I have just finished this marvelous frolic through the philosophy of science and evolutionary biology. In the first essay he wonders why no one ever aI have just finished this marvelous frolic through the philosophy of science and evolutionary biology. In the first essay he wonders why no one ever attacks Dalton (the scholar who formulated atomic theory) or Einstein's E=MC, the way they do evolution. The problem is they aren’t fair game. There is no money nor fame to be earned by attacking scientists whose obscure theories involve intricate mathematical models . Darwin and biologists are not so lucky. They must constantly explain and defend their work to the public. This is not necessarily a bad thing. "Nothing clears the brain better than to have to explain your ,job to persons who are not specialists in it.
One of Darwin’s greatest contributions to science, if not to mankind, was his development of population theory, the realization that all individuals are unique, that differences between individuals are real and important. Even identical twins are different though they contain the same genes; the influence of environment can never be the same at all times. The old view, called essentialism, reduced everything to typology, i.e. the belief that every species or race can be reduced to a "type," distinct and unchangeable. The misuse and misunderstanding of this theory was easily perverted to form the basis for racism and sexism. Kurten ruminates on the difference between science and pseudoscience. Science maintains a healthy curiosity about what things are really like. "Pseudoscience, on the other hand, is produced by those who ’know’ beforehand what the answer is going to be." Scientists may have an idea where their research may lead, but they are always ready to change their opinion. (Kurten argues that changing one’s opinion about something every day keeps one youthful as long as there is validity to the change, of course.) Pseudoscience represents a shortcut in the search for happiness, hence its popular appeal. Science forces us to face the truth, unpleasant as it may be....more
Matthew Chapman, author of Trials of the Monkey An Accidental Memoir, and great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin, had moved to the United States, tireMatthew Chapman, author of Trials of the Monkey An Accidental Memoir, and great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin, had moved to the United States, tired of the English predilection for class distinctions. Never a diligent student, he fell in love with the story of evolution and visited Dayton, TN, home of the famous Scopes trial. "In my mind the anti-evolution movement remained a quaint Southern aberration resulting from a combination of moonshine and religions of the snake-fondling type. I had drunk of the aforementioned mountain dew and found it a powerful mind-altering substance, oddly delicious, with only the faintest leady aftertaste of the car radiator through which it had been distilled, but concluded it was not the best stimulant of intellectual cognition." Now that's a delightful quote.
When he learned that a small town in Pennsylvania was to be the site for a replay of the Scopes trial, he packed his bags. York County, PA is a land of contradictions. Militant in a state of pacifist origins -- they sent more troops to the Revolution than any area of comparable size and population -- they had evolved into the antithesis of William Penn's "holy experiment" in religious toleration, and the area was known for its religious zealotry.
Dover, sadly, reminds me of the rural town near where I live, except that we have no traffic light. As with Dover, the highpoint of the week is Friday night football/basketball, and the major traffic jam occurs when the old ladies drive to the post office to pick up the mail. A town of about the same size, we have 1700 residents and 4,963 churches. The school used to annually host a local minister who handed out copies of the New Testament to all the kids until they got a call from the ACLU when a local liberal (guess who?) called them. The debate over evolution and teaching of intelligent design (an oxymoron if there ever was one) tore Dover apart.
After the resignation of several school board members, the board appointment process filled it with fundamentalists. Even they realized they couldn't force intelligent design down the throats of the students so they had science teachers be required to read statement indicating that evolution was "just" a theory and students wanting another view should read Of Pandas and People, bordering on a violation of the Pennsylvania standards of education. An editorial in the York Daily Record suggested that," Watching what's going on in the Dover Area School District is like watching a train wreck in slow motion." To give you an idea of the backward climate, the town's mayor had just been acquitted by an all-white jury of having given bullets to local white gangs thirty years before so they could "go out and kill as many black people as they could during some very severe race riots."
One of the arguments of the school board was, "it's just a statement we want read to the students, takes only a couple of minutes, not that important, so what's the big deal?" To which the plaintiffs natural response was, "If it's not so important why are you taking this to court?" Not to mention that the statement provided an unequivocally false impression of what science is and what a theory is. In addition, while making the argument against evolution, the board and the defense team could never marshal arguments for intelligent design. "The logic of picking out intelligent design, which is inherently untestable, and saying that any evidence against evolution is evidence for intelligent design employs a logical fallacy that I think most scientists reject."
The plaintiffs lawyers were a congenial group, staying in the same hotel, eating together, and generally having a good time. The defense team, however, "was a dysfunctional family with a frequently absent father." Richard Thompson, who bore a resemblance to William Jennings Bryan, from the Thomas More Law Center, which he had founded with money from the Domino's pizza chain and who had made his reputation obsessively trying to send Dr., Kevorkian to jail,, would often disappear even while important testimony was being taken. Competition between the Discovery Institute and Thomas More Center would not help their defense.
One of the really nice things about Chapman is that he genuinely likes people, even people he disagrees with completely, once he gets to know them and you feel his sympathy for the participants. Humor abounds. One of the school board members was so fiscally conservative that she was described by another board member as being so tight "she could squeeze the nickel 'till the buffalo farts."
The linkage of belief in evolution and atheism haunted the debate. The plaintiffs at Dover put many people of faith on the stand who fervently believed in the evidence of evolution. Particularly effective was a Catholic priest, Haught, who in his friendly and non-confrontational manner effectively dismantled the defense questions. Often the defense misunderstood the implications of what was said. Chapman asked one of the plaintiff's lawyers about a line of questioning by the defense that seemed to bring out the weaknesses in the defense's own case, the lawyer replied, "We don't get it either, but the good news is that whatever we forget to bring out during direct, we can rely on them to bring out during cross." Haught, argued convincingly that science and religion were related but operated in two separate and distinct realms. His example is instructive: Suppose a teapot is boiling on your stove and someone comes in the room and says "explain to me why that's boiling." Well one explanation would be it's boiling because the water molecules are moving around excitedly and the liquid state is being transformed into gas. But at the same time you could just as easily have answered that question by saying, "It's boiling because my wife turned on the gas." Or you could also answer that same question by saying, "It's boiling because I want tea." All three answers are right but they don't conflict with each other because they're working at different levels. Science works at one level of investigation, religion at another. The problems occur when one assumes there's only one answer.
Haught concluded his testimony by saying, "the God of intelligent design seems to be a kind of tinkerer or meddler who makes ad hoc adjustments to creation, whereas I wold want a child of mine to think of God as something much more generous, much more expansive, a God who can make a universe which is, from the start, resourceful enough to unfold from within itself in a natural way all the extravagant beauty and evolutionary diversity that, in fact, has happened. To put it very simply, a God who is able to make a universe that can somehow make itself is much more impressive religiously than a God who had to keep tinkering with the creation."
Apocalyptic thinking played a large role in the belief systems of those defending their desire to teach intelligent design. They truly believe the end was coming, that evolution was a hoax, and that science had evidence proving it to be a hoax but that evidence was being suppressed. The ignorance of the anti-evolution crowd of science and how it worked is truly saddening. They never forgive their antagonists. Scopes, who had never really taught evolution and was picked mostly because of his willingness to participate in the trial, had his life turned upside down. He had wanted to teach geology at the college level but had his much-needed fellowship revoked. "As far as I'm concerned you can take your atheistic marbles and play elsewhere," was the sentiment conveyed in the rejection letter. He realized the stigma of the trial would follow him and he spent his professional life working as a geologist in South America.
Contrary to popular wisdom, I think the hidden debate at Dover was between the God who employed evolution as opposed to the flaky God of instant creation. This formed the crux of the trial that made the outcome almost inevitable. This was not so much a battle between evolutionary atheism and God's intelligent creation, but between two very different views of God and how he/she/it operates. The judge was thus forced, in my view, to rule, quite appropriately, that science was to be taught in the classroom, that the water is boiling because the heat is exciting the water molecules, and not religion, which was suggesting the water was boiling because we want tea.
The Burgess Shale is a fossil deposit of importance equal to that of the Rift Valley sites of East Africa in that it provides truly pivotal evidence fThe Burgess Shale is a fossil deposit of importance equal to that of the Rift Valley sites of East Africa in that it provides truly pivotal evidence for the story of' life on earth. The shale comes from a small quarry in the Canadian Rockies discovered in the early 20th century by Charles Walcott, then a leading figure at the Smithsonian. The Burgess fossils come from the Middle Cambrian Period, around 350 million years ago. They form one of the earliest assemblages of soft-bodied creatures from the first era 1'0 multicelled animals. They include various worms, crustaceans, etc., but also a large number of unique and unclassifiable forms.
In the late 60s Harry Whittington began to study the Burgess fossils in detail and discovered that many of them beloned to lineages which left no modern descendants. The identification of Marrella, Opabinia and other strange Cambrian creatures dropped. a real bombshell in paleontological circles. They prove that the Cambrian was a time of incredible evolutionary experimentation. In the space of a few tens of millions of years there evolved not only the ancestors of everything alive today, but also dozens of lineages that never went anywhere. Most of them were simply wiped out during mass extinction episodes: that of the Permo-Triassic resulted in the extinction of 96% of the species then alive.
Stephen Jay Gould has chronicled the story of the Burgess shale in detail. But in true Gould fashion he has drawn broader lessons. He looks at the career of Walcott and examines why Walcott felt it was necessary to shoehorn all of the Burgess forms into a progressive theory of ancestry and diversification. Historians (and paleontologists are a subspecies of historian) like all people are often deeply constrained by what they expect to find. The Burgess shale did not fit previous theory and was therefore made to fit. The implication of Whittington's discoveries is that evolution depends upon an enormous number of accidents, each so contingent upon the other that it would be impossible to replay the tape and get the same story again.
Gould ends his book with an extended meditation on the nature of historical truth. He rejects the idea that the historical sciences are in principle less accurate than the experimental sciences: they are both capable of arriving at the truth, often through the progressive detection and correction of error...more
McCrone begins with two assumptions: that "self-consciousness must have a biological basis" and that the mind evolved.
Language is one of the defining McCrone begins with two assumptions: that "self-consciousness must have a biological basis" and that the mind evolved.
Language is one of the defining human characteristics; indeed it is language that has permitted our species to learn how to control the environment around us rather than being forced to adapt to it. Language permitted self-awareness and self-consciousness.
Being intelligent is hard work. The brain uses about one fifth of the oxygen intake even though it's only about one fiftieth of the body's weight. During the climatic changes of the Miocene era some 10 million years ago, the apes which had flourished in the rich forest environment were forced to adopt a land-gait and leave the trees. Most of the ape lines became extinct, a process almost completed today; they had reached an evolutionary dead-end. Only the human line of apes survived. Because two-legged movement is not as efficient, nor as fast as four-legged, these strange upright ancestors of ours developed social organizations for the common defense (also a characteristic of the few remaining apes like baboons and chimps.) Still, this alone was not enough for several early hominid lines became extinct, unsuccessful experiments of God.
The Australopithecines, with strong jaw for chewing up the tough roots and plants of its diet disappeared with the advent of the colder ice age. Our direct ancestors, with smaller jaw, a more varied diet, and the ability to cook, were better suited to adapt to the change in environment. The last 3,000,000 years have been dominated by the ice-age with only brief 10,000 - 20,000-year long interruptions of more temperate climates (we near the end of the most recent one now.) These periods placed terrible stress on the animals that had developed warm coats and had adapted to colder climates. Many species died out. The lightweight homo line with his intelligence and flexible diet was again successful. Another advantage was food-sharing -- almost unique to humans -- and pair bonding. But language, appearing it is thought with home sapiens, was to make a crucial difference. "Language paved the way for all the special abilities that we so value abilities such as self-awareness, higher emotion and personal memories."
McCrone examines how various basic mental abilities work such as thought, memory and learning, in order to appreciate the structures that language expanded....more
A fascinating journey. In high school, being a somewhat sanctimonious little shit and having become entranced by the romance of archeology, I naturallA fascinating journey. In high school, being a somewhat sanctimonious little shit and having become entranced by the romance of archeology, I naturally stumbled over the career of Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit whose works challenged some of the more orthodox views of the Catholic Church. He was particularly interested in the interaction and synergistic relationship of the spiritual with matter. Reviewers of other books about Teilhard have suggested it was his interest in evolution that pissed off the church; I think it was his forays into theology that resulted in his periodic exile. While fascinating, this overly hagiographic biography frequently stumbles into adoration.
The author, founding member of the Teilhard Centre in London, is a woman, perhaps significant, given the importance of several women to Pere Teilhard during his life. With Lucile, for example, he conducted a twenty-year correspondence that reflected his desire to help her spiritually, yet "at another level these most personal, most intimate letters speak of a depth and intensity of love as never before in Teilhard." Hmmmm. Lucile for her part, "longed for a fuller giving, a complete union, not only spiritual love and friendship. .." Teilhard's letters in response to her longing suggest he never succumbed. Well, maybe.
As a child growing up in the Auvergne, he had always sought treasures "that were incorruptible and would last. He remembered years later being devastated when his mother threw some curls she had cut of his hair into the fire, and he saw them consumed. He had learned that he was perishable. He began collecting things he thought would last, rocks replacing metal when he saw how iron would rust away.This epiphany led to a lifelong passion for fossils. It's the more striking then that the war would not affect him more. . . In fact, his war essays contained the seeds of most of his more fully ideas that came later. They did seek a reinterpretation of Christianity, "the need for a new image of God, the quest for a practically engaged spirituality appropriate to the needs of a contemporary world." His vision of mankind as one, "sharing a common origin and destiny in spite of all its diversity and diversions. His vision of mankind as universal and one was a pervasive strain running through his thought and writings. That his writing was continually suppressed and prevented from being published by his Catholic superiors is understandable but troubling to me who sees little need for orthodoxy. More evidence of the hagiographic nature of the book is that the Index (the Catholic list of prohibited books) does not appear in the book's index, despite its mention in several places.
I have often been accused of an optimistic outlook on things, indeed, making candy out of excrement, so to speak, but Teilhard makes me look like a piker. In China, doing fossil research, amidst the Japanese atrocities in China and seeing extraordinary extremes of hunger and poverty, he managed to "maintain such an attitude of hope and deep belief in the future of humanity.
The Phenomenon of Man, perhaps his summative work, was finished after his return to China in 1940 following a sojourn in France and America. In it he attempts to answer the question of the significance "of the human being within the vast cosmic process of evolution." A copy finally made its way to Rome in 1945, and he was disappointed to hear that permission to publish had been withheld. The book "demonstrates how the rise of evolution is an immense movement through time from the development of the atom to the molecule and cell to different forms of life and to human beings with greater diversity. This movement exemplifies how the development of ever greater structural complexity leads in turn to an ever greater "within" of things, and increase in consciousness and reflection." The ultimate result of the development of a more collective human consciousness is the appearance of a "super-consciousness" and "ultra-human," which he calls the "Omega point," i.e., God.
Even Teilhard was not immune to doubt, and he wrote toward the end of his life: "How is it, then, that as I look around me, still dazzled by what I have seen, I find that I am almost the only person of my kind [what did he mean by kind, here? Priest or human?:], the only one to have seen? . . . How, most of all, can it be that" when I come down from the mountain" and in spite of the glorious vision I still retain, I find that I am so little a better man, so little at peace, so incapable of expressing my actions, and thus adequately communicating to others, the wonderful unity that I feel encompassing me? Is there, in fact, a Universal Christ, is there a Divine Milieu? Or am I, after all, simply the dupe of a mirage in my own mind? I often ask myself that question."
To which I might respond, does it really matter? Teilhard was a fascinating man who was clearly dedicated to his beliefs and the Church. Despite the book's adulatory nature, one senses the inner turmoil and struggle faced by Teilhard as he sought to make sense out of the universe. ...more
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