Social evolution
evolvingthoughts | April 27, 2007
Tonight my boss and colleague Paul Griffiths asked me who I would exile in the Greek manner for the good of the polis in which I live. After some thought I suggested George Pell, Cardinal of the Catholic Church and general ignoramus about science. Paul asked why, and I said that he was divisive in our society.
It hit me: Pell, like all conservatives, thinks that social cohesion is paramount to political activity (of course, like most, but not all conservatives, it is his form of cohesion that he wants, to the exclusion of all others). But things have changed since the 1950s when…
evolvingthoughts | April 25, 2007
I am not sure what exactly this is about, but it is being launched tomorrow. It appears to be a website that corrals news and information about the ecology and biodiversity, global warming and so on. I guess we'll have to wait until the launch to find out. The blurb that was sent to me is below the fold.
A dream has finally come true. After four years of hard work, the first of what will someday be thousands of the most trustworthy portals on the Web, is about to launch. It will be free of corporate/commercial bias, and FREE to the public forever!
http://earthportal.org is the result of…
evolvingthoughts | April 22, 2007
Well, I'm off to Sin City, sorry, Sydney, tomorrow to visit Chris Mooney, who's giving a talk in that metropolis, and Tim Lambert, another Sb Scibling. But before I go, I just had to note this study on the effects of the gun buyback and stricter controls in Australia following the Port Arthur Massacre. A prior study had argued that it had no effect on the rate of gun deaths; this study says that around 280 deaths per year have been prevented, both suicides and violent crime-related deaths.
At the actuarial rate of $AUS2.5 million per death saved, the $500 million buyback paid for itself in…
evolvingthoughts | April 21, 2007
Jonathon Gottschall, in a recent piece in New Scientist (reprinted here) offers what he calls "Literary Darwinism":
Understanding a story is ultimately about understanding the human mind. The primary job of the literary critic is to pry open the craniums of characters, authors and narrators, climb inside their heads and spelunk through the bewildering complexity within to figure out what makes them tick.
Yet, in doing this, literary scholars have ignored the recent scientific revolution that has transformed our understanding of why people behave the way they do. While evolutionary…
evolvingthoughts | April 16, 2007
It is always a Very Bad Idea, as Pooh Bear might have said, for a foreigner to comment on another nation's internal policy after a tragedy. As I am inveterately attracted to Very Bad Ideas, being a Philosopher of Little Brain, this does not deter me. If one cannot comment on gun policy after a tragedy like this, when can you?
First thing is the necessity for weapons in a civil society. I do not mean a society run by gangsters (or gangstas), or one in a Somalian warlord condition, or the Wild West, but a well-ordered civil society. One in which order is maintained with a balance of civil…
evolvingthoughts | April 15, 2007
A bunch of topics that I can't be stuffed blogging in detail, but are important:
Larry Arnhart and Roger Scruton, both Darwinians (see previous post) and conservatives, justify the existence of religion as a social cohesive force. I wonder, though, as a Darwinian (see previous post) and a not-conservative, why we can't use the values and rituals of social justice and morality as a cohesive force, especially given that religion can only cohere a society by excluding and marginalising those who disagree with it. That said, we can invert the issue and say that a function of religion is to…
evolvingthoughts | April 14, 2007
For a long time now, I have had troubles with the use of the word "Darwinism". Not just by creationists and antiscience advocates like IDevotees, but by scientists themselves. You routinely see press releases and book titles that declare the death or some fatal illness of Darwinism, which, in every case, their own theoretical or experimental contributions points up. It is time, I think, to lose the word entirely.
The term has a history that is itself confusing and contradictory. Let's consider some of the things it has been used to denote:
1. Transmutation of species
1.1 Gradually (…
evolvingthoughts | April 14, 2007
Hank Fox at Unscrewing the Inscrutable has posted an Atheist Declaration of Rights. With two minor changes I reprint it below the fold.
Nonreligious Declaration of Rights
1. Freedom from Fear and Hate:In every part of a secular society, the nonreligious have the right to live free of fear for their personal safety, their homes, pets and possessions. The nonreligious have the right to be safe from public hate speech and vilification.
2. Freedom of Speech:The nonreligious have the right to freely speak of atheism in public, or to publicly display characteristic messages or symbols, without…
evolvingthoughts | April 11, 2007
Francis Darwin, that is, son of Charles and editor of his correspondence.
In Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, volume I, Francis reprinted a number of letters of Darwin's on the issue of religious belief, and in a footnote, he noted the following:
Dr. Aveling has published an account of a conversation with my father. I think that the readers of this pamphlet ('The Religious Views of Charles Darwin,' Free Thought Publishing Company, 1883) may be misled into seeing more resemblance than really existed between the positions of my father and Dr. Aveling: and I say this in spite of my…
evolvingthoughts | April 10, 2007
SYDNEY broadcaster Alan Jones' comments before the 2005 Cronulla riots were likely to have encouraged brutality and vilified people of Lebanese and Middle Eastern background, Australia's broadcasting regulator says.
Source
evolvingthoughts | March 30, 2007
There will no doubt be many April Fool's gags and hoaxes tomorrow. None will have the cachet of the Spaghetti Harvest, or the discovery of Homo micturans, because you can't get the wood, you know, but they will all be worthwhile relief from the inanity and insanity of our present society.
But there is a hoax doing the rounds that, while not an April Fool's gag, is a gag about April the 1st.
The story is this:
Hooray For That Judge In Florida, an atheist became incensed over the preparation for Easter and Passover holidays and decided to contact the local ACLU about the discrimination…
evolvingthoughts | March 23, 2007
Grrlscientist just pointed out that MDs are threatening to boycott The Lancet, because Reed Elsevier, the publisher, supports weapons fairs, including manufacturers of cluster bombs.
This is a worry. Elsevier publishes around 40 journals that have a philosophy component. Perhaps philosophers, who are after all supposed to be consistent on principles, should also boycott those journals. I list some of the major ones under the fold.
Cognition
Cognitive Systems Research
Endeavour
Historia Mathematica
History of European Ideas
International Journal of Law and Psychiatry
International Review…
evolvingthoughts | March 17, 2007
The Cafeteria is Closed has a very nice little discussion of whether Nietzsche was properly the foundation of German nationalism and anti-Semitism, answering, with documentary support, no to each claim. Given the recent slurs on evolutionary theory as the foundation for Nazism and the holocaust, it's a good point to make.
But is Nietzsche even a "Darwinist" (a term only the Discovery Institute, or as we like to call it, DIsco, seems to use these days, as it has no real meaning)? He certainly accepted that evolution occurred, and he managed to avoid some of the sillier philosophical claims…
evolvingthoughts | March 15, 2007
So, lots of people are talking about spirituality. What do I think it is, if anything? Below the fold.
I'm a naturalist. This means, in a philosophical context (i.e., neither a scientific nor a religious context) that I think that phenomena can be given a naturalised account. I think this also of spirituality.
I had something of an epiphany when reading Alfred Wallace's essays on Spirit. For those who do not know, Wallace had an argument that ran roughly thus:
1. All humans are roughly as intelligent and capable as each other (Wallace was a true racial egalitarian, even when Darwin…
evolvingthoughts | March 14, 2007
Ordinarily, sermons should be reserved for holy days, such as when football and cricket is being played, but this is occasioned by some Scibling conflicts...
When I were a young lad, me ol' mam told me to keep a civil tongue in me 'ead. [Actually, she told me something else, but this is a family post.] Have you ever wondered about the notion of civility?
Etymology is something of a guide here - it comes from the Latin civis, meaning "city". That is, it is the mode of behaviour, the manners, of the city. In Greek, the term is polis, which means "city" also. From these two words we get…
evolvingthoughts | March 9, 2007
Aristotle said that for any well-defined topic, there has to be an object of study. What is the object of the study of religion? Well, for a start, it is not God, but the conceptions and roles that gods play in religion. If a God exists, that object of study is not available to us to empirically measure, experiment with, and model. What we must study is the religions themselves.
There appear to be several phenomena that fall under the rubric of "religion".
First, and this is, I believe, a matter of our western-centric history, religion is defined as an experience. Various folk have held…
evolvingthoughts | March 7, 2007
Once upon a time, there was a village that lived on the side of a large mountain. Just above them was a cloud cover that never moved, obscuring what lay above. Below them were dotted many other villages all the way down to the bottom of the valley.
The villagers did not know where they came from. Well, that is not quite right, for there were two opposing schools of thought, both of whom said they knew. One group, the Ascenders, said they came from the villages below, or trekked past them from the valley, where there were many other groups, some quite similar in their languages, dress and…
evolvingthoughts | March 4, 2007
The following is a series of reasons why in a democracy, one should not elect Christians as leaders or representatives.
1. They are exclusive, and will favour their own over the welfare of all. Minorities like Jews, Muslims, Hindus and other religions, as well as those who lack any religion, will be marginalised.
2. They have no moral sense, and will do whatever anyone in their faith community tells them they should do. They are religious relativists.
3. They try to impose their own views on others by law. They will try to make religious dogma binding on those who don't share their…
evolvingthoughts | February 25, 2007
Mahatma Gandhi is reputed to have once been asked by a journalist what he thought about western civilisation. "I think it would be a very good idea", Gandhiji is supposed to have replied. True or not, the anecdote came to mind when I read William Rees-Mogg's piece in the Times Online: "Religion isn't the sickness. It's the cure". A curative religion, one that civilises, would be a very good idea. Pity it's not yet in existence.
Rees-Mogg repeats the old canards of conservativism about "modernity" - it is a moral failure, a panic against religion, a neurosis, and it caused social Darwinism…