Aesopo - 09 September 2007 01:59 PM

Van Hecke’s discussion was so apropos for the broadcast.  It drives me crazy how unthinking and dogmatic secularism is becoming, and what I’m noticing increasingly over the last few years is that secularist thought is becoming more this self-congratulatory “in-crowd” clique of bashers, comfortably “talking the talk” while freely filling their own arguments with ideological presumptions, logical fallacy, confirmation biases, and all the rest.

This is true.

mckenzievmd - 10 September 2007 12:51 PM

We need to prevent suffering (dukkha?) the best we can.

I’ll go along with this. I’m just not sure all suffering is physical or material. Understanding our place in the cosmos, our lack of significance, and the fantastic improbability of our being here at all may help us to live better, happier, more meaningful lives. So in that sense, I think the inquiry into our origins might be “practically” useful.

I still disagree that our understanding of evolution has no consequences for medicine and our understanding or pathogens. Antibiotic resistence patterns, the formation of pathogens from related non-pathogenic organisms, and such evolutionary processes give us insight into how medical problems work that can guide therapy. Animal research is critical in the development of therapies for humans and understanding of human disease despit the lack of complete, perfect correspondence between what happens in chimps and what happens in people. And while an understanding of the human genome can be used in discriminatory ways, it can also provide the basis for much more targeted, individualized treatment and a bnetter understanding of idiosyncratic drug reactions and rare diseases that develop from complex multifactorial environmental and genetic factors. You seem to take your understanding of how disease works so deeply for granted that you don’t recognize that an understanding of evolutionary processes contributes to it. What Darwin first elucidated clearly and others have further explored is part of the accretion process of scientific knowledge which leads to more comprehensive and thus more effective understanding. An excessive focus on the directly practical or applicable is too narrow a perspective that leads to missd opportunities to develop useful things we weren’t originally looking for.

I’m not advocating we all sit around and revel in our absttract theories about the universe. I’m a clinician, and I’m very interested in practical applications and consequences of scientific knowledge. But I think hyour dismisal of evolutionary theory as useless frippery is extreme and unwarranted.

I have not dismissed Evolution as frippery:

frippery

1. (obsolete) Cast-off clothes.
2. (obsolete) The place where old clothes are sold.
3. Hence: secondhand finery; cheap and tawdry decoration; affected elegance.

Fond of gauze and French frippery. — Goldsmith.
The gauzy frippery of a French translation. — Sir W. Scott.

4. (obsolete) The trade or traffic in old clothes.

As Shermer et al continue to repeat, Evolution explains the development of complex systems by random interactions, more stable systems have a survival advantage. No need for a “Designer”, hence the religious fears and objections.

I still have to see a practical application of the random process that cannot be predicted.

You obviously hold Darwin in high regard, it is part of your avatar. I just don’t worship him.

You obviously hold Darwin in high regard, it is part of your avatar.

He is my avatar.

zarcus - 11 September 2007 10:59 PM

You obviously hold Darwin in high regard, it is part of your avatar.

He is my avatar.

My mature side feels your avatar is disrespectful, my juvenile/National Lampoon side says: Cool!, is he a “rebel biker” or a gay/Village People symbol?

To get away from the discussion of evolutionary theory and back to the van Hecke interview for a moment.

I would classify her as a “soft epistemologist.” I’ve heard her sorts of arguments before: science and rationality can’t offer the meaning of a poem, or there are forms of knowledge outside the scientific purview, or gaps in evidence (in, say, archaeology) limit the scope of our conclusions and require us to keep an open mind to alternatives, etc.

DJ did a good job of pointing out some of the pitfalls of her approach, some of the looming abysses that await the unwary.

Just to take the poem example. The meaning of a poem cannot be “known”—it can only interpreted subjectively. To claim that poems have a truth value that can be “known” (as the earth circling the sun can be known) is to claim that everyone can have their own truth. That is not the case. Everyone can have have their aesthetic and subjective appreciation of a poem, or a painting, or a piece of music. People can discuss and compare their reactions and interpretations, but there is no single “truth” in a poem that everyone can “know.” The key point is to distinguish “knowledge” (which is universally demonstrable) and “aesthetic appreciation” (which is inherently subjective)

In no way, however, is the value of rationalism and science as an enterprise limited by such observations. Arguments like van Hecke’s are often presented as doing just that, as even van Hecke suggests so by labelling them “blind spots.” It’s not a blind spot that science can’t present a universal, single meaning for a poem or a painting, since the appreciation of aesthetics is an intensely subjective experience. But appreciation is not “truth.” That’s a vital distinction to appreciate.

As to the limits of evidence, every scientist and rationalist knows this and this is why all conclusions are provisonal pending further inquiry. And supposed “other ways of knowing,” when assessed, invariably turn out to be personal, experiential, and subjective and, as such, have no business claiming to be “knowledge.” Subjective experience is not knowledge, it’s just experience.

Finally, how—o take van Hecke’s own example—should archaeologists be aware of blind spots as they reason from limited bodies of data? Should they be open to “alternative” theories of civilizing spacemen, or civilizing Atlanteans, or lost super-civilizations to explain the data? Hardly. Archaeological hypotheses, like all hypotheses, are formulated on the best available evidence using the best available interpretive tools and they are always subject to revision in the face of new evidence. So what? How does the scarcity of data create “blind spots” in reasoning here?

If an archaeologist (or any scientist) insists on maintaining models no longer supported by the evidence, they have left the realm of genuine inquiry and have begun defending unsupported dogma. That’s not a blind spot, it’s an outright travesty and such a person will be quickly passed by as other researchers follow the best available evidence to a revised conclusion that better accords with the data.

I liked the interview and found van Hecke articulate and engaging, but I thought she skirted very close to some awful nonsense.

OhioDoc - 12 September 2007 01:16 PM

zarcus - 11 September 2007 10:59 PM

You obviously hold Darwin in high regard, it is part of your avatar.

He is my avatar.

My mature side feels your avatar is disrespectful, my juvenile/National Lampoon side says: Cool!, is he a “rebel biker” or a gay/Village People symbol?

How is the picture disrespectful? The picture actually stems from a lecture by Frank Sulloway to the Skeptics Society. Frank’s book is titled “Born to Rebel”.

Here is a description of Frank’s book from Amazon:

This groundbreaking book takes on the influence of birth order in personalities and offers some surprising conclusions. Frank J. Sulloway, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has undertaken the first comprehensive study of birth order in determining personality and social outlook. He produces overwhelming evidence that, because of the evolutionary hierarchy in families, first-born children are more likely to be conformists while the later-borns tend to be more creative and more likely to reject the status quo. He documents just how different siblings are from each another--a person tends to have more in common with any randomly chosen person of their own age than with a sibling--and explains why sibling differences occur. The book offers new insights into the determining factors of who we are and who our children will be, and it is unlike any research yet published. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Next to the picture was written “Rebel with a cause” but that is unseen in my avatar. Charles Darwin was a later born. Charles in the picture is dressed as Marlon Brando from the movie, The Wild One.

Even without knowing this, having Charles Darwin dressed as Marlon Brando is not disrespectful in my book.

Forgive me for just barging in.

OhioDoc asks for a practical application of evolution. One that will feed people and will lead to new technologies, if I read what he means by “application” correctly.

The theory of evolution is a paradigmatic example of how random processes in nature can create things that look as though they must have been designed, in other words, how science can explain things that previously seemed inexplicable. As such it forms the basis of the rebuttal (a complete defense, in legal terms) of the Argument from Design, probably the most powerful and easily grasped argument there is for God’s existence: a plausible alternative explanation. It helped set the framework for explaining things in the field of geology that were pointing to a very old earth indeed. It showed how the fossils we’d been finding weren’t Easter eggs planted by God after all. It expanded the realm of science out of simple cause/effect and formulaic laws and introduced new modes of explanation. It is the keystone of the entire modern anti-religion movement.

I think religion, religious wars, the purposeful wearing of blinders, and the modes of thought promoted by religion have killed and starved people. Any force countering religion, anti-scientific thought, and the epistemologies of Authority and Ancient Texts and denial of empirical evidence, must therefore be said to feed and save people.

I’m quite certain that’s not what OhioDoc was getting at though. He is looking for a direct scientific application of evolution, along the lines of how, for example, germ theory led to doctors washing their hands and instruments. At one point he says

I still have to see a practical application of the random process that cannot be predicted.

But evolution is observable (yes, in the short term, in the lab...fruit flies I think it was) and testable. Darwin himself used the observation of a plant with a very long flower plus evolution to predict that there should be a moth with a very long proboscis. Years later the prediction was successfully verified.

Often, scientific and mathematical theories and may seem at first to have all the practical application of epic poetry. So long as the theory is observable and predictable, however, rest assured that a practical application will not be far off.

Has the theory of how stars end their lives given us any practical technologies? Nope, not yet. It lets us know cool things like that our Sun is good for another 5 billion years, or whatever it is (should I bother to wallpaper the kitchen?) and that we are made of star stuff, and all that. Should we discontinue our inquiry into stars and space and dismiss the whole field of astronomy and make all budding scientists work in food biology or renewable energy physics?

Please clarify what your actual point is.

Edit: yes, it was a moth.

Prism, there is a big difference between birds and moths, you are referring to Xanthopan morganii praedicta , what is practical about that moth?

Zarcus, “The Wild One” was banned in the UK for a long time, I don’t recall ever watching that movie, I doubt that I will spend any time doing so.

I doubt that Marlon Brando would be a good role model as a person or as any of the characters he portrayed (maybe Terry Malloy can rise above the scum!).

Moth, bird...whatever. The point is that the theory can be used to predict, contrary to your assertion.

The expression ”a closet <something>” comes from the gay community.  A closet gay pretends to be straight, by definition.

What does a closet atheist pretend to be (in the USA)? A Christian? Does such a person go to church to keep up appearances?

Hazred - 22 September 2007 12:43 PM

What does a closet atheist pretend to be (in the USA)? A Christian? Does such a person go to church to keep up appearances?

It’s a good question, Hazred, and doesn’t admit of a simple answer. In many big cities in the US there are relatively low levels of churchgoing. I don’t have numbers in front of me, but certainly in NY it’s far from assumed that anyone you meet is a churchgoer. Nevertheless there are large portions of the public that basically go along their daily lives without any express opinion on religious matters, and I think the assumption is that there’s a certain percentage of that group that are in fact atheistic but don’t want to admit it “in public”, that is, among friends, family, coworkers.

It might be that in other parts of the US, where churchgoing is a more popular enterprise, one might well find some who go to church for social reasons, and who nevertheless do not believe in God. Assuming these people aren’t Unitarians (or liberal Jews), atheism in a churchgoer would not be socially acceptable, so these people may indeed need to be quite strongly “closeted”.