Changing minds 1 Jan 2008 The Grauniad has a puff piece on what has changed the minds of “the intellectual elite”. It seems Alan Alda is one of them in virtue of his screen roles… still I have to like his comment: Until I was 20 I was sure there was a being who could see everything I did and who didn’t like most of it. He seemed to care about minute aspects of my life, like on what day of the week I ate a piece of meat. And yet, he let earthquakes and mudslides take out whole communities, apparently ignoring the saints among them who ate their meat on the assigned days. Eventually, I realised that I didn’t believe there was such a being … I still don’t like the word agnostic. It’s too fancy. I’m simply not a believer. I notice also that Steven Pinker has changed his mind about human evolution being stopped at the development of agriculture. At this rate, he may come to accept the results of population genetics… Evolution Religion
Administrative Off to the wilds of Oxfordshire 14 May 2010 So, tomorrow I fly to Oxford (well, to Heathrow, and bus to Oxford) to this conference on religion and toleration. It looks to be an interesting conference, and I am commenting on a paper by one of my favourite anthropologist/psychologists, Ara Norenzayan from UBC. It includes such luminaries as Amartya… Read More
Biology Articles of faith: The theological and philosophical origins of the concept of species 22 Oct 201329 Oct 2013 It takes a while for the implications of one’s own work to sink in. In my 2009 book Species, a History of the Idea (see here), I argued that the notion that before Darwin people were essentialistic and fixist about species was false. A recent paper by Jack Powers about Mayr’s misreading… Read More
Ecology and Biodiversity Couple of organismic blogs 20 Jun 2007 No! Not orgasmic! [There, that should bump up the hits] You all know, of course, the inestimable Darren Naish and his wonderful blog Tetrapod Zoology. What? You don’t? Go there immediately and come back when you’ve read it all, and the old site too. [Fifteen days later] So, I wanted… Read More
At this rate, he may come to accept the results of population genetics… LOLwilkins, lets not get too excited there! Actually, its funny how certain molecular evolutionary biologists don’t believe in population genetics. In my department at Penn State we have the world famous Dr. Nei. A friend of mine (at Harvard) gave a talk here on population genetics and modeling, heavy on the math stuff (he’s of the I heart Bayes crowd) and probably lost most of my department. But he met with Nei and listened for a half hour as Nei told him population genetics was basically full of shit.
Well Pinker is no molecular geneticist – he’s a linguist. But the very idea that evolution stopped for humans is contrary to all evolutionary biology I know. It’s rather like that Gilbert and Sullivan lyric about art: Art stopped short In the cultivated court Of the Empress Josephine Nothing that evolves stops doing that if circumstance change, and humans are no exception. So why think that?
What Alan Alda is saying is that he had a concept of “a being” (God) which turned out to be false. What most people do is: they are given an outrageous concept of God from religion and when they come to reject it, they simultaneously close the door to any other concept of God which might not be outrageous or incompatible with science. In this way, religion manages to hold the God-concept monopoly, which is a pity. Not that science needs such a concept to pursue knowledge or that philosophy needs it to pursue any of its concerns, but possibly humans need it in order to stop (or transform?) the moronic views of God prevalent today. Here is one such possible alternative “God” concept: the being who can see everything through Alan’s eyes is Alan’s Self (yet not limited to Alan’s ego structure). It can perceive Alan’s world thanks to the biological system of Alan’s body. It does not look at Alan from “above” or have its own separate conscious thoughts, but since it includes all the intelligence of Alan’s subconscious mind, as well as the total sum of everything that constitutes Alan, it might appear at times (if misinterpreted) as if “someone” beyond Alan “guided him” to a certain idea or action, or even “miraculously” cured some illness Alan might have been suffering from. In the case of an earthquake: let “God” be all the physical laws involved in this earthquake and all the constituents of the earthquake. Since physical laws (of geology) have no self-consciousness of their own, nor do the constituent parts of an earthquake, it is absurd to claim that “God” made it happen consciously or intentionally. I am neutral as to whether we need to use the word “God” at all. But I think it is better to reject only the moronic and “counter-scientific” God-concepts and not the whole issue.
The edge website has many more. For extra aggravation, you can always read Baron-Cohen contradicting himself. He says here that he’s given up on equality because his research has shown that women are less good at anything that matters. In the pile of crap in which he purported to show that, he says he always knew this was the case, but couldn’t say so because the political environment was too hostile.
stelios writes: I am neutral as to whether we need to use the word “God” at all. Occam would advise, “Don’t bother.”
stelios writes: I am neutral as to whether we need to use the word “God” at all. Occam would advise, “Don’t bother.”
What struck me most about that Graudian story was the introductory paragraph’s note of amazement that people actually changed their minds: But in a refreshing show of new year humility, the world’s best thinkers have admitted that from time to time even they are forced to change their minds. I suspect the presuppositions embedded in that paragraph inform a good deal of the opposition to evolution and science in general: “My God, they change their minds! Where’s certainty when we want it???”
What struck me most about that Graudian story was the introductory paragraph’s note of amazement that people actually changed their minds: But in a refreshing show of new year humility, the world’s best thinkers have admitted that from time to time even they are forced to change their minds. I suspect the presuppositions embedded in that paragraph inform a good deal of the opposition to evolution and science in general: “My God, they change their minds! Where’s certainty when we want it???”
At some point I came to realize that theism is the irrelevancy operator that may be applied – usually as a suffix – to anything. It is also effective when applied in combination with the unary operator ‘A’. Great blog John, keep up the good work!
Alda’s actually pretty smart–he’s hosted a TV show for years (Scientific American Frontiers or something like that), and an aquaintance who was featured in one episode told me that Alda was right there with excellent questions and quick pickup the whole time. Of course my favorite of his movie roles was as a total jackass in Crimes and Misdemeanors.
Nothing that evolves stops doing that if circumstance change, and humans are no exception. So why think that? Humans do evolve, into angels… (Voltaire if I’m not mistaken?)
TV,Hollywood,Bollywood are themselves The pushing circumstance of gene freq changes. Huge amounts of face and brain drains to filming and science centers and cities (California etc) from agriculture families around the world. As have seen many actors are son/daughters of actors etc. Similar copulate similar more than ever in Hollywood ?