabolic rates, and don’t fly much; they probably can’t, with a full stomach, and spend much of their time sitting around digesting. Geese have to eat huge amounts, and shit huge amounts, to keep their metabolisms going since they don’t extract much of the nutrient value from their food. (You may have heard the expression “like crap through a goose”.) Grouse don’t fly much either, and never for long distances, and supplement their diets with other stuff when it’s available.
Non-deterministic of course. Imagine a nucleus decaying, an energetic particle emitted, which subsequently encounters a DNA molecule in a gamete causing a mutation. I’d like a determinist to tell me how that can be traced back to the first cause.
I’ve stepped in it!
So would we be forced to conclude that the Law of Large Numbers, and most of what we know about random processes is bunk?
The chemicals which make you want something are also part of the same group of chemicals that make you choose a particular action. Is there something different about this chemicals that make you want and the chemicals that make you act? The chemicals which make you act have a free will, but the chemicals for want are determined by their state?
dazz,
Are the scientists aware that God created the trillion worlds? Assuming your answer is yes, I’d say we should believe that evolution is non-deterministic. You’ve stipulated that the intra-world evidence points unmistakably to non-determinism, and (by the logic I’ve been using in this thread) there’s no inter-world evidence to contradict that.
If the scientists aren’t aware that God is involved, I’d probably give the opposite answer. In that case the trillion worlds seem like independent trials in an experiment, and the fact that they all converge on the same result may outweigh the “unmistakable” evidence for non-determinism.
It actually is related, because it suggests the question: What actually counts as a human, and how specific is God’s putative target? I know that Ken Miller, for instance, speculates that God was just aiming for an intelligent, self-aware species — not necessarily humans per se.
Alan,
Not to the curious.
I think Patrick might have been the goal. Only got one, sadly.
Don’t think so, no. The thing that really puzzles me is why there is a universe (and by extension why are we in it). While mathematical models is an excellent way to understand what might be going on, they do have a tendency to simplify reality. And on the other hand, theological arguments are just ad hoc, in my view and generated from an emotional need that I don’t happen to possess. Perhaps that’s a problem for me but it doesn’t feel like one.
Just trying to get to Patrick, I guess. Long winding road.
keiths,
Interesting, thanks for the input.
Why should that matter? The question is whether evolution is non-deterministic. The fact that a god created it or something else did doesn’t seem relevant to me.
The fact is that we would face contradictory lines of evidence, (almost) impossible to reconcile
That sounds counter-intuitive to me. I would think knowing some external super-mind was behind it all would make people lean towards determinism, although again, I don’t see how knowing god did it would add to the evidence for either alternative
Good point.
keiths:
phoodoo:
There’s nothing incoherent about the idea of a physical system that chooses its wants in the same way that it chooses its actions (though the choice of new wants would, of course, be dependent on the current wants, and there would have to be an original set of wants to get things started).
We don’t appear to have that ability, though (William’s goofy claims notwithstanding), and there seem to be good evolutionary reasons for that.
keiths,
But that is not at all what I asked. I asked what was different about the chemicals that force our wants, and the chemicals which have freedom to choose?
And who would even know if it is incoherent, we have no verifiable theory about how it does it.
phoodoo,
Chemicals don’t have the “freedom to choose”. Certain physical systems — particular configurations of “chemicals” — do.